New Life

For the past five years or so, Julie have been living a life that was, while not built around just surviving, definitely defensive in nature. Get Julie through grad school before she can't stand her job any longer and quits them both. Get the kids through high school. Hope Julie's cancer doesn't come back. Borrow money with the plan of paying it back eventually. Just keep it all together and functioning, reacting to each crisis as it happens, using as much mental duct tape as necessary, until we can manage to gain control and start doing what we want to do instead of what we have to do. Until we can make it to the New Life.

I'm very happy to say, the New Life has started. Julie has her masters degree and board certification and is working as a Family Nurse Practitioner. She likes the work, the pay is good, and she's working daytime hours so we get to see each other a lot more. It's been five years since her cancer treatements finished. And now that I have a CPAP machine that helps me sleep a lot better (more on that later), I have a lot more energy. And we've decided that now is the time to deal with something we've both been postponing: our weight.

We're eating better - a lot better. Lots fewer calories. We're going to the gym together 4-5 nights a week. In five weeks I've lost 14 pounds. Today Julie ran her first race ever, a 5k. She's already signed up for a 10k in October and a 10k followed the next day by a half marathon at Walt Disney World in February. Our plan is to keep pushing until we are both well under 200, and then to stay there. We're feeling great, we're feeling empowered, and this is gonna happen.