A Matter of Perspective

I've been back on the running pony for some weeks now, slowly building mileage and making sure I don't fall off.  As I keep saying, I'm not a runner, but I want to be!  It's just that sometimes I'm... shall we say... less than enthusiastic about doing the work involved in becoming a runner.  It would be kind of awesome if I could wake up tomorrow and be like "Hey sweetie, I'm going to join you on your thirteen mile run, and YOU'RE GOING DOWN."  But no... tomorrow's going to be a mile-and-a-half slog at a searing 10:15 pace.  The best consolation is the bacon waiting patiently in the fridge.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh right, perspective.  Jason left the house at 5:30 this morning to whip out his 11 miles before work.  (Yeah.  He runs more in a day than I run in a whole week.  He's amazing and I love him.)  I'd asked him to poke me before he left so I could get up and do my run before breakfast.  So he did (well, he didn't literally poke me, because that would be rude and unboyfriendlike), and I got up after silently whining  for fifteen minutes or so.

Ate a banana, drank some water, got into my running clothes (as much as running annoys me sometimes, I love the clothes), and sat on the couch.  And sat on the couch.  And sat on the couch.  I just kept thinking, "Gotta run two miles... don't wanna.  One mile away, then one mile back.  Gotta, but don't wanna.  Don't wanna.  MAAAAAAHHHHHH" 

And then I thought about the lady who lives in our subdivision.  If I had to guess, I'd say she's in her mid to late 40's, and is a very dedicated runner.  She's not very fast (like I'm one to talk about fast), but she's out there like clockwork, at sunrise, almost every day.  And the interesting thing is that it seems like the bulk of her running is on the long oval drive at the back of our subdivision.  And I thought... I don't want to run a mile away and a mile back... but I could do laps!  Yes!  Laps are doable today! 

Whatever gets you out the door, amirite?  Anyway, I'd wasted so much time whinging on the couch that it was 6:48 by the time I got out the door.  That's a lot later than I like.  According to my Garmin, the oval is around four tenths of a mile, so five laps would give me my two miles.  I actually ran into Jason on his way home, and his smile is always a boost.  So that was nice.  He was in the shower by the time I got home, but I still got some breakfast cooked before he came downstairs.  (I like to be helpful in the mornings.  Having his breakfast ready is the least I can do.)  And now I've earned the right to be a slug the rest of the day.  Yay!

So there you have it.  Perspective.  Two miles seemed like a lot this morning.  But since I was able to break it up into manageable chunks, it didn't seem like such a wall.  I don't even care that it was a boring run and I didn't get to see any turtles.  Boring is a minor issue when you don't want to do it anyway. 

I bet I don't do laps tomorrow, though.

A Quilt for The Littlest Russell

Two of my friends are having their first babies--both are having girls, and the two babies are due within a few days of each other.  They are the first of my "grown-up" friends to produce offspring, so these little kittens are going to be spoiled rotten, and yours truly is more than happy to help with the spoilage.

We just held a shower for one of the girls today, and naturally I had to go nuts with the quilting.  I've worked on this blanket pretty much non-stop for the last couple weeks and just finished it up this morning.

I present to you--a purple and green quilt.

This one shows the color.  It's not perfect but it's close.

And this one shows the texture.  Vive la hand-quilting!

It's machine-pieced, hand-quilted and -bound.  I do not like machine quilting.  Like, at all.  I don't like the way it looks, I don't like the way it affects the drape, I kind of think of it as cheating... I just don't like it.  So, hand quilting it is.  I'm kind of a traditionalist that way.  Someday I'll have a magnum opus of a hand-pieced, hand-quilted monster, but I'm cool with machine piecing for now.  But NO MACHINE QUILTING.

Where was I?  Oh!  More details.  The binding is scrappy (yay for using up yardage!), the backing is a solid piece of unbleached muslin (the better to show off my quilting [I refuse to be modest on this topic {I mean, I'm still a quilting noob and it looks pretty dang good if you ask me}]), and it runs a hair short of 45" square.  I'm really pleased with the texture, but I think next time I'll try a different batting.  I used an 80/20 cotton/poly blend, and it's just a little too lofty for my taste.  I think in the future I'll stick with 100% cotton, or the cotton/bamboo blend I used on my sister's quilt. 

The whole thing was a learning experience (first time sewing bias-edged pieces), and while it's good, it's not show quality.  I did okay on the places where four corners meet...

Semi-gratuitous texture shot.  Yum.  I like dense quilting.

See?  Not bad, not bad at all...

On the places where eight corners meet, however, my results were a bit hit-or-miss.

Hit!

 

Miss.

Big miss.  Blech.

But I'm really, really pleased with how the binding turned out.  It's a French-fold binding, both for durability and because it seemed the easiest way (no raw edges to harass me!).  The corners are kind of good-not-great, but I learned a lot and they'll be better next time.  And it turns out that while I haaaaaaate hemming, quilt binding is very soothing and meditative.  Loved that process, really.

What?  You want to see more of that gorgeous backing with the quilting and everything?

OH WHAT THE HELL, I GUESS SO.

Seriously, I am really, really happy with how the quilting turned out.  It's mostly free-handed, too.  Go me!  (Sorry.  Modesty failure again.)

This whole experience just made me happy.  The small size meant it wasn't a huge time commitment, and it's been nice to get a break from the bed-sized quilt I'm making for Sis (which just needs to be bound!  The quilting is d-o-n-e DONE!), and the colors are so cheerful, it was honestly hard to put it down (which might have also been the fact that I had one week to quilt the bitch).

It was very well-received by the mom-to-be (which I expected; she's a little crafty herself so she understands and appreciates the work involved).  I'm happy she's happy, and I can't wait to make the next one!

I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY

I have been so very neglectful lately.  Okay, more than just lately.  But work was all busy, and then I couldn't run, and work was still busy, and I started to get end-of-season-itis and work was STILL busy and then my season ended and I spent a couple weeks decompressing and I did a lot of crafting and I'm starting to run again even though it's HOT and I really don't have any excuse not to write anymore.  So I'll tell you a story about a recent run.

Jason gets up very early to run before work in the summer, and I've been heading out the door around the same time (usually a bit later, since I don't put in near the mileage that he does, but still quite early).  It's typically around sunrise, so I get to see a lot of wildlife that tends to hide itself away as the day heats up and the humans get out and about.  I don't usually get to see any big animals like deer (although Jason once spotted a coyote on a frozen pond), but there are lots of different kinds of birds, and bunnies all over the place, and little frogs and toads when you get into the woods.  And because our running trails are built along the local floodway (which is another post for another day), there are lots of ponds and creeks, which equals a startling number of turtles.

A few weeks ago Jason found a little turtle the size of a nickel, far away from water and getting dangerously dry.  He carried it a quarter-mile to the pond down the trail and let it go in the mud near the edge.  It soaked up some water, then swam away.  That is just one small example of how awesome Jason is.  There's no way the little turtle could have made it all that way on its own.

My turtle spotting was not quite so adorable.  I was nearing my turn-around point on the hill near our house (which I swear is the only hill in Plainfield), when down the trail I noticed a big lump of some kind.  The trail is right next to the road there, and I assumed it was roadkill.  As I got closer, however, I realized--nope, not roadkill.  Snapping turtle.  A big one.

It was about nine inches across, just sitting smack in the middle of the path.  There's a small stream of some sort that runs right under the road there, so I assume that's where it came from, but I wouldn't have expected such shallow water to provide enough food for a snapper that big.  We did have a wetter-than-normal spring, though, so maybe it had just traveled. 

ANYWAY.  It was big, and it looked like it was headed toward the road.  Not only is that path on a hill, but it also comes around a curve, so if a car came along while the turtle was crossing, it would definitely be turned into turtle hash.  I'm a country kid, and I know you can't pick up a snapper.  They're too aggressive and kind of scary.  So I decided to squirt it in the face with my water bottle and annoy it back off the path.

It didn't like that one bit.

It went from "oh, don't mind me, I'm just a big ugly bastard hanging out here with my head in my shell" to "I AM GOING TO EAT YOUR FACE" in less than half a second.  It was so fast, we might have actually time-traveled backwards a second or two.  I was standing a safe distance away and I still jumped back a bit.

But my mission was accomplished; I ran into Jason on my way back (not literally) and warned him about the turtle.  After he got home he said the turtle had moved back into the brush on the side of the trail. 

He also wondered why it was all wet, so far from the water. 

I Don't Know What To Call This One. It's Mostly Going To Be About Sewing.

Yeah.  That's the best I could do.

A couple weeks ago, my sister called me out on the quilt that I stalled on.  "So... Cooper ate our comforter.  How's that quilt coming along?  Not that it's any hurry or anything, we've just been sleeping under a comforter with its guts spilling out."  Cooper's a dog, in case you were curious.  I had to admit that the quilt pieces were cut out... and some of them were sewn together... not very many of them, but some of them....

And I started feeling bad.  Since work has calmed down in the last couple weeks, I decided to get to work and stop being such a lazy bum.  It helps that the weather hasn't been very conducive to outdoor excursions lately.

Yeah, that's about three inches of water standing in our claypit.  I mean our backyard.  And a shovel and hose that have been there since September. 

See?  Gloom and doom.  And cops!  They were doing driving drills in the rain.  They do driving drills pretty much every day.  They also have target practice every day.  Living next to the police academy is AWESOME.

Anyway, so I managed to get my two-square pieces sewn into strips today.  I wanted to get the top completely assembled today, but I didn't have quite enough time.  Plus I got bored with it.

I dislike this ironing board.  It is the third I have gone through.  I KNOW WHAT I WANT AND I CAN'T AFFORD IT.

Isn't my sewing corner the adorablest?  PS those are not my real sewing shears.  My real shears rock much harder.

Here's a funny story.  When I was cutting out pieces, I carefully stacked them into 9 piles of 8 pieces for each color.  As I reached the end of my yardage, I started to worry.  I was pretty sure I was going to run out of the red stripey stuff.  It seemed wrong, since I'd had enough of the green and I purchased the same amount of each, but maybe I did something weird along the way.  And sure enough, I came to the end of the piece and found myself three squares short.  Whatever, I'm smart, so I decided to pull some scraps out of the trash and cobble them together into squares.  I did a good job matching up the stripes, and I don't think they'll be all that noticeable when the quilt is all finished.

Oh yeah, go MacGyver!

So I'm puttering along, happily sewing away and matching seams like a boss, and when I get toward the bottom of my two-square stacks, I notice something funny.  A few of the red-stripey stacks had extras!

EXACTLY THREE OF THEM HAD EXTRAS.

MacGyver or MacGruber?  I AM AWESOME.  Ugh.  And yeah, I'm totally leaving the MacGrubered pieces in place.  One, because it's a funny story, and two, because I am not a perfectionist.  It's 3 squares out of 144.  That's, like, 2 percent.  98% is still an A.

And then this happened.

Oh, no.  Ohhhh, no no no...

OHHHHH, YES!!!

And it was awesome.

The end.

Hey look, a creeping kid!

Creeping back in from a little absence.  Work has calmed down for a few weeks, we're barreling to a close for the season (although it looks as if I'll be working a few weeks longer than originally planned, which is fine), I'm working (and not working) on some crafty things, and I've gone full-on Paleo.

WHAAAAAT?!

I know.  I've become one of those ridiculous girls who has to do all the same things her boyfriend does.  Horrible.  Disgusting.  I'm an independent woman, right?  Well, yes.  I am.  Which means I have the right to do whatever I want.  If he asks me if I want to run a half-marathon (which he did ask, a couple months after we met), and I want to try it (which I did), that's cool.  He has never once pushed me into anything.  And as it happens, even this die-hard "NOT AN ATHLETE" really, really likes running once it becomes a habit.  My ankle is still effed, which means I haven't been running since you last heard of me, but the difference is that I want  to be running.  And since he's gone Paleo and had such mind-blowing results (at 36, he weighs the least he's weighed in his adult life, and he just keeps running faster and faster), I've been curious to try.  So I took the plunge a couple weeks ago, and it's been basically amazing.

It helps that I've kind of been easing into it for the last few months.  Since Jason and I live together, any meal I've eaten at home has more-or-less fit the Paleo/Primal profile.  No grains, no legumes, no (or very, very little) dairy, and no refined sugars.  Once you kind of change the way you think about food and what constitutes a "meal," it's not hard.  You do have to go grocery shopping on a regular basis (and by that I mean "three times a week"), but that's not a hardship once you start seeing the results of an improved diet.  And you have to cook.  You just do.  If you don't know your way around the kitchen, believe me, you will learn, and quickly.

So!  In two weeks (or three?  I can't remember when I jumped in all the way) I've lost ten pounds, and I'm very close to being the lightest I've been in my adult life (I sense a theme here).  My belly is noticeably flatter.  I sleep better.  My skin is better (it wasn't bad to begin with, but it's not as dry).  I don't get the shakes when I get hungry anymore.  In fact, I don't get as hungry as I used to.  It seems like a normal-sized meal is more satisfying than it used to be.  And it occurred to me, my weather-induced headaches seem to be less frequent, and less severe when they do happen.  Dunno how that relates to diet, but it does seem like there may be a connection.

And any diet that gives you leave to eat meat at every meal?  YES PLEASE.

Neglect and Disrepair

A quick fly-by bullet-points list.

• I am still injured.  I have run exactly half a mile since buggering up my ankle, and that was out of sheer stubbornness and stupidity.  I suffered a setback of several days' healing time.  I'm hoping that I'll be able to try again sometime next week, but I ain't gonna hold my breath.  But hey!  I'm only limping a little bit now!

• Work is still destroying any semblance of routine (even as far as theatre goes, which is Not Very).  I have had the WEIRDEST schedule for the last two weeks.  It'll improve after the weekend, though.  The bizarro three-way-tech is over.

• I've stalled a bit on the quilt.  My sister says she's not concerned about getting it soon (plus she knows me really, really well), so I'm not worrying much about it.  It's just hard to work on outside of daylight hours, because the light in my sewing room suuuuuuuucks.  It'll get done... eventually...

• I have a knitting project so close to finished I can smell it (smells kind of woolly) and I am so excited!  I've been looking forward to this pretty much since the day the yarn arrived in the mail.  Rest assured, I will post it here.  

• SPRING IS VERY NEARLY HERE.  I cannot express in words how this thrills me.  If I were the video-making type, I might express it with a dance, but you'll just have to use your imagination (it's a very flaily, butt-wiggly, right-ankle-favoring kind of dance, in case you were curious).  I have my minuscule backyard garden all planned out, I'm expanding my collection of potted things, and I have made the majority of my seed purchase.  I'm not a flower gardener; they are very pretty but they don't go well with steaks and pork chops.  I'll be growing cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, snap peas, pole beans, tomatoes, sweet peppers, Swiss chard, carrots, radishes, salad greens, and herbs.  YES.

• There are only about 8 or 9 weeks left on my contract for the season.  Time to start thinking about a summer job... meh.

• Snow sucks.  I like it at Christmastime and then I want it to go away and never come back.  Until the next Christmas.

• Standing water in the backyard also sucks.  

• But the standing water is also kind of welcome because it's not snow or ice!  Yay!

• Just as long as it's GONE by the time I need to till my garden plot.  Grr.

• Garden, garden, garden.  I might have to temporarily change my name to Knit - Stitch - Run - Dig for a few months.

• Yay dirt!

In Which I Whine Like A Little Bitch

I'm injured.

Pardon me for a moment....

WAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH NO NO DAMMIT NO

That was me, throwing a temper tantrum.

It's my own damn fault, really.  I know I am not a "biomechanically efficient" runner.  I've got knock-knees, high arches, and every joint in my body sounds like bubble wrap.  Not the happy little crackly stuff, but the big fat heavy-duty stuff that sounds like a cap gun.  Seriously.  I can pop the arches of my feet.  Surely that is not normal.  So I need to be a little more cautious than those to whom running comes as easily as breathing.

Over the last several weeks, I've been doing more running indoors.  For one thing, it's been snot-freezingly, eyeball-crackingly cold, and for another, we got this little tiny ice storm last week that hasn't melted yet.  (Not to mention the fact that I've been working oddball hours lately, and I generally prefer running in solitude, which is hard to come by in the heart of downtown Indy.)  I do not have a treadmill readily available, so when the weather's being a bastard, I came up with the genius solution of running at work.  The lobby in the theatre has a second floor mezzanine which makes a decent running track.  It's quiet!  There's no traffic and not many people!  The carpet is all cushy underfoot!  I don't have to bundle up!

The problem lies in the size of said track.  19.5 laps to a mile.  That's pretty short, my friends.  If I was already in good running shape, maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal.  If I did a lot of balance and stability exercises, maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal.

I'm not.  And I don't.

Did you know?  Tight corners, and lots of them, are maybe not something you should do with any regularity when you're still building a base.  And just the basest of bases, too.  This week was going to be a 12-mile week.  But now it's a zero-mile week, because I have developed what I suspect is peroneal tendinitis, most likely from turning corner after corner after corner during the vast majority of my runs over the last few weeks.

I am not a wuss.  I can generally take my aches and pains in stride (heh), with the exception of when I'm eating and I bite my tongue or lip and make that horrible "OH THAT EFFING HURTS" face and whoever I'm eating with goes "Are you okaaaaaaay?"  Yeah.  No matter how much I love that person, if I'm bleeding in my mouth and swearing profusely and they say "Are you okaaaaaaay?", I want to punch them.  Repeatedly.  With both fists.  And possibly bite them and say "Are you okaaaaaaay?" and see how they like it.  The moment always passes pretty quickly, but I really wish they would just not say a damn word... ANYWAY.  We were talking about my ankle. 

...

What?  I have really pointy teeth.  Accidentally biting myself usually result in chunks of flesh going missing.  It sucks, okay?

Whatever.  Back to my story.

I tried running the day before yesterday.  My ankle was a little tender right above the stick-out bony part on the outside, and had been for a few days, but I wasn't sure if it was a brewing running issue or just a mystery bruise (you get lots of those when you work in theatre).  I was going to have to run on the mezz, again.  Snore.  Since I had gone through the ordeal of developing and then fighting shin splints last year, I knew that IF I was working on screwing up my ankle, running through the pain was NOT going to help.  I know the wisdom of stopping as soon as pain alters your stride, and sure enough, two miles into my three-and-a-half, I was limping.  Noticeably.

An hour after I stopped, my ankle was screaming.  I iced it, tried wrapping it but had to take it off because even the slightest contact was agonizing, and ate a few ibuprofen.  If any of that took the edge off, I can't imagine how it'd have been had I just left it alone, because it huuuuuurt.  I was reduced to hopping down the steps at work on my good leg, and my boss even offered to send me home (I declined, because as I told her, it was either sit at home or sit at work, and I didn't want to admit that much defeat). 

After a couple days' rest, it does feel better, although it's still sulking pretty doggedly about being so thoroughly abused the last few weeks.  As I said, I only suspect it's peroneal tendinitis.  I Googled my symptoms, and the all-knowing search engine pointed me to several sites that indicate exactly that.  Overuse injury, often related to activities involving frequent changes in direction, like, I don't know, maybe turning 78 sharp corners in the span of one mile.  I'm not going to the doctor for this (yeah, I'm one of those who tells other people to not hesitate to go to the doctor but I have to be on the brink of not caring if I live or die to go myself).  I know it's not broken; there's no reason for me to have developed a stress fracture, and there's been no traumatic injury to my ankle.  It's certainly a soft-tissue injury.  So the only way to get a definitive diagnosis would be to get an MRI which I definitively cannot afford. 

And even if I did get a professional diagnosis, what then?  Either I'm told to STOP RUNNING FOREVER because OMG HUMANS WERE NOT DESIGNED TO DO SUCH A PHYSICALLY CHALLENGING ACTIVITY YOU ARE GOING TO DESTROY EVERY BONE BELOW YOUR PELVIS AND BE CRIPPLED IN FIVE YEARS or I'll be prescribed rest, ice, NSAIDs, and probably some mild stretching and strengthening exercises, all of which is just plain old common sense that I can figure out for myself.  If the doctor had a magic wand that would fix it on contact, then sure!  I'd go (as long as my insurance covered it).  But he doesn't, so I will rest.  Ice it.  Take NSAIDs, just enough to dull the edge so I can go about my daily activities and get plenty of sleep.  And when it stops hurting I will stretch, strengthen, and ease back into running, hopefully in a couple weeks or less.

Sigh.

LESSON LEARNED, ankle.  Lesson learned.  I'll cut you a deal.  I won't make you run on the mezz anymore, if you stop being a little bitch.