I've Gone Missing in the Past

Well well well.  I had the week off of work and, well, I was "busy" relaxing and being a geneology nerd.  Seriously, I spent entire days tracking my lineage on 2 different sites.  One thing it has done, without any outside effort, is to bring me closer to both of my parents, as we have all been communicating much more frequently.  My mother has been very involved in tracking our lineage on her side, and we bounce information back and forth to help each other out.  Once I signed up for a (free!) FamilySearch.org account, it auto-populates what it can with records such as birth, death and baptism records, I was amazed at my lineage.  Now, anyone can alter the information in the Family Search charts, so more research is needed on some of the things I found, but it is certain with documents and literature, that one of my great (tenth great to be exact) is Mary Towne Estey, one of the women who was tried and hanged at the Salem Witch Trials.  There are movies about her, her sister and her mother, Johanna Blessing.  It is a branch of that lineage that leads to royalty.  Knights, Barons, Kings and Queens from several countries including England, Poland, Kiev, and Hungary.  Now, this is where I take it with a grain of salt because I did not research all of the lineage leading up to them.  It is a little nutty to think about it, there is lineage from before 900's (kings of various countries) depending on which ancestor I look at.  But then I bring myself back to a nice, grounded place with this:

My Great Grandparents

My great Grandfather passed long before I came along, so I didn't get a chance to know him, but my great grandmother lived a long life, and I was nearly ten by the time she passed.  I can't say I remember much about her, but I have felt a great deal of warmth, comfort and even girl power/pride when I look at pictures of her because she seems like a lady who did not sit quietly and just do what she was told.  I have a copy of this photo printed out on my dresser, in a very fancy lead crystal frame that I got for my own wedding but never used.  I talk to them as if they are here with me, and in a way, I feel like they are.  It is something very healing, something I never expected to make me feel the way it does.  I am really happy I'm taking this journey now, while my parents are still here, and most of my aunts and uncles are too.  I did lose an aunt to brain cancer earlier this month, it would have been one of the grandchildren of the folks in the picture, my dad's sister.  That is the second of my dad's siblings to pass from brain cancer.  Scary stuff!

On the other hand, the other most major killer in my family is heart disease.  I got my results from my Calcium Scoring test, the test that measures how clogged your arteries are.  I got the remarkable score of 0!!! No clogging, no lesions, no calcification in heart, lungs or any other structures nearby.  These results were completely unexpected as I have a history of high blood pressure and high cholesterol and have been overweight since I was 8 or so.  I actually shed a tiny tear of joy when I got the news.  As of right now, I have a pretty much clean bill of health!  I can't tell you what a gift that is!

Friday the 13th, after ending an extraordinarily busy day at work, and with enough stress coursing through me to change the number on that heart test, my son and I decided to participate in a 5K event downtown in my city.  When it started at 7pm, the temperature without windchill was somewhere around 6 degrees above.  There was a little wind, and after having freezing rain prior to the drop in temperature, the trails/streets/sidewalks were so icy!  We walked most of the way, which was my original intent, but my son, being 13, felt self-conscious when we were last, so he insisted we run to catch up to the others a few times.  Let me tell you, my knee was reminding me why I'm not supposed to run.  While I was running, I got a familiar, warm, good feeling and my brain filled with delightful thoughts of taking it up again, really trying to find a way, but if I get a trainer, and the right shoes...But I woke up the minute I stopped running and felt the swelling start to encompass my knee.  I lost about 40% of the cartilage so it is not a good idea for me to run. At any rate, we finished in about an hour, which isn't too shabby for walking, on ice, in the f-f-freezing cold!

Yes, he does already tower over me at the age of 13.  I am only 5 ft!

We did feel pretty good about ourselves afterword, and decided that Saturday could be a lazy day because we sure did earn it!  To be fair, except for the following Thursday when I went trapsing through a cemetery of knee-deep snow looking for family graves, most of the days on my vacation last week were pretty lazy.  Lets just say, some of meals consisted of chips because I was too enthralled with what I was researching to actually take time out to cook.  So getting back to work/schedule/routine today was actually not such a bad thing for me!  I lost my I-need-to-get-up-early-and-workout-because-I-need-to-fix-my-health mojo, and I am not quite sure how to get that back, but maybe once my Monthly Madness goes away I will have more energy and get back to it.  I don't like how sluggish and bloated I have felt this week with the extra salt (and sleep) I've taken in.  I am sticking to the things that had been working before, taco salad for breakfast, and chopped southwest salad for lunch with nuts and dairy for snacks.  I don't expect super impressive results but that's kind of what this plan is about, managing life without ruining my health.

My son said he'd like to do more 5K's when the weather is nicer and I think that would be a great thing for both of us.  I'd like to get to a point where walking that long doesn't kill my knees, back and hips, but it did comfort me a little to hear him complain about the same parts of his body, then I know it's not just because I am old and out of shape!

I don't have any words of wisdom tonight, just a quick catch up since I've been gone longer than I anticipated.  I will try to not let things lapse so long from now on.