Category Archives: Blogging

day late and a dollar short (hello 2019)

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josie aka ‘pot roast’ has settled into our home beautifully

Hello, my name is Sara and I used to blog here. My blog friends will understand that I am less than disciplined and regular about my posting and it’s always hard to sit down and write the first few sentences after one of my absences. Yet somehow I always do and here I am again.

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it’s been a mild winter so far…

I’m tempted to write up a 2018 Year In Review post but it’s a day late and a dollar short on that one, as we’re now well and truly into 2019. Suffice it to say, my 2018 was one of my best years yet. I didn’t knit that sweater, but I did read 52 books as planned and ran more miles than I’d forecast (most of them dramatically slower than I’d have liked, but oh well). I took on new challenges, projects and teammates at work, and although I didn’t travel during 2018, next week I’ll be on a plane to Japan. Miss L continues to grow as an intelligent, funny, lovely, caring young lady who is my absolute favorite person in the world. As always, one of my proudest accomplishments is the way that her father and I have continued to work together with respect and consideration to raise her.

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there’s been a lot of hygge knitting. check me out on ravelry (sixtenpine)

B.’s job has brought him home to Michigan and fingers crossed, he will spend at least half of 2019 here, living with me. Our life together is a happy one. Sometimes I think of life as a road and if the rough patches of my prior troubles, bad relationships and poor decisions had to happen to travel to a place where I can him in my life, they were all worth it.

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hosted b’s family for his birthday dinner on christmas day – last year’s cake was elvis, this year he wanted morrissey!

I’m hoping it won’t be so long until I chat here again, but in the meantime, I hope you are all well and happy, and that your 2019 proves to be better than your 2018.

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let the new year in like a snow squall across the lake

 

the challenge.

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One of my favorite blogs (Foxs Lane) has blogged every day for the past two Januaries running. This isn’t uncommon; there is actually some sort of organized blog event that goes by a completely obnoxious acronym (NaBlahBloMeh or some such thing) challenging bloggers to post every day. But Foxs Lane is different. Her reasons for doing so are compelling and her blog is really utterly beautiful and it’s made me think, could I write every day for a month?

The answer is of course I can. My content might be sparse and I might not be full of lush photographs or lyrical philosophical insights, but of course I can commit to set down some words every day for a month. And so I shall. I considered this challenge last night as I was driving home from a lovely dinner party in my old hometown. There was wine and cheesecake and Cards Against Humanity and laughing til our faces hurt and this amazing salad that was so fresh and wonderful that I actually dreamed about it last night. (I dreamed about it in a good wholesome way, not in a Cards Against Humanity way, because damn, that game can make anything feel creepy.)

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Whenever I go back to that town, I have an almost visceral, skin-crawling reaction to being in a place where I spent my formative years. Every house is familiar, every street. It’s almost mythic. The atmosphere is charged with memory and importance and I am always conflicted when I cross the boundary and set off home along black highways between desolate cornfields.

Anyway, last night I was driving home, listening to Elizabeth Gilbert on the World Book Club and I looked at the clock on my dashboard and calculated that there was no way I could make it home in time to post yesterday. I guess that’s when I realized that I was committed to this challenge.

I’ll see you all tomorrow and in the meantime, here is a picture of my friend’s ridiculously handsome dog. He helped me eat some of my ham but I did NOT share the salad.

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lowlights

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  • House of Cards – I’m not a huge fan of political dramas but this one is gooooooooooooood.
  • Listening to Jon Krakauer’s ‘Into Thin Air’ during my commutes. The version I have is narrated by the author and I am basically finding myself driving aimlessly so I can keep listening to it. Is it weird that I want to start climbing now?? I have become so obsessed with the whole controversy that I think I have to read ‘The Climb’ now as well, and I’m going to check Netflix for that Everest doc.
  • This week, I’ve been the only person in my department and I’m doing constant triage. People come to find lawyers, they find a row of closed doors, and me. I never imagined that being in a corporate legal department would result in such a wide array of problems to solve. I’ll never get any benefit out of it, but damn, my knowledge is now a mile wide and an inch deep on easements, governance, compliance, bailments, anti-counterfeiting, and FORK TRUCK LEASES. If I can drag myself through one more day of rolling that rock up that hill, bless my heart.
  • Please, please, please, please, PLEASE secondhand gods of running – PLEASE don’t let me be getting shin splints. Please. Okay? I will use my foam roller and increase my miles by only 10% per week and ice and sleep in my ugly compression socks and wear the compression sleeves when I run and slay a chicken on your altar if you just won’t give me shin splints.
  • I’m getting too much pleasure and enjoyment out of Get Off of My Internets. I won’t tell you which blogs I like reading the vicious snark about.
  • I never thought I was a motorcycle boot kind of girl until I saw THESE bad boys on my beautiful bestie. She assented to my request to purchase the same pair. She’s an unselfish sort. They feel extremely heavy and clompy but after mincing around in heels they are undeniably solid and comfortable and the leather is just absolutely gorgeous. They are also the real deal. Steel toe, oil resistant, Good year welt sole. They are, in the words of ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’, bona fide. They probably won’t look as cute on me because I don’t curl my hair, but anyway.

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  • Soon I’m going to do a post on how crazy my cats are. But after this week of shin splints, legal department triage, and a disastrous climb up from base camp, I just don’t have the energy to get into it. I also don’t have the energy to link to the House of Cards and Into Thin Air and everything like that, bleah.
  • After a summer of ruining my hair, I’ve officially turned the reins over to my stylist. Burgundy lowlights.

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And those, my friends, are the lowlights of the week.

  • The sky has been like a watercolor painting this week, big blue with fast-moving voluminous clouds, green and gold and thick soft air. Some days it is too hot to run outside and even when the cool front moved through, it was extremely humid and I had to walk a few paces at every half-mile of my lunchtime run. I reflected that a couple of years ago, taking any walking steps during my run was distressing to me – an indication of a failed training opportunity. I wondered if I should be pushing myself harder.  Then I remembered that I’m still setting personal bests in the short runs I’ve done this summer, and I’m enjoying running more than ever. I am not competing with myself or with anyone, I’m just enjoying being outside and the feeling that comes from regular activity.
  • I’m staying motivated by signing up for smaller events every 2-3 weeks. I found a 4-mile run for our local Founder’s Festival, and in August we have the annual Farmington Run for the Hills, which I will do as a 10k. I love these smaller runs in my hometown because they are usually community-oriented, for good causes, and have a very upbeat, grass-roots feel. (Plus, I can roll out of bed a half-hour before and ride my bike to the start.) Then in September I will do the Kensington Challenge 15k, and start ramping up training for October in Empire. I love the Sleeping Bear Half Marathon and although I don’t really expect to bust out a PR this year – last year the stars were totally in alignment – it’s such a nice event and the weather is terribly, excitingly unpredictable and it’s my favorite time of year to run.
  • I finally spent my birthday money on a couple new pairs of running shorts, tank tops, and some new socks. I’m slowly replacing my ragged old Athleta sports bras – which are like strapping on Viking breastplates – with a fabulous VS sports bra that I found – The Standout. It’s so comfortable and the racerback straps are cute, it’s been a great find and as someone who is slightly more top-heavy than the average runner girl, a good underpinning is almost as important as good shoes.
  • I like running and I like blogging so why is it that there are so few women’s running blogs that I enjoy reading? Most that I check out are too over the top for me. Instead of being motivational and inspiring, I find them to be a litany of accomplishments and selfies of their muscles and race photos. Don’t get me wrong – if you have the stones to be doing halfs and fulls and tris and Ironman events, you have put an inordinate amount of work into it and you deserve to feel very proud of yourself. I just don’t necessarily want to read about it, I guess. There are a few good running blogs that I like – but I feel as though I like them not because they’re running blogs, but rather they’re blogs by women who happen to run, and do a lot of other things too. They seem more balanced.

I know that nothing about this seems very well-structured, but it’s okay to me. When I started running a few years ago, I essentially stopped blogging. All the hobbies I’d enjoyed suddenly seemed sort of trivial compared with my split times, my aching muscles and minor injuries, my goals and gradual accomplishments. I felt as though I had nothing to say, and it was time to stop talking. Now, I’ve found my voice again, without losing my stride, and even if the things I want to say are trivial and unstructured, I like being able to say them.

live authentic part II

I felt bad after my very cynical ‘live authentic’ post and guilty that perhaps I’d oversimplified things. It’s easy to do that in a blog post. You’re sort of shooting for this mixture of insouciance and humor and poignancy and you frequently let one element outweigh the others and miss the mark.

I thought about it a lot today and came to the conclusion that for me, living authentic isn’t about trying to make my life look or seem easy or beautiful, it’s about trying to isolate and identify the beauty and happiness lurking inside my everyday life and feel gratitude. There’s a tail-wagging-the-dog difference and to me, that difference is the actual element of authenticity. When you’re able to look at your life holistically, the good and the bad, and yet value and appreciate the quicksilver moments of elegance and happiness and loveliness, you are living authentically. At the age of nearly-41, I feel like I’ve only recently discovered this and will likely spend the rest of my life working on it. But it’s good work to do.

I have all the moments that I described in my last post and no, they aren’t the moments that get photographed. I don’t shoot selfies of my overfed tummy or unshaven legs or circles under my eyes when I’ve gotten insufficient sleep. I shoot selfies when I feel beautiful. I don’t take pictures of the endless dead seedling trays I’ve baked or over or under-watered, I take pictures of my beautiful flowers and herbs when they are at their peak and I am proud of them. I don’t take pictures of endless streams of traffic instead of walks in the woods and I don’t brag about the runs that are failures of fatigue and laziness and bathroom issues or shin splints, I feel exuberant about the ones where I feel like I could run and run and run and never get tired. And the ‘living authentic’ part is realizing that all of those elements exist all the time and ebb and flow and they all make up your day or your week and you choose what to be happy and proud of, and what you want to project to the world. I think this is the silver linings playbook, to capture a thought from one of my favorite reads of 2013.

Today I went to work and I had too much to do and I felt that bitterness of not being able to putter around and do exactly what I wanted to do in the comfort and solitude of my own home. And yet I had the kind of day where the relationships I’ve forged with the people I work with made me change my mind. I helped people, I accomplished things and they gave back in return. I had a CAD engineer excitedly consult with me about setting up a possible webcam for Mommy duck. I had my small cadre of teammates set up an outing for next week so I can take them to my favorite botanical gardens to see an 80-year old agave cactus bloom, something I never thought anyone around me would be remotely interested in. I had people in my office all day for one reason or another, laughing and talking and asking questions and making plans and working on strategy and developing ideas together. I had a beautiful lunchtime run in the sunshine and came back with a sunburned nose. I had dinner with my daughter and we lay in the hammock while we ate our ice cream and my shorts were too tight, and we watched the pine branches overhead, very green against the blue sky. Mommy duck went away and came home and the fish swam in his tank while the cats stared, hypnotized. I took the trash out and saw a pale moon shadow in the sky, waiting for the gloaming. All of these things happened and then I felt sad for my harsh and negative commentary about what is in actuality a very nice and sweet pair of words. For the time being, I’ve found a nice place in the world and I am lucky to share even the most tedious bits of my existence with good people and the gratitude that I feel and project is now for me the most authentic way to live.

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I loved this post on A Side of Sweet about what I informally think of as “the new YOLO” – the hashtag “live authentic” which at first glance can seem very positive and motivating and inspirational but, as Kelly’s post points out, can really just be annoying as all hell and make those of us who are actually forced to work for a living doing distinctly unbeautiful things feel a bit, shall we say, inadequate.

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I wish my life was all about PeonyWatch2014, naps with beautiful yogaesque cats, communing with ducks, walks in the woods and going for long runs wearing perfectly coordinated Nike outfits while I “live authentically”. And I DO get to do some of that, sometimes (okay, I don’t have any perfectly coordinated outfits of any kind, much less for running). But more often than not, my version of living authentically is sitting in traffic or in my office thinking, talking, or writing about widgets, packing lunches, wishing my house wasn’t so cluttered, wishing I had time for a nap or a run, missing my kid, checking my finances, wondering what to read next, wishing I had time to weed the garden, feeling tired, feeling hungry, feeling fat, wondering if it’s almost time to eat, wondering if it’s almost time to go home, wondering if we need more wine, negotiating who does bedtime reading or lunch packing, going to bed at 8PM with the intention of reading but instead exhaustedly watching a rerun of the Real Housewives of Somewhere while berating myself for not cleaning the litterbox and feeling annoyed with the cats for breaking something or dragging a shoe upstairs to chew on (really). And then getting up the next day to do it all over again.

on going out and coming home

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I try not to talk much about a variety of topics on the internetz, including my work and my personal relationships and now, as she gets older, my daughter, whose life and image and thoughts and feelings belong to her, not me to share with the general public. But I’ve been through a lot over the past year, and there were many days when I just didn’t think I could get out of bed and face the day.

All my life, I have felt that I needed someone else to trust and to lean on, because inside I never trusted my own self to get me through hard times. I felt fundamentally unreliable and flawed. When I faced a challenge, I never truly believed I had the ability to get through it.

It’s a terrible weakness, not to trust or like your own self, and although I wish I could change many things that have happened lately, the silver lining of all of it is that I finally know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can get through what I have to, and that I am more than I ever thought I was. Part of me hates to see that written out in black and white, because my old self would feel that was tempting the universe to knock my feet out from underneath me. I don’t think like that anymore. Now I think the universe is more receptive, it’s something that responds to the energy you put out into it, and gives it back, and if you wake up every day to see the beauty in what is around you and feel gratitude for it, and love the people in your life and what you have been given, and you work to be happy, the universe responds to that. The only person who is responsible for your happiness is you.

This is a long way of saying that I flew across the country this week, and visited new places, and saw new things. I spoke in front of groups of people and laughed with them and made friends. I wasn’t perfect, but I was real, and I wasn’t afraid, and everywhere I looked I saw sunshine and warmth and new things. I trusted myself and enjoyed myself and when I came home, I was so happy for the little life I have here. California was hot and dry and bright, the Santa Ana winds moving restlessly through the palm trees against the blue sky. Traffic wound in glittering ropes along the asphalt. There were people everywhere, great waves of people pressing in on all sides. When I wasn’t presenting, during our car trips and at the airport, I couldn’t even speak for staring around me.

And then I came home, and my world was small and damp and green, full of cats and a chattering child, cluttered with construction paper and crayons and toys. I dreamt last night of five cardinals in the branches above me, and picking up a small colored bird, thinking it was dead, and having it come alive in my hand, fragile and prickly. I liked coming home the best of all. It’s so strange to feel that at the age of 40, I’ve been newly born into something I never was before. I have such a short life left to enjoy, I’d better get to it.

to read

terri windling writes a beautiful blog with beautiful pictures, and her ‘into the woods’ has been fascinating – a very thought-provoking, extensively researched series on mythical archetypes, fairy tales and literature.

highly recommend.