GrumpysMonkey

The past couple of weeks have been insane. I’ve realized that I really need something in my life. (Don’t get all excited, I’m not talking about a baby). What I need is help. Unfortunately, there’s no one type of help I can put my finger on.

I suppose an assistant would be about the right term, but said assistant would have so many duties! I need someone to pick a business card company for me. I need someone who could do dishes and clean up my kitchen, but not require me to clean ahead of cleaning. I need somone who could organize my house for a couple of hours so that I could then vacuum (because of course, with the Dyson now in my life, I WANT to do the vacuuming, I just don’t have time to clean the floor enough to be able to vacuum). I need somone to plan out my day for me and keep me on task.

None of these duties would be every day of course. Some days I’m very capable of staying on track. Other days I’m very capable of cleaning the kitchen. But there are so many days that I need one thing or the other and I certainly can’t write a job description for any one thing.

I need someone for maybe 5 hours a week, who would do whatever I needed done during those 5 hours. Think I could find someone like that who’d work for English Muffins or a loaf of bread? Yeah, probably not.

So now I’m not sure if Target should be on the list or not. I still suspect they should be, but I’m confused.

We complained about our order using the online form. It wasn’t even much of a complaint. Here’s the text that we sent them.

We recently ordered the Dyson vacuum cleaner during your sale as the only local store that had it in stock wasn’t easily accessible on a busy weekend and ordering online was going to be easier.

When we placed the order, the delivery was scheduled between Feb 25th and Mar 1st. All was well and good.

Today, the delivery shifted into April 7-8th, which isn’t as acceptable. We could have found the time to make it down to a store 40 minutes away had we known that was going to happen.

That store still has some in stock. Is there any way we can get our online order shifted to the brick and mortar store at the same price?

We got no response from them. None. Yet yesterday, I got a shipping notice. The vacuum has shipped. While I’m happy that the vacuum has shipped, I still find this poor customer service since I’ve gotten no response to my message.

So Target, thank you for shipping my vacuum. I’m happy I won’t have to wait until April. But if you want your customers to feel like you value them, please consider responding to customer emails, even if it’s just with a simple, “we’ve shipped the vacuum, sorry for the inconvenience.”

Target has made it to my list. My “I don’t want to shop you any more list”.

Last week they had Dyson vacuums for 20% off. That’s a big savings and we wanted a Dyson. So I looked online, and the Dyson we wanted was available to be shipped within three or four days. The model we wanted wasn’t available in the local stores, as they were all out of stock.

So we placed the order online without a problem. Delivery was set for February 25th through March 1st. Great!

I look today at the order status and it says “delivery between April 7th and April 8th”. Um, WHAT? They slipped the delivery date over a month and didn’t even update us. No email, nothing.

Well, if we’d known that, we would have driven 40 minutes to a store that DID have the vacuum in stock last week when it was on sale. Of course now it’s not on sale. So now we’ve got to wait over a month for a vacuum we could have had this weekend simply because their website decided to changes dates on us AFTER WE’D PLACED THE ORDER.

I’ve discovered the secret to making sure that I’m not flat on my back once a month with cramps. Bee pollen. 1 tsp a day.

No, I’m not doing cartwheels, but I’m also not rocking back and forth in the fetal position moaning for one day a month. Two months in a row so far.

Oh, and there’s nothing wrong with men TAKING bee pollen. It’s supposed to do lots of beneficial things. But I just wanted men to be warned that we’d be talking about female shit here.

Just throwing this out there so that we have it down. This year we need to prioritize our spending on a few key items. A dyson, a new camera for John, and cargo bikes.

The Roomba is going back to Costco. It’s not a bad little vac, but it requires too much handholding and too much watching. Our house is a bit cluttered, not really in a bad way but just because we have a lot of stuff and I’d rather have an easily maneuverable Dyson than the Roomba.

John needs a DSLR to be able to improve his food photography and maybe to get back to his flower photography.

And we need cargo bikes. I’m tired of driving to the U-District market. We’re only a mile away. We should be able to make it easily with a cargo bike.

So, Dyson, Nikon, or Madsen? If you’re listening and want to help us out, go for it. (just kidding. kind of)

It’s the one time a year that we ask for money. John and I are running the Beat the Bridge race again this year to benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to find a cure for Type 1 Diabetes.

Our team page is here. From there you can donate to John or me, or join our team if you’re going to be in Seattle on May 16th.

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I haven’t for years. It just seems silly to focus on something just because it reached a certain date on the calendar. However, January marks the 6 month countdown to our first marathon of 2010, so it just seems like the right time to step up the marathon training.

So this isn’t a resolution post. No. Not at all. So my apologies that it’ll read like one.

For this year’s marathon training, I’m going to try some different things. Sure, we got through the marathon last year. It was a great experience. But lots of it hurt, it was hard, and I think we could have done a lot of things differently. So here’s my plan for this season.

Monthly Goals

Last week I wrote out all of my planned workouts for January. I’m going to be doing either 2 or 3 runs a week, but I’m going to alternate a lot more circuit training (mixing cardio with weights) and walking into the mix as well. I want to do a lot more strength training this year. Running isn’t just about the legs, it’s about the core, the arms, the neck, and the ass. So to that end I’ll be lifting a lot of hand weights, doing a lot of crunches, reverse crunches, and hamstring and quad work.

Walking

Since we’ve switched to barefoot running, I’ve realized how important it is to really take the time to strengthen my feet. The arches in particular need a lot of work. So I’m going to go for at least one walk a week of at least an hour. Some weeks I’ll do two, depending on how much running I’m doing. During the walks I plan on focusing on the proper form in the barefoot shoes as well as just mentally preparing for the marathon and listening to my Spanish lessons.

Diet

I hate that word. But I’m not going on a diet, I just want to be more mindful of my diet. I’m going to be keeping an informal workout log and I’ll not only record my workouts, but also what I’m eating before, during, and after (to the best of my abilities). It won’t be too strict, and I’m not going to majorly change the way I eat, but I do want to play around with different meals the night before hard runs and after hard runs to see what foods best help my recovery and my stamina.

My hope for 2010 (this is the closest I’ll get to a resolution) is that I can be more focused in everything that I do this year. More focused on work, more focused at home, and more focused at the gym and when out running. If I can do that, the marathons this year (yes, there will be more than one) should be a lot easier than last year’s.

Recently several people have asked me more about the barefoot running and I figured I’d take a few minutes to share more about it in case anyone is thinking about making the switch.

1. Are you really running barefoot? No. We’re running with five finger shoes. These shoes provide enough protection that small rocks, glass, and small tree branches don’t hurt. Yes, having parts of the shoe between your toes is a bit weird. But other than making it a little hard to get the shoes on the first couple of times, they feel just fine.
2. Do your feet hurt? No. Well, not really. You need to build up slowly with running barefoot. Your arches will get tired quickly and the balls of your feet will be sore the first few times because you’re running with little to no padding so the feeling is much like a bruised sensation. For me, this feeling took about a month to go away. It took me a month to go from zero to 3 miles each run. The first couple of weeks I was doing quarter and half mile runs and that’s it. But now I’m up to 5 miles and I could probably go further if I just had the time. (We’ve been busy).
3. What about knees, hips, ankles? I’ve had a history of knee and hip problems. But since switching to barefoot running, I’ve had no problems at all. My calves are tired because the motion of barefoot running, when you’re landing on your mid-foot rather than you heel is a lot harder on your calves. But your calves are designed to take it. So other than taking some time to build up calf strength, I’ve had no problems whatsoever.
4. Do your feet get cold? A little. Particularly when running on wet ground or on wet leaves, some water does seep into the shoes. And when it is cold outside, the first quarter of a mile is kind of cold on the toes. However, once you’re running, you don’t really notice it anymore unless you run through a puddle.
5. So why do you do it? Really, go read the book Born to Run. There’s a lot of technical information about how and why, but basically, when you land on your heel, your leg is extended in front of you and that actually hyperextends your knee (which is bad). When you land on your mid-foot (the fleshy padded part), you actually land with your foot almost directly underneath your body, Your leg is still kind of bent and this is how the knee was designed to work.
6. What about speed? Your stride is very different barefooting than with shoes. You’re basically just lifting your feet and using momentum to propel yourself forward. So stride length doesn’t really factor into the picture. It took me a while to figure out how to go faster. I was stuck about a minute per mile slower than I was with shoes. But I finally figured it out today and I was back to my old speed. Basically, you need to maintain a straight back and sort of angle your body forward to increase momentum.

Some other information.

So I’m a pronator. What that means is that when I land on my foot (my left particularly), the ankle and foot sort of bend inward a bit. This can cause all sort of problems, including knee problems. This is why I’ve had knee issues. So I’ve been investing in expensive shoes that are supposed to try to prevent pronation. Unfortunately, they can’t fix the entire problem no matter how expensive the shoes so you still end up with knee issues. The theory behind barefoot running is that the pronation is actually fixable when your body learns that it has only itself to rely on (and not those expensive shoes). I haven’t had my stride analyzed since I started barefooting, but I do know that I have no idea where my knee brace is and I DON’T CARE. I haven’t needed it since I started this. Not only that, but no more shin splints, no more hip pain, and I can run multiple days in a row. We ran 4 miles this morning and I actually ran partway back from the grocery store this afternoon. I NEVER could have done that in running shoes.

I want to try this. How do I get started?

If you’re seriously interested in barefooting, there are a couple of things I suggest. First, get the book Born to Run. Read it. Then if you’re in Seattle, do a lesson with Barefoot Ted. He’s local to Seattle and you can do an intro lesson with him and bring up to 4 friends. He’ll give you exercises to get started and help you figure out your stride. We did this and it was very helpful. We’ll go back in a month or two for a refresher lesson to make sure we’re still doing everything correctly.

Ok, so this is sort of a rant.

Today, on Twitter, someone was complaining about random re-tweets. Those things that happen when you say something, someone you know repeats it, and then someone they know repeats it again. They felt that somehow their privacy was being invaded because the person repeating what they said was a stranger.

This irks me a lot. First of all, my dear husband, asked this person about it. Now something you should know about John. He’ll support any position if the logic is there behind it. Not saying he’ll agree with it, but he can get behind you for believing it. But, there must be logic behind it. If your argument isn’t logical, he’ll try to help you figure out logic to support it even. Even if he doesn’t believe in it. You want to know how to support a position? How best to convey your beliefs? Talk to John.

John asks why this person is upset over something said in public and gets jumped on because he’s trying to understand the logic.

Twitter is a public platform. Things you say are not private. Even locked accounts (those for which you have to approve every person who follows you) can be re-tweeted. So nothing you say is completely and totally private. It is much like blogging. You cannot control who reads a public blog. Anyone, in any country (well, any country that doesn’t restrict traffic) can read your blog. Criminals can read your blog. Nothing is stopping someone with bad intentions from reading your blog. Nothing is stopping someone with good intentions from reading your blog. Unless you’re password protecting pages or posts, what you write WILL be accessible by a shit-ton of people.

Twitter works the same way. What you say on Twitter is available to the general public. What other people say on Twitter is available to the general public. If you use Twitter, it is your responsibility to know that what you say is for public consumption. If what you’re about to type isn’t intended for public consumption, then DO. NOT. SAY. IT. 

There’s no hostility here. I have no ill will towards the person who made the initial statement. They are a lovely person with a lovely blog.  I am merely pointing out what I see as an inaccuracy. What is put on twitter is public. That is a statement of fact.  What you write on your public blog is public. Don’t have  any expectation of otherwise.

There’s not much of a point to this post. Other than just to get it out there.

I want to write.

I want time to play games.

I want time to sit on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, and crochet while watching a movie.

I want a weekend at home that doesn’t require cleaning.

I want to write again for pleasure, for myself, for no reason at all.

I want a day, or a week, or really, more than a week, that isn’t scheduled. That isn’t filled to the brim with work and posts and chores.

Yes. I am OK. I am just tired and overworked and unsure that will ever change. I work more than most people realize. I love my life. I love my work. But sometimes I just want a break.