The Summer O' Fun

School's back in session, which is always about the time of year I remember I'm an adult and have things to do.  You know, things that don't involve playing with Sam.  Because for the summer, I pretty much just play with Sam.  Particularly this summer - he's 12, and sometime around mid May it hit me that the summers when he thinks it's fun to hang with his mom may be limited.  That meant that for the past few months, no matter what the question was, the answer was yes.  "Do you want to play tennis?" yes.  "Do you want to go run in the woods?"  yes.  "Do you want to watch me do baseball drills?" yes.  "Do you want to learn to play Call of Duty with me?"  yes.  (full disclosure - that one started as "do you want to learn to play Madden?"  and I tried a yes, but it turned out that game sucked.  So I moved on to throwing C4 and firing fake artillery, and created my own Call of Duty avatar (named Beastly), and discovered that I'm way more Call of Duty than Madden.)  So with all of those yeses, this was very high on my all-time list of favorite summers.  Maybe my favorite one ever.


Photographic proof of the summer of fun:

But all good things eventually transition a bit, and school started, and I'm back in adult land.  Well, sort of, since I still tend to have a lot of the aforementioned fun.  But it also includes making jewelry, which is also high on my list of fun things.

I made quite a bit of jewelry over the summer, I just didn't actually do anything about letting anyone else *know* I was making new jewelry.  Until now, when I listed the new rings on Etsy.

I wore these all summer, and people would ask where to get them and I would say "ummmm….."  So it feels a little less loserish to now have a real answer.  "In my Etsy shop." 

Snow Day. For Real.

We finally got our snow day.  We were predicted to get at least 8", and on Wednesday school was canceled preemptively.  And then. . . nothing really happened.  It flurried.  It was cold.  That was it.  Sam and I walked to Pilates, had fun, flittered about.  But no real snow.  I got cranky.  I walked around declaring "This storm is a DUD!"  And then. . . natured payed me back.  It *really* started to snow.  (Well, for Asheville, which doesn't generally get much.)  By Thursday morning we had at least 8".  I was supposed to be working, but instead I tried to just enjoy it.  It's beginning to occur to me that, at age 11, my time is getting shorter rather than longer for Sam to want to play with his parents, and I better soak it all in and have fun.  And that's what we did.

Experiments in the Slow Lane - MAF, Moose and I Hit the Woods

I've started my flirtation with the MAF/low heart rate training I mentioned last time.  I don't know if it's going to be a magic bullet, but it does seem like a very nice step off my roller coaster of get injured/go hard/get injured.  And the leg that I think is slightly wonky feels totally fine when tooling around with my heart rate monitor on.  My MAF zone is 124-134.  yes, that's low.  Which means that it's slow, and theoretically, as someone who likes to work hard,  I should hate this. But you know what - I don't.  At least not yet.  So far I just toodle around, smell the roses and enjoy the idea that I'm hopefully gaining some aerobic strength, but at least I'm not hurting myself.  And I think the reason this works for people is that you're going at a low effort, so you can go long - I don't think anyone ever got a fabulous aerobic system by running in their MAF zone for 20 miles a week.  And maybe I'll get there, which would be novel and interesting and fun, for the time being I'm just toodling happily along for a bit and then calling it a day.

Among other things, it gives me a good excuse to take Moose out in the woods and play.  And take pictures of the frozen creek.  And hike up the big hills while still in my heart rate zone!  I am WALKING, and playing with the dog, and still in my heart rate zone?  Ok, I'll take it.

One fly in the ointment - Maffetone reallllly doesn't like anything anaerobic during the aerobic phase, and he includes any sort of body weight training in his definition.  Which means Chisel would definitely not work for him.

Brooke took this picture of me at Chisel a couple of weeks ago.  I think mainly to document my awesome purple pants.  $20 on sale at Target.  Eat your heart out Lululemon.

And the lower leg has felt sort of iffy after Chisel the last couple of times, so maybe I'll take a small Chisel hiatus.  He's fine with regular Pilates though, which is good because no way am I giving that up, so maybe I'll just add an extra mat class instead.

But today, I actually haven't done much of anything, because we're on an unexpected snow day.  Here's the family walk we took earlier.

Unexpected snow days - doesn't get much better than that.

Almost Back At It

It's a New Year, and I'm ready to get going with it.  We've had the loveliest of holidays, but I'm beginning to get that itch to be back in my routine.  Clark and Sam go back to work and school tomorrow, and I'll very quietly whisper aloud that it's kind of ok with me.  Not because I don't like having them home - I do! - it's just that they're too tempting when they're here.  If there's a pool tournament going on downstairs I don't want to miss it!  If there's a Walking Dead marathon - ok, I don't mind missing that one.

But I thrive in a routine, and that requires an absence of fun distractions to really put into play.  I'm also excited about a lot of new ideas for my business in 2014, and have a (dauntingly long) list of articles I want to read, and new designs to try, and analysis to compile from last year.  I suppose the downtime is good, because without it I'd still be feeling a bit sleep deprived and bedraggled, but now I'm ready to go!

Among the many ideas floating around in my head for the new year is this one - it's a big (2"?) round disc set onto a channel bead so that it slides on the wire.  I've been wearing it for a few weeks and am excited to add it to my Etsy collection in 2014.

One other idea I've got for the new year is to add some Etsy "How To's".  I get lots of questions about how to sell on Etsy, so I'm going to start covering a few of the topics and posting them on here.  If you've got any specific questions let me know, and I'll move them to the top of my list.

I'm wishing everyone a happy and joyful New Year, filled with people you love and work that inspires you.  This is your life - make the most of it!

When Bad Ideas Are Good

Santa brought Clark some fishing gear for Christmas.   So of course he wanted to try it out asap.  And so on Saturday, when it was 37 degrees, we decided to head up to the headwaters above Lake Logan to try it out.  At first blush I wasn't so sure this was a great idea.  After all, even though the water isn't deep up there, its COLD in the best of circumstances - this is trout water.  But what the hell, it was Christmas break after all, when all ideas are considered, and even the not-so-great ones get some follow through.

The thing is, it's really pretty near Lake Logan - I've been up there a fair bit for triathlons, both actual races and when the tri club does open water swims there every Wednesday during the summer - so I figured worst case at least we would freeze our asses off under lovely conditions.  And in fact when we got there the creek was lovely indeed.

I'm probably giving the wrong impression here - in that I don't fish.  I've tried, and it's just not my thing.  So instead on our way out of town I got an XL peppermint mocha in a thermos, and sat on the bank drinking coffee and taking pictures.  Which turned out to be completely satisfying.  The boys were having a great time, I had on 48 layers of clothes so I was plenty warm with my coffee and entertained with my camera, and it was actually surprisingly fun.

And then things took a turn for the truly entertaining.  Clark had to wade out into the middle of the creek, and for a second there it looked like he was definitely going to take a bath.

He bobs.

And he weaves.  But miraculously he manages to stay on his feet.  But his boots do not manage to stay above water.  In fact the boots completely fill with totally frigid creek water.

And when the boots fill with 40 degree water, the party is pretty much over.

Biltmore

Continuing with our vacation week, we woke up this morning thinking. . . what to do, what to do?  Actually, no -  that's how Sam and Clark woke up.  I woke up thinking about the packages I needed to get ready to ship.  But once that was done, and Sam had crushed me in bumper pool, we turned our attention to the rest of the day.  And decided to head over to Biltmore Estate to see the Christmas decorations.  

I have been to Biltmore approximately 1,989,989 times.  I grew up in Asheville, and for several years boarded a horse there (which is AMAZING - you can ride all over the Estate.)  More recently, I spend a lot of time running there - you can run a 10 mile out and back on the river that's dead flat - which is hard to come by in this area, and perfect for tempo runs.  

But, it's been a while since I've been to Biltmore when the Christmas decorations are up.  And Christmas is kind of one of their things.  So we went.

You can see Biltmore really brings out the gravitas in Clark and Sam.

Biltmore is so beautiful, that even this is pretty - and this is the side of the stables that you can only see from the public restrooms.  

We made it through the downstairs of the house - which is where most of the decorations are  - but sadly I have no photographic proof since picture taking isn't allowed in the house.  We gave up on seeing the upstairs - it was crazy crowded, and we've been through the house a zillion times, so we headed outside instead.

Where Sam and I played with the panoramic feature of the iPhone.  Pretty good.

And finally we hung around long enough to see it lit up at night - which was all that Sam really wanted.

Christmas Recap

We've had the loveliest of Christmas holidays.  Thanksgiving can be kind of nuts around here - I always feel like we're driving around to a zillion different gatherings, and in the meantime I'm usually having one of my busiest work weeks of the year.  Christmas, on the other hand, is different.  I've usually hit a lull at work and am taking a deep breath and relaxing, and we don't travel around nearly as much.  We do Christmas Eve with my family, and then we host a Christmas morning brunch for any family and friends that want to come over, and then usually we don't much of anything else.  It's the best, and here's how it all went down:

Christmas Eve we started what should be a new family tradition.  We headed out to Richmond Hill Park and played in the woods together.  Clark ran, and Sam went with me and ran while I rode my uni.  It turned out to be FREEZING, and I was feeling kind of bad for dragging Sam out in it.  The kid has no body fat, and he looked like he was turning blue even after I added a bunch of layers of bike clothes to him from my stash in the car.  But then it started snowing and all was forgiven.  Snow on Christmas Eve = fabulous, no matter the temperature.

Somewhere out there Sam and I ran into Clark, and we took some pictures.

This is one my favorites.  If you look closely you'll see Sam peeping out from behind the tree. 

Once we got ourselves out of the woods we started prepping the brunch we were going to serve on Christmas morning.  We procured sausage at the new Katuah Market  - it just opened, and is owned and largely staffed by the same folks that ran Greenlife before it sold to Whole Foods.  It was like old home week seeing all of the familiar faces, and is beautiful.  Of course since we live within a 2 block walk of Greenlife/Whole Foods, Trader Joes and Harris Teeter, our grocery cup overfloweth and we don't usually need to get in a car and go looking for yet another grocery store.  But I did like Katuah and will no doubt be back.

Lots, and lots, and lots of sausage balls.  And a few other things.  French toast figured prominently.  And some hash brown/egg cup things that seemed to take about 400 times longer than promised, but were actually pretty good.

Christmas Eve with my family - woohoo!  

Our tree on Christmas Eve night.  It looked basically the same on Christmas morning, except it wasn't dark outside and the pictures therefore looked kind of weird with all of the lights.

Let the present opening begin!  Moose was really fascinated by the poodle ornament.  Strangely perceptive, or strangely delicious smelling?  I'm going with the latter.

 Yes, that's my cat in a military portrait.  I cannot stop laughing.  Thanks to Clark and Sam and Skymall, this now has a place of honor in my studio.

Christmas brunch with the family and friends - all of that sausage-ball making pays off.

Bumper pool tourney after the brunch.  Family competitiveness never takes a break.

And after brunch. . .  more uni in Richmond Park.  Like Groundhog Day.

And then Christmas dinner with Leslie and Ed - for which I made my very first ever cake.  Seriously.  I had so little idea of what I was doing that I had to watch a youtube video to figure out how to properly prep the pans.  But the cake itself was (and I'm loathe to toot my own horn here, but…) AMAZING.  I attribute this entirely to (1)  Ina Garten and (2) my ability to follow directions, because as I've mentioned. . . I have no idea how to bake a cake.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.  (and a good beer.)