Christina Hollis—Called To The Barre

A Pixabay runner— not me!

After a break of many months because my arthritis flared up, I’ve started running again. What I do is actually more like trundling, but it’s all movement! I use a treadmill, as the forest tracks around here are too uneven for my unusual gait. At first I had a manual treadmill, but my OH bought me an electric one for my birthday. It’s much easier than propelling the belt myself.

After my lay-off, I went right back to the beginning of the National Health Service’s Couch to 5K. You can find details of the nine-week beginners' course here.

The first sessions of the course are more walking than running, but no matter how inexperienced, you’re soon doing more running than walking. Then before you know it you’re running for ten, twenty, then eventually thirty minutes without a break.

I can recommend the NHS system, but it concentrates on improving heart health and stamina. Greatly daring, I signed up for a new adult ballet course in our village hall to work on my strength as well. Son No. One and DD joined too, although they’ve both got several advantages over me—youth and slenderness, for a start. Son in particular did ballet from the ages of five to eleven.

I was never one of those little girls who wanted to be a ballerina. Watching The Nutcracker at Christmas is about as far as my interest went, until Son became interested in dance. While ferrying him to and from classes, I discovered how much hard work is involved. 

This is NOT how I was doing it...

Adult ballet for absolute beginners like me wouldn’t be such a full-on experience, I told myself. Wrong!  The teacher said we’d use up to 700 calories in  the session, and she was right. We didn’t stop moving for the whole hour. I discovered I have no co-ordination, and poor balance. I found it very hard to copy the teacher’s movements. Moving my body in ways I’d never thought possible was like trying to organise jelly! 

It wasn't all pliés and glissés. We did floor exercises, too, to strengthen our core. That's a fancy way of saying we did all sorts of variations on sit-ups.

The lesson was painfully good fun.  I can’t wait for next week, although I was quite stiff this morning. I managed to jog a slow 3k before breakfast. If I try to get in a few minutes of ballet practise each day before next week’s session, maybe I’ll improve. Let’s face it, I couldn’t get any worse! 

When this blog is published I’ll be away at the Romantic Novelists’ Association Conference. I might not be able to answer comments straight away, but I’d love to hear if you've ever tried adult ballet, or other group keep-fit activities.

Christina Hollis—Springing Forward Into Summer

This has been a year full of challenges. First, the weather took a turn for the worse. The winter had been long and gloomy, but not especially harsh. Then in March, when we might have expected signs of spring to come thick and fast, England was attacked by what the media called the Beast from the East. Feet of snow fell in a matter of hours and for days the thermometer was stuck well below freezing. You can find out more about that here. I'm glad to say it feels more like spring as I'm writing this—and about time, too!

Find out more at christinahollisbooks.online

My second challenge was to start a new blog. Computers really aren't my thing, so I'm careering along on a learning curve so steep, it's almost vertical. I'd love to know what you think of christinahollisbooks.online. My series You Can Write! has been exploring the ways writers can combat the fallow patches that every author experiences. One interesting method is by attending a refresher course such as the Explorers workshops run by Libertà Books. The tutors, Joanna Maitland and Sophie Weston, are both successful authors who have each written many best-selling novels. Despite their great careers, they know what it's like when the words just won't come. The ideas they share really are drawn from what they call their 'blood-stained experience'.

You Can Write! continues next week, with a piece on the differences in approach between writing for pleasure, and profit.

Who could resist this? Not me, that's for sure!

May is my birthday month, which brought both pleasure and pain. Nobody likes getting older, and I've found my battle to maintain a healthy weight gets harder and harder as the years go by. This year, DD's present to me was a wonderful feast prepared by Waitrose Entertaining. The centrepiece was a big red- berry cheesecake, which made a lovely contrast to my triple chocolate birthday cake. Now you can see why I have such a struggle with my weight! Luckily, my husband also gave me a perfect present. It was a new treadmill, to replace the one I wore out a couple of years ago and never got around to replacing.

Now I have no excuse. If I want to eat cake, I have to put in the miles on the treadmill beforehand.

It's been a long time since I last poured myself into a bikini. That's not going to happen again any time soon, but I might manage to make it into a one-piece swimming costume before the summer is over!

Christina Hollis writes contemporary fiction starring complex men and independent women. Harlequin published six of her historical novels under the pen name Polly Forrester, then her first Mills and Boon Modern Romance, The Italian Billionaire’s Virgin, was published in 2007. Since then, she has written eighteen contemporary novels, sold nearly three million books, and her work has been translated into twenty different languages. When she isn’t writing, Christina is cooking, walking her dog, or working on her garden.

You can catch up with her at https://christinahollisbooks.online, on Twitter, Facebook, and see a full list of her published books at christinahollis.com

Her current release, Heart Of A Hostage, is published by The Wild Rose Press and available at myBook.to/HeartOfAHostage  worldwide.

Jenny Gardiner: Bizarre things you learn on the internet

While my son was training for a marathon over the past few months, I started to notice a strange phenomenon when he returned from his long runs. He'd come into the house and ask me, "Did you just clean or something?"

As if!

Now, anyone who knows me realizes that is a completely ridiculous question to ask. I only clean for company. So obviously that hadn't happened, as we didn't have anyone coming to visit!

After this had happened a few times, I knew there must be some linkage to his distance running. So I went to my old reliable go-to source for knowledge, Google. Sure enough, I typed into my computer, "why do I smell ammonia after a long run?" and Google, via Runners World, told me the answer: because if your body lacks adequate carbohydrates to burn during exercise, it begins to burn proteins, and ammonia is a byproduct of protein metabolism. Your body is actually producing ammonia, which is picked up by your blood and carried to your respiratory system, where you then smell it.

Who knew?

My kids and I have long joked about the bizarre things you can learn on the Internet. Once, late at night on a long drive, we were coming up with stupid questions just to keep me awake, and we decided we simply had to know if spiders experienced flatulence. The answer: not exactly, but sort of. An unsatisfying response at that. Perhaps more entertaining, though, was asking Siri (the iPhone virtual assistant, to this unfamiliar with her) to find that out for us. Siri, the font of all knowledge.

Last week I was making a large batch of granola, only to realize that the Aunt Jemima Lite "syrup" (if you can call it that) in my closet wasn't a satisfactory ingredient: all the recipes called for real maple syrup. Now I'd recently heard in the news a story about a major heist — of maple syrup — due to it's exorbitant price, and realized that the cost of said syrup would preclude my purchasing it to save money while making my own granola instead of buying the expensive stuff already made. But then I remembered, ages ago my mother had sent us one of those odd gifts we never got around to using: a "breakfast" kit, with some sort of flavored waffle mixes and a bottle of — ta-da! — maple syrup, long since relegated to the back of the food pantry. I checked out the bottle, with a veritable antique expiration date stamped on it, and gave up hope on being able to use it. But then, I figured I'd Google it, just in case…And sure enough, I learned from Chowhound that I'm pretty sure I could use maple syrup tapped back in the 1800's, if given the chance. I cracked open the bottle; it was fine, tasted fine, needed not one bit of intervention, and the granola was perfect (although it was likely more perfect because I also used honey from my friend's bees).

We have high-maintenance pets that require all sorts of particular types of foods, but that can also not eat all sorts of particular types of foods or they could die. I am constantly Googling what you can and cannot feed parrots and rabbits, for instance. Thank goodness our dogs and cat can get by with the standard chow. The other day I was happy to see fava beans in Whole Foods finally (a harbinger of spring), and purchased a bunch. I then thought that would be a treat for my parrot. Alas, I learned from those-in-the-know in the bird world that that could've killed her. If you know our surly parrot Graycie, you'd probably have urged me to feed her a bunch, but I simply couldn't do that to the old girl.

Last night I noticed a large brown stain on the stove. Now I've mentioned my cleaning skills aren't exactly the hallmark of my existence, and I am particularly bad at getting cooked-on food off of the cooktop. Invariably I scratch the enamel, which is a bad plan. So as I was failing at Windexing away this large brown burn, I stopped. Let's see what my Google Guru has to say, I thought. Sure enough: a simple paste of baking soda and water worked like a charm. I might even start not loathing cleaning the cooktop. Nah.

A while back we had a large group at our house for dinner in New Year's eve and someone dripped butter on her new silk dress. Now I'd have written that dress off for a goner, stain-wise. But Google knew otherwise. Cornstarch! We rubbed a bit of cornstarch into the stain and it pulled the grease right on out. She was able to head on to another party that night without looking like she'd needed a bib for dinner.

I think the thing that intrigues me the most when I type a question into Google is that someone else has already entered that question. I'm now motivated to come up with bizarre questions that surely no one has contemplated (or at least contemplated into that vast database in the clouds). It's become my obsession to come up with the unasked one. I'd hate to believe there is no more unexplored territory in the world of curiosity, and I'm determined to blaze a trail, Lewis and Clark-style, until that one unknown question materializes. Wish me luck.

Jenny Gardiner is currently an armchair scholar at the University of Google. You can find her at www.jennygardiner.net
Sleeping with Ward Cleaver

Slim to None

Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Who's Determined to Kill Me

Accidentally on Purpose (written as Erin Delany)

Compromising Positions (written as Erin Delany)

I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in this Relationship (I'm a contributor)

And these shorts:
Idol Worship: A Lost Week with the Weirdos and Wannabes at American Idol Auditions

The Gall of It All: And None of the Three F's Rhymes with Duck

Naked Man On Main Street

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