The best part of weight loss
is the things you can do.
A year ago I would not have been able ot mow my backyard, by myself, at all.
This year, I’ve mowed the lawn over and over again, by myself, in about twenty minutes flat. No huffing and puffing. My heart rate increases but I’m back to normal in a very few minutes. The last three weeks, I have not been able to mow, partially because of shoulder injury, partially because there was NO DAMNED RAIN.
Now, there’s been rain, and the backyard has sprung up like nobody;s business. SO I got out there tonight and mowed.
First of all, I have to say once again that the reccomends I got from Chris Byrne for boots (Danner Desert Acadia) Time was, I wore my “work” shoes to mow. Translation: Old street shoes, too worn to polish up anymore. Lots of times I took the laces out, to make it easier to get in and out of them in a hurry. And consequently, it killed my feet and legs. See, I would have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about my footing, wiht sloppy, loose fitting shoes, and it made mowing that much harder. And with a decent pair of boots, it’s (literally) a no brainer. As the boots held me in good stead on my hike, I’m inclined to get another pair for work, and wonder if I can get street shoes from Danner.
Anyway, the back slope is done, after helping the neighbor diagnose bad spark plugs in his truck.And since today, it rained like a horse pissing on a flat rock for two hours, it’s incredibly humid, so I wore a short sleeved teeshirt, someting I almost never do.
And the last thing I did before I put the mower away was to drive the damned thing through a cloit of poison ivy the size of an ottoman.
yeah, that’s all pureed poison ivy, leaking oil of urushiol, and all over my upper body, face, arms, hair.
I took that picture, and got my ass in the shower asap.
The drug store sells little hotel-soap sized soap bars that are supposed to nullify the urushiol. I wash with one right after touching anything close to poison ivy. Don’t know if it works, or if I’ve been lucky to not have it on me in the first place.
If you have a breakout, use aloe gel – the natural kind from the health food store that you have to refrigerate. You’ll barely itch when the breakout matures.
I just wash down with Lava soap, seems to do fine. About once a year i end up having to use prednisone, but this time I think I cauight it in time.
Fuck it. That shit won’t even phase a man like you.
LOL! Fact is, I’m so damned allergic it sometimes ends me in the emergency room. But I like having a good reason to scratch.
I’m hoping Alex inherits my non-allergicness to poison ivy.
Several years ago, I mentioned to Dad that I didn’t know what poison ivy felt like, apparently never having gotten into it despite growing up in the woods.
He’d recently found some on his place, so we did a “controlled exposure” because I wanted to be able to recognize it when it happened.
Absolutely nothing – he was incredibly jealous; the stuff drove him nuts.
Reactions to Poison Oak/Ivy comes and goes. Nobody is truly immune to it. If it doesn’t do anything to right now, it might at another time of year or if you get a larger exposure to it.
I heard some folks on the radio that had written a book called something like “Fighting Back Against Nature” that said that plain old alcohol on it immediately worked. It absorbs the oil and then evaporates it off of you. They said they take a plastic bottle of it and a rag when they go in the woods and just slobber it all over any part that gets exposed and it prevents an outbreak.
Of course, there’s also the stuff that works so well at preventing a reaction that the Forest Service bought out the first year or two’s production of it. Can’t remember the name right now. Ivy-Be-Gone or some such. It’s been long enough now that it’s available in the stores.