What makes my heart happy...

This week:
* I'm going to be on vacation after today for a whole week and plan on at least three of those days being without email, cell phone, or any connection to the outside world. It's not a cool trip to Alaska or anything, just a bid to get my creative mojo working again.
* The Heroes premiere is tonight. Yes, I am all geeked out about a television show.
* I have a giant stack of books to take with me, including The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M. Homes, There’s A Slight Chance I Might Be Going To Hell by Laurie Notaro, Varieties of Disturbance: Stories by Lydia Davis, and The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. And if I run out of books before vacation is over, Sabrina let me borrow The Last Days of Dead Celebrities by Mitchell Fink (morbidly fascinating, I know, but I can't help it).
* Girls' weekend in Savannah. Three girls, four days, you fill in the rest.

Learning to love canned salmon...

I'm working the Perricone Prescription this month, which means giving up the chicken, the red meat, and any form of processed food whatsoever. That's the easy part. The thing I worried most about was eating salmon five times a week. Not just any salmon - it has to be wild Alaskan. If you can find it fresh, it's uber expensive. Dr. P recommends canned and I found the brand he mentioned in his book at a local grocery for under $2 a can.
A. It's gross. You have to dump it into a bowl and pick out the skin and bones.
B. It looks and smells like cat food.
C. I was glad I had fresh lemons because I needed them to get the salmon reek off my hands after digging through the mess.
D. Eating it plain? Ew.

So last night I decided to try one of the healthy recipes: little bit of lowfat cream cheese, little bit of eggless mayo, horseradish, green onion, dash of Worchestershire. Mix it up, add crumbled up canned salmon. Spread on low carb whole grain wrap, add fresh blanched asparagus (asparagi?). Roll it up. Eat.

It was tasty and I must have done a pretty good job of bone removal, because the only crunch was from the green onion. I made a second wrap to bring for lunch today, thereby hitting my five times a week salmon goal. Yay, me!

Morning BS...

Blood sugar, I mean. Mine has been high in the morning in the past and I've been struggling with how to get it down. For a while, eating a little protein before bed worked. Exercise in early evening also seemed to help. But the numbers are creeping back up and that's not good. I'm a type 2 diabetic and have really good control over my blood glucose levels (not with insulin; with food), but lately it seems like diabetes has become my part-time job.

Last bloodwork, my BG and A1c were great, cholesterol slightly elevated (which is normal for me), but my triglycerides were sky high (up 300 + points from the test 3 months earlier). If anything, I've been exercising more and eating better. I tried a month of high fiber/no bad anything (ask me if I ever want to SEE brown rice again...), new test: 100 points up on triglycerides.

I'm currently reading Dr. Oz's YOU: The Owner's Manual: An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger and it has a lot of good info about cholesterol and preventing heart disease, but not much about how triglycerides can be reduced (only that they're an indicator of heart problems...anything over 150 is high and mine are in the 700s). Also that worrying about it is going to make it worse. The only way I know how to get anything done is to worry about it. I can run two minute sprints at 5.8 and have my heart rate down to 140 immediately after. People with heart disease can't do that, can they?

Where am I going with this? More treadmill, more bicycling, more fiber, more raw foods. Less worrying, lowfat dairy products, and red meat. Reading Dr. Oz's other book, You: On a Diet. Quit the bitching. Watching more Discovery Health (I know, I am a fan of the man they call "Oz"...love his new show The Truth About Food) and less TBS (hard not to get pulled in by those Family Guy marathons though).

Besides, shouldn't everyone's health be like a second job?

You show me yours and I'll show you mine...

Inspiration, I mean. I'm working on my essay for Skirt's October issue and it's supposed to be about creativity. So for the past week or so, I've been thinking about what inspires me, how it works, what used to inspire me but doesn't any longer, and how I'm going to find my next source. The basic facts:

* I lost my muse a few years ago and that's just not a position you can place an ad to fill. So I've been muse-less.
* Creative inspiration is like a drug. After a while, the same dose doesn't do it for me anymore.
* People ask me how I can write an essay every month and how I managed to write a book in just three months. The answer is easy: I do not have a social life. I knew what I was getting into when I chose what I do for a living. I love what I do, but I also know what I've given up. Long term relationships are few and far between because, really, who would want intimate details of their life put out into the world for public consumption?
* I don't know the answers to (a) where ideas come from, (b) how ideas turn into essays, or (c) how I stay motivated. I work as hard at keeping myself inspired as I do at actually writing about what inspires me.

Here's my latest source of inspiration: Inspiration Boards Flickr Pool.

To all of my creative writer and artist friends out there: What inspires you? Please share. It's an emergency.

New book, new site...

I've been tinkering around with this for weeks and am finally ready to share. My new "author web site" is up at kellylovejohnson.com. It's going to be a home for my first book (and hopefully my second...and third...and fourth) and other writings. Since I'm self-taught with the web design stuff, I'm still playing around with it, but I'd love to hear what you think.