I've been avoiding going to the gym for the past few months because I really have not been enjoying it at all. A few weeks ago my mom asked me about Curves, since there's one in town, and so last week we started going together. And this morning after doing a free week’s trial (mainly to see if my mom liked it) we finally signed up for good.

Yes, I know that I quit Curves earlier because it had gotten too easy, but I figure the important thing is that I at least get some regular exercise, and while the gym might be a better workout, it’s not any kind of useful workout if I’m just not even going. Plus having my mom do this with me means that we can’t just roll over, smack at the snooze button on the alarm clock, and tell ourselves that we’ll just work out another day.

All this is just to explain why it is that I finally got around to getting my very first mammogram. Curves had a special where if you showed proof of a mammogram, they’d waive the service fee (which, at $150, was enough money to convince us we might as well suck it up and go do the damn exam). I called, expecting I’d have to wait a few months, but ‘luckily’ they had some cancellations so I got mine yesterday morning.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting. You hear horror stories all the time about cold metal plates, lots of painful squishing and manipulating of appendages that were not meant to withstand that sort of abuse, and so on. But either I just got lucky, or those machines have been drastically improved over time. Granted it was more than a little disconcerting to have to stand there while the tech poked and prodded to make sure everything was in the right position for optimum squashage. And it was especially ‘amusing’ when I was told for each shot to ‘just take a deep breath and relax’ – not so easy to do when one corner of the thing is digging into your armpit and a large machine is trying to turn one of your breasts into a pancake. But it was over quickly and I saved myself a pile of money by getting the darn thing and I’m sure it will make my doctor happy and at least now I have it out of the way and will (hopefully) not have to do this again for a number of years.

And in the meantime I am back to exercising regularly, at the ungodly hour of 6:45 in the morning, three days a week, because we are all about being healthy around here, by golly. Yay me.