After A Very Long Absence.....

I'm back!!

Yes, after a very long (much longer than planned) absence I’m back again.  The reasons for the lengthy time away are many.  First off, because of the Very Evil Person who was the manager for the department I worked in, I had to leave it.  I was heartbroken that I couldn’t stay in a place I truly believed I was meant to be.  And it took a while to completely understand I was a victim of workplace harassment and that no one would do anything.  I went to the union and they tried but the HR department kept putting us off again and again and after a while in the new department, I had to let it go to get past it.  I wish now I hadn’t as she struck again and my dear coworker I worked with also recently bid out as the Very Evil Person cast her spell on my friend – to the point of calling her into her office and telling my friend she wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone unless it was work related and especially me and another person.  The irony is I barely spoke to my friend at work, not wanting to draw the attention of the Evil Person to her.  And my friend has returned (early) after taking time off from dealing with breast cancer.  That didn’t stop the Evil Person though and so far the union hasn’t really helped my friend though she has gone to them too.

But I love the department I’m in now though I had never seen busy until I went there.  For a few months I was working overtime just about every day and weekends in an effort to try and catch up on the massive amount of work that pours in – and another reason I wasn’t blogging.  I finally burnt out and faced the fact that we were never really going to catch up.  Since the manager knows this too, though the pressure to work hard and fast is there, the NEW manager is a good one and is very supportive.

Then there was the fact I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. I think I mentioned that, but I started going to the gym more and more in an effort to get myself out of the terrible shape I’d managed to get into over the years.  Combine that with a whole lot of overtime and I’d come home and zombie like watch some telly, read some and crash.

Then, when I was getting ready to make a return, the gym I belong to had a weight loss challenge I signed up for and that meant even longer hours at the gym.  The prize for first place was $10,000 so as you can imagine, that was an excellent incentive.  One of the conditions was you had to have so many sessions with a trainer.  Way back when I first joined, knowing if I didn’t do something like work with a trainer, I would drift back into old habits.  That kind of happened over summer.  Although I was still working out, bad food was creeping back into the diet.  But now I’m straightened out again and discovered much to my amazement that I LOVE roasted veggies and that a salad with some cooked chicken thrown in tastes very, very good with a vinaigrette instead of say Thousand Island dressing.

I ultimately didn’t win, the person who did lost 66 pounds next to my measly 23, but better than winning was stopping at the gym and eating healthy has become a lifestyle now which is good.  And while I still have quite a ways to go, I’ve lost almosthisclose to 50 lbs – probably by next week it will be *official*.  And as I said on Twitter – yep I came back there tonight – it’s being healthy that’s the best.  It’s being able to go 10 minutes on the elliptical, ride the bike over 5 miles, walk a mile on the treadmill, that makes me feel really good.  It’s knowing my heart is healthy and getting healthier, that I’ve lengthened my life expectancy I think, that I’m not so short of breath I even scare myself that is the wonderful thing.

I really do have so much to say that I think I’m going to have to do this in 2 parts.  What I’ve wrote so far is much of the outer of me, but the inner me has undergone changes to so that’s up next post.