Soft as butter, tough as old tree roots

2004-03-15 - 11:45 p.m.

Today has been a good day. For some reason I woke up this morning with energy. It was awesome. My energy's been lacking for a while, but today it was back and more than normal even.

So first thing this morning was my weekly weigh in. I lost 1.5 pounds last week bringing my grand total to 20 pounds lost this year. Yeehaw!

Then I went to step class. Step class is so much more fun when I have energy.

After step class I rushed home, took a shower, beautified myself and headed down to Stockton to meet Doodle for lunch. I haven't seen her since December so I was glad to see her. She's planning on taking the NAPLEX this Thursday so she's pretty nervous about that.

Yesterday, while messing around on BookCrossing, I came across another website, www.booksalefinder.com, which lists local not-for-profit book sales. Through that site I discovered that the Stockton Friends of the Library actually have a used book store. None of this quarterly book sale stuff for them, they have a shop open six days a week! So of course since I was down in Stockton today, I had to stop by their store. I ended up buying 8 books for $5.75. I got Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross, Children of Dune by Frank Herbert, Speaking Stones by Stephen Leigh, The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt, The Death of Sleep by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye, The Dragonbone Chair and Tailchaser's Song both by Tad Williams, and The Stone Within by David Wingrove. I could easily have gotten lots more, but I restrained myself and only bought books that are actually on my "to read" list except Pope Joan which snuck its way in there.

On the way home from Stockton I stopped at Tapioca Express for bubble tea. I wasn't too impressed with it. It was ok, but it wasn't great. I think I'll give them another try to see if that was just a fluke because I've heard lots of good reviews about that place before.

When I got back to Sacramento I had some grocery shopping to do. Since Wednesday is St. Patrick's day I bought a corned beef. I was astounded when the first 2.5-pound corned beef I picked up was priced $50! It ended up that someone had messed up the decimal point and charged $12.50 per pound instead of $1.25 per pound, but that was pretty funny.

Afterwards I went to step class again, this time with my mom, and I still had plenty of energy. I was still going strong by the end of the hour while usually I'm pretty worn out. Afterwards when we were doing abs, the instructor had us doing an exercise where we got into a position like we were about to do a push-up only instead of using hands we were resting on our elbows and forearms. The exercise was to hold that position as long as possible. For some reason while everyone else was falling over and collapsing I was sitting there waiting for her to tell us to do something that would give us a workout. The instructor said something to the class about "feeling the burn" and she happened to catch my genuinely shocked expression when I realized that that was supposed to be the workout. So then she made it her mission to find something that would be tough for me. Right there in the front of the whole class. She went through several exercises before giving up. A lack of strength has rarely been an issue for me. And I've never lifted weights. Nor will I ever.