HERE'S WHAT 44 LOOKS LIKE
Cindy Maddera
15 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "My nurse"
Last week ended with me wanting to high five everyone. My friend and yoga teacher, Kelly, is/has put together a summer camp for adults and she posted a need for workshops and people. Now I’ve been thinking about a photography workshop for some time, one centered around using your camera phone. I figure if I can take nice pictures with my phone, you can too. So I presented the idea to Kelly and she was so enthusiastic about it, that it made me want to jump up and down. Tickets are on sale now for Camp Wildling and I’ve had a sneak peek at the entire schedule. If you’ve ever had a dream to attend that camp from Parent Trap, this is your chance. Then, I put my name down on the volunteer list for this year’s AIDS Walk Open and I got asked to do a meditation workshop for wellness week at work. The very best part that ended the week was something I did at work that was a little outside of my wheelhouse. It involved basically writing a program to do a bunch of stuff on a microscope. And it worked! It worked really well!
High five!
Then Sunday morning around 4 AM, I woke up sweaty and nauseated. My body felt like it had been used as a punching bag. When Michael came in my room later that morning, I burst into tears and he cancelled our dinner reservations for my birthday dinner that night. I spent the next two days laying around, drinking water and occasionally eating a saltine cracker. I did eat a bagel with cream cheese and lox on the second day and had some regrets about that food choice. I laid around another day, ate a pb&j and a taco, both of which tasted like ash or mold but stayed in place. So I’m back to work today moving at half my usual speed, but living and breathing and keeping food down. Winner! So far, I am the only one in the house to be struck with this. Michael thinks it was food poisoning. I’m not sure that I have ever had food poisoning so I don’t know. I am very paranoid that Michael’s going to come down with it next, assuming it was not a poisoning situation.
So, forty four looks five pounds lighter than forty three. I have been hankering for a spa day and there is a plan in the works for this once we take care of other things first. I can just tag the last few days on as a spa treatment, the colon cleanse treatment. I don’t recommend it. The massage and facial are much better options, but if you’re feeling puffy and just want to reset everything, food poisoning…I mean a colon cleanse is the way to go. Really, I’d rather not celebrate my birthday on my actual birthday anyway. The Shitty Ghost of Birthdays’ Past tends to overshadow any attempts at a nice birthday. So when things settle down, I will spend an afternoon hanging out in a steam room, getting massaged and scrubbed. I will eat a dozen oysters on the half-shell with a Caesar salad and wash it all down with a Pimm’s cup. Michael keeps telling me how sorry he is that I was sick on my birthday and every time he says it, I just shrug.
It’s one day. One day out of every year. Sure, it’s meant to be celebrated with candles and cake, but honestly, there was serious doubt that I would even make it that first day. Birth was traumatic. Who wants to celebrate that? Celebration comes in the days that follow, when it looks like you’re actually going to survive. Well, it looks like I have survived. Now it’s time to celebrate and I might just spend the rest of the year celebrating. I am really excited about the things I have planned for this year.