I am hard of hearing....

YUP! you read that correctly! I'm heard of hearing.

Yes, JUST like your grandparent's hard of hearing condition. The kind that might require an "aid to hear." I have what the medical community calls Single-Sided Deafness (SSD). I have a fully functioning (in fact, an exceptionally hearing) right ear but a left ear that became deaf due to nerve damage in my 1st 2 years of living from illness and high temperatures.

You might wonder why I put the bit of "aid to hear" in quotes, it's because my insurance considers "hearing aids" as an excluded service.

Yes, my insurance company believes that, and I quote:

"Hearing care that is routine, except as provided under Child Wellness services, including but not limited to exams and tests, any artificial hearing device, cochlear implant, auditory prostheses or other electrical, digital, mechanical or surgical means of enhancing, creating, or restoring auditory comprehension"

Really? Really Humana?!? You're going to deny me the right to hear! The right to know if sounds are coming from the left side? The right to know if an ambulance is racing to save a life while passing me on the left? You're going to deny me the right to hear the sound my hair makes when placed behind my left ear? The right to hear my daughter or son tell me they love me when they're sitting on my left side while watching a family movie?

I can say it's not fair but I understand, with a population of almost 60,000 people, in just the U.S., who live with single-sided deafness there would be a significant savings for them!!! They can save so much money not having to pay for that need! But Humana, I'm telling you that I'm not just a need but a person that's hurting. I'm hurting when I've had friends visiting over 500 miles away to have dinner with me in a restaurant and I can't understand what they're saying over the dinner table.
Humana, you're telling me, that when I'm hurting to hear my stand partner tell me critical things to write in our music during a symphony rehearsal, that I am denied to hear and to properly participate in rehearsals?!

So Humana, I'm writing this to you, for you, and this is entry ONE of my journey to getting a Cochlear Baha 5 processor (that ain't no hearing aid but an Osseointegrated Implant System) and dammit, I deserve it!

Being a parent takes planning….

but how am I behind on EVERYTHING?

I have an "At-a Glance" 12 month Spiral Calendar, a dry-erase Month Board Calendar perfectly placed above my work desk, a computer calendar that is always up on my laptop-which is generally always placed on my work desk-that syncs to my iPhone and iPad. I even have a watch that can retrieve notifications that are pushed to my mobile devices. HOWEVER, or some reason I can still forget something!

For example, my daughter had a make-up violin lesson scheduled yesterday and I put that make-up lesson time on my dry-erase calendar and my spiral calendar but not my electronic devices, so you guessed it, I forgot her lesson.

Am I on schedule overload?! Wait, but I forgot to put the event in my electronic devices, does that mean I under-scheduled my schedules?!

It's mind-boggling that I can have so many places to list things and STILL forget something!

In a world where we practically have everything and anything at our finger tips we can still be unfulfilled, missing events, or arrive late to things. How am I going to fix this, you ask.

Maybe, each morning I'll read my list of events for that day and write those events on my forehead. As much as I think that would work, even though I have a massively wide forehead, I wouldn't be able to list EVERYTHING.

Today I've decided to print my schedule for the day and put in my wallet so I can reference it and confirm with my mobile devices, what do you think?

Yay or Nay on print outs?

Lifting Days and Rehearsal Days

It seems that lifting does not happen when I'm playing principal cello when rehearsing a symphony series. I'm just too dang tired and super stupid stressed about playing well that I'm afraid that when I lift that day of a rehearsal that I'll be tired, worn out, and make horrible mistakes.

I mean, I not only do I have to worry about playing my entrances correctly but also I must play with precise intonation AND musicality must be played with every phrase, MAN, is it exhausting to finish a symphony rehearsal.

That is why my lifting days have suffered. I wake up at 5:45 or 6:15 and the only energy I have is to get my kids ready for their day of school let alone lift reps of heavy weights OR trying to succeed at a snatch or clean & jerk lift at a 85% load?!

How do I get so spent if I'm not lifting?!
The rehearsal seems to kick my butt more than lifting and I'm pretty sure I'm SITTING on my butt when I rehearse while playing my cello. Sitting. on. my. butt. Just sitting there.  I've determined it's the mental stamina that I exhaust, along with fine motor skills that go and go for every movement I play using my bow and fingering on my cello.

Knowing my limitations and giving into my exhaustion will help me heal and perform at my best. If I take a break at lifting while attending rehearsals I will go back to my lifts rested and prepared. As if I take cello back a notch I will build stamina every time I practice.

So breaks aren't such a bad thing after all.

Weighing in

Wondering why those pictures are posted?

Well, I signed up for an Olympic Weightlifting competition, The Georgia State Games. It's nothing fancy but it feels funny doing a competition that's not cello related. It's even more funny how I've always been afraid to audition for any cello competitions but next Saturday I'll compete to place heavy kilos over my head!

I'm not exactly sure why I've been putting hours into practicing my lifts but ever since I started being coached on olympic lifts (Oly-lifting) I've been motivated to practice my cello. I've even started to work on Elgar's Cello Concerto *GASP* (Those that know me, know how much I hate this concerto).

Maybe signing up for GA Games has put the fire under my butt to DO and not just watch. I feel that if I can bring myself to compete in Oly-lifting then I should bring my self to practice and sign up for symphony auditions.

I'll have to just start and try. I mean, what do I have to lose?

(Wish me luck at the GA Games! Please.)

Bigger the Kid, Bigger the problems?

Does it ever get easier? I once heard a friend say, "The bigger your kid, the bigger the problems." Yikes! How am I going to handle these so-called "problems?" I have one kid still in the single digits but another in the double digits and starting middle school. I know, I know, puberty, hormones, and/or peers can effect my offspring but I was never prepared for the....lying.

Yes, I'm complaining about the lying. Once, getting caught playing with his Nintendo DS in bed (because I heard the music playing from the game) my child has managed to lie to my face that he wasn't playing it. He plainly and quickly said that he wasn't. I look at him in awe and wonder how can he possibly think to get out of this?! He kept trying though, an A for effort but a freaking F for lying, every time he kept saying, "I really, really, really don't know what you're talking about." I eventually walked out to calm my blood pressure. Another time, involving a neighbor and their bee hive, Taylor said he think he knew who did it, blamed another kid, and insisted that he we no where near the bee hive. Turns out another kid with him saw all of it go down. Taylor wasn't the one messing with the bee hive but he WAS there witnessing someone else doing the action. I mean, why couldn't he just come clean and explain that before coming up with his bogus lie?!?

How or why do we lie? Where do people think they'll get? It made me think, after a new discovery that people at my CrossFit gym have been fibbing their scores and/or times, I wonder WHY?! Why would someone feel the need to do that? Technically, they're only competing with themselves.

So it doesn't surprise me that if adults think they can get away from lying then what's stopping a kid who gets CAUGHT in the act of lying?

Since I've had a cold, I've missed 11 days of  CrossfitRx WODs *gasp* Not only has working out taken a back seat, my cello practicing has ceased as well.

I went to cello choir practice and couldn't believe how out of shape I was with thumb position, heck, even first position (an "easy" position) felt foreign! How did I get this sloppy in my sound, bow hold, vibrato, etc.? Everything felt unfamiliar! For starters, after my head congestion cleared I could actually hear myself instead of my ears generating muffled noises. I plan on having practice sessions like this:

Day 1-Two Hour Practice Session-

30 minutes of 4 Octave Scales (C,G,D,E Major and A, E, Bminor) and 3 Octave Shifts with all 4 strings and pitches from 1st-3rd position.

Break-10min

30-40 minutes of Thumb Scales, 3 Popper Etudes with thumb position work (with breaks whenever I need them but I will accumulate 30-40 of practice)

Break-20 minutes

20 minutes of Bach Work: slow note-by-note work of approx. 30 measures

What will I expect when I go back to Crossfit?

Sloppy form on olympic lifts? A slow down in my MetCon performance? Like my cello choir rehearsal, I'm headed for some bad workouts however if I approach my workouts like I would cello I'll remember to expect a difficult road ahead. 

Exercising with Weights

Nothing can prepare you for a new place because everything happening in that new space is well, new.  This is move No. 3 for my kids actually, 2 if you’re only counting what moves they can remember. With each move came a barrel of changes and anxiety all rolled into the excitement of a new house. The only anxiety I had about the move was the physical moving portion. How do you prepare yourself for lifting heavy boxes and furniture? How do you muster up the energy to fill a 24-foot U-haul with only two other people, grab furniture, pack furniture, and unload the furniture? I have no absolute answer but I can tell you what worked for me and it was exercising with weights.

         Weights seem to be something most women don’t want to factor into their workouts. Some women (me included) would rather slave away on a stationary bike, treadmill, or elliptical for endless hours a week; probably log in an average of an hour and a half a day. Nothing is wrong with logging in cardio time but what about combining cardio and weights, ladies?  Five years ago, I used to log in a workout that looked like this:

Cardio: 45 minutes for miles on a bike, treadmill, elliptical or trail run.

Weights: 30-40 minutes focusing on a body region e.g. lower body, upper body, back, etc.

Cool Down: 10-15 minute light walk or yoga stretching

That’s a total of a little over an hour and a half spent at the gym. Don’t get me wrong, I saw results, lost weight, gained a little muscle definition (somewhere) on my body. After two months I saw the results but you would think I would have been pleased but the opposite happened. I was getting bored with my gym routine. I tried adding other things like hiking, pick up sports, or pool aerobics. Everything I added was great cardio but I still had to log an hour or more to see results. I just didn’t have the time to spend 2 hours of my day being that active. Let’s face it, American jobs don’t exactly lend themselves to sliding in two or more hours for gym workouts, unless you don’t want to eat and go to the gym during lunch, who would skip their lunch?!

How could I get a workout that combined weights and cardio that took less than an hour to complete? Well, CrossfitRx, has been the perfect solution to my problem.  Each Workout of the Day (WOD) is done in 25 minutes or less, yes you read that correctly, less than 25 minutes! I’ve even done some workouts that have kicked my butt in 15 minutes. Each WOD requires you to get as many rounds in as possible of some intense ass kicking movement and heavy lifting.

            I started Crossfit in May 2011 and have seen results of lost inches, higher stamina in my days, and most importantly, the move put my strength to the test. I might have had some nice dark purple bruises afterward moving but I looked at them like battle wounds. Those “wounds” were impressions of a day’s worth of hard work made easier by Crossfit.