And there was much rejoicing (yay...).

It is officially summer vacation! Hooray! Finished all the work I needed to do in my classroom today, went to our end-of-the-year luncheon, checked out with the dean. That means I'm free and clear until July 16, when I start my two weeks of summer school. And after that, nothing until August 9. Whoo hoo!

But I'm not going to spend my summer lying around the house eating (like I did last summer). Oh no. I need to use this time to get myself out of the rut I've gotten in (the non-working-out, eating-way-too-much rut). My weight has crept back up over 180. I weighed myself this evening (even though it includes clothing and food weight since I just ate) and I'm not happy: 184.2. A solid 10 lbs heavier than my best weight so far since we started this whole weight-loss adventure over a year and a half ago.

So my summer will be spent at the gym. Not all day long; I don't think I could keep that kind of intensity up. But what I'd like to do is go to the gym in the morning and swim a few miles, then change into clothes and lift some weights. Then I would go home and do whatever needed to be done at home, and go back to the gym in the afternoon to meet my spouse and do some cardio. It will require a lot of effort and dedication from me, which I so far haven't shown in quite some time. I don't know if I'll be able to stick with it, but I'm going to try.

I also need to work on my eating habits. Right now we're pretty broke, so I don't have to worry about buying too much food. I just need to pick food that is good for me (fruits and veggies mostly) and only small amounts at a time. Ideally I would like to run/walk/bike to the farmers' market that is about a mile from my house to purchase my lunch, or maybe to the grocery store or Subway or something like that. However, my dislike of running coupled with the really unpleasant temperatures and humidity of a typical Southern summer may be prohibitive.

Anyway, this will all begin tomorrow. I'll start out the day by weighing myself, and then I'll hit the gym to swim. We,ll see how this goes from there...

I hate cancer.

I survived Mother's Day, I made it past the one-month anniversary of my mother's death, but somehow it just all keeps coming back to me. It seems like so many people I know have lost a loved one to cancer, have a loved one with cancer, or have had cancer themselves. It's everywhere.

A close coworker just got the news this afternoon that her mother's lung cancer, which was treated last year with chemo and radiation, has spread to her brain. Two close family friends have fathers with lung cancer now, one in the late stages.

It just sucks. With everything else in the world that isn't fair, why do diseases have to pick off the good people?

This has been sort of an emotional day. I haven't really done much, just went to the gym and sat around the house, took a nap and worked on school stuff, but the thought of my mother has been with me all day. My brother had sent me a gift of Almond Roca, something we all traditionally gave my mom every year for various holidays, and I had sent him a small pillow I had made from one of my mom's shirts. Our dad had suggested that we didn't really need to celebrate Mother's Day anymore, since neither of us have children, but to hell with that, we decided. So we sent each other cards and gifts, and spent the day thinking about what we didn't have.

But what really drove it home came as I was finishing a book my Honors students have been reading. The book is The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons. It is a sequel to another book, Ellen Foster, and follows the life of a girl named Ellen who lost her mother when she was about ten and is now going through adolesence with her adoptive mother and the rest of her somewhat crazy family and rural-town friends. The stories have been very good, but obviously in the past few weeks the character of Ellen has become a bit more familiar to me. Although we are different ages and lost our mothers in different ways (and of course she is fictional and I am not, at least I don't think I am), some of the thoughts and ideas that drift around Ellen are ones that have crossed my mind in the not-so-distant past. Anyway, the last passage in the book, as I was finishing it up and preparing to write a quiz for the girls, struck me very suddenly, and I found myself briefly in tears, but not in a bad way.

"Knowing well that I could be more than what my mother did, more than the moment she died--I am what she was before and is now, here with me in the burden of her love I'm content to carry, gorgeous to me and lighter than breath."

I cannot stay in the waiting room of the hospital, waiting for a phone call from the surgeon that I simultaneously needed and dreaded. I cannot stay in that room at the hospital, the one where the doctor summoned us to tell us that he had lost my mother on the operating table. I cannot stay in that little curtained-off area in the ICU where they brought my mother's body afterwards for us to view. But I am afraid that when I left the hospital finally that afternoon, hours after my mother's spirit left me behind, I left part of myself behind, in that waiting room, in that little room on the third floor, in the ICU beside the shell of my mother.

My life is not the one that ended. I don't want to stay in that hospital. I don't think my mother would have wanted me to, either. But I do not feel whole, yet, and I do not know how to regain the part of me that could not bear to leave.

Wow, my 100th post. And somehow, things haven't changed that much.

I'm still struggling to lose weight. I still haven't made permanent improvements to my housekeeping abilities. I still haven't gotten 100% organized at school.

Pretty sad that in over a year I haven't made that many advances.

Anyway, I need to work on the same things I've been working on.

1) I need to get better at working out. I was especially bad this week, making it to the gym only three times. I really need to finish the chore of losing all the weight I've needed to lose. I'm still hovering just below 180 lbs. I have many reasons to lose the weight. Self-esteem, certainly, is a primary one. But the events of the past few weeks have driven home to me all the issues in my family history that can affect my health (cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, alzheimer's, stroke, diabetes, etc.), and a lot of them can be influenced by obesity. Definitely cause to drop the weight.

2) I need to get one top of the school stuff. Thankfully, I'm almost 100% caught up. I had been doing pretty well, and then I went out of town for a couple days for my mom's surgery. When everything went to hell, I lost an entire week. By the time I got home, I had seven days' worth of homework assignments, plus a test that included an essay, to grade. I literally just reached the official "caught up" point, where the only items I had to grade were items actually turned in today. Hooray. And even better, I only have a week left of classes (since the girls are almost out for the summer). And the week is pretty much all reviewing for the exam, except for a test they'll be taking. So I really don't have many assignments left to grade. I need to get together their study guide and exam, but for the most part it's smooth sailing.

3) I haven't really improved on the state of my house. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'm still working on washing the dishes that were sitting in the sink the week I headed to Cali for my mom's surgery (and that was back on April 18). Ick. I also need to get onto the laundry, and I really need to vacuum up the dog hair.

Anyway, at least with school ending in a few weeks, I can try to get back into some semblance of shape. And get my house cleaned up. And everything else.

Man, I'm a slacker.