#and this has killed a nice bit of time staying awake before lb starts so there you go

[sportsthoughts]

15 people 15 questions

thank you for the tag @couthbbg !!

1. are you named after anyone?

depending on which of my parents you ask either lucy pevensie (chronicles of narnia) or lucy in the sky with diamonds (beatles) i'm kind of good with either tbh

2. when was the last time you cried?

lol i watched the makeover episode of canada's drag race this afternoon while i ate my lunch and it had me in bits. this season has been a*

3. do you have kids?

not yet. hopefully in the next two years. my inspiration is my sister who has a newborn baby and is still plugging away writing fanfic. best believe if i'm fortunate enough to have a baby i'll be on here doing night feeds and shitposting.

4. what sports do you play/have you played?

very keen gym goer and pilates doer but no fun team sports. did some dance as a kid. i love literally every sport though and will watch and enjoy any sport as a spectator.

5. do you use sarcasm?

does anyone answer this question with no?

6. what's the first thing you notice about people?

physically - hands. not sure why

7. what's your eye color?

what's YOURS

8. scary movies or happy endings?

happy ending. i am not joking when i say you could not pay me to watch a horror movie.

9. any talents?

i am the best houseplant gardener i know. i have never met a houseplant yet i could not revive or make thrive. at this point i maybe have like 50+ houseplants. hmu for gardening tips seriously. its a passion

10. where were you born?

England. not being more specific although if you followed this blog 5 or 10 years ago i actually used to have the name of my HOMETOWN in my blog title. I actually shudder to remember this. what was i thinking. at least i don't live there anymore lol

11. what are your hobbies?

watching sports obvs, pilates, walking, gardening, digital photography, reading, really want to do more crafty stuff but at the moment i struggle to make time for it even though i've hoarded a ton of art supplies. husband is trying to get me into gaming but honestly have 0 patience for it.

12. do you have any pets?

besides my houseplants no. not in a pet friendly house atm. would love a dog but i have to vicariously live through my sister and her cats.

13. how tall are you?

5'4

14. favorite subject in school?

call me crazy but legit all of them. my high school experience was actually pretty positive and i didn't really hate any of school except maths. favourite at a push was probably history although that was mostly due to a very foxy teacher

15. dream job?

feel like most of you know what i do for a job anyway and yeah, it's my dream job. wish i got paid slightly more for it but the work is a dream.

Tagging any of my followers, feel free to say I tagged you! Aaaaaand @heartsoftruth @carlando @geooooooorge @malkinse @queeerkings @cornerihaunt @prettyhockey @ferperss if you're in the mood!

[carasueachterberg]

This week the pups morphed from guinea pigs to real puppies. They are growling and wrestling and starting to even notice the toys I’ve placed in their box. I tried a few Live Streams but as about 23 hours of their day is spent sleeping both ‘puppy hours’ mostly featured a big pile of pups napping. I will try again this week.

Mia continues to be an all-business mom, getting the job done and getting back out of the box. She is much more interested in what is happening in the rest of the house or the other dogs.

Below are the entries for this week. If you’d like to read them in real time (and maybe catch a puppy hour livestream) be sure to follow my public Facebook page.

Diary of a Rescue Day 8:

Everyone got noisy today. Mia has decided she does not want to be in that puppy room. She would like to come out and play with the other dogs in the house. It’s obvious she is a young dog and being cooped up with those little vultures is getting to her.

I tried to walk her more and to give her time in the hallway instead of only the puppy room. I’m hesitant to allow her access to the other dogs yet. With every other Mama dog I’ve waited until the puppies were weaned to introduce the mama dog to our pack. I still think that’s the best way so likely I will wait but we may try walking her with a Fanny, my young female dog who will eventually be her best playmate.

The puppies are also getting noisier and more active. It makes me wonder if their ears are starting to open. They are still wobbly and awkward but they are beginning to play and wrestle.

Because we all need some more positive stories to follow, I am going to try to post more video of the puppies. I’m going to set up my phone to stream a LIVE hour of puppies tomorrow from 11:30-12:30 EST. Can’t promise there won’t be poop or household noise but hopefully watching puppies will be much better than watching the news!

#stayhomeandsavelives and watch #puppies!

Diary of a Rescue Day 9:

They get a little more active each day. Today I weighed them all and everyone except Usnavi and Cinderella broke the two pound mark. If we have the birthdate more or less right, the growth chart puts them between 40-50 pounds. They seem small to me though so we’ll see if they stay on that trajectory.

Little personalities are starting to emerge. Dolly is very curious and outgoing, Usnavi is mischievous, Mr Mistopheles is very mellow (and the biggest pup), Evan Hansen is charming, and Calamity Jane is a bit of a noodge.

This morning I did my first ‘Puppy Hour’ and live streamed them for an hour. I will try again tomorrow but do it in the afternoon when they are more active.

I am trying to post as often as possible because I know people can use some happy media. Please take care of yourselves and look out for your neighbors.

#puppiesMakeEverythingBetter #opttoadopt

Diary of a Rescue Day 10:

At almost three weeks old the puppies biggest activity is sleeping. Still, I can spend inordinate amounts of time just watching them sleep- the little twitches, the mewling, the rolling over and getting stuck between siblings. All of it is adorable.

This weekend I thought I’d share a little of their days by live streaming a ‘puppy hour’ each day. I enlisted my son to rig up a holder for my iPhone and then I announced the appointed hour.

Saturday’s Live stream, while probably too far away at least had a little activity when Mia popped in and out of the pen and even settled down to nurse.

Sunday, though, was a solid hour of sleeping puppies, except when the phone holder slipped and then it was ten minutes of towel before Nick fixed it and then it was back to sleeping puppies.

I’ve decided I will give it a few days and then try the live stream again. With all that is going on in our world, I think a puppy hour would be a nice break from nonstop bad news.

Hopefully the next one will be a bit more entertaining.

Mia continues to spend her days at the gate, hoping someone will take her out for a walk. She is definitely ready for the single life.

#puppylife #nappinglife #opttoadopt

Diary of a Rescue Day 11:

It’s hard to get pictures of the pups with eyes open- when they are awake they are busy- stumbling around, nursing, or pooping. I caught a few today, though. They are looking less like guinea pigs and more like puppies.

Mia has been spending a lot of time in the hallway outside the puppy room, lying at the gate that separates the hall from our living room. From that spot she has been watching my husband install a hardwood floor. He says she reminds him of a toddler, easily amused watching ordinary things.

(I think he’s remembering our kids as babies, certainly by the time they were toddlers they were rarely content to ‘watch’ anything- they’d have made a big mess of all the stuff from the living room currently piled in that hallway!)

If we must be stuck at home, home with puppies isn’t such a bad deal. I hope you are fairing well and finding a few silver linings of this situation.

#staysafeandsane #togetherbutapart

Diary of a Rescue Day 12:

Today my kids, Ian and Addie, are in charge of the crew. My husband and I made a quick trip down to our cabin in the mountains of Virginia to cut the grass, address the carpenter bee infestation, and deal with the results of me leaving bananas on the counter the last time I was down here two weeks ago.

Thankfully, the bananas held up okay and the house wasn’t filled with fruitflies (as anticipated), but the bees are out in force and the exterminator is coming tomorrow. (I hate the idea of killing any bees, even ones that are eating my house, so hopefully he will have ideas how to not just evict them but keep them from coming back.)

So far, the meager first-hand reports are that the puppies and Mia are doing fine. Ian sent a few pictures. I’m sure they will seem so much bigger when I see them again tomorrow. I can check on them via our puppy cam and everything looks fine, at least on camera. My kids have helped care for dozens of puppies by now so I’m confident the pups are in good hands.

#togetherwerescue #mykidsareprettygreat

Diary of a Rescue Day 13:

The pups are three weeks old now. Tonight I weighed them. Smallest is 1 lb 11oz (Usnavi) and biggest is 2lbs 11oz (Mr. Mistopheles).

They got their second dewormer tonight and it went much better than last time- everyone slurped it up and looked for more. While I was deworming them, I noticed that there are teeth coming in, so later this week I will introduce some soft puppy mush. Solid food is the first step towards Mia’s independence, which she desperately needs.

Mia is a mischievous one, already trying to figure out how to climb out, pulling everything down within reach, and attentively watching out her gate at all times. She can’t wait to join the other dogs and this household.

Everyone faired just fine in my absence. It is awfully nice to have such competent kids (well really starter-adults).

#puppyhouse #happytobehome

Diary of a Rescue Day 14:

There is little to say beyond the cuteness, so I’ll let it speak for itself…

Thanks for reading!

Cara

If you’d like regular updates of all my foster dogs past and present, plus occasional dog care/training tips from OPH training, be sure to join the Facebook group, Another Good Dog.

For information on me, my writing, and books, visit CaraWrites.com. I have a new book, One Hundred Dogs and Counting: One  Woman, Ten Thousand Miles, and a Journey into the Heart of Shelters and Rescues, coming out in July. If it sounds like something you’d like to read, I’d be beyond grateful if you’d consider preordering it. Preorders contribute to the success of the book, not only giving me and my publisher some peace of mind but hopefully attracting media attention.

And if you’d like to know where all these dogs come from and how you can help solve the crisis of too many unwanted dogs in our shelters, visit WhoWillLetTheDogsOut.org.

Our family fosters through the all-breed rescue, Operation Paws for Homes, a network of foster homes in Virginia, Maryland, D.C., and south-central PA.

If you can’t get enough foster dog stories, check out my book: Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs . It’s available anywhere books are sold.

I love to hear from readers and dog-hearted people! Email me at carasueachterberg@gmail.com.

Need some good news for a change? How about #puppies?Diary of a Rescue Week Two #fosterdogs This week the pups morphed from guinea pigs to real puppies. They are growling and wrestling and starting to even notice the toys I’ve placed in their box.

[whole30problems]

Day 20: 1/20/18

Soooo... we are considering not finishing this Whole30. I’ll get into why, but let me first just say that I realize this seems like a really lame cop out. And I think it would be if this was the first time I was doing Whole30. But I already did the whole thing once so I know I’m capable of it - so it doesn’t feel like giving up to me, it feels like considering my options knowing how I’ll feel in both scenarios and trying to make the more mature move instead of focusing on the guilt that I think people will be disappointed in me or make fun of me or whatever might happen.

Actually, lemme just tell you about my day because I think then you may understand where I’m coming from.

Breakfast

I woke up at 5am again, sneezing and with a constantly runny nose (I should have taken a picture of how many tissues I used in the next hour; I think it was probably like 30). For some context on this: I have woken up between 4-5am every single day for the last... I think 2 weeks? We finally acknowledged today that it seems like I might be allergic to something in the apartment, because it seems like as soon as I leave home I’m fine, and as soon as I come back (like right now, as I type this, I am sneezing again, and I have not sneezed in hours) it starts up again. So that is stressful thing #1.

So I woke up at 5, put in a few hours of work (stressful thing #2: work is crazy right now for a bunch of reasons and I know someone’s going to yell at me about work/life balance but I work at a very early stage startup that is doing a lot of cool things and this is not the time for me to have a work life balance so just don’t yell at me about it. But yes I basically work 24/7 currently and it’s exhausting), and sat around sneezing and feeling miserable. 

Erik woke up eventually and offered to make some of those yummy smashed potatoes out of leftover cooked potatoes we have in the fridge. I said that sounded great. Then he came out of the kitchen with ONE plate with a couple potatoes and a sausage on it. I asked him where my breakfast was and he said he didn’t realize I wanted any. “What made you think,” I asked him, “That I would be making my own breakfast at some time in the future? I’ve been awake for hours and I’m starving. I also literally can’t stop sneezing long enough to even make it into the kitchen, PLUS I’m in the middle of a bunch of work.” (I am a joy to build a life with.) So he made me some breakfast:

Then he went off to skate (his current passion) and was so excited because this is the first day in months where it’s warm enough that he can go do it outside. He came back only an hour later, which is always a bad sign because it means something went wrong. It turns out the skate park was closed (and still full of snow), and he crumbled. The problem is, as I may have described here before, that January removes everything Erik loves. He’s not allowed to have beer. He’s not allowed to eat any comfort foods. He doesn’t have any free time because he’s constantly doing the dishes (or helping with other household chores that I don’t have time to do because I’m cooking every second of the day that I’m home). And he can’t spend any time outdoors, which makes him totally insane.

So on days like this, where he thought he might have something nice to do and then even that got taken away from him, it’s really not easy for him to bounce back. To his credit he tried, but it illuminated for me yet again how miserable this diet is making him. It’s just withholding one more thing that has the potential to make him have a good day. So there’s stressful thing #3.

Lunch

We went to see a couple apartments (as I think I mentioned the other day, we just found out we have to move), and since this was my first time really moving around today I noticed that a subtle lower back pain from yesterday had blossomed into what felt like a full-on muscle sprain. It was bad enough that I was limping a little because it hurt every time I moved my leg (back injury: stressful thing #4). When we got home from looking at the apartments, we did some stretching, which helped a little, but when I stood up from the floor I got really dizzy and that thing happened where I blacked out for a few seconds and couldn’t see anything and had to hold on to Erik until it passed. (Concerned family reading this: I promise I am fine, this is not something that happens often.)

This is when Erik totally lost his mind. He started expressing some concerns that I guess he’s had for a while, which is that I’ve basically been sick the whole time we’ve been doing Whole30 (as he put it, "I’ve never seen you this frail in the entire time I’ve known you”) and he strongly feels I should consider whether or not this makes sense for me to keep doing. I argued that I don’t see how eating less healthy would make me feel any better. What, if I was drinking regularly and eating pasta all my problems would be solved? And I really don’t know the answer to this - I don’t know if these things are a coincidence or if my diet really is hurting me somehow - but I do know that last year at this time I felt great, and for whatever reason I do not feel great now. I do have more energy at work, yes, which is nice, but I think that’s just because I’m not drinking and I’m not eating sugar and I’m going to bed earlier. But I feel sick, and weak, and exhausted at the end of the day, and I can’t sleep. So something certainly doesn’t feel right. Stressful thing #5.

Anyway, we argued about that for a while and then I made us a greek salad, which was really good!

It’s just romaine, hardboiled eggs, tomatoes, and kalamata olives. The dressing is olive oil, red wine vinegar, lemon juice, garlic, and salt and pepper. While I was making this admittedly very simple and quick salad, I was also heavily guilting my husband about not offering to make it. But the problem is, he hates cooking more than anything in the world, I think maybe even a tiny bit more than he hates seeing me in pain, which is certainly a lot. So I made lunch while I moaned every time I had to move because my back hurt, and constantly blew my nose because it wouldn’t stop running, and generally gave him a hard time. The thing is, I joke about this a lot here, but this kind of intense diet really is tough on a (or at least our) relationship. It’s so much work, and it’s neverending. Erik has done the dishes 3 times today, and somehow there are still dishes in the sink. There’s always groceries to order or something to clean or something to cook. And it is very much not making us enjoy the limited time we have together at home. Stressful thing #6.

I took a nap after lunch and that helped (so did the heating pad I put under my back).

Dinner

We did have one really nice part of our day. Remember that angel Duncan who cooked us a Whole30 dinner last year? He did it again this year, and this time he had help in the form of a second angel, Sarah:

They hosted us for dinner, and made us a delicious salad, a spatchcocked (??) chicken, and a truly amazing slow cooker curry cauliflower korma that you should 100% make. This was the best dinner I’ve had probably all month (half because it was good, and half because I didn’t have to make it). We brought the La Croix. They wouldn’t let us clean up any of the dishes after dinner. Like I said: angels.

They read the blog, so we talked a lot about how it’s going and the pros/cons. And while we were talking about it, I realized... there aren’t really any pros this year. In addition to all the health problems I’ve been having, I also still haven’t dropped more than those original 5 lbs (and I’m convinced that was just from getting rid of alcohol). And we’re just... so... miserable.

Duncan also made us a “second course” (since we’re not allowed to have “dessert”) which was a sort of smoothie made from bananas, coconut milk, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Oh my god it was heavenly.

On our walk home, Erik and I had some real talk about the Whole30. He told me how guilty he felt eating that paleo crack bar the other day because it had raw maple syrup in it, and how it got him thinking that so many of the Whole30 rules seem so silly because we already know (from doing it + reintroduction last year) that a bunch of the forbidden foods don’t make us personally feel bad. I also think I’ve been relying on the Whole30 too much as my sole (theoretical) method of losing weight or staying skinny when really what I should probably be doing is exercising. And, ya know, sleeping.

I think we just don’t... really believe this is the right diet for us. And we actually DO eat relatively healthy (much more than we used to before Whole30). We went down the list:

We almost never eat bread or pasta at home

We almost never order in food

We eat breakfast every day, and it’s usually some variation of the eggs and meat/veggie we’re eating now

We’ve both cut down on our caffeine

We’ve both massively cut down on our sugar (outside of my one vice, Pumpkin Spice Lattes in Nov/Dec)

I eat way less cheese than I used to, and Erik eats way less fast food than he used to

We’re not perfect, but we don’t have any serious dietary reactions to anything we eat, and we’re relatively thin, active people. I just don’t really know what we’re trying to get out of this anymore. It doesn’t really feel like it has a point this year. Last year, we had a goal: finish the Whole30. Prove that we can do it. Now it just feels like a dumb project we’ve finished already.

I feel pretty confident that even if we choose not to continue doing the Whole30, we can still use January as a healthy month (no alcohol, little to no sugar, more veggies, and actual exercise) and get more out of it if we’re not stressed and miserable all the time.

So there you have it. I don’t know what we’re going to do but I can tell you that I’m leaning towards giving up on this. We have enough stress in our lives without a self-imposed diet that seems to be killing both of us slowly. I still super believe in the Whole30 and think it’s worth doing once to learn what works and doesn’t work for your body, but I think what I’ve learned this time around is that rather than doing something extreme like this again, a smarter thing is just to take what you’ve learned and incorporate that into your life in a sustainable way. I’d like to be healthy year round, not just in January.

And Erik would like to eat a pizza.