pink!
November 28, 2011
(I KNOW. Haircut blogging. Yawn).
Posted by jodi on November 28, 2011 at 11.26am
workout update
November 6, 2011
We haven’t had one of these in a while.
Quite frankly, it’s because there’s been a complete slackitude in the workout department around here. I’ve come to the realization that I was working myself too hard last spring (as evidenced by the shoulder injury that put me in physiotherapy for the summer and pretty much sidelined not only the weight training but also the running, right when I was about to triumphantly complete the final week of Couch to 5K). While working out very hard every day felt good (INCREDIBLY good), I think it had a lot to do with frustrations about working from home and some crippling motivational blockage in the studio. Fast forward to the end of summer after physiotherapy, vacation, a couple of summer colds and moving into a new (NOT IN MY HOUSE) studio, and there are self imposed office hours to keep, which pretty much kill the leisurely work-out-all-morning-then-dawdle-in-the-shower lifestyle.
BUT! Have I ever told you about our (Peter’s, actually, but it’s hard not to go along when you sleep in the same bed) brilliant method of adjusting to the entry and exit of Daylight Savings Time? It’s simple: get up at 6:45 and go to bed at 11:00 from March to October. From November to February, get up at 5:45 and go to bed at 10:00. Get it? IT’S THE SAME TIME. Your schedule adjusts so your body doesn’t have to, so you skip the groggy days of time-lag that accompany the change. Anyway, the point is that the alarm goes off at 5:45 now, which allows ample time for a morning workout without sacrificing any coffee-drinking or internet time, all before office hours start at 11:00. There is even still time to dawdle in the shower, if I want.
So! After months of scattered workouts, the new schedule is going to look something like this: cardio and some kind of weight training on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. Tuesday and Thursday mornings will be rest days or light cardio at most, because Tuesday and Thursday evenings are 3 hour derby practices. Saturday and Sunday are optional but on weekends when we’re in town Peter and I will probably do our full kettlebells workout together. I’m also thinking of starting the 100 Push Ups programme again (SAFELY, and slowly! Please don’t send me a bunch of concerned messages, I KNOW and I have strategies for not busting my shoulder again, I promise) as well as working my way back up to running for 30 minutes (right now I’m running for more like 10 minutes; I could do 15 but laziness always intervenes at the 10 mark).
Since I’m the only person looking at them anyway, I’ll probably aim for posting workout updates every two weeks from now on instead of weekly. That will give me more time to jack around on the internet between workouts.
Posted by jodi on November 6, 2011 at 7.00am
it’s possible to learn new things about yourself even in middle age
October 27, 2011
Since getting my driver’s license for the first time ever a couple of days ago, I’ve run a few errands all alone in the car. While I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m doing something illegal (I’m not), I’ve discovered something about myself: I am a singalong driver. A very loud singalong driver. This while being the kind of person who won’t sing in public, ever. So if you see me at a stop light belting it out, don’t judge. I’ve got years of repressed radio sinalonging to get out.
SCARAMOUCHE SCARAMOUCHE WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO!
Posted by jodi on October 27, 2011 at 10.07am
i used to live here*
July 29, 2011
*if it wasn’t obvious, this should always be said in Chicken Lady voice
142 Columbia Drive: spring or early summer 1975 to summer 1981
What the house looked like in 2006. Who puts those stupid stars on houses, and why? This trend baffles me. Also I don’t understand what people like about those angled-cut 2×2 railings that make every house look like a trailer. Bitch-bitch-bitch like a crotchety old lady In My Day we didn’t use pressure treated lumber et cetera.
No socks got shoved down the heat registers in this house, and no fires started. There was, however, a 15cm diameter hole in my bedroom wall, kicked there during a fight with a babysitter who wouldn’t let me stay up late to watch scary movies. The dislodged piece of wall didn’t fall out completely, but hung there from a hinge of plaster and old painted-over wallpaper, swinging like a little door to let in and out the small monsters and demons that I was certain lived there. Things did disappear into the hole from time to time: pencils; hair baubles; doll shoes; super secret notes; at least one sewing needle; and yes, a few socks. I would lie on my right side in bed, back to the hole, spine tingling with what I just KNEW was the fingers of the wall-dwellers tickling my skin, too terrified to peek over my shoulder lest I catch sight of one. The only time I’d ever turn onto my left, facing the terrifying portal head on, is when my dad would play a certain record that frightened me because it sounded like monsters. He’d only play it after I was in bed, unaware that I was lying awake upstairs panicking while the monsters danced behind my quivering back. Years later, as a teenager, I figured out that the “monsters” record that frightened me so much was Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. Of which I now own two copies and can listen to it at night or alone or whatever, without incident.
Here is what the front of the house looked like in 1978, when it still had the wartime concrete slab porch and fat pipe railings, corrugated aluminum window wells, and wooden screen doors (how I’d love to find plain wooden screen doors like this for my house!):
Yup, that’s me, a giant bristol board sunflower. Pretty much the least awesome costume for sitting in a school desk all day.
A couple of years later those doors got painted red:
Yes it’s Hallowe’en again. Although my outfit IS awesome.
One more from around 1976: I don’t even know what pleases me so much about these plain slab porches. Growing up in military housing gave me a love for utilitarian blandness. Also, brutalism.
Those bars were perfectly spaced so that if you were sitting with your knees wrapped over the bottom bar and holding onto the top bar, and you accidentally lost hold on the top bar, you’d swing backwards and crack your skull on the side of the concrete slab. It happened to all of us, all the time.
Here is the car we drove when we lived in this house: a 1976 Volvo station wagon.
Bikes in the snow!
Chicken Lady!
Posted by jodi on July 29, 2011 at 12.38pm
on toplessness
July 20, 2011
Yesterday I received a message from a friend who works at the CBC, inviting me to comment on the 20th anniversary of Gwen Jacob’s arrest for walking topless down the street in Guelph, Ontario. Unfortunately, I’m sick with an awful cold this week, so sick that last night I resorted to sleeping sitting up on the TV room couch in an effort to keep the coughing jags under control. I’m drowsy, a little bit stoned on cough syrup, and my cough-ravaged throat is in no condition to be heard on the news. But! YOU ALL ARE IN LUCK. Just because I’m sick doesn’t mean I haven’t got anything to say about Gwen Jacob.
See: the Gwen Jacob case kind of made me a feminist. I don’t mean that this case changed my life or made me a radically different person (a more radical person? heh) than I would otherwise have become. If it hadn’t been this it would have been something else. I just mean that, for me, it was this. In 1991, at age nineteen, I had already experienced rape, sexual coercion (something that I didn’t yet understand then, but do now, is ALSO RAPE), being dumped from a car on a sideroad in the middle of the country for not “putting out”, various other non-sexual assaults including a friend’s boyfriend trying to crush me with a chesterfield (I’m not even kidding), and a massive amount of slut-shaming. This one incident, this woman I didn’t know who was my age and grew up near where I did being arrested and charged with indecency for taking her shirt off, seemed to highlight all of the double standards in the whole world, for me. It was something concrete to be angry about at a time when I didn’t possess the words to protest against things like slut-shaming.
(Incidentally, I tried going topless outside for a while once, the summer after Jacob’s arrest, when I was all alone on the farm, not likely to be seen by anyone but the occasional gravel truck driver out on the road. How it felt: silly, contrived, exhilarating, terrifying. And oddly itchy. And when my areolae starting feeling the effects of too much sun, I gave it up.)
After the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned Jacob’s conviction in 1996, when going topless effectively became legal in Ontario for all sexes, a few (very few) women started trying it just because they could. Once or twice Peter and I saw one in downtown London, always walking with a male companion, never alone, reveling in their new freedom but cautiously, self consciously, defiantly; drawing stares. Hardly free of any kind of double standard, and certainly not free of their bodies being immediately sexualized. Peter overheard one of these topless women in conversation with her (male) friend, and guess what the two of them were talking about? People’s reactions to her toplessness. In the days after the court ruling our options had expanded from living with the double standard of only men’s toplessness being socially acceptable to either that or being an activist, a test case, and having our bare breasts be a constant centre of attention. Our options hadn’t really expanded to include our toplessness being NOT A BIG DEAL.
The thing is, double standards don’t just disappear overnight because the Court of Appeal says they’re unfair. Body policing and slut-shaming and rape culture don’t just disappear overnight, and the evidence is all around us, every day, that they haven’t even budged one bit. 20 years after Jacob’s arrest, 15 years after her conviction was overturned, what does her case mean for women in Ontario, exactly? If I went outside right this minute, took off my shirt and walked down the street with my breasts visible, here is what it does NOT mean:
-that I will not be perceived as behaving with indecency;
-that my body will not be sexualized or consumed in a sexual manner;
-that I will not be catcalled or otherwise verbally harassed;
-that I will not be groped;
-that I will not be propositioned;
-that I will not be raped;
-that I will be treated with respect, or even with indifference.
Also:
-that if I am perceived as behaving with indecency, that will not be perceived as my fault;
-that if my body is sexualized or consumed in a sexual manner, that will not be perceived as my fault;
-that if I am catcalled or otherwise verbally harassed that will not be perceived as my fault;
-that if I am groped that will not be perceived as my fault;
-that if I am propositioned that will not be perceived as my fault;
-that if I am raped that will not be perceived as my fault.
What it means: that at least I won’t be arrested.
Posted by jodi on July 20, 2011 at 1.57pm
4:00am insomnia blogging
July 19, 2011
There is a smell being drawn in from outside by the bedroom window fan, a fresh and not-fresh, green brown slimy smell, like algae. Nerve endings buzz, high on cough syrup, and restless legs twist in the bed but don’t want to stand up and walk around, either. This is (hope) the last of several risings, sitting upright in the dark to suck on cough lozenges. The stomach rebels at the sickly sweetness of those, but the throat demands them. In the late afternoon the heat wave gave way to torrents of rain then curled in close again, holding that moisture, keeping it warm so that the only relief comes from stretching out bare feverish feet in front of a fan that sucks great algae stinking breaths from the hot wet outside. I feel like I’m living in the South again, where damp settles into houses and never goes away and things slowly rot and you don’t even notice the scent of mould in sheets, in clothes, in hair, in everything until you go away somewhere and open up your suitcase and the stench hits you and you wonder, is that what my life smells like?
It almost wouldn’t be a surprise at all to wake up and find the house overgrown with kudzu, like in a story. Or a dream.
Posted by jodi on July 19, 2011 at 3.29am
i used to live here
July 10, 2011
These photos of every house I’ve lived in have been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of years now, waiting to be made into a page on this site called “every house I’ve lived in”. Which page is clearly never going to get itself made. So, here begins a new level of navel gazing at jodi’s weblog. Enjoy!
166 Columbia Drive, Huron Park, Ontario: December 1971 to spring (or early summer) 1975. I was an only child in this two bedroom 1.5 storey house, from which we moved for more spacious digs when my mom was pregnant with my little brother. Above is how the house looked in 2006 with an ugly new wood porch and beige vinyl siding. When I was a baby the house had light blue slate siding and the wartime housing standard issue concrete block porch with fat iron railings, painted black, as seen in this photo from 1973:
scanned from negatives, Kodak Safety Film
Fun fact about this house: maybe four or five years after we had moved to a larger house up the street, when I was about six or seven, there was a late night fire in the upstairs bedroom where I had slept as a toddler. I’m going to guess it happened around Easter because my memory of the fire is all tangled up with that of some chocolate bunnies that were so tall my parents had to move a shelf up in the fridge just to get them in. Anyway. My mom woke me in the night and said she had something to show me, and she took me down to the back porch and pointed across the back field where we could see the sloped roof of my former bedroom engulfed in flames. Then she told me that the fire might have started because of all the socks I used to shove down the heating registers when I was little, and “so you shouldn’t do that here, because we want to live in this house for a long time”.
I didn’t find out until I was around twelve that the fire was actually started by grow lights in a weed closet.
In my mom’s defense, she was very, very young, probably about 24, and she has no memory of saying anything like that to me, and I have a vivid imagination and also some other memories from around the same time of walking up a tree-lined lane on what looks like an old-timey Southern plantation, hand in hand with two women in long dresses and big floppy hats, sweating through my pyjamas from the heat. And I’m fairly certain that never happened.
Here’s what we drove when we lived at 166 Columbia. This was after the white VW bus had bitten the dust, and before the green Austin Mini. My parents always had the cool tastes in imported motorcars.
scanned from negatives, Kodacolor X
Posted by jodi on July 10, 2011 at 9.22am
me at seventeen
June 24, 2011
1. Silver foil abstract paint swoosh wallpaper
2. OZZY
3. Home cut mullet
4. White tank top (4.1 no bra)
5. Peter Frampton drawing, laminated
6. Red eye
There is not one thing not to love about this picture. Me at seventeen = amazing, y’all.
Scanned from old 110 film negatives. Taken with a ten dollar camera of unknown origin, but I remember that it had a quarter, a penny and a four-leaf clover scotch taped to the outside of it, and that I took it everywhere. Hard to believe there was a time when I only had one camera in my purse.
Posted by jodi on June 24, 2011 at 7.28pm
workout update
March 21, 2011
Seriously, this is all about my workout, so feel free to skip it if you just don’t give a rat’s arse. I’m not offended.
Since our time in Boot Camp ended at the end of January, Peter and I have been working out together 5 mornings a week, using a routine and schedule that Peter put together to see him through from Boot Camp to the beginning of Daylight Savings Time. At which time he begins to set the alarm at 7:00 instead of 6:00 (shift your schedule instead of your body; avoid the pain of DST lag! It works!), ride his bike to work and go to the gym in the evenings, leaving me on my own in the morning. In order to stay motivated without a workout buddy, I need a finite goal to focus on, one where I get some kind of cookie at the end (even if the cookie is just the knowledge that I achieved a goal).
I also have another goal, although it’s starting to look like a fairly modest one:
And that goal is to be able to run all the way around that lake up there, without stopping, by August.
I’ve never been much of a runner; my ankles roll over easily and beside, I’m totally lazy, y’all. But last August when Pennsictime rolled around I was two months into a three month stint with a personal trainer, and I didn’t want to lose all that I’d gained (or gain back what I’d lost, har-de-har). Marco (formerly of Refine Fitness, our neighbourhood gym) gave me a couple of workout routines to do in camp, and Peter and I ran around the lake first thing in the morning before getting down to it. Now, for real runners this lake is a piece of cake, and I’m anticipating that getting around it once is only going to take around seven minutes (seriously, it’s tiny) but last year I couldn’t even make it a third of the way (for Pennsic folks, that’s from Wulf Den to Pandora’s Box) without stopping for a breather. Yeah, seriously out of shape.
So today I started the Couch to 5K programme, with the help of the lovely free podcast from the NHS. The plan was actually to start C25K and the One Hundred Push Ups programme at the same time, as the two together seem doable in a single workout, but I forgot to do the pushups test ahead of time (early fail!). So this week I’ll be working C25K into my regular 5 morning workouts, and starting next week the official plan will be thus:
Monday, Wednesday and Friday: Couch to 5K on the treadmill at the gym, then upstairs to do the 100 Pushups training, after which I probably won’t bother with any cooldown beyond stretching
Tuesday and Thursday: 20 minutes cardio on the bike or cross trainer, one of my 5 weight routines, then 10 minutes cooldown on the treadmill
Saturday: optional, probably light cardio and once through the weight machines circuit
Sunday: day off.
The 5 weight routines are the ones Peter and I have been doing together since February, which I’ll talk about in more detail in my week-end recaps (because this here is already enough reading about something that interests only me, am I right?). There’s one kettlebells routine, two that use mostly body weight working a mix of upper and lower body, a routine that’s mostly abdominals, and the Day 5 Grab Bag, which is where I just pick a half dozen or so free weight exercises, whatever I feel like doing (it usually involves those wide grip pulldowns and barbell rows, which are my all time faves). I’ll also be working on raising my weights, so I’ll be recording the weight here to track my progress.
Couch to 5K is a 9-week programme, 100 Pushups is 6 weeks; I expect it’ll take me longer than the six weeks to get to 100 pushups, and Week 1 of that will be starting when I’m already on Week 2 of C25K. So this plan should see me through the next nine weeks before I need to come up with another goal and another plan. And come Pennsic I’ll be running around that lake 3 times without stopping, just watch.
I’d like to insert a photo of rippling quads here, but my quads have a soft blanket of fat over them that’s quite becoming, really, but pretty much hides all muscular definition away from view. So instead, because a blog post loves a picture, here’s one of that lovely lake (which I may or may not have posted before) Shot with the Holga, hacked with foam and rubberbands to hold 35mm film.
again, for Pennsic people, this is from the back of House Redhair (across from Wulf Den), gazing across at an angle to Casa Barducci. Whoa, nerdy enough yet?
Posted by jodi on March 21, 2011 at 3.06pm
like a record, baby
January 30, 2011
New tattoos: shoulder (me) and inner forearm (Peter). Slightly different red inks but otherwise the same. Inked by Qpaukl Kimmerly at rEvolution gallery + studio, Kingsville, Ontario.
Posted by jodi on January 30, 2011 at 9.18am
