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Getting Far Too Excited

I am definitely getting excited about my upcoming community-supported agriculture share. Perhaps a little too excited. But what can I say? I love the idea of having fresh vegetables delivered automatically every week. I love that the money is going to a local business. And I love getting their newsletter with random little tidbits like this:

We are currently planting herbs in the green house and this year will have an eco-friendly and unique way to send you fresh herbs. All the herbs you receive will be in a bio-degradable earth friendly container which, with a little extra care, will allow you to keep growing the herbs!

Seriously, how cute is that?

Thanks to their newsletter archive online, I know that last year’s first shipment had asparagus, strawberries, kale, spring onions, and basil. 2007’s didn’t have basil or asparagus, but did have mint sprigs. What will 2009 hold? Well, aside from a lot of eating, of course.

Also, I went for a second swim this morning with Julie and Laura. They start their swim class next Monday, and I’ve got an 8:30am meeting then, so Mondays with them will be out for a while. This time I used an extra pair of Julie’s goggles and yes, I am sold. I will buy a pair ASAP. (Plus I still need to get my information from the eye doctor so that I can order a pair of prescription goggles.) And my strained tendon has stopped being even a tiny bit sore, which is a big relief. Good, good times on that front.

The first shipment last year

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Weekend To-Do List

For the first time in quite a while, there are no visitors in from out of town, no big events, no family dinners, nothing scheduled for this weekend. I find the idea rather startling in a good way. (Don’t get me wrong, all the visitors were great, the events were fun, and the family dinner was delicious. But after a while it gets exhausting.) So now I’m finally making my Weekend To-Do List, for all of the things that I’ve been putting off each and every week.

This is a work in progress; I’m sure there are more things that I’m forgetting… and of course this leaves off the regular events like “write reviews” and such.

  • Re-arrange living room (tv, bookshelves, couch)
  • Organize closet and dresser (move pants, t-shirts) and get rid of old clothes
  • Run 8-10 miles
  • Saturday morning farmer’s market photography
  • Buy primer and paint for Artomatic (provided I decide on the color)
  • Read book club selection for next week’s month’s discussion (Farthing by Jo Walton)
  • Sleep

Somehow it feels good just to write it all down. We’ll see how much actually gets done, of course…

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Lemon Bars and Chlorine

This was a nice weekend, over all. On the downside, Charlie’s been coming down with a bad cold (or something) and spent all Sunday out of commission. Which meant, of course, that he got to avoid the craziness of a family holiday dinner.

The dinner was, needless to say, ultra-delicious. My mom’s side of the family is populated with great cooks and the food we had this year was no exception; ham, scalloped potatoes, carrot souffle, scalloped pineapple, green beans, asparagus, and probably something else that I’m blanking on. Plus three desserts; banana pudding, a carrot cake, and lemon bars that I’d made and brought with me.

Lemon BarsThe bars turned out pretty good overall. Next time I need to make sure I really push all of the crust out nice and flat; it was a little high at one end and those bars had to get thrown out because they were almost all crust and no lemon. Also, I need to buy a lemon zester before I make this again because using a cheese grater is a real pain in the butt. Still, overall, they were good. (Jim, I’ll edit in the recipe under a jump when I get home tonight.)

This morning I finally got off of my butt and went lap swimming for the first time in approximately 20 years. So yes, I did indeed survive. If my counting was correct (and it may very well not be) I swam 20 laps (or 40 lengths) of the pool, which comes out to 1000 meters. With little rest breaks between each lap, mind you, with which to confer with Julie and Laura. It was a nice time, although I clearly need to get some goggles because everything is now a tiny bit blurry. Also, need to find my rubber flip-flops. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do the whole shower-at-the-gym routine. (My current gym is all of 5 minutes away, my old gym was a 2 minute walk around the corner.)

I’d originally wanted to use this spring to tackle a triathlon, but missing Philly back in November put a hold on that. But I might give one of the mini-triathlons from Tri It Now a stab. If I get the bike serviced I am pretty sure I could handle that right now with no problem. (Famous last words, I’m sure. I can hear Moose cackling at my naivety.) In the meantime, though, I just need to keep at it. Practice makes better…

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In case you hear of people laughing so hard they drown…

I feel like I should somehow warn the world that (provided all goes well) I am going to take a stab at lap swimming on Monday. I am pretty sure that I have not done actual lap swimming since, um, 1986 or so.

Saying that this is going to be entertaining? Understatement of the universe. I’m sure there must be a German word for when you are simultaneously looking forward to something and terrified of it, all at once. They’re good with that sort of thing.

On the bright side, new lighting for Artomatic is officially purchased. I suppose there’s a small chance it may somehow fail horribly and I’ll have to use the old one, but hopefully the first weekend of site set-up I can test it out and make sure. (But if someone out there wants my old lights, well, they’re probably going to need a new home.)

And I have told myself that in May, I have to get my old Wine-Book Wednesdays posts up and running again. All it will really take is a good hour or two to scan in about two dozen more images. So if there aren’t any new posts by May7th, feel free to nag. After all, it’ll have been a year since the last one. Yeesh.

This weekend Charlie and I are seeing Chicago at the National Theatre. I’ve never seen it before—on stage or for that matter the movie version. I know absolutely nothing about it. Hopefully entertainment is heading our way tomorrow night.

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Wishing I Had a Porch

Last Saturday was a little crazy busy for me; I had a 12-mile run in the morning (with another one scheduled for Sunday morning), business to take care of at my parents’s house out in Vienna, and dinner with some of Charlie’s co-workers up in Chevy Chase. And let me first get out of the way, the run was great—Charlie and I ran it together, and despite some nasty headwinds beating us down, we had a really good time. Likewise, dinner (at La Ferme) was also excellent, with good company and good food.

But I have to say, the best part of Saturday? It may have been after I’d finished taking care of everything out at the family estate, and I got to sit out on the deck and read my book for about an hour.

A Peaceful Afternoon [365portraits: 094]

I know, it doesn’t sound like much. But one of the things that I’ve really missed when I moved into Arlington was having my own porch or balcony; it’s something that while in both Falls Church and Tysons that my place had and I somewhat took for granted. There are a lot of nice parks in my current neighborhood that I can walk to and kick back and relax at… but there’s something extra-special about being somewhere all by yourself and just able to really and fully unwind. Especially in the spring.

It was just a great way to spend the afternoon; finishing the second 400 pages of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, drinking a (rare for me) soda, letting the sun keep me warm, and not worrying about anything else. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, and being outside means that I don’t find myself looking at everything in my home and thinking, “I really should take care of that.”

I also got to fiddle around a bit with a new camera lens; it’s a macro lens that lets me get some tight focuses on objects and blur everything else out behind them. I’m definitely still learning its finer points but so far I’m pretty happy with what it’s letting me do.

Daffodills Daffodill

Mom’s daffodills are already getting a little droopy and towards the end of their cycle, so it was nice to have someone appreciate them while they’re still out. (You know, for someone who hated hated hated weeding the garden all those years, every now and then I think that it would be nice to have a garden of my own. What sort of horrible subliminal brainwashing is going on with me?)

And speaking photography, I started looking at alternate lighting ideas for Artomatic this year, and may have found paydirt. Of course, what I really need to do is get up early on Saturday and hopefully finish up the set of photos for the exhibit. And then print the photographs, and buy frames… and paint for my wall at Artomatic… get new business cards…

It’s no small wonder I still owe some people e-mails from two months ago. Or why updates here are few and far between. I’m ready to become fabulously wealthy and live a life of leisure, can’t you tell?

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Back to the Races

Yesterday, I finally got back on the horse, so to speak. With having missed the Philadelphia Marathon in November due to illness, this was my first double-digit mileage race in a year. As a result, I won’t lie—I was more than a little worried, doubly so since I’ve been training entirely on my own for both this and the Potomac River Run Marathon in May.

To make matters slightly tougher, even though I’ve run the National Half Marathon all four years, now, starting last year they changed the course for the half marathon option. In past years, it was an almost entirely flat course. 2008 and 2009’s course, though, has a long slow climb for miles 5-8 (followed by a swift drop for miles 9-10), and then one more hill at mile 12. When I ran this course in 2008, I ended up several minutes slower than my previous year’s time, thanks to burning out on the hills and choking at the end.

This year, happily, that ended up not being the case. I ended up with a much more consistent pace, and an overall much better feeling about the race in general. I never felt beaten down like I had last year, and while I now look back and think that there are spots that I could have pushed a little harder, it’s ultimately a big victory. With that in mind, though, there were some things I feel like I need to remember in what I did right and what I did wrong.

Things I Did Right

  • This year, I successfully found one of the official pace groups to start the race with. I’d used the 4:00 (full marathon) group  in 2007 and it worked out really well. Having found the 3:55 group (which is an 8:58min/mile pace), I figured they would be good to run with. Aside from a slightly slow first mile due to crowding, miles 2-4 were good, with the second mile even making up the lost time from the first. That said, when the hill started at mile 5? They took off, so to speak. They were about a block ahead of mile by the time I hit marker 5 (and I was all of 11 seconds off of the pace, so I hadn’t slowed down that much), and were completely out of sight by marker 6. Yeesh. I never caught them, either, and my finish time was only 30 seconds off of their projected finish. Oh well. Still, I felt like I was smart to stick with them, but also didn’t get pulled into the craziness. That said, I now wish I’d latched onto the 3:50 group, who knows how that would have worked?
  • This year, I also had the good sense to really think about how I was going to handle the course. I told myself that if I picked up a little bit of time on the uphill that I would just make it up on the way back, and because I had the plan in place that’s exactly what happened. As it was, only mile 7 was where I gained any significant time (33 seconds) and I burnt that all back off the next few miles.

Things I Did Wrong

  • I ended up seriously dehydrated this race, and it’s my own fault. Towards the end of last year I started running with Gatorade in my water bottle instead of water. It certainly seems like a smart idea, but the reality is that I don’t actually find Gatorade terribly refreshing. So unless I’m really, really thirsty… I don’t drink it. I ended up drinking less than half of my water bottle the entire race, and at the very end (with about a tenth of a mile to go) it was definitely starting to catch up with me, feeling a little crampy. Then, as soon as I was handled some bottled water, I drank the entire thing in about 5 seconds flat. So from now on, I’ll stick to grabbing a cup of Gatorade at water stops and using that to get the electrolytes back into my body, and carry water. Sure, it was a cool day out, but I sweat a lot and dehydrate easily. Not smart in the slightest.
  • Also, on a similar note, I really need to wait until closer to the start to get into the entrance corrals. I spent the entire race needing to use the bathroom, but (unlike last year) ended up just gritting my teeth and bearing it the whole way through, since every available stop along the way had a huge line. Not smart.
  • I also really need to drop 5-10 pounds. There is no way around it. I’d gotten rid of a few earlier this year but they mysteriously came back in the past couple of weeks, just in time for the race. Hmph.

Overall, I’m really happy with this year’s finish. I think I could have done better had I really pushed it, but I have a full marathon in six weeks, so this was the way to handle it. And, should I run the race again next year, I feel like this new course is no longer my nemesis. Yay!

(9:15, 8:43, 8:58, 9:00, 9:09, 9:00, 9:33, 8:52, 8:52, 8:40, 8:57, 9:16, 8:50, 0:50)

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The Way It Used To Be

2009 = Music explosion!

Generally speaking, 2008 was kind of a dud year for new music. Not many new albums I was really excited about, per se, and even artists that I like who did release albums had some real middling end results. But this year? Well, we’ve got Bruce Springsteen, U2, Kelly Clarkson, Indigo Girls, Tori Amos, Pet Shop Boys… lots of new music for me to be listening to for the rest of the year, quite frankly.

As it is I’ve been listening to the Pet Shop Boys album preview (thanks Trevor!) today and there are a couple songs (“The Way It Used To Be,” “Pandemonium,” “Love etc.”) which have just instantly clicked—that great sort of feeling of, “Yes, yes, more like that” coupled with having a deja vu flashback to earlier albums and thinking how much you loved them as well.

I’m not saying that artists need to be like what they’ve already done (that gets old quite frankly) but there’s something great about a song that puts you in mind of an earlier project. Almost like you see how they’re connecting the dots from one to the next. Anyway, good stuff! Can’t wait for the actual release so I don’t have to keep clicking on a song title on the web site to listen to specific tracks over and over again.

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Hurry Up, Spring

This morning I was really tired and it took me a while to figure out why—it’s because I’ve been using my psychic powers at full-blast to try and make spring arrive ahead of schedule.

Well, perhaps not, but it’s a nice idea, isn’t it? I’m so sick of it still being dark when I wake up to hit the gym on Monday mornings, or perhaps to do some before-work running on Tuesdays or Thursdays. If it’s still dark out, it just drags me back into slumberland. At least we’re at the point now where it’s not pitch-black when I leave work so I can get the running in then, but still… not a fan. I don’t know how people live up near the Arctic Circle during the cold months; not even so much for the brutal temperatures but the lack of sunlight.

On the other hand, I’ve been having taking three virtual trips into Japan as of late to get through my desire of being somewhere else. As I think I’ve mentioned before, Animal Crossing: City Folk on the Wii is still intensely a funny, an adorable and low-key simulation game where my biggest worry is trying to eventually catch all 64 fish for the local museum’s aquariums. Also in the game realm, though, is Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Justice For All, which I finally started playing on the NintendoDS. It’s a fun cross between an adventure game and a novel, as you navigate the twists and turns of Phoenix Wright’s latest cases before coming to the inevitable conclusion. In many ways it’s like reading a mystery/investigation novel where you have to solve the crime before the author point-blank tells you. I enjoyed the first of these games, and it’s fun checking out the second one.

Last night I also started reading the 856-page comics autobiography A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I’ve really enjoyed reading Tatsumi’s comic short story collections as they’re translated into English; they’re always slightly twisted and depressing little vignettes of life in Japan by slightly pathetic people, with something just off-beat enough to attract as a reader. What’s great about A Drifting Life so far (although to be fair I’m only on page 80!) is that Tatsumi is able to really plunge the reader into a different place and time without ever overtly doing so. There’s no huge info dumps or exposition, but it really gives me a strong feel for 1949 Japan.

In many ways, A Drifting Life is just the kind of autobiography that I really like, because it lets me “travel” to not only a different place but a different time as well; it’s a much less expensive way of visiting somewhere that would otherwise be inaccessable. Really good stuff, and once it’s officially released (next month?) I think it’s going to knock people’s socks off. I hope so, because I love the Tatsumi short story collections and want there to be many, many more down the line.

(And, with no exercise scheduled for tomorrow morning—my spinning class is in the evening—that means I can stay up a little later and read some more of the book. Yay!)

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A month later…

…and my life is still boring.

Housework [365portraits: 067]All right, perhaps a slight exaggeration. I have been doing more than just vacuuming, honest. In all honesty, I’ve actually been very busy this past month. It wasn’t so much that I had a lot of extra things on my plate, but rather that I went on vacation for almost a week in mid-Feburary to see some friends. Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time, but ever since then I’ve felt like I’ve been catching up on, well, everything else all at once.

When that happens, I find that all sorts of communications slowly shut down or off entirely. My e-mail inbox is normally in the single digits, and ever since mid-February it’s been about four-times as full of things still waiting to reply to. (Cringingly, there’s an e-mail or two in there from right before my mid-December surgery, the remnants of being behind back then too.) I’ve ignored a lot of website updates that I normally read religiously. And needless to say, well, it’s now been over a month since I updated here.

On the bright side, a lot of the “no news is good news” adage applies here. Work is going well. Running has started to finally click back into place (although I am never, ever, ever training for a spring marathon again). Hopefully the friends who are starting to think I’ve dropped off the face of the earth haven’t written me off. Reviews are still being written. Perhaps more importantly, I have an idea (finally) for this year’s Artomatic; it will (like last year) be photography-based, and I think I’ve got about half to two-thirds of an exhibit already taken care of. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I can finish taking the appropriate photos and get that rolling. And last week I started carving out some time from my schedule to start some fiction writing again. We’ll see how that goes, but at least for now there are four pages of something that I think don’t entirely suck. Oh, and I have a monstrously large television now because the old one was on death’s door.

Mind you, things are still busy. Tonight and Thursday involve things after work with someone from out of town. Then Friday through Sunday with different people in from out of town. The following weekend is a half marathon. The weekend after that is possibly some birthday stuff, although at the rate everything else is piling up I’m half-tempted to just skip trying to make plans entirely and just celebrate it by doing nothing.

But hey, I’ve got my health, I’m happy, I’m still gainfully employed. There are certainly worse things in life than “I have too many things going on all at once” in the grand scheme of things. Hopefully now that the dangling sword of not-updating-ocles is no longer over my head, it’ll be a little more frequent, right?

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Warmth! Warmth!

I’m always surprised when we get crazy warm temperature in the winter here in DC, and this weekend was no exception. 55 degrees on Saturday! 62 degrees on Sunday! When I’m opening up the windows and turning off the heat, well, you know it’s working out well.

Ironically, of course, I’m going to be in southern California for part of next week and I think it will actually be slightly colder there. What’s up with that? Oh well, I’m enjoying this weather while I can.

Opening the Windows! [365portraits: 039]

Even despite a bad ending to an otherwise good 14-miler on Saturday, it felt great to run outside and move in the weather. It just makes me that much more eager for spring. But until then, I’ll settle for a good meal on Saturday night at La Ferme in Chevy Chase, outdoor seating at Sunday brunch, having the windows open while writing this afternoon, and now sitting down for Friday’s Battlestar Galactica. I had a ton of stuff to get accomplished this weekend, but it’s nice to have them all done.