The Tales of Missus P.

After hanging out this morning, I finally made myself go to the pool after lunch. As I’ve said before, the highway around here is blocked off on a lot of exits for road work, so I have to time my trips just right so I don’t get stuck in too much traffic.

I really didn’t feel like going to the pool today because it becomes really boring. Back and forth. Back and forth. No music. No audiobook. Back and forth.

However, today the pool was kind of busy and me and an elderly gentleman were trying to make our way back and forth around the kids who were swimming in the big lap pool. (There’s a medium sized pool for the little kids and their parents too.) In the big pool there were some teenaged kids who were pretty respectful of other people’s space, and I was able to get around them all right. However, this one couple and their middle school aged son just didn’t get it.

Usually I try to stay in the pool for 30 minutes. In that whole time, the couple (in their 30s, so they should have known better), kept splashing each other and floating and playing back and forth horizontally in the pool, across four lanes. Now, most people see where someone is trying to make a lane for themselves to swim in, but these people just didn’t care or understand. Two other elderly people came in to swim as well, and in that 20 minutes that we were all there, that couple with the kid apologized to each of us for getting in our way.

That didn’t stop them though. You’d go past them, and they’d just float, splash, wander right back through the lanes. At one point an elderly lady (who was going a heck of a lot faster than I was, bless her) ran smack into the mother. The father just grabbed a hold of the mother and stayed there, so the poor old dear had to try and squeeze past them. Even if they had just stayed in a general area, we could have all stayed away from them, but they did this through a quarter or the pool, so we couldn’t dodge them every time.

Anyway, I quit early, and stopped at the Angel of the North to take my self portrait (I don’t like the term “selfie”), per the theme for today. Ironically or not, the ice cream man, Mr. Whippy, drove off after I’d taken my picture and was thinking of getting a 99 ice cream cone. Blast!

I did, however, go on to Starbucks for my light triple caramel frappuccino. I tried out my AlphaSmart 3000, which was good, but I’ve discovered I’m very use to UK keyboards now, so I keep trying to add quotation marks by hitting Shift-2. I only wrote 560 some words today too but, alas, I did something, so I won’t beat myself up about it too much.

Tonight I finally tried to get rid of my bee situation. I found yet another unwelcomed intruder in the bathroom today as I was brushing my teeth (how are they getting in here?!) and I purchased some wasp, fly, ant spray at Homebase while I was out. I tried to shoot them from outside, but this isn’t that long, stream type stuff. I waited until it got dark and I didn’t see them hanging around outside the window. I discovered that they’ve built their little home in the window sill, so when I hear them moving around in there, they’re like right there in the window. *shudder*

I sprayed the little gap in the PVC frame and one little bugger got in and soon died from my wrath of spray. A second one was in there buzzing around (again, in the windowsill) but he finally stopped. No idea if I got any more of them, if I just made them mad, or if I convinced any of them to go away, but we’ll see tomorrow morning when twenty of them are dancing outside my computer room. *double shudder*

Finally, tonight I watched The Men Who Made Us Thin. It was all about how diets started as a business and they aren’t scientific or medically concocted with the consumer’s well being in mind. I always heard that diets were bad because you end up gaining more than you start off with, but I never knew the extent of it. Apparently, the weight-to-age-to-height charts that they first started using were just arbitrarily made up by some guy at MetLife who wanted to sell insurance, but doctors started using it as a guideline. Also, the University of Minnesota did a study in the 40s where they made men eat a 1500 calorie diet for six months and they went mad. Like chopped off their own fingers, tried to escape to eat grass, and tried to harm their roommates, because they were starving. Keep in mind that “The FDA recommends that women should consume 1500 to 2000 calories a day depending on whether they need to lose weight or maintain weight.” Also, my beloved Weight Watchers confirmed that consumer failure is the reason they continue to stay in business. Consumers blame themselves, not the diet. Bottom line. Focus on health, not on weight.

And my link for today: Lauren Oliver Writes at Home (And On the Move). Before I Fall was written primarily on her Blackberry. I would type on my mobile if I had the patience. The article is great; she says she likes to just sit at home and write. Cafés mean getting dressed and going outside. Yup. Productivity and solitary confinement definitely go hand in hand.