Tag Archives: Family

thanksgiving, some links, & a finished object

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays because you get all the gratitude, joy, and time with family without a lot of the extra nonsense and pressure to conspicuously consume. You just eat and watch football, and when everyone goes home you have some extra time to put up the holiday decorations and take naps! What can be better than that?

Brandon & I started the day with the Detroit Turkey Trot, which is sponsored by the Parade Company and runs along the Detroit Thanksgiving Parade route. It was clear and cold and despite my initial reluctance to roll out of bed, I was so glad that I let Brandon convince me. The vibe is fun and excited, with folks camped out on the streets before the parade, slapping high fives to the runners and calling, “Happy Thanksgiving!” We’d initially planned on doing the Drumstick Double (which would be the 10k and the 5k) but it cut it short to the 10k so we could get home a little earlier to prep for dinner. It’s a fast course, mostly downhill for the last half, and we had a tailwind, so I was pretty happy with our time.

I heard there are around 18,000 participants for the Detroit Turkey Trot.

My parents drove down from northern Michigan to spend the day with us and meet their grandkitten Pot Roast. My mom makes the best pumpkin pie, and Miss L baked her famous cheese rolls for us. Brandon carved and my dad introduced him to the delicacy of the turkey neck, heart, and gizzard. (Barf.) Although Miss L did classically Thanksgiving-themed placecard drawings, I went with a more Scandinavian-themed table setting this year, which I always really like.

ca19db90-e090-4aa0-80b6-db7a85b606a4-collage

We spent the rest of the weekend getting the house decorated for the holidays, and I watched some new-to-me YouTube knitting vlogs (Fiber Tales from Denmark!) while I finished up my Garment House hot water bottle cover. (Raveled. And it was purely a to-be-used knit, so I didn’t bother with gauge, switched to a slightly larger circular from dpn’s halfway through, and ran out of the stashed Cleckheaton Mohair that I was holding with a plain Lion’s Brand worsted. So it’s wonky but since it will spend most of its life tucked at the bottom of a bed, I’m not stressed.) Brandon’s cousin came over to help install the replacement dishwasher for my old Bosch, and Miss L started her Advent Calendar!

5e11cc67-abba-45a9-85f4-09655bb9ace9

a53ff773-7434-4b72-bdc8-bbad0d9fa876

Harry Potter Funko Pop! Advent Calendar 2019!

Sadly, my car “Finn” did not want to start when the long weekend was over, so it’s been a Monday with a tow truck and working from the car dealership. I was dreading the outcome – new starter? new alternator? new CAR?!? But needing a new battery was the best (and likely most inexpensive) outcome so I am now ready to face the rest of the week with a working car AND a new dishwasher!

He felt like all the rest of us on a Monday morning after a long weekend…

I got creative with leftovers over the weekend and apparently I was not alone – Brandon texted me that all of the guys he works with brought turkey pot pies today for their lunch. 🙂

59699973787__a6aa95df-bb54-420f-a61f-00b2c6a89c29

I hope my American friends had a lovely holiday and all of my overseas friends had an equally lovely weekend. To close, I wanted to share a couple of links for anyone who is as Moomin-mad as I am. Finland is definitely on my bucket list!

What the Moomins can tell us about climate change

My search for the real Moominland

leaf peepers

4 Replies

c753e4cf-0843-4759-894a-6e03b156bfa3

Miss L and I blew this downstate pop stand and headed up north on Thursday night. My folks live up there and we love visiting them at any time of year, but fall is especially magical. On Friday, while my mom worked her gig at a local historical museum, my dad took us into Traverse City for an emergency yarn run (mitts for Miss L) and shopping at one of our favorite bookstores, Horizon Books on Front Street. I picked up the new Philip Pullman (wait for it – Show Us Your Books!). It felt very conspiratorial as the streets were still bustling with folks in Friday work mode while we played hooky; but there was the indisputable growing excitement of TGIF and the inevitable WEEKEND right around the corner.

Saturday was one of those spectacular autumn days with a cerulean blue sky, and you don’t know how to dress because it’s so warm in the sun, but chilly in the shade, or on the lakeshore with the wind. We went to Arcadia and walked the new marsh boardwalk, and then up the Baldy Dune overlook, with Lake Michigan turquoise below and the Frankfort Light in the distance. The weather is syrupy and golden-honey now but very soon will show its teeth, with the gales of November and the immense black winter laying heavily down along the shore.

4c2047b1-01f4-42d2-b251-2193d4d066d0

9d1a60f9-bb17-4def-959a-2421a8aead23

Miss L and I made my dad stop for pumpkins at a roadside stand; it was full of bushels of apples and squash and the scent of cider. I wanted one of every kind of squash – acorn, butternut, spaghetti , delicata – but we just left with two four-dollar pumpkins. Miss L and I sat on the back deck in that rare sunshine and carved them into jack o’lanterns to leave with my folks to scare all the evil Halloween spirits from their old farmhouse.

17a374ed-bd9f-45aa-8421-5e3a9f3a7d41

We drove downstate on Sunday, in lines of leaf peeper traffic, and took a few short detours for some color touring of our own. Highway 115 between Thompsonville and Cadillac was at or slightly past peak. Hurry if you want to see color, as the rain is coming in again and will likely take all those bits of sunshine with it.

in which the best thing is a birthday

Leave a reply

The big thing this past weekend was Miss L’s birthday. I cannot believe my little one is 11 and entering middle school this year. It goes without saying that she is the light of my life and I could devote endless pages to her, except that is a little icky because, you know, her safety and privacy. I usually keep her off the blog, except peripherally. However, I will post a pic of her cake, which Busch’s kindly personalized with our favorite dragons.

96122509-e555-40b3-b8a2-9182acd3e418

And Emmett didn’t quite understand WHY he didn’t get any presents.

c996be7a-f368-41d5-8788-3ce0f5f98eee

After her celebrations with us on Saturday, she went to her dad’s house on Sunday to celebrate with her family there, and Brandon and I were off for our last long run before next weekend’s Crim. Unfortunately I slept in until almost 9 and Brandon was afraid to wake me up. I heard him tiptoe in, put his running shorts on, stare at me hopefully for awhile, then leave again. At some point later, I smelled a mug of coffee being put by my head, and after clearing his throat and whispering, “It’s getting really hot out”, he wisely retreated quickly. I was grumpy about it from the very beginning, having no time to wake up gradually and enjoy the morning and my coffee; and he was right, the weather was atrociously hot and humid and as a result it was one of the worst runs I’ve had in months.

Our plan was to do a 3-mile out to our local nature park, do a couple of miles on the trails, and then 3 miles back the same way; however, we got there and spent a long time in front of the bottle-filling water station, and I just wanted to lay down in front of it, continually filling and swilling my hand-held, and Brandon maybe realized that things were going downhill (NOT literally). So we decided to try for more distance inside the park, where it was at least shady, and a shorter 2-mile route back. Of course, inside the park is steep trails, so what we got in shade we lost in hills, and I was basically baked for the 2 miles back, which I spent staring at Brandon’s back as he charged up hills like the engine that could. I pulled the pin at 7.5 excruciatingly slow and frustrating and painful miles and walked the rest of the way while Brandon chugged away ahead of me. He chirpily fist-bumped me and enthused that it was a great sampling of what the Crim will be like next weekend – “MUCH hotter and MUCH hillier” – and I tried not to vomit and pass out at the thought.

da349ae9-7a6e-4e50-96b1-ee74e68732b4

Anyway, I’m looking forward to a week of catching up at work (although “looking forward to” is not really accurate, should maybe be “have no choice about”), and Workplace Violence training in which I apparently learn what to do in case of an active shooter on-site. I am already prepared for this, as my plan is to hide in someone’s locker, although come to think of it I last checked that I could fit into one of those lockers when I was 20 lbs lighter, so maybe I’d better re-validate that as an option.

Pursuant to the 20 lb comment, I’ve been tracking my calories and water intake with Lose It! for the last four weeks, and staying away from wine (this after aforementioned Lose It! documented Cabernet Sauvignon as my top caloric expenditure, with grilled chicken a very distant second, which I felt was WRONG somehow and should be addressed. However, there’s still cake in the refrigerator and ice cream in the icebox so I have to figure out my plan relative to those things, which may just be f- it, I deserve it since I’m not drinking any calories, and I have a horrible death run on Saturday in FLINT, and if the Workplace Violence training is all it’s cracked up to be, maybe I don’t even need to worry about fitting into a locker after all.

late summer

Leave a reply

Miss L and I were up north for several days last week visiting my awesome parents and had a lovely time on the beach. My folks are wonderful and we love spending time with them and the extra benefit is we can fish and enjoy Lake Michigan and the Sleeping Bear while we’re there, too. We spent lots of time outside in the sun getting brown and bug-bit, we ate ice cream and had dinner at Dinghy’s in Frankfort, we visited Fishtown (where I was supposed to run a fundraising 5k in July, but due to the timing of a scheduled trip to Cedar Point with my brother’s family, I had to scratch. I feel sad that I didn’t get that t-shirt. But next year).

The water levels are very high and we watched a small boy drop his fishing line in the channel and pull out fat fish as the tourist crowds milled past. And we had breakfast at the local eatery in the village where friends of my folks were providing live music – they’re a married duo with a guitar and a flute and they did music for beautiful and popular children’s book called “Paddle to the Sea”. I will confess to getting a little misty at some of their songs invoking Paddle’s journey via the Great Lakes and eventually to the Atlantic Ocean.

I read three books – my Charles Manson beach read, which ended up feeling a little scattered and not satisfying, “The Immortalists” by Chloe Benjamin which I read quickly but also did not enjoy, and a book by the daughter of the BTK serial killer which only stood out to me because of all the times she mentioned Arby’s and Taco Bell. I’d be a serial killer, too, if that’s all I ate. (I’m a grump with my summer reading, I guess, but just wait til I post my thoughts on the book I’m reading NOW – “My Lovely Wife” by Samantha Downing, which may be the most grump-inducing of all).

It all went too fast, as it always does. Still, I managed to do some productive things done besides reading – I had a work conference call AND I pounded out 8 miles on the Betsie Valley trail to fulfill my “long run” obligations. It felt better than the 8 miles Brandon and I did last weekend at Kensington, which was an excruciating miserable slog.

And yes, for anyone keeping track, I’m still running. I mean, I’m not running *well*, but I’m doggedly logging the miles. I’ve gained weight, I am very slow and lazy, and I don’t feel good about my times. I’m running for the finish line, not the finish time, which makes me embarrassed to tell people that I run, because if the person I tell is another runner, they inevitably ask about my paces, and I have to tell them that my average pace (which used to be between 9 / 9:30 per training mile and under 9 for race miles) is now a solid sub-12 minute mile (barely) for training runs and between 10 & 11 for race miles. And I know what other runners think, because I used to think the exact same thing, which is are you really running if you’re running 11 and 12’s? I hate to say that because it sounds so condescending and snotty now but runners care about their times and now because I’m a slow runner, there are no more gleeful post-run or pre-run selfies to smear all over social media because I know I can be modestly proud of my finish time.

As previously mentioned, Brandon and I are running the Crim 10-mile in Flint next week and are going up for a romantic (haha) evening in a hotel the night before so we don’t have to get up at 4 AM to drive there and pick up our packets. (I booked our room on Expedia and received an email confirmation “CONGRATULATIONS YOU’RE GOING TO FLINT” which, if you’ve ever been to Flint, is hard to view as anything other than cutting sarcasm on Expedia’s part.)

I’m a little concerned as my last run had to be cut short because of shin pain. I’m very leery of any kind of shin pain because of the terrible shin splints I had several years ago, which resulted in a stress fracture that cut short my fast running days, which will likely never return. Brandon and I are planning another long run this weekend so I’m going to lay off until then, wear my compression sleeve, and hopefully see improvement. I made it through a half marathon training cycle in February and March without shin issues so that’s something I’m clinging to.

Anyway, that’s the update from late summer here in suburban Elysia, where the days are fading in some ways and brightening in others, and the roads smell like sun-baked fields and a few tired, dusty leaves are beginning an early drift to earth. This time of year will always invoke a pleasant melancholy that is pure nostalgia for my childhood days when I knew summer was growing old and back-to-school clothes and pencils were right around the corner.

melting snowdrifts

Leave a reply

I was more than ready for a break when Miss L & I headed up north last week. I have a great flexibility with my job that allows me to work from home when I need it, but it’s still work. First quarter was a long slog without any real time off to speak of, trips to Japan and Mexico, a book fair, a half marathon, Girl Scout cookie sales, and the usual juggling of house, Miss L’s activities, work, etc. So a few days without any responsibility was just what I needed to refill my well a bit.

The weather was sunny one day, rainy the next, and we planned our activities accordingly. We went shopping in Traverse City and Glen Arbor; we got coffees and went to Interlochen and had dinner at Dinghy’s in Frankfort. Miss L learned to knit (!) – I finished a book – Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny, the latest Gamache mystery – and my mom’s Tokyo Sunrise socks in the Jaywalker pattern (unfortunately they rushed off the needles and I didn’t get a picture and they may be too big but knit happens).

I got one nice 4-miler in along the Betsie River bike path, and went out with Miss L another day to do a Couch to 5k workout with her, at her request.

ca783a99-18a2-48a6-bef4-681871d64fe7

Later that day, my mom & Miss L & I went out to the Pierce Stocking scenic overlook in the Sleeping Bear. The roads and the scenic overlooks are still closed for winter, but you can park by the guard shack and hike, if you don’t mind lingering snow pack, remains of winter storm damage, and the uncanny echoing emptiness of the big woods all around you. It goes without saying that we didn’t mind, and the feel of the warm spring sunshine on our faces while we picked our way over melting drifts was wonderful. It’s what makes living in Michigan so amazing – spring takes so long, but it always comes, inexorably, with dripping drifts and small snowmelt rivers running downhill and a warm breeze in the pines, speaking.

img_4841-collage

We came home downstate to nearly 70 degree temperatures, but a promise of snowfall later in the week. I always miss my parents and being up north, but it’s also time to be home, pay bills, sleep in my own bed, do the laundry, and get back to work. I hope you all had a lovely break, if you took one, and feel ready to go back to your regular life. xoxo

shine like glamour

Leave a reply

So what have I been up to since we last talked? Let’s see, we went to a carnival with my brother and his family.

8.2016_carnival2

There’s something about a small-town fair that really appeals to me. I think it reminds me of how exciting it was when we were kids – all the old small-town festivals and county and state fairs. In daylight, they look tired and cheap, but at night, especially to a kid, they glimmer and shine like glamour.

8.2016_carnival1

My brother is always an excellent carnival companion, perhaps the best there is. He is prone to pointing out that when I am on a particularly frightening ride, I curse in a decibel lower than my regular voice. This observation always makes me laugh and think of Chris Farley of SNL dressed up like the Gap salesgirl. He makes me laugh so hard and so often that my abdomen aches the day after I am with them.

Miss L juked me twice this year. If she wants to go on a scary ride, I of course must accompany her. However, as I get older, the heights really bother me. This year, she was determined to go on the shock drop, where you are harnessed in and they lift you up up up 70 feet into the air. You are essentially sitting with your legs dangling, nothing between you and oblivion but a locking harness. Miss L ran up, sat down; I sat next to her and locked my harness in place. Once this was done, Miss L jumped out of the seat and said, “Nope. Changed my mind,” and scampered off to join my SIL, who was shrieking with laughter. “Well hell no am I doing this, then,” I thought, and tried my harness. Locked and loaded. No escape. And the ride began its ascent. Everyone thought that was quite hilarious.

She also thought she wanted to ride the Zipper, in which you are locked into a tiny revolving cage and spun up and around, over and over. I climbed in – she climbed in next to me – the cage door began to swing shut and she was out of there like a shot. Luckily, my brother climbed in next to me, and as the cage door locked and we began the ascent, he said conversationally, “Well, if there was some sort of catastrophic event down below, we’d really be screwed, locked in up here, wouldn’t we?” NOT HELPFUL.

We went back and my SIL had arranged a lovely little birthday party for Miss L. It’s always a fun tradition and one that I remember all year long.

The weather has turned a bit cooler and Labor Day, the last hurrah of summer, is almost upon us. The major road construction that has plagued us is over, and school starts next week. Still, true autumn feels a long way off still. My friend had a Lularoe pop-up party on Facebook and despite my caution toward such cultish things, I bought some leggings and a skirt and am excited to wear them with boots and sweaters, hopefully soon. I need cool weather, rain and incense, knits and candles and a fire in the woodstove.

Six Ten

of this be sure: you do not find a happy life, you make it.

Tag Archives: Family

thanksgiving, some links, & a finished object

leaf peepers

in which the best thing is a birthday

late summer

melting snowdrifts

shine like glamour