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
