Ash Wednesday

Usually I have a good story about wearing ashes on a southern campus, but it didn't work out that way this year.

I decided not to go to the 7 am service. I would have had to leave swimming early and also ask my husband to drive the carpool. This year my church offered a 12:15 service, and I teach only until 12:05. So I figured it was easier just to go to the 12:15 service instead of changing around my morning schedule.

It turned out to be a mistake. I was a few minutes late to the service and it was hard to get focused. I didn't eat lunch until after the service was over and by that time I was in a state I get into when I go too long without eating where I feel weak and know I need to eat but can't think of anything I want to eat--usually I end up bursting into tears. It takes an hour or more for my blood sugar system to recover after I do eat (I actually don't go very low, but apparently my body has a strong reaction to running out of reserves).

I had an appointment at 4 so I had very limited time to get in my long run. My blood sugar system hadn't stabilized when I started running and I had an intermittent headache. The food did kick in fairly quickly and I ended up having a good 6 mile run. But then when I hurried back to my office for the appointment the person had cancelled.

Since I ran after church, wearing a cap because of the bright sunshine and headache, and then showered, I didn't end up walking around campus with ashes on my forehead at all. It contradicts the reading about our father who sees in secret, but I rather like the experience of being visible. And usually there is an entertaining story to tell about confused students.

Next year hopefully I will remember that it is worth going to the 7 am service even if it is hard to fit into my schedule.

My monthly totals for February are:
Swimming 12 workouts for 15:40 hours
Biking 3 workouts for 42 miles in 3:54 hours
Running 8 workouts: 36 miles in 8:30 hours
I'm happy with my achievement in the half marathon, and the month revolved around that, plus travel and rainy weekends and then a bad cold.

talent search results

My daughter finally got her results from taking the SAT as a seventh grader through the Duke Talent Identification Program. Reading 560, math 540. Annoyingly they don't send any information on how to interpret results for a 7th grader taking a test designed for 11th and 12th graders, but I was able to find online last year's information sheet. Her combined score is in the 95th percentile for 7th graders who took the test (who are a very select group). What she is more impressed by is that she scored in the 72nd percentile for college bound seniors in South Carolina, as a 7th grader.

I always was told as a child not to brag, so I'm feeling uncertain about whom I can tell. So I decided at least I would brag here.

I got out for a two hour bike ride this morning--got about halfway before the rain started and even then it was very light. I was determined to get out today because yesterday I fell asleep instead.

it is the weekend already

But we have yet another rainy Saturday predicted. Spring is teasing us--I'm ready for some really nice bicycling weather. I guess I should try to get out on my bike at least for a short ride this afternoon.

In my environmental history course we are reading Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. What I'm struck by so far is not so much the ideas, which I had some sense of already, but the role of art. If you look at my notes on the Hudson River School, or Wednesday's notes on early preservation ideas, or even today's notes on Yellowstone and the Adirondacks, you may get a quick visual sense of the impact that art must have had on American ideas about wilderness.

better, finally

I swam this morning and it felt wonderful after three days off from all exercise because of my cold. This afternoon I had a meeting with our new priest that was cancelled--he had no idea that it would take him 3 hours to drive 120 miles home from the diocese camp in Aiken. The choice is to drive three sides of a rectangle on the highway or take back roads through quite a few towns. So I used my unexpected free time to go running despite a misting rain. Actually, I think I was inspired by the mist, which was like the weather for the half marathon, because I ran fast. I learned from the half marathon that I can safely push myself more than I thought.

I had missed the news that Betty Friedan died at the beginning of the month, until I saw an obituary in the Economist. I like the reflections on how the world has changed. "I never knew a woman, when I was growing up," Friedan writes, "who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children." There were in fact some: Lillian Gilbreth, Ruth Patrick, Margaret Mead, and others, but women were told they had to choose. Thank Betty Friedan for the idea that we can have it all, even if it isn't easy.

bad cold

I got so much healthier when I brought my blood sugar under control that I haven't had a cold that lasted for more than 2 days in over 2 years. But pushing myself too hard has caught up with me and now I'm in day 3 of a cold and still feeling rotten. I went to the doctor today because the inhalers I use to keep from getting a chronic cough after a bad cold were prescriptions from 2000 and 2003--the pharmacist said definitely not good any more.

I haven't seen this family practitioner since he diagnosed me with diabetes in Oct. 2004. I started going to a gynecologist and asked her to be the one to manage the diabetes, since all this doctor seemed to know to say was to tell me to lose weight. The interesting thing today is that he chose not to say anything about my weight loss and diabetes management; instead he made conversation about the article featuring me that was in the newspaper a few weeks ago. I would have liked to brag about my good diabetes numbers, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that this doctor and I have worked out over the years how to keep me from going into a chronic cough (apparently a reactive asthma). The year I strained one of the joints between my ribs and my breastbone and it hurt so much to cough and I kept coughing for weeks made me take prevention very seriously.

I asked the doctor about when to go back to swimming, but all he had to say was judge by whether I had my energy back. Our pool uses salt in the water and less chlorine, so it probably won't hurt my sinuses.

motherhood

My husband was told my son's basketball game was at 4 pm yesterday (actually I suspect he was told the Friday schedule, not the Saturday schedule). My daughter and I showed up in Greenville at 4 only to learn that the game was at 7 pm. Since it would have taken us almost an hour to drive home, we went and hung out at a bookstore. I started reading Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner, and ended up buying it.

I wouldn't have bought the book if I hadn't spent some time reading it, as it is about the kind of mothering I feel vaguely guilty about not doing, such as trying to plan the perfect birthday party (in our house the key rule was no home birthday parties because we can't clean up the house in time). It turns out it is very reassuring to read a book about what is wrong with the model I felt guilty for not following. The author's analysis (at least as I see it 60 pages into the book) is that women who grew up believing the feminist battles were already won assumed that everything depended not on social change but on making the right private choices for themselves and their families and therefore gave those choices unbearable weight.

Saved by feminism yet again. When I began to read feminist writings in college I realized that I was trying to be one of the guys and I needed to learn to think more positively about women and about being a woman. I was on the tail end of activist feminism but I was very aware of the battles fought and of the danger of internalizing discrimination. I haven't participated in the social culture of parents mostly because I had too much else to deal with, both externally and internally. But feminism at least kept me from feeling guilty that I was happy to go back to work, didn't want to stay home with my children.

Race pictures