Refelctions of Summer

Hey!! I feel bad that I have been on hiatus this summer, but hey, it's summer. Plus, I have been putting into action all the things I said I would earlier this year. First off, I quit that job that was killing me (as you already know) but I have to repeat myself as I feel that it was the best decision that I had made all year. Going back and reading my posts earlier this year, my darker posts went beyond my usual seasonal affective disorder, I was depressed about that job. I kept talking about change, and lo and behold, I made that change!! I am so proud of myself, as I often wait for things to happen to me rather than to affect events for myself. I now have gone back to working in restaurants where I can be the social animal that I am. I love meeting people, having a changing schedule and changing faces, and most importantly, a schedule that is not oriented to morning. I get to wake up whenever I feel like it. And now waking up naturally, I realise that I naturally wake up between ten and eleven--a far cry from the six a.m. that I had to force myself to wake up to for the office. And what a difference it makes to be able to work on your own personal circadian cycle...

No longer do I feel so bad about being single. Working in an office, burying your head in a cubicle, you don't get to meet many new people, and that was driving me crazy!! How can one meet new people sitting in a cubicle? So now, I am in the fold in the city, seeing new faces everyday and happy to make new connections. I have already met a ton of new people!!

I have also been furiously riding my bike non-stop. Funny thing, my riding has improved about a thousand percent. Earlier this year, my stress that had made me stop eating for a couple of months had made it so that I had no energy to ride more than from home to work, work to home, and the bar in between. I was sick all the time and feeling lethargic. I even went so far as to think that I wasn't good on uphills and needed some work on it. But really what I needed to do was to eat. And I must say that I have had a very strange experience with this. After not having eaten or having an appetite for months, then to get the appetite back and eat again is a very strange sensation. It's like food is all new all over again!! And I have even been craving a lot of red meat--i.e. beef--and I have answered that call, after not having eaten red meat for years. But I do believe that if your body craves something, you need to eat it. And I think that the starvation depleted my iron, and once I started eating again, my body was like give me iron!! Now, I can handle any hill I come across with power and strength. I swear, it's almost like I have a whole new body. In fact, I have decided to start training for racing again!! I have to find a trainer because I can only train myself so much. I need to kick it up a notch.

I wish I had gotten to the beach more this summer. But riding my bike, I have gotten a tan, so I don't feel like I missed out on any sun. However, I have the craziest tan!! I wear the fingerless gloves when I ride, so I have tanned fingers and wrists, but the hands are not tanned at all. It looks really weird. Then I laid out on my deck a couple of times and got my famous bikini tan lines, but then again, riding in shorts, I have darker calves than I do thighs!! I guess I have what I like to call the "urban tan"...which is crazy lines all over your body, even crazier than a farmer's tan which is very basic. I look like an Easter egg double and triple dipped in different places!! Hahaha!!

I feel like I am in a very different place than I was earlier this year. Light years away in fact. I can't believe how depressed I was, but I have worked hard to get to where I am now and I don't want to look back. Soon I will be moving into my own place, getting my car back from the ex (he has better parking in his neighborhood than I do in mine for the moment), and then, the ONE thing I have been ranting about all year: a vacation. For one, I will be going to St. Croix this January with a very nice gentleman who invited me to go with him. But I feel I also need to take myself somewhere by myself. I want to prove to myself that I did it all on my own and the vacation will be the reward for myself, so that I can sit back and reflect on all that I have done, then look toward the more I have to do.

I am a happy camper at this point....!!!