Good morning! It's been a pretty good week.

Exercise

Met my exercise goals – minutes, cardio, and strength training. Found the "magic bullet" exercise for making my hip feel so much better: stiff-legged deadlifts with dumbbells. Three days in a row now I have awakened with no hip pain, and have been able to walk and move throughout the day with little or no pain. Yippee!

I like belonging to a challenge on one of the Forums, too. Helps to keep me honest, and I learn about what others are doing with their exercise routines. Did you know that Yoga can be considered a strength exercise?

Food

Met food goals, too. Decided to be more honest about how I am tracking my foods. Basically, I wasn't marking in the diary a few extras. My Emergen-C vitamins (at 25 cal), the occasional diet Dr. Pepper, lite beverages, and my Xylitol use. But I started to wonder if those things could be affecting how I feel and my weight loss results. So I've begun to track them. The awareness is helping to make it easier to make better food choices. On days when I felt stressed, and might have had a diet Dr. Pepper to give me a sense of fullness and give my hands and mouth something to do, I noticed gastro-intestinal discomfort AND a tendency to want to eat more later in the day. In that light, easy to substitute sparkling water for my Dr. Pepper fix.

Attended a Conscious Eating seminar this week. That was helpful too. In Calorie King (as the name implies), I've been focusing heavily on my calories but not always my nutrition or my "whole-self." The seminar gave me some tools to use to help stay mindful of the whole picture. Here's their website: http://www.benourished.org/. They've got some helpful information under their Resources links. I've even placed some information about intuitive eating on hold at my local library.

DADDIE-O

My dad received his second hip-replacement surgery this week. First one was close to two years ago. Second hip had become bad enough last autumn to think about scheduling the surgery. Surgery happened this Monday past. He is doing well. We live 3K miles apart. I was glad to hear his voice sounds determined over the telelphone.

We had a brief, but very good conversation just before his surgery. After the conversation I hung up the phone and thought "How blessed! My dad has grown and changed since I first started talking to him again 20 years ago. I guess I have, too."

I'll call him again this weekend.

People Connection

Most all of my life, I've never stayed in any one place more than two years. As a kid, we averaged moving every 18 months (no, we weren't military brats – just disfunctional). I've duplicated that pattern in most of my adult life. BUT – I've been on the same job for 10+ years now (in the same field for 29 years). AND, now that I'm in a house I love and neighborhood I love, I'm determined to stay in this home until my body won't let me take care of it anymore!

Staying in one place makes community. For the first time in my life I'm able to accept friendship, to reach out in friendship and to receive the reachings of others. I don't have the vocabulary to describe what's going on. To the outside, it probably looks very small. E-mails to a few women I work with, phone calls, conversations in the hallways at church. But to my internal life, these things are huge changes and absolute gifts to my spirit.

Holy week...

...begins tomorrow. And I am ready for the Lenten journey to come to an end. The discovery has been heavily about the paradox of balancing both earthly and divine — something I have not been very good at accepting in myself or in my relationship. It's been an enlightening and humbling journey. I pray I am able to apply the things I've learned to help me be better in relationship whereever I may be (like to hubby!, and at work, in church, in the world at large).

Until we meet again...

If it be the will of God, may all our efforts be especially blessed at this time, may we learn something, touch someone, smile at something new, inspire someone else. Shalom Alechem.