Ladies (and gents — please pass the info along to ladies in your life), I have a Public Service Announcement to make. I’ve been meaning to schedule a baseline mammogram for the past year or so, but I kept putting it off because I didn’t *have* to do it, and I’ve always heard that they are terribly painful. (And really, why voluntarily undergo pain?)

I realize everyone’s experience may be different, and technicians and machines are different, but I’m here to tell you that my first smash-o-gram wasn’t NEARLY as awful as the hype I’ve heard over the years!

It wasn’t pleasant, by any means, but I’ve had underwire bras that were more uncomfortable than the procedure itself. The smashing part really wasn’t too bad; the worst part was the stretching I felt in my skin at the top of my rib cage and my pecs, after the technician maneuvered and adjusted me into position and the plates started to press together.

The digital machine was pretty cool; I even got to see the images afterward. For once in my life, someone told me that it’s great that I have fatty tissue! 🙂  Seriously, though, the dark areas on the screen were fatty/non-dense places, and any white spots represented breast tissue/dense places. Those are the areas that the doctor will scrutinize for any abnormalities.

I’m not anticipating any problems, and thankfully, I have no history of breast cancer in my family, but it’s good to have a baseline so we can keep track in the years ahead. So, if you haven’t had a smash-o-gram yet, or it’s been a while since you have, then make an appointment and go do it!

Portuguese is spoken in Portugal & Brazil, of course, but some other countries like Mozambique & Cape Verde also speak it. I don’t have the bandwidth to research it in depth right now, but one site I glanced at said that it is the 6th most common language in the world, and another said 8th place.

Portuguese is considered one of the romantic languages, and it really is beautiful to listen to. Vocabulary-wise, it has many similarities to Spanish. For example, Iglesia means church in Spanish, and the Portuguese word is Igreja. (<<I think those are spelled correctly, but I'm going by memory). One of the gals on the trip speaks fluent Spanish, and she can understand just about everything she hears in Portuguese, though she doesn't speak it.

Certain sounds in Portuguese resemble French or Italian to my untrained ears, just judging by the way one's voice inflects and the rhythm of sentences. Some sounds, such as the way X is pronounced like a soft Ch, even remind me of Chinese.

I am going to miss this place. Brazil is a beautiful country with so much potential, yet so much need. Gorgeous beaches are bordered by inexpensive cement homes, practically one on top of the other, with no aparent zoning or property lines. (I was told that code enforcement has gotten more stringent in recent years, and the code officer stopped by the church a couple of times while we were building.)

I hope we can come back again!

The kids are going on a camping trip with Dad and a couple of uncles for the long weekend. (Male-bonding, arr, arr, arr!) Normally, I relish my “me time,” but I’m feeling oddly ambivalent about it. Maybe it’s because I’m concerned about how well they will behave in front of extended family. Maybe it’s because I’ll just be at home instead of hanging out with girlfriends on a weekend get-away somewhere.

The two things I really ought to do (clean house and get ahead on schoolwork) don’t sound like a very appealing way to spend a long weekend. Part of me wants to go out and do something, and another part of me just wants a nap.

The last time I took a personality test (one of a battery of inventories and screenings before I went  overseas to work in the mid-90s), I scored ESFJ on the Myers-Briggs test. I think the assessment is still pretty accurate, though it’s worth noting that I scored ever-so-slightly to the “extrovert” side of the mid-line. I think, perhaps, that’s why I enjoy alone time. I like being around people, sometimes, but I also appreciate – and need – time to myself.

Time to think. Time to process the to-do lists and what-if scenarios. Time to manage stress and daydream about the ideas that swirl around my brain.

So, I’m trying to think positively about having the house to myself for a few days. I can purge some old stuff that the boys won’t miss while they aren’t around to change their minds and beg to keep it. I can tackle my bedroom, which has become a repository for all things in need of mending, sorting, filing, storing or donating. I can think about what I want my life to look like … what might need to change and how.

I can think uninterrupted about what life is turning out to be like as a solo parent for real, and not just the way it has been during each deployment. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll be solo forever. I have laughably little dating experience; in fact, I can only think of two times that a guy asked me out after I moved away from home, and one was a blind double-date. The last guy’s name was Monty; he was a grad student studying literature. He wrote poetry. We went to dinner, talked about books, and I didn’t hear from him again until I ran into him at the grocery store a few years later. He was recovering from chicken pox and looked a fright.

(You might wonder why I didn’t include my future husband in the way-back-when dating list; that’s because we never dated. We hung out with the same friends in college and knew each other well, but he never asked me out, and then I graduated & moved away. We corresponded long distance, saw each other a couple of times on weekends when we were both in the same state, then I left the country, and he proposed when I returned.)

So, anyway … enough with my pity party … I have closets to sort and rooms to clean.

About a year ago, I started conversing with my doc about the popping and wicked pain in my right knee. Fast-forward to the end of the summer: meniscus repair, pretty minor in the realm of knee surgeries. Now nearly 9mos post-op, the popping & pain have returned. 😦 I want to exercise, but it hurts to climb stairs, much less exert myself with something crazy like jogging!

Talk about a Catch-22: I need to lose the weight that I gained while blaming the fact that my knee was in so much pain, and now I feel like I’m stuck. The one activity I think I could tolerate doing is swimming, but between work & home obligations, I have a difficult time getting to the university pool or the Y during operating hours.

Pity party, waah. 😦

(There’s a title that’s sure to draw more than the usual overload of spam comments! LOL)

I can recall one brief year in college when I felt comfortable enough in my own skin to wear a bikini, and even then, the top was a racer-back, high-neck style (with a zipper that I kept pretty far up), and the bottoms were a high-waist cut. Bikinis were either explicitly forbidden or strongly discouraged when I was growing up; either way, I don’t remember having any. Ironically, the plus-size, one-piece with a skirted bottom that I wear now shows more cleavage than I ever would have dreamed back in the days when I thought weighing 140lbs was dreadful.

Even at the pinnacle of my athletic years, when I was swimming almost daily and biking all over the neighborhood, I wore a solid size 10. I remember having one pair of shorts in a size 8, but they were an anomaly. I was fit and muscular, but I did not have an hourglass figure — I’ve always resembled more of a rectangle. My hips and chest have been the same measurement for as long as I’ve ever measured my circumference, and although my waistline has grown and shrunk and grown some more, it has never been markedly more slender than my other measurements.

All that is to say, I dread shopping for bathing suits. I needed to buy a bodysuit-style one-piece for the super-sprint triathlon (<<read: super-short, not super-speed!) that my best friend and I participated in last weekend, and it was a humiliating reminder that I have much more work to do concerning my weight.

Three childbirths have secured the fact that I will never, ever wear a bikini again, even if I got down to what the size charts say I should weigh (which, by they way, is easily 30lbs less than what I’m aiming for). No one in public needs to see the wrinkly, stretched-out terrain that is my belly.

I thought about posting one of the dreadful pictures from this weekend here as motivation to myself, but I decided against it, because if I ever run for office, that will be the first snapshot to hit the tabloids, and I would feel humiliated. I’ll just keep the picture in my mind and try to pull it to the forefront when I want carbs and other junk. It’s easier said than done, obviously, or else I would have succeeded by now. I told myself that I would never roller coaster my weight, but that’s exactly what I’ve done. Sigh.

So, I’m re-motivated to get serious: eat right and move more. Next year’s photos will not be so embarrassing!!