Early days

I moved to a new country on Wednesday. It is now Saturday, and I have spent the last two days cleaning my house, stocking up my cupboards at Costco, befriending the kitten (including believing I had lost the kitten out of a window, crying in the garden thinking I would be dumped for being a negligent girlfriend, finding said kitten inside the house after all - hiding in the recliner), and attempting to get my head around the gargantuan to-do list. It's early days in the New Life.

I have also succeeded in eating badly, sleeping badly, overreacting, panicking, and my personal favourite: sitting in a stupor.

Cowboy is hiding from me this morning, while I scowl at the computer. Who knew it would be so difficult to find affordable, relatively nice furniture in an actual shop where I could go in and just get the furniture? I didn't realise how important it would be to me to have furniture. I've been living out of a suitcase for weeks now. It was fine while I was waiting to move, but now I'm here, I want to plunge some roots down and feel like I have a home.

It's becoming an ordeal. If I could hide from myself, I would.

On the flip side, things that I thought would be horrible, terrible, insurmountable issues as part of the move have turned out to be nothings, and the relief is overwhelming.

Yesterday I played with the horses in the rain, and began to see how good life is going to be. If I could only get some furniture...

Progress report

Mark the Magician (the personal trainer) had casually mentioned in my first session with him that a person should really be able to deadlift their own body weight without too much trouble. That was the same day that I squeaked and groaned as I tried to deadlift 25kg, and protested, "That's really quite heavy!"

He was gallant about it and didn't laugh at me until a week later.

Today, I was lifting 50kg. It was tough, but up it went, for 6 reps. Then I did pull ups - pull ups! - for 6 reps (I'll admit, they were assisted rather than my full body weight, but still). This whole process was repeated 5 times. I felt like Xena. Next time we do deadlifts, apparently we're gunning for the full body weight equivalent. It's exciting.

Now when I tense my glutes, there's actually a slight curve to my butt, and there is something firm underneath the winter stores. This is very exciting. It's been a long time since I had a butt worth mentioning.