It's the Freakin' Weekend

The last weekend in October was mostly focused on my brother's 40th birthday.

On Friday evening, I headed toward the Plaza to meet up with my Rep volunteering buddies for our pre-volunteering dinner. This time, we chose Spin! Pizza. After dinner, we drove over to the theater for the KC Rep's production of The Foreigner. I got assigned the cushy job of will call and then settled in to enjoy the show. It was pretty funny and I may have spit on myself due to an unexpected laugh. It was late for me by the time I got home and a pretty much fell into bed.

I had planed to get up and go for my long run early Saturday morning before we hit the road, but I was very tired and couldn't drag myself out of bed. Ditching my plans was just as bad, though, because I kind of had a meltdown. I pulled it together enough for us to hit the road and even remembered to pack all of the important stuff. Thank goodness Tim was there to make sure everything else was taken care of.

As we headed out of town, we saw a terrible accident on westbound 70. All of the traffic was being diverted from the interstate. I quickly reloaded Facebook onto my iPhone so I could alert a friend who I knew was going to be traveling through the area. After that, it was pretty smooth sailing. Lily worked on her homework--a creative essay on what 10 animals she would bring if she were Noah and there were going to be floods--and debated with us the merits of, say, elephants v. camels and cows v. goats. I grabbed a bunch of back issues of Better Homes and Gardens and flipped through them, tearing out the stuff that was most interesting. Is it just me or does anyone else have a difficult time of letting go of magazines?? Ripping stuff out is the only way I can bear to send them to recycling nirvana.

We made it to Mom & Dad's and unpacked everything. We presented my brother with his birthday gift.

I finished this project in less than a week. That's super-speed for me!

He didn't realize that I made the blanket until my mom told him. (Made, as in, put the border on it.) That was kind of a nice compliment.

I decided I might as well get my long run in. I got on my gear and plotted a course through the gravel roads of my parents' rural subdivision that was basically six miles long and hit the road. It was a beautiful sunny and warm day. My parent's roads are up on a ridge so it's always fairly windy up there. I got to run past there house several times so I threw a water bottle in their yard to grab every time I ran past. Very convenient!!

I showered and got dressed and we all loaded up in the car and drove across the interstate to go to the sorghum maze. Except for Lily, none of us had been to a corn maze before. It was a lot of fun and we all decided that sorghum was a better medium for mazes than corn. (These are the kind of discussions that are had by a farm/agribusiness family!) Dad bought Lily a "princess" pumpkin and we drove down the road a little ways to try to spot Clydesdales.

Sorghum blew into Tim's mouth just as Mom took this picture.

After we got home, Mom, Lily, Tim & I all pitched in to make this cake happen. Mom baked three cakes in advance so we could stack them up. They were so moist! It was difficult to pile them together, but we managed in the end. I decided we should go with paper windows and signs because there just wasn't time to go whole hog with the icing decorations. I'm not supremely skilled when it comes to cake decorating and covering the cake with different colored star-tipped splotches to make the T.A.R.D.I.S. design was NOT in the cards. I also insisted that we present the cake before dinner just in case if fell over. Thanks to some strategically placed dowel rods, it was still standing when we finished dinner.

Just to make sure we did all the autumn things in one day, my dad planned a wienie roast that evening. We gathered around the fire eating chili and hot dogs and rotisserie-ing our  bodies to try to even out the warmth. We skipped the s'mores in favor of birthday cake!

On Sunday, we went to church and had a big fried chicken birthday lunch with all the fixin's. I so went overboard on the calories, but that is something that you have to do when it comes to Mom's chicken dinner. After lunch, we loaded up into the van and took off to the country to take family pictures.

While we took pictures, we also explored the old barn. Tim had never been in a hayloft before. What a city slicker!

We were all reluctant to leave but after dinner, we packed up the car and hit the road. It was a great weekend and we didn't want it to end.

Crafties

Last night I made a belated anniversary gift for my favorite couple, the Happy Hobsons. Check out their Amazing Race audition video.




This couple got married one year ago on a very cold October 6. Did I mention the wedding was outside and the bridesmaids dresses were strapless?

Copyright 2012 Design and Capture Studio www.designandcapture.com 913-530-5510

I was very lucky to be matron of honor and Liz and I spent the months prior to the wedding crafting button bouquets and boutonnières.
Copyright 2012 Design and Capture Studio www.designandcapture.com 913-530-5510

So, for their first anniversary, I knew I wanted to make something--in honor of all our crafty bonding time, and that I wanted to follow the traditional gifts--paper for the first anniversary. 

Ultimately, I'm glad I procrastinated so long before deciding what to make. (Hello, day before gift giving.) Admittedly, I was a little distracted on the actual date of their anniversary. The Hobsons got married on the same day as Lily's birthday so I was busy planning for this frivolity instead of thinking about a crafty paper gift.

If I had made a gift in early October instead of early November, I would never have thought to make a Christmas ornament. Happily, this is a gift that can turn into a tradition, varying the material with each new traditional gift. 

I stopped by the craft store looking for the following: base for the ornament in the shape of an H (I found a chipboard one to stick with the paper theme), festive scrapbook paper, and Mod Podge. I'd never decoupaged anything before, unless you count the boxes I made in junior high and high school by rubber cementing pictures cut out of magazines to old shoe or jewelry boxes and then "sealing" them with packing tape. I wonder if those are still around somewhere or if I threw them away? 

Besides the H motif in the ornament and the use of the traditional material, I also wanted to incorporate memorable events from their first year together so I combed through Liz's Facebook to make sure I hit some of the high points. I typed them I to a Word document and printed them out to incorporate into the decoupage. 

Here is what I ended up with

I'm kind of excited to start planning for next year's ornament!

Junk in My Trunk

On Tuesday evening, Tim asked if I could show him where my clothes go so when he does laundry and I'm not home, he could put them away rather than leaving piles on the bed for me to deal with. As nice as this request was, it made me feel...frustrated? angry? lazy? selfish? I'm not really sure what particular emotion the request brought up exactly, but it was bad.

Identify the Problem

I have listened to Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project on my iPod so many times while commuting or mowing the yard that her commandment "Identify the problem" floated through my sub-conscious. Since high school, I've never lived anywhere for more than three years. In all of those places, I never settled on a good storage solution for my clothes because it didn't seem to be worth the time or money to come up with a solution that might not work in my next home. To further clutter the issue (and the closet), when I moved into Tim's house a little over four years ago, I willingly jettisoned my estate sale chest of drawers at a garage sale because it wouldn't fit anywhere. No matter how many Rubbermaid boxes I bought or how many items of clothing I decluttered, I couldn't answer the question of where my clothes belonged because I never took the time to create a permanent storage system that worked. 

Finding a Solution

Unlike Rubin, my solution for closet clutter clearing was not simply trash bags. My first step probably should have been to take inventory and pare down, but I've done this so many times that it is becoming difficult to figure out what to let go of. 

I did think about my storage needs for a hot second. Emotionally, however, I needed to take action. I logged onto target.com and opened in a new page any item that struck me as a plausible solution. Once I had opened 173 new pages, I began to narrow down my choices. 

Criteria

1. Size matters. Obviously, if the item wouldn't fit in my closet under my hanging clothes, it had to go. Even if it was capable of folding and putting away the clothes itself, I wouldn't be able to make it work.

2. Caviar taste on a hot dog budget. I have fifty dollars from my side gig burning a hole in my pocket and I decided that my storage solution had to be something I could purchase with that amount. Goodbye beautiful and probably not very functional bathroom cabinets. That cut out about half my open pages.

3. Form follows function.

3A. Fitting into my sloppy clothes-putting-away style. I know from experience that I'm most successful at staying organized with hangers and drawers. I already have the hangers covered but I said "sayonara" to my drawers about four years ago and my clothing storage has suffered ever since. I also knew I wanted several drawers, one for each category of clothing.

3B. No snags allowed. As I was browsing, I started to consider function over form. Although some of the wicker-type drawers were attractive, I thought about the increased potential for my tights getting snagged and nixed all the pretty but prickly options.

I was left with three pages open in my browser. Of those three, price became my main motivator. The option I chose was on clearance, so I got two three-drawer storage bins for less than the cost of one of the other options. And free shipping and a 5% discount by using my Target card--what's better than that? Unfortunately, when I checked today to grab a link and screen shot to the drawers I ordered, I couldn't find them again, so I guess they are all sold out.

The only bad thing about this experience so far--except for the bad feelings at the beginning of the story--is that I didn't have the instant gratification of carrying my new storage solution out of the store when we went last night for our regular shopping trip. So now my thoughts are consumed with daydreams of an organized closet every time I open the closet door or lean over to get my underwear out of the under-the-bed Rubbermaid. (An everyday occurrence--maybe now you can sympathize with my frustration.) The good news is that my order has shipped so I should be able to dig into my mess and tell my husband where my clothes go soon!

It's Called Managing Expectations

The day was going so well, right up until 10:30, the time my boss usually shows up for work. 

One of the first things he did was give me a lecture about "dreaming big." Here's what happened. I told him I was nominating a project for an award. He asked if we had a chance. I said maybe we could get an honorable mention but probably not the big prize and began to describe the type of institution that usually wins. He cut me off (per usual) and told me I needed to dream bigger. At which point I punched him in the face* and pointed out that he's the one who asked about our chances and that I was--after all--doing the work of nominating. Then he asked me if we were going to apply for an award from *this* organization. He had to rifle through a stack of papers to show me which organization he was talking about because he doesn't actually know the name of it. I said that their awards don't happen until Fall, but, of course it was on my radar. Then I escaped with only one name having been dropped.**

Later this day, (yes, all of this before noon) he gave me a compli-plaint (a compliment coupled with a sneaky criticism or complaint; different than a back-handed compliment) and then he reminded me with annoying meddling why I don't tell him about the things I'm working on.

*Punching did not actually occur.

** I think my new way of marking the length of our conversations will be counting the number of names he drops.

Running Recap: Overdue

It's been way too long since my last running recap. Here are some boring details:

Miles run: 15.25
Runs skipped: 4 -- 10.5 miles total
Reasons for skipping: back pain, travel, being mad
Fastest run: 2 mile loop in 19:29
Travel workouts: 2 bouts of 4.25 miles on the hotel treadmill
Longest run: 3 miles
New milestone song: "Who wouldn't wanna be me" by Keith Urban
Bouts of intestinal distress:  1 -- but I ran through the threat
Most memorable runs:

While traveling for my work conference, I really pushed my pace on the treadmill. I always feel so awkward when running on the treadmill. I also fiddle with the speed a lot. I kept cycling up and down from 5.5 mph to 6.5 mph, trying to stay under a 10 minute mile, which I did on both runs.

My first run back home after traveling, I also pushed the pace. This resulted in my fastest run but also it was difficult to catch my breath when I finished.

For my three-miler yesterday, I stupidly chose the hilly route. My legs felt heavy as soon as I started so I kept my pace slow, which might have affected my stride. My calves felt like they were going to cramp as I was struggling up the hills. It hurt. This is also my first run struggling with intestinal distress and mucous choking. This is the glamorous side of running, folks.

And speaking of glamorous running, here's what I've learned from the various and usual gross things that happen when I'm running:

Intestinal distress: I'm not running hard enough. Typically I feel like I'm going to poop my pants only when I'm running downhill or on a flat stretch after jugging up a hill. Picking up the pace or heading uphill makes the pressure go away. If it doesn't, I'll likely stop running and quickly walk to the nearest bathroom. I've never had a real pooping emergency while running and I don't intend to, either.

Side-stitches: Breathe, dummy. And pay attention to what I eat before I run.

Mucous Choking: This means I should have carried water or some fruit snacks with me. Those things usually help. If I don't have them, it's time to spit all the way home and hope I don't start heaving. That's the worst. I've also never thrown up while running. I remember two times where I've gotten close. One was from mucous choking while on my way to go vote (I ran to the polls) and the other was after my 5K PR. I held it together, but in retrospect it would have made that PR much more epic. How many people can say they've thrown up on the field of a major league baseball stadium?