habits to quell the ailments
Hello everyone, you’ll have to excuse me for the few days of radio silence – I went and probably OVERDID the fun at the Adelaide Salsa Festival, and have now come up with a chest infection! BOO!
Adelaide was all kinds of happy as a trip, and whilst I’m still glowing about it all, I am pretty miserable what with a whoopy cough, wheezy asthma breath, and perpetual tiredness – LIKE my back injury isn’t enough to keep me occupied!
When I’m sick, I’m a BAD patient who is whiney and generally sad about my discomfort. I need lots of loving and looking after, because I get so damn homesick for Singapore and family. The thing is, with S at work all day, my caretaker is ME. Do you have any rituals for when you fall sick? I sure do – living away from home for 10 years makes you invent all these steps-to-good-health, and even if they’re not REAL remedies, they sure do the job of curing the emotional sicky-poo feelings.
Firstly, I get out the Brands Essence of Chicken. I used to hate it when my mum made me take this as a kid, but now I almost gleefully down it precisely because it reminds me of when mum forced it upon me. If I’m feeling like a sweet treat, I’ll have some Birds Nest drink with ginseng.
I also get out my usually-hidden stash of vitamins – my mum is the queen vitamin pusher of the world, and when I’m sick, I call her to whine and ask for advice on what to do. Every single time, she tells me to get the vitamins out, and then the conversation goes like this:
“Shan, you want to take the Vitamin C with Acerola, and also Vitamin B for your joints. Don’t forget glucosamine and fish oils for your back and OH don’t take painkillers, those are so bad for you. Shan? Are you there? Why can’t I hear you opening the bottles? Open the bottles now! I want to hear you take them right now! YES, whilst I’m on the phone with you! Pour your water. Why can’t I hear you pouring the water and swallowing??? Shan????”
The hilarious thing is, my mum is the RELAXED parent. And people wonder where I get my control issews from.
When I’m sick, I need Milo, made Singapore coffee shop style with hot water, like a hot chocolate. (An aside for my Singapore readers – here in Oz, people sprinkle milo powder over cold milk, and that’s how they have it. Yes, I know, it’s horrifying). One of my favourite things was when my mummy would take time out of her busy schedule to make me a milo herself and bring it to my room.
Then, I need comfort foods – noodles, and congee. I’m not fussy about the kind of noodles I eat, even instant is fine. It’s more for the soft squidgy mouthfeel and comforting taste of soy sauce and a fried egg on top. If I’m having a head cold, I want SPICY noodles to clear my sinuses. Congee generally gets simmered all afternoon and forms a fabulous sick-day dinner.
Do you have any sick remedies that are comforting to you? Share them here – I may just give them a try, I’m feeling that wretched!
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adelaide salsa festival 2011
Am currently on-route to the Adelaide Salsa Festival – every year, I go to this fantastic event to teach, perform, dance, and it’s a wonderful opportunity to catch up with my fabulous and talented Latin dance peers from around Australia.
This year I won’t be dancing much obviously, but I have missed dancing incredibly and am excited to be surrounded by the music, people and community that I’m passionate about, and teach and perform to the best of my ability!
I’m also particularly proud – this year 3 of my own team, trained by yours truly, are also teaching and performing their on professional couple routines on stage. I can’t tell you how pleased I am for them and how far they’ve come!! If there’s anything better than teaching – it’s watching your students achieve greatness themselves and getting excited about their soaring to new heights!
It’s going to be a wonderful weekend. Dancing. Learning. Teaching. Performing. Great music. Great people. Partying hard. Hanging with my amazing team. Good lord, I’m tingling with joy, and do appreciate my life so!!
Read Morefinding my fitness
I’ve never really been a horribly unhealthy person – I like good food and feeling energetic a little bit too much for that. I’ve never in my life been overweight, or even flabby, nor have I ever succumbed to smoking or eating fast food too much. Having this back injury though, has given me months of reflective solitude to think about the changes I wanted to make in order to live more healthily on several levels, not just a physical one.
I’ve always been incredibly body-fit, and all because of dance. I really do think dance is one of the most complete exercise/fitness programs you can commit to, as long as you’re training with the right technique and are using your entire body. Because of dance, I’ve been lucky enough to have a toned body which I love, and hold good stamina, strength and flexibility.
Lately, because of my injury, I’ve been interested in building different healthy habits for my future self. I spent my twenties dancing almost every other day, if not daily, so exercise for me was an incidental of my daily life and work. It’s really easy to stay fit and healthy when you’re young, but I really wanted to master some life changing habits to take with me through later years. Ironically, without this injury, I would never have taken the time to think about this, and implement them.
One of the things I truly admire in people is their ability and drive to go to the gym, or get their daily dose of exercise. Dance has been my only exercise, and I hate gyms (actually, I’m rather scared of them because all those crazy machines! They look… scary!) Dancing makes me feel alive in a way no other exercise/sport does. But I’ve now realised that I really need to cultivate a healthy passion for daily exercise because dancing may be limited to me as an activity from here on out. And I certainly want to remain active in older years! Things I’ve done so far:
- tried Bikram yoga (eager to get back into it once I’m better)
- started swimming (for as long as I don’t have a day job, I want to try and stick to swimming every other day)
- contemplated walking around neighbourhood (I really hate walking)
- pilates (love it, but it’s expensive because I need one-on-one at the moment)
- tennis lesson (so bad at it, but enjoyable – want to try again once I’m better)
The biggest thing is swimming, of course. So far I’ve managed to stick it out the most, and this last week I’ve been every single day. I still dislike it, and find it really difficult. Lots of people say I should feel so much pain relief floating around in the water. No, all I feel is STUPID POOL VIBES. 
My goal is to find some activities I really enjoy, and then stick to trying to do them every other day at least. It’s really awful, trying everything and just not liking them, especially how much I LOVE dancing, but I know that I have to keep at it until my body starts enjoying the endorphin rush rather than the activity itself. One of the things I can’t do is put on weight because Mr Spine will just hate it, and since I’ve greatly reduced the amount of dance I’m doing (by about 80%), I really have to keep on top of it.
What are your exercise options, and how did you get into a routine of it? Do you enjoy your activity of choice, or do you do it because you adore it? Do you have any ideas for someone who can’t do a great deal of movement at the moment?
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easiest bolognese ever
I do love cooking, but lately I’ve been trying to simplify all the meals we make at home because I simply don’t really have energy for fussy, elaborate meals. Roasts have been my friends, and slow cooked meals make for wonderful easy-going activities on my back. A while back, I learnt that you can cook hamburger patties from frozen, without thawing, and people, that changed my burger eating habits profoundly (ie, they’re on our menu more often). Since then, I’ve been searching for other ways to simplify the cooking process and skipping steps, without compromising on quality or resorting to bottled sauces.
Last week, I managed to work out the what has got to be the easiest way of cooking bolognese sauce, ever. Now, I’m not italian, and am not pretending to be – so I’m not claiming this to be the most authentic bolognese there is out there. Plus, I like to shove lots of vegetables into any sauce-y food I make to up the nutrition factor. When I make bolognese, I like to slow cook it for hours so all the flavours meld, and the richness of tomatos really come through. All the waiting over the stove, stirring, and carrying a heavy pot though, aren’t great for my back. Here’s how my little experiment to make bolognese easy went.
I started with a heavy based roasting pan, and chucked the minced meat in it. I kinda thawed it out a little in the microwave, but they were still pretty hard. I figured for the purposes of the experiment, I was going to try and be as dodgy as possible. I used 2 parts beef mince, 1 part pork mince.
hunka meat anyone?
Then I emptied 4 tins of tomatos over it all. I don’t get too fussy with measurements when I cook, which explains why I’m a terrible baker but an awesome main-meal person. Along with the tomatos, I drizzled in about 4 or 5 tablespoons of olive oil.
Then, I added a profuse amount of mixed herbs (if I have fresh I use it, if I don’t it’s fine too), lots of garlic, salt, pepper, and any secret ingredients you usually put in your sauce (please leave it in the comments). If I’d had a red wine bottle open, I would’ve splashed it all in as well.
Then I put it in the oven, which had been preheating at 120 degrees celsius. I wanted to give the meat a chance to thaw AND cook, and anything higher I think would’ve burnt it.
Whilst I sat back and prayed for success, I went and massacred Sonia in our Words with Friends game.
nyahahahahaha.
About 40 minutes later, this is what it looked like, and it smelt pretty promising!
You can see that some of the meat hasn’t cooked through, but it was all soft enough for me to give it a good stir and separate the chunkier bits into little itty bitty melt in your mouth bits. Yay!
I chucked it back in the oven for another half hour, then took it out (because I got impatient!) and added the vegetables that I like to hide in our sauces. S and I would never get enough vegetables if we didn’t do this!
I added in mushrooms, frozen spinach, and about half a jar of tomato paste. Usually if I have carrots on hand, I’ll grate a few of those in too – you don’t even taste it. Sometimes, I chop half a pumpkin up into little cubes and throw it in as well – I love the taste of it contrasting with the tangy tomato sauce! I gave everything a good stir, and then whacked it back in the oven. Another 30 minutes later, this is what it looked like:
Starting to look really yummy! At this stage, I had to go to the studio and teach, so I left the oven on about 115 degrees, and left the house.
3 hours of slow simmering in the oven later (with no touching or interference from me), we had sumptious, deep tasting, heart warming bolognese sauce.
TA-DA!
You’ll have to excuse the crappy photos – I wasn’t really expecting this to turn out as good as it did so just let my iphone do the work. Mental note – must keep DSLR charged up and ready to perform at my every cooking whim!
SO, the verdict? IT. WAS. AWESOME. It hardly needed any work or supervision, and I managed to get rid of many steps like thawing the meat, browning it, and stirring over the stove. I know there’s the case for browning the meat to improve its final flavour by caramelizing it etc, but to tell the truth when cooking something down for 5 hours, I don’t think it makes a huge difference.
This is going to be the way I make bolognese whenever I’m time or energy short from now onwards – S couldn’t taste any difference between this batch and the way I usually make it (and he’s pretty discerning – err – fussy)! I could shove it in the oven in the morning and have a hot meal at night! You cannot imagine how excited I am about finding out this totally works – between the time savings, and not compromising on quality or nutrition, it is mighty pleasing.
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post epidural madness
Hello, world!
It is now day 4 after the unpleasantness, and here’s how it goes so far. The whole point of the epidural was so that I could have about 2 weeks of pain relief from my back injuries, and basically use the time to kick-start some strengthening and repair.
Yesterday I woke up with no pain, and let me tell you, it was the weirdest but most fantastic feeling ever. My body felt light, I felt motivated, and there was a massive smile on my face. I decided to start my day by cleaning the entire house (woohoo!) then went to the pool. I managed to swim more than I ever have since this injury – usually I average about 8 laps of a 25m pool (hey! I’m INJURED), but yesterday I pushed through to 12 laps.
It felt incredible, accomplishing and all, but I thought I was going to pass out – my body isn’t used to being actually pushed in any physical way anymore!
Of course, after doing that, I had to have a very quiet afternoon, then a little dinner in for a couple of my girlfriends. It was frustrating that by evening, some pain had returned – that little glimmering window of amazing pain-free was like an apparition that never happened.
Today’s good – I’m sore but not in PAIN. I’m about to head to the pool again. Want to try for 10 laps today, I think 12 was pushing it a bit far. Especially because I’m doing some dance coaching tonight. I am so going to miss this 2 weeks of NO PAIN. I don’t want to be there from the emotional fall out when it comes back, let me tell you that!
I’m not a great swimmer. I can swim, but I don’t love it – partly because I don’t like being cold and wet, and partly because it just doesn’t feel like dancing. Uh uh, yeah. And, when I try to do the crawl, it feels like I’m flailing around rather than smoothly traversing through the water. Add in about 10 years of swimming max once a year, plus a body that’s been largely immobile for 7 months, and zero fitness, and you have me:
Still, my goals this next fortnight are to: get to the pool every day (except the days I have physio/pilates), and try and establish some kind of routine around smelling like chlorine and hanging with the other, lovely, elderly, mid-day swimmers at my pool. I really need to get some semblance of fitness back and it’s really the only low impact way to do it. Plus, I’ve found a pool that caters to older people, which means it’s heated to almost 32 degrees. No complaining!
S also sat me down late last night to have a serious talk about boundaries – he doesn’t want me pushing ahead too far and too fast, and rupture more things in ol’ Mr Spine. I’ve never been good with boundaries though, so this next 10 days or so ahead is going to be a bit of a challenge for myself. Wish me luck, the week is about to get TESTED!
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