Vanquished?

Okay maybe, hopefully we're over this rat thing, but my eyes still dart around the room, every room, pretty much constantly, and I'm sitting with my feet up on the couch. Our lovely exterminator trapped an adult rat in the basement last Thursday, which may have been the cause of the young, possibly orphaned, rats running around the living room and tv room all day and night on Easter Sunday, with CAM and JTM in hot pursuit, Wrangler cowering on the loveseat, and me hiding in the bathroom Tweeting updates.  JPM chose to ignore the whole situation.

We thought there was just one, but it was two of the almost cute little fellas (yes, I saw them) who found their way into the cardboard box trap that JTM rigged up, and possibly a third lured into the peanut-butter-and-grocery-bag trap, also cunningly put together by my surprisingly brave, resourceful and creative domestic partner and his valiant young apprentice.  Easter was less than relaxing, what with these short-eared, long-tailed rodent(s) leaving their little brown deposits - we really would have much preferred long-eared rodents bearing chocolate eggs, thank you very much.

Just after the weekend our rat guy found another adult in a basement trap, and today there were none inside but two out in the shed - nice "healthy adults" he said.  Oh thank God they were healthy when they died!  And thank God they were outside in the shed! Shed I can kind of handle.

But there's this funny scratching noise we thought we heard in the wall between the master bedroom and bathroom, so more traps went down in the courtyard where there might be access to the master bathroom plumbing.  EEEW!  Hopefully nothing will gnaw its way through the wall while we sleep.

Bootcamp Week 1 Results

So I'm a week into the April bootcamp in which I plan to lose massive amounts of weight and inches, and the results are less than spectacular.  I'm down a whole pound to 176, and the measurements are just wonky: 41, 37, 46.  Basically everythings half an inch bigger than a week ago.  PFFFT!  I can't expect real results if I don't put in real effort.  I feel like I'm back on track now - three days properly following Weight Watchers, and I'm 3 for 3 in excercise (twice to gym and a big walk yesterday).  Admittedly it was a rough week last week: we weren't sleeping much on account of the rats, and suddenly there was chocolate and hollandaise sauce everywhere due to it being Easter and all.  And the weather SUCKED!  But all that is past me now and I'm moving on.

What I cannot figure out is why it's so damned hard to RUN!  I feel like I've been working away at it for MONTHS and I seem to make no progress - I still cannot get much past the two minute mark without bonking - heartrate in the 170s, gasping for air, legs failing me.  I look around me at other people on the treadmills: old, young, svelte, chubby, whatever, and they seem to just glide along at a 5 or 6 mph, whereas it's an epic struggle for me.  I had the asthma test a few weeks ago, in hopes that we'd discover that a few puffs of the inhaler was all that's been standing between me and my running career all this time.  But no, just some very, very vague hint that there might be some very, very mild something (or nothing at all).  The doc seemed to think we could leave it at that. 

And so it goes, going nowhere two minutes at a time.  On the plus side (cause there just always has to be one), I know that the exercise is helping me lose weight and improving my health and fitness level, even I'm not seeming to much better at running.

Boot Camp: epic fail (so far)

Today is not an official  "April Boot Camp Report," but I just need to put this out there.

Here's my my Boot Camp progress to date:

1. Avoid gym completely
2. Eat a lot of chocolate (oh man, it's EVERYWHERE at this time of year), especially before breakfast and between meals
3. Find various ways to avoid exercise of any kind (the basement decluttering is forging ahead again anyway, and I've been BLOGGING, too!)
4. Take second helpings of anything and everything
5. Make hollandaise sauce "for the kids" and eat it directly from the pan
6. Go for a pedicure
7. Eat a wide variety of foods after 10:00 pm nightly

Yup, I'm really rocking it!

This egg totally makes my ass look fat!

Some Other Rodent in Charge of Easter This Year

Rats have hijacked my Easter!  Not safe to have the annual chocolate hunt, and all the Eastery stuff is in the scary rat closet with the big rat trap and small rat turds (fresh ones in the doorway this morning - so much for our hope that there was just the one.) JTM pointed out today that we share our home with spiders and insects of all varieties (there are PLENTY here!), and that we have all kinds of fish swimming around pretty much at floor level (our house is built around a fully-enclosed courtyard with a pond taking up most of it - you can actually walk out a set of sliding doors in the authentic tatami room and step right into it, or cross a charming little bridge to a small sitting area, shaded by a Japanese maple that threatens to grow right into the house - it's all very Japanese and charming and not at all "us", and we LOVE it!).  At least, he pointed out, rats are mammals unlike the other creatures that hang out in such close proximity.

But koi would not trash my Easter quite the way the bunnies' plague-bearing cousins have.  This year I have to present the children's treats to them in some sort of impervious metal container, like a safe deposit box or something the bomb squad uses when they want to detonate something. Just, you know, to be on the safe side. I dont' know if rodents like chocolate generally, but it HAS to be more appealing than fish food to a fellow mammal, and they've eaten all that already.

a fish would not do this to a rabbit, no way!

Boot Camp Starts Now!

April Freaking Fools! Somehow I managed to convince myself that I was losing weight, when the truth is  I am actually up about five pounds since Christmastime.  How dare I pass myself off as a successful Weight Watcher!

So with the goal of wearing the pair of kick-ass white hiphugger jeans I got last year (size 12, a size I've NEVER been - I went straight from girls' 14 to ladies' 14) to celebrate Mother's Day this year (Oh yes, I've got BIG plans to stain them with barbeque sauce and red wine), today I begin a month-long diet and fitness boot camp. 

Here are my stats today:

• Chest: 40"
• Waist 36.5
• Hips 45.5
• Thigh (left) 25
• Weight 177

By month's end my weight should be in the 160's and I should be an inch and a half smaller in the chest and hips, and three inches smaller in the waist. I'll let the thighs do what they will.

I'll post my progress each week and talk about the things I've been doing (or not doing).  On the 22nd of this month is the TC 10k, which I've walked the last two years.  This year I plan to run at least part of it, a minute at a time, and finish in 1:40, so I'll need to do quite a bit more walk-running over the next few weeks.  10k is actually a bit of a distance and, even though I've done it twice with little or no training, I really took it at a leisurely pace, finishing in 2:13 my first time and 1:57 last year.  This year will be different - I'll be doing more than just challenging myself to get across the finish line, and getting ready for that should be good for a pound or an inch (or two)!

Oh, Rats!

So yesterday morning while we were on our way to work, I suddenly got this terrible crawling sensation, like there was something running up my leg.  THAT's what I get for wearing pantyhose for the first time in a year - it was actually my tight, spandex stocking laddering its way up my thigh!

But it turned out to be an omen, a harbinger (since I've ALWAYS wanted an excuse to use that word.) Before the day was through JTM had called me to say that "something" had been eating the fish food and leaving small black turds in the corner of the tatami room.

Well, some gals have their hairstylist on speed-dial, I've got an exterminator.  Gordon, the rodent-whisperer, met us at the house and delivered the prognosis with all the gentleness of a kindly doctor telling us that the test results were back and it wasn't looking good: "It's a rat," he said, as gently as he could, after examining the fresh turd trail. A rat likely hanging out in the closet where I keep my knitting and craft supplies, more of them in one of the basement storage rooms, and in the crawl space, and a good old rat party going down in the shed. Four out of ten on an infestation scale, he said.

So he laid a bunch of traps and is coming back on Thursday. In the meantime, I heard a funny snapping sound from the closet last night but no way was I going to look in there - some gals don't cut their own bangs or do their own colour, I don't set or check my own rat traps.  I'm funny that way.

The rat thing doesn't come as much of a surprise - I thought I saw something scuffling around in the courtyard one night a few weeks ago, and JTM is convinced he saw something bigger than a mouse and more sinister than a squirrel dashing across the driveway towards the neighbors' place a few days ago.

So the plan for this weekend is to clear as much junk as possible out of the house and clean up the property  outside. I'm trying like hell to be cool about this as , but I am honestly completely grossed and freaked out. Thank God for Gordon!

UPDATE APRIL 1: One rat trapped (so far), in basement crawl space, and silence from the craft cupboard.  Will steel myself to go in there this weekend and make sure no rat couples have shacked up in my yarn box.

I blog as well as I keep house

...which is to say wildly inconsistently!  My commitment to decluttering and staying on top of the laundry (rather than being buried under it - mffft!) has pretty much fallen by the wayside, along with the regular blogging, tweeting and healthy eating. But hey, since I've last checked in, I've been to the Olympics (three times! On the ferry just like Mukmuk!), renovated a bedroom, had my sweet old parents from Winnipeg for a visit (Dad's 80th!), rocked a series of really important technical proposals at work and been to the gym more than a few times. 

Turns out the laundry will wait and the dust will quietly settle while I'm busy living, but always there is the niggling, nagging in the back of my mind that won't let me sit through an entire episode of ANY tv show without leaping up to take care of some household business during commercials...I just cannot seem to shake the notion that if I can just get it under control I can keep it that way!

On a more interesting note, I'm following JTM on the blog he just started, dreaming about a vegetable garden, leaning toward the concept of eating a little less wheat and much less meat, figuring out a lot of little ways to save money, and planning an extremely inauthentic Mexican feast for Easter. Eggs: Mother Nature's little pinatas!