August 9, 2003

• Art Triumphant

  
  

  I have passed up two excellent photo ops lately, one at Kashwitna Lake, and another a week or so after that, when I was leaving Wasilla late, after a meeting, and there was a beautiful shaft of sunlight streaming through some picturesque clouds.  Both times traffic was heavy and it was not only inconvenient to pull off the road, but I was intent on a mission each time:  getting to town the first time, and getting to my dinner and rest the second time.  I had started asking myself if I was losing my artistic edge, passing up such beautiful scenes, but I guess it was just a temporary lapse.

  
  

  I have a bunch of new pictures I took Wednesday in Wasilla, and I have a weighty topic to blog about, unrelated to the pictures, so don’t expect the text to follow the pics. I’ll caption the images whenever that seems necessary or useful.  This first shot is my Subaru, Streak, parked at the Best Western Lake Lucille Inn, where I took all of this first series of landscape shots.

  
  

  So, do you think you’d like to lose some weight?

  
  

  Have you thoroughly thought that through?

  
  

  Weight loss can be complicated, and strange….

  
  

  I know I hadn’t really thought it through, although I’d been sorta wanting to lose weight for most of my lifetime.  As a pre-teen, I wasn’t seriously overweight, but thin was in and I felt fat.  I was dieting by the time I was eleven.  Not dieting intelligently or with much real information, just trying to restrict calories… some calories.  I’d skip the potatoes, but I was addicted to pastries and soda pop.

  
  

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  As I grew older, weight became more of a problem and I did more dieting.  I tried many different diets, I fasted, and I used amphetamines and other diet pills.  I screwed up my appestat and put my body in famine mode so that every spare calorie I ate went to fat to be stored for the next famine.  What my body considered “spare” calories included, I guess, a lot of the ones that might otherwise have gone into energy.  I got shaky and irritable and depressed from low blood sugar by the time I was thirty.

  
  

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  Then I stopped dieting to lose weight and started trying to eat healthily.  I saw a little bit of improvement in my blood sugar, temporarily, but then the carbohydrate addiction asserted itself.  There was also a matter of several food allergies of which I was unaware until I was in my fifties.  When I had studied enough nutrition and learned how to determine what my allergies are, the only problem left, the only thing keeping me from staying on a healthy diet were the cravings for the addictive foods. 

  
  

  I would start the diet, stay on it a few weeks to a couple of months, and then relapse like addicts often do.  Meanwhile, my weight had peaked somewhere around 230 pounds.  I was wearing size 20 jeans.  Those were Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, FYI, for purposes of standardization, as I know that sizes vary by manufacturer.  GV jeans are, in my estimation, the best there are.  Gloria knows how a woman is built and cares how we feel in our clothes.  They fit. 

  
  

  Greyfox calls them Glorious Vanderbutts.  When my old faded pair got threadbare and I wanted a new pair, I looked in vain in all the local thrift shops.  Desperate enough to spring for a new pair, I checked Google and learned that GV had sold her clothing line, and that the fabulous Vanderbutt jeans were no longer in production.  I found a slightly used pair, size 20, on ebay and won the auction for only 75 cents over the minimum bid.

  
  

  I was happy in my size 20 Vanderbutts, if not entirely contented in my obese body.  But I wasn’t really healthy.  I was taking four different kinds of meds for asthma and had a lot of discomfort and incoordination and such from myalgic encephalomyelitis, plus other problems associated with systemic candida infection and chronic fatigue syndrome.  For all those reasons, I needed some help with the awful food cravings so I could stay on the healthy diet.  Then I got the help I needed.

  
  

  I learned of amino acid supplement therapy for addictions, and applied it to my food addictions.  I started feeling more energetic immediately.  Without sugar to feed on, the yeast died off.  I was able gradually to get off the asthma meds, and the flareups of the ME (“fibromyalgia”) became farther apart and less severe.  Then my still relatively new fabulous size 20 Glorious Vanderbutt jeans got baggy.  Before they actually started falling off (although some of my other pants, notably my PJs, did fall down a few times) I found a pair of size 16s in a thrift shop.  I had shrunk right past size 18 without even noticing.

  
  

  When I noticed how my butt was shrinking, I also observed that my ankles and calves had more of the shape I remembered from my youth, and that my thighs were slimmer than I remembered them being before.  I had always had fat thighs, but now they are tight and hardly fat at all.  That came as a surprise, until I thought it through.  I attribute it now to the “fibro” and CFS, which cause pain and fatigue due to the muscles being tense even when “at rest”.  I’m working out when I’m just sitting still.  Once I discovered how to read the bathroom scale, I also discovered that I’d lost about seventy pounds in six months.

  
  

  The next series of shots was taken at the Farmer’s Market in the “old Wasilla” section of the Dorothy Page Museum, where some of the oldest buildings from Wasilla’s past have been gathered.

  
  

  The one at right is the Old Fart himself, showing the wares to a customer.  We had a good day at the market, and my ArmsMerchant  was grateful for my help setting up and for my arrival back there after my photographic excursion to Lake Lucille, to help him serve the rush of customers just before closing time.

  
  

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  I started paying closer attention to the scale once I’d noticed the first 70-pound loss, to see if the weight loss continued.  I didn’t expect much because the only exercise I get is housework and driving back and forth to town, walking around a little on errands, no purposeful exercise program at all. 

  
  

  I shed maybe ten more pounds in the next three months, and that didn’t seem like a lot. Then I also started noticing that I could get into old clothes I hadn’t worn for years.  A few wraparound skirts came out of storage, and I purchased a few “new” pairs of used jeans.  I noticed first that one of the skirts that had fastened in one buttonhole when I got it out, now fits in a tighter one.  I also noticed my beloved size 16 GV jeans were loose.  They must have stretched, I thought, since I haven’t been losing that much weight.

  
  

  But occasionally, I’d look down and see that, for example, the roll of flab that had remained at my waist after the first 60 pounds were shed was now gone.  Once again, my legs look like dancer’s legs.  Greyfox exclaimed once when he hugged me, “you’re shrinking!”  A pair of slim, tight Jordache jeans had “stretched” until they were no longer skin tight.  The Vanderbutts were getting gloriously baggy in the butt.

  
  

  Today, I found a pair of size 14 GVs at Sally Ann.  I tried them on, and THEY were too loose.  I put them back and looked a bit farther south on the rack, and found a pair of 13s.  I decided to buy them, even though they were a bit loose, also.  I thought… “hmmm, if 13s are loose, I wonder if I could get into a size 12….” 

  
  

  Fortunately, there just happened to be a pair of size 12 Gloria Vanderbilts a bit to the south of those 13s, and they fit like a second skin.  They are black, too, which is a change from blue, fershure.  I got them, also.

  
  

  The last time I went to the clinic, my health care provider was alarmed at my weight loss when I told her I hadn’t been trying to lose weight.  Even after I explained about kicking the food addictions, she was concerned about my tapering off and cutting out the asthma meds… but why take drugs I don’t need?  The money is better spent on newer, smaller Glorious Vanderbutt jeans, I think.

  
  

  In the last shot from the Market, Babushka here at far left is laying some low-key ridicule on the Anglo girl at far right who is asking how many beets she needs to make borscht.   Of course, as anyone knows, that depends entirely on how much borscht one wants to make.  Babushka is one of the Russian Old Believers who live in this area, after having fled the USSR a generation or two ago for religious freedom.

  
  

  The next series of shots were taken in front of the Fred Meyer department store.  In the parking lot, I had noticed several swallows flying around, chasing the mosquitoes and the dragonflies that chase the mosquitoes, too.

  
  

  

  
  

  In the shady area at right, under the overhang, three airborne adult birds are visible, bringing insects to the young in their nests and returning to the hunt for more.

  
  

  The cliff swallows have built mud nests in the overhang, one on the right and two clustered together at the left.

  
  

  Mud marks at other locations in this overhang show where previous nests have been removed.  The reactions of onlookers varied.  Most seemed to enjoy watching the birds as I did.  A few appeared to be offended by the droppings and worried about being shat upon.

  
  

  

  
  

  Here the baby birds can be seen at the openings of their nests, waiting to be fed.  Below, the wait pays off as first one and then another of the parents returns with a bug.  A passerby warned me to “watch my head” as I stood practically under one nest to get these shots of the other two, but I was really more concerned about my lens than my head.

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  I enjoyed taking these pictures.  I hope you’ve found them worth waiting for the page to load.

  
  

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  • 4:09 am
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