GrumpysMonkey

I love my family. I love my friends. I love having houseguests and showing people around my city. I love introducing friends and family to our favorite restaurants, farmers markets, and sights.

But we’ve been hosting first my parents and then my friend M for a week now. We just dropped M back at the airport. So for the first time in a week, we’re sitting on the couch in our pjs, watching TV, and eating random vegetables and things out of the fridge (rather than an actual meal).

I’m going to sleep well tonight. And then in a week or two, I’ll be ready for house guests again.

I’ve got something going on. I suspect it may be food poisoning, but it’s also possible it’s some sort of 24-48 hr flu. Fever, digestive crap. Nothing else. No sneezing, no sore throat, etc. Came on very suddenly, hoping it leaves the same way. I’ll be fine, I’m just temporarily miserable. It’s amazing how even the slightest fever can just sap all energy.

But what has struck me this time, more than any other illness I’ve ever had is the feeling that I’ll never be well again and that I’ve never been well before. This fever has apparently stolen my memory of what it was like to feel good, even though I know as recently as yesterday morning I was feeling great, had a great workout, etc. Tuesday I had a fantastic run, Monday I had a stellar core/strength workout. I just find it funny. I know that tomorrow (or worst case Saturday) when I’m back to normal, this sick feeling will be what’s a distant memory, but for now, feeling healthy is something I just can’t identify with at all.

At least overall I haven’t been sick in well over a year, if not two years, so I’ve still got a good track record going. Hopefully this will be the last illness for at least another 2-3 years.

As happens every few months, I get guilted back into blogging again (Hi Stephanie!). I don’t know how long it will last this time, probably as long as I remain relatively unstressed. Though there’s a fair amount in my life to be stressed over (not bad, just busy more than anything). So for those of you who aren’t on Twitter, and who I haven’t talked to recently, here’s what’s up.

Running

We’re doing pretty well with the transition to the VFFs (barefoot shoes). We ran a half marathon on Sunday and today, Tuesday, I’m pretty much back to normal. Running without standard running shoes though presents a lot of challenges. You really need to work on your balance a lot. You don’t have the flat sole of the running shoe to help you balance, so all of the balancing is done with your foot muscles and the stabilizing muscles along your legs. So I’m working out like a madwoman. Seriously, we do 2-3 strength training sessions a week focusing on core strength and balance, at least 3-4 hours of cardio a week and one long run. Some weeks we fit in another short run, other weeks we don’t. We’re working up to the Rock and Roll Marathon at the end of June and then we have another half marathon and another full marathon planned for 2010.

Work

Work is work. It’s never a really good idea to talk about your job online, good or bad, but I’ll just say that my job is going fine. It’s a lot of work (but that’s sort of the point), but I work with good people, have an office with a door, and while I don’t really like the fact that I have to take the shuttle home most days, the shuttle does have Wi-Fi that works sort of well, so I can at least do some work while I’m on the shuttle.

House

I’ll get some photos up sometime in the next week or so, but the house is good. John has a lot of work to do organizing the garage, cleaning out his storage unit, and cleaning the small room downstairs where a lot of his stuff ended up when we moved in. We’re working on organizing the kitchen and the guest room (we have a futon, so come visit) and doing little things like polishing off the light installation we did under the kitchen cabinets and figuring out what to do with the pantry area.

Garden

This is where we’ve done the most work this year. Here’s a photo of what the backyard looked like when we bought the house.

The backyard before

That plant-y, jungly area up top is the old garden. There were seven rose bushes in and around the various plants. Have you ever tried to harvest kale or strawberries while navigating between two large rose bushes? OUCH! Plus, the left side of the photo is west. The bottom of the photo is south. So in the summer, the sun just beats down on the yard. This is great for gardening, but not so much for sitting outside when it’s hot outside and the house (which doesn’t have air conditioning) is too hot to enjoy. The upper area however is shaded before the lower area. So we are in the process of turning the upper area into a lawn/seating area with a place for the grills and for flowers and maybe a small herb garden. The lower area is going to be almost entirely garden.

We ordered three raised beds and John filled them with the 3 yards of dirt we got delivered. We’ve planted them by now, but here’s a little preview of what they look like now.

Beds before planting

The bed on the right is all lettuces and spinaches. The bed in the back will be peas, broccoli, and some other random plants. The bed on the left will be tomatoes, onions, and basil. To the left of the beds will be corn and quinoa. In back of the beds to the right is a peppercorn tree and other places in the yard will have more berries, currants, a yuzu (Japanese citrus), and a hardy kiwi. We still have a lot of work to do down there to get the yard looking “pretty”.

Cook Local

We’re doing a lot of work on Cook Local. So far so good, although we really need to figure out how we can get more local readers. We get a lot of search traffic, which is fantastic, but we need more local involvement. We’ve tried to start forums, but we’re not getting a lot of traffic there. I think that I need John to really try to focus on those a bit more, or really, to focus on Cook Local more. Running the site and cooking and blogging and doing the photos is a full time job that I’m doing in addition to my full time job. Though John has been helping with the cooking more, which is very helpful. But really, while he’s a good cook, I’m really the cook and he’s the community guy, so I think we should both play to our strengths and really try to make a big push for this to get it kicked into high gear.

Cats

Finally, a couple of cute cat pictures.

Binky

Wingnut

Just throwing this out there so that we have it down. This year we need to prioritize our spending on a few key items. A dyson, a new camera for John, and cargo bikes.

The Roomba is going back to Costco. It’s not a bad little vac, but it requires too much handholding and too much watching. Our house is a bit cluttered, not really in a bad way but just because we have a lot of stuff and I’d rather have an easily maneuverable Dyson than the Roomba.

John needs a DSLR to be able to improve his food photography and maybe to get back to his flower photography.

And we need cargo bikes. I’m tired of driving to the U-District market. We’re only a mile away. We should be able to make it easily with a cargo bike.

So, Dyson, Nikon, or Madsen? If you’re listening and want to help us out, go for it. (just kidding. kind of)

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I haven’t for years. It just seems silly to focus on something just because it reached a certain date on the calendar. However, January marks the 6 month countdown to our first marathon of 2010, so it just seems like the right time to step up the marathon training.

So this isn’t a resolution post. No. Not at all. So my apologies that it’ll read like one.

For this year’s marathon training, I’m going to try some different things. Sure, we got through the marathon last year. It was a great experience. But lots of it hurt, it was hard, and I think we could have done a lot of things differently. So here’s my plan for this season.

Monthly Goals

Last week I wrote out all of my planned workouts for January. I’m going to be doing either 2 or 3 runs a week, but I’m going to alternate a lot more circuit training (mixing cardio with weights) and walking into the mix as well. I want to do a lot more strength training this year. Running isn’t just about the legs, it’s about the core, the arms, the neck, and the ass. So to that end I’ll be lifting a lot of hand weights, doing a lot of crunches, reverse crunches, and hamstring and quad work.

Walking

Since we’ve switched to barefoot running, I’ve realized how important it is to really take the time to strengthen my feet. The arches in particular need a lot of work. So I’m going to go for at least one walk a week of at least an hour. Some weeks I’ll do two, depending on how much running I’m doing. During the walks I plan on focusing on the proper form in the barefoot shoes as well as just mentally preparing for the marathon and listening to my Spanish lessons.

Diet

I hate that word. But I’m not going on a diet, I just want to be more mindful of my diet. I’m going to be keeping an informal workout log and I’ll not only record my workouts, but also what I’m eating before, during, and after (to the best of my abilities). It won’t be too strict, and I’m not going to majorly change the way I eat, but I do want to play around with different meals the night before hard runs and after hard runs to see what foods best help my recovery and my stamina.

My hope for 2010 (this is the closest I’ll get to a resolution) is that I can be more focused in everything that I do this year. More focused on work, more focused at home, and more focused at the gym and when out running. If I can do that, the marathons this year (yes, there will be more than one) should be a lot easier than last year’s.

We’re going to get a new faucet for the kitchen.

We’ve decided on a style, and now we have to pick a color. We’re debating between stainless steel and tumbled bronze.

Here’s a link.

You can see both colors on that link.

Our cabinet knobs are chrome, our dishwasher is stainless, and our fridge is stainless. But we will likely replace the fridge within 5 years and the cabinet knobs are easy to replace.

Our house is a 1915 Seattle style craftsman. So we do like to preserve the older look of the home.

Thoughts? I want to order in the next day or two.

So here’s my current list of things that annoy me. I’m sure I could come up with more items that annoy me if I was at home, but right now I’m at work on my lunch break, so this is the best I can do.

1. Our freezer. It’s too full and we have to fight to get it closed.
2. Our kitchen sink. The faucet is too short and awkward and throws water everywhere.
3. Our washer. It is a front loader and there’s no “SOAK” mode. I can’t get my dish towels to not smell stale.
4. Our closet. Not organized. Not enough space. My side particularly. John’s side is fine.
5. Our pantry. There’s always shit on the floor in front of it. Always tripping over stuff.
6. Shelves above our stove. Not organized, can’t support a lot of weight.
7. Our fridge. We lose stuff. Things go bad. Seems there’s always more moistsure than there should be (and it isn’t an old fridge)
8. Our breakfast nook area. We’ve been toying with removing the table and putting a butcher block type wheeled cart in there for food prep.

So, I need to decide what to pick off next. We’ll go to the plumbing store this weekend to see about the kitchen faucet. But what next?

Obviously we need to keep money in mind. There are a few things we have been weighing.  

1. Do we want to spend the money for a heater upstairs? It would likely be about $7K.
2. Do we spend the money on a new washer and/or dryer?
3. What do we do with the pantry? I’m sort of out of ideas for that. I can’t quite get my head around what we need to do there.
4. Same goes for reorganizing the shelves above the stove.
5. The breakfast nook would be easy to mark off other than figuring out what butcher block to buy or whether to use the one we have in the guest room.
6. Then speaking of the guest room… we need more bookshelves in there. Maybe we spend the money on that.

I know I’m just talking out loud here and there aren’t any “right” answers. But for those of you who know me and read here (all 3 of you), what would you do? Any thoughts?

I’m contemplating trying to blog every day this month both here and on Cook Local. You see, it is NaNoWriMo again (national novel writing month) and every year I lament that there’s no way I’ll be able to participate. i just don’t have the time.

But I think I can blog every day, even if I just short little posts. I’ll use it to get back to my personal blogging, and to do more with Cook Local. I’ll try some new things, try to build a community around Cook Local, and just get into the habit of writing more. I really want to get back to writing for pleasure (and not just for the blog). I’d like to get back to writing fiction.

But onto today’s post. Things that annoy me. I’ve decided that over the next year, I’m going to try to get rid of the things that annoy me most in my life. (No, John isn’t going anywhere.)

The first of those annoying items is gone as of today. We purchased a chest freezer and now the freezer attached to our fridge can be easily opened and closed. We can find things in it and we’ll actually have room for ice now! Yay!

Our sink

Next up is the kitchen sink. We need a new faucet because the current faucet it way too short and ends up spilling onto the backsplash all the time. It isn’t long enough and the water ends up running onto the division between the two sinks and getting everywhere. Plus, I’ve got to lean way far forward to get to the faucet.

I could use some help though. Anyone have an idea as to what to do with this area behind our sink? It collects water and gets very dirty. We’ve taken to putting a dish towel behind there all the time to sop up the water.

Also, any ideas for faucets that would work? We’d love one that is high and curved or one that has one of those extensions that can be used by hand.

I took this video last night. Binky has decided that the bathroom sink is a wonderful, magical place.

I’ve been pretty distracted the past week or so. Last week, one of Wingnut’s eyes turned all glassy. This wasn’t a standard eye infection, and of course, anything that makes little kitties sick and unhappy is not good. So I took him to the vet last week, expecting some eye drops and then all hell broke loose. To make a long story short, the vet said that the way the eye looked, there were several possibilities, three of which were VERY VERY BAD. One of which was so bad that if it was the case, he’d be terminal and there would be nothing we could do.

Obviously, this really hit both of us hard. Poor little guy is only 6 months old. So the vet took blood, ran tests, and more tests. 

Many hours (and tears) later, we’ve mostly ruled out the very deadly disease. There’s no difinitive test for FIP (which is the very deadly disease), but there are indicators that were negative in Wingnut. It’s not feline leukemia or FIV (another immune disease). It is still possible that it could be a different type of infection and there is one more test that we had sent out that won’t be back for another week.

Wingnut is at least very happy and playful, and his eye has started to look better than it did when we took him in. I brought him to the specialist yesterday and they were a little less concerned than the regular vet. Of course, it could still be the deadly diseases, but they are thinking that it is feline herpes (which basically is something that he could live with for 20 years and be just fine with occasional eye flare ups that would require drops or creams). 

So we’re giving Wingnut lots of extra love these days, even though some of that love involves putting drops in his eyes 3 times a day which he hates. Please think some good thoughts for him and hope that we figure this out soon and that it’s not anything serious.