Gyming nothing to the imagination.

“How is the gym thing going?” Why, thank you for asking. Very well, actually. I’m up to a 30 minute run without feeling like I might die. So that’s good.

I do, of course, have a gripe. A woman who shall remain nameless because I don’t know her name, uses the treadmill in front of me. She starts by stretching. Now this is a fancy gym. There is a designated “stretch” area. But X insists on doing it on the treadmill.

It would be fine if she was just flexing her arms or warming up her ankles, but X does a full 360 degree stretch. She downward dogs, Kama Sutra’s her leg over the machine’s edge and dry humps the handle bars with such rigor I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for the machine. All the while her bum takes center stage in my vision. There’s more. Buttocks I can handle. If anything it’s major incentive for me to keep running. But the woman has camel toe. Big bushy camel toe. That’s how tight her lycra tights are. And it’s unavoidable because it’s right in front of me. Hello someone else’s vagina. I’m so not please to meet you.

I know what you’re thinking. Just move. I’ve thought about this. Some mornings when X is getting her full stretch it’s hard not to. But I do consider her the lesser of many evils. At least her stretch only lasts a short while. It could be worse. I could have the bloke with B.O, the instructor who grunts when she runs (you know who you are Monica Seles on steroids) or my personal least favorite Perfect Barbie. I can still have a bit of a laugh at X. I have the feeling Perfect Barbie feels the same way about me.

Wonder Woman flies again. Bitch.

A friend of mine recently launched a range of energy drinks. She was kind enough to send us some to try. They’re good. Very good. You can read about them at www.vuka.com. But this blog isn’t about the drinks, it’s about my friend. Lets call her Wonder Woman (WW).

I think most people have a friend or member of their family who’s a classic over achiever. They excel at everything. That’s WW. She has 4 businesses, 3 gorgeous, talented kids, 1 loving husband, runs marathons to raise money for sick kids and on top of everything is blonde with great tits. Don’t you hate her already? I know I’ve tried. But she’s also really, really nice. Damn her.

Now I wouldn’t mind it so much if I was half the woman WW is. But truth be told I’m way to lazy to be that perky. I could probably start a few businesses, running a marathon, how hard can it be? But if I had all that on my plate I would bitch and moan about it to all who would listen. WW is one of the happy, positive people. Her family are like the Von Trapp family on Prozac. Her hills are alive with the sound of rave music. All that positivity is obviously productive, I mean look at what the woman has achieved, but where’s the fun in it? Where’s the whine?

Now I only have one job. Mom. Two, if you throw in Wife. And I spend all day bitching to whoever will listen about how hard my job is, how there’s no “me” time, no recognition for a job well-done, blah blah blah. You name it, I’ve complained it. More jobs would mean more moan, and well, even I don’t have enough Jewish angst for that. So I think I’ll stick to what I’ve been doing and live vicariously through the achievements of my friend. And maybe, just maybe, all that abundant, exuberant, Yes-We-Can-Obama-like energy will rub off on me. Cue: “Shiny Happy People” dancing song and those bluebirds from Snowhite.

Wild South Africa. Grrrrrrrr

Hands up all the ex pat South Africans who’ve had an American ask: “When you lived in Africa, did you have wild animals in your back garden?”. And then, go onto clarify that they are specifically wondering about lions. Right, I thought so. It’s not just me.
Now I don’t want to ruin any Henri Rousseauesque image you Americans have about living in South Africa. But I do feel we should clear some things up.
The only wild animals I had in my garden (beside my children) were small, guinea pig looking rodents called Dassies. It’s disappointing I know. You were hoping for at best a lion, at least a zebra. But let’s not negate the tiny Dassie. They are quite wild. And, I’m sure they can be ferocious and vicious when provoked, or when not looking like cute little Peter Rabbits. There were no giraffes or buck and I’m quite sure I would have noticed a Hippo.
Sorry.
I do have some good news for those of you who are, at this very moment, blocking all your South African friends from Facebook because they are obviously not as exotic as you had hoped. The Dassie is, in spite of the huge height difference, the African elephant’s closest living relative. So the truth wouldn’t be too playdough in structure for you to say: “ Some of my best friends are South African. They had elephants in their backyard.”

Some other things I would like to clear up while I have the forum.
I do not come from Britain, Australia or Canada. I sound nothing like them.
Thank you for saying you think my accent is cool. Back in South Africa I sound like Fran Drescher. Johannesburg is not near to Cape Town and no, I don’t know your South African friends who live there. I also don’t personally know Nelson Mandela although he does seem to have met or shook hands with someone who knows someone I know. Cricket is the greatest game ever played. And I do feel sad for you that, until now, you thought it was a little insect. It’s a sport. I swear. Look it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Hyrax

This is not a Blog.

This is a Sorry. Sorry to those 3 loyal fans who come here daily. I have been uber (I use "uber" rather than "super" because that's what they use to describe Heidi Klum, uber model. It just sounds cooler. roll it around off your tongue. It's fun.) busy doing the mom thing. The kids finally started school again. I was first mum at the school at 6.30am banging at the gates. Summer holiday is a month too long. There I said it. One can only frolic with one's kids on a 24/7 basis before mom's little helper gets served up at 1pm rather than the traditional 5pm. And now that school has started I have all the free time in the world to spend running missions for my kids. Thus no blog. So once more, because I'm really hoping you 3 keep coming back, sorry. I shall blog again soon.

How to get Madonna's arms in 78 000 easy steps.

Despite promising in a previous blog to shun all exercise in favor of my couch,
I find myself, once again, a member of a gym.

I joined for 2 reasons.

1:
Cheap childcare. For 2 hours I pay only $9 for a nice play area and a break from the kids. That’s why I joined. I didn’t realize that the nice-looking young man, who got me to sign on the dotted line, was in fact Satan. Sure the kids are having fun. But I’m getting harassed by the treadmill, bullied by the Stair Master, spanked by the butt machine and I think the abdominal weight contraption pulled my hair. All the time I could see Lucifer laughing at me while filing my contract in the SUCKER MOM section of Hades.

2:
Something had to be done about my “Oprah arms”. Even my husband who has always tiptoed (as quietly as a 6.8 giant can) around the subject of flab, has raised an eyebrow at them. He stopped short of actually flicking them when he saw my “Are you shitting me?” look. This is a true story. He will try to deny it.

This is what I think about gyms. They are places where people with outrageously good bodies go to show other people how good their bodies are. I say this, as every single gym I have ever been to has more people standing around than actually working out. And the standers are never the tubsters. Never. The standers are the bodies we want. The bodies we get puffy, sweat-cultivated-acne-pockmarked and beetroot faced to have. The standers never sweat. They never have Lake Erie etched into their t-shirt back. They don’t heave, wheeze, moan or desperately gulp-suck their asthma inhaler for breath. They just stand; “Here is my gorgeous body. Look at me you pathetic excuse for what a human being could be, look at me.”

So why do I bother? Well, I believe that with the right amount of torture, pain and suffering I can reach the point where I will no longer have to go to the gym to work out. I will be able to just stand. I will have achieved ridiculously good body nirvana and the coin you bounce off my well-toned ass will no longer sink into an abyss.

Until then I’ll be using the equipment I’m paying for.

cigar smoke hell or our apartment.

I just walked into my apartment and it smells like a cigar pit. I don't even have words to make this funny. To make you chuckle.
Share your smoker hell stories please. The more of us there are, the more chance we have to stump them out (see a vague attempt at not so funny humor there, but it's a start).

Diet madness.

I am a naturally thin person. But lately I'm thinking maybe this isn't enough.
Maybe I too should be dieting. After all it's all I see on TV. One diet plan ad after the next. It's all I read in magazines, how to get thin in 3 days, how be a size 0 (which for me is the size of an open mouth starving), ad after ad of emaciated women who look like 12 year old girls, followed by an article on self worth.

Now I've never been tempted to try any of these diets, firstly because I love my food too much. Secondly, if I had to starve enough to squeeze into a skinny jean I'd have zero boobs left. Zero boobs and no hips. My husband would be able to take me to any restaurant in the Village with rainbow pride. And thirdly I have daughters I'm trying to set an example for.

But today I did come across an article I feel could work for me. True I'm only going to take from the article the parts I want to. But that's my prerogative.
I've posted the article below. Read it now then you can read the rest of my blog. Or, you can read the rest of my blog and then read the article and it'll be like that movie Memento. But in blog form. It would be Blogento.

I am personally testing this theory by having a tub of Cherry Garcia while sitting on my couch. I plan on doing no exercise today bar lifting the remote control. I'm doing this in the name of science of course. I weighed myself this morning. I shall weigh myself tonight. And if the weight is the same I shall never exert myself again. I shall get wobbly, and floppy and will become a large, throbbing target for the heart attack reaper but by God, I shall be thin.

Why Exercise Won\'t Make You Thin

my alphabet is missing a Z

2.49am

There are those incredibly lucky people who sleep. I know they exist because there are three of them who live with me. Heads hit pillows and that’s it. Lights out, see you in the morning. In fact I do suspect there are lots of these lucky beings out there. When I look out across at the apartment next to me, as one does in NYC, I see lots of lights off. So I assume they’re sleeping and I hate them for this.

Then there’s the apartment straight across from me, and the one 6 floors down. Their lights are on. I can see them wondering around. Baldie is making a sandwich and white briefs is watching TV. They are like me. People who can’t sleep. People who wake up at the slightest, lightest noise (admittedly in NYC that’s usually an ambulance or a crack whore). People who, to quote Faithless can’t “get no sleep”.

These people are usually herbal tea drinkers, naturotherapy-sleep-aid stockpilers, over-the-counter-anything-with-a-PM-attached-to-it takers. I know because I am one.
I use all the remedies, all the “cures”. I know what Valerian is, I’ve kava kaved, I’ve counted almost all the sheep in New Zealand (except for their cricket team, I’m saving them for 5am). And still, here I am, up at 3.10 am listening to my daughter snoring in the next room.

I got medical help once. Or 4 or 5 times. None of this sleep institute stuff, I hear they watch you sleep and that creeps me out, besides how do you watch an Insomniac sleep (these are the banal, stupid thoughts we have, Baldy and I at 3.20am.) But I have been to my MD and been he prescribed wonderful little pills that did actually give me a night or 6 month’s sleep. My MD did tell me that I was far to young to be having sleep problems. I agreed, took the pills and no longer had sleeping problems.

Problem is, that while the nice billionaires at the drug companies claim their Wonkaseque looking, miracle sleeping pills are non addictive (and really who can argue with a man in a white coat with a whatsit sticking out of his pocket) I find that they are. Not so much the pill. But Sleep. Sleep glorious Sleep. It’s a lovely thing when you get it. And I want it bad.

But a little voice keeps me from popping one every night. In fact I haven’t had one in 6 months. Because I don’t want to be that reliant on a pill to take me to Lucy and her sky of diamonds. I want sleep like everyone else. I just don’t.

So tonight it’ll be type meditation. Hopefully the sound of my fingers on the keyboard will lull me to sleep. So far it’s not working. Tomorrow I’ll forgo caffeine. The day after that I’ll meditate to crappy dong dong dong chants. If that doesn’t work, I’ll be up. So do pop in for a cuppa chamomile if you’re in the area at 3.39am. It’ll be nice to have the company.

My smoking gun

We rent our apartment in NYC for all our arms and a few of our legs. For what we’re paying we could easily buy about 8 foreclosed houses in Vegas or a condo in Orlando.

But living in the greatest city in the world comes at a price, that’s just how it is.
Increasingly however, this A4 size price-tag has become unbearably hard to bear. The reason: Smokers.

Smokers surround us. All their stinky, smelly, hazardous, harmful fumes come directly into our apartment. It seeps in through the vents, light fixtures, windows and air-conditioning. The smell is nearly always detectable. Now I’m a reasonable person. I understand that a smoker has an addiction. I understand it’s hard to resist a man in cowboy boots, on a horse, telling them how good they look with a cigarette in hand. I know it’s a struggle for them quit.

Thing is, I’m not trying to make these air-polluters quit. I don’t care how much poisonous tar and chemicals they inhale into their own lungs. Maybe one day they can get sick enough to get one of those nifty devices you press on your neck to talk. They’re perfect for Darth Vader impersonations. They’d be the hit of any Star Wars convention. I’d invite them over to Halloween.

What I vehemently, ferociously, frantically, vein-popping-out-of-the-side-of-my-head angrily object to, is having to inhale their smoke. I don’t fart in their lounge. I don’t drop rotten eggs in their bedroom. I don’t empty my garbage onto their balcony (although at times that is tempting). But they seem to have no problem doing it to me. And more frighteningly to my children.

Of course we’ve brought this up with our neighbors. And of course, because they’re addicts, they don’t get it. They’re fighting so hard for their right to kill themselves, that in their foggy, smoky, cigar-ridden, selfish haze they’re unconcerned that they’re harming us too.

We do actually have a clause in our lease. Lucky us. Our lease says the following: Smoking is strictly prohibited in all parts of the building (other than within a tenant’s apartment) In no event, however shall a tenant permit anyone to smoke within it’s apartment if….. (B) any smoke or odor from the tenant’s apartment is detectable anywhere outside of such a tenant’s apartment.

Of course Management couldn’t give a lab rat’s nicotine injected, cancer ass.
Management has basically offered for us to move. In other words they are kicking us out, not the smokers. I would laugh at this if laughing didn’t aggravate my newly acquired smokers cough.

So what’s a nice, tax-paying, law-abiding couple to do to protect the health of themselves and their kids? I guess we’ll have to sue. Or move. Or both. And that will cost at least a mansion in Detroit.


For those who are interested here are some interesting facts:

Second-hand smoke (which is sometimes called environmental tobacco smoke or ETS) contains toxic substances, over 40 of which cause cancer. Some of these substances are in stronger concentrations in second-hand smoke than they are in the smoke that goes directly into smokers’ lungs.

ETS is causally linked with a number of adverse health effects in children (under 18), including:

* lower respiratory tract infections (i.e. croup, bronchitis and pneumonia)
* Increased fluid in the middle ear
* upper respiratory tract irritation
* reduced lung function
* additional episodes of asthma
* increased severity of asthmatic symptoms in children
* reduced oxygen flow to tissues, comparable to children with anemia, cyanotic heart disease or chronic lung disease †

ETS is also associated with:

* Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
* acute middle ear infections (otitis media)
* tonsillectomy
* meningococcal infections
* cancers and leukemias in childhood
* slower growth
* adverse neurobehavioural effects
* upper respiratory tract infections (colds and sore throats)
* unfavorable cholesterol levels and initiation of atherosclerosis (heart disease) †