Outsourcing

Because I’ve had a crazy weekend of rehearsal, wedding, and family reunion, I’m exhausted. I even skipped my run this morning for the sake of an extra hour’s sleep and still feel like I haven’t caught up.

So, I’m outsourcing my blog today to tide you all over to an actual post. (Which will hopefully come this evening.)

My aunt took some wonderful pictures at the wedding.

My dad wrote a blog post about yesterday. I know it’s not about the family reunion, but I just couldn’t resist pointing out the cuteness of my parents on my blog. Seriously, I couldn’t have asked for better role models.

(Though, they messed up my teenage-hood a little. In health class, I remember talking about how teenagers are supposed to have a switch from being mostly influenced by their parents to being mostly influenced by their peers, hence, rebellion. I couldn’t relate.)

A farmer in seminary

D putting on sunscreen before canoeing the Saugeen.

My father has always been my greatest spiritual role model. He taught me to think for myself, to consider possibilities beyond the most commonly accepted, to explore and to learn about God, his creation, and myself with a critical mind in order to discover the truth amid all the fluff and prejudice that organized religion can be*.

This past week, my dad received an acceptance to seminary. So, he’s starting a blog to document the new experience and the new phase in his life.

It’s kind of fun watching my parents go through their mid-life crises together. My mom has bought a not-yet profitable business and is working her way towards a certificate in kinesiology. And now my dad will be attending a class twice or three times a week and will someday hopefully graduate with a Masters in Theology.

I can only hope I’ll be as young as they are now when I turn 50.

* But, I will note, does not have to be.

A running update

My health and fitness consultant is constantly reassuring me that it’s hard to keep up a fitness regime. The only thing to do when you fall off, she says, is to get back on. Or something like that.

I fell off. Completely. I haven’t gone running or hit the gym for probably something around a month. The really surprising thing is that the weather has mostly been good for running. While everyone else’s activity level is going up, mine is going down. Starting in February or so, I was running in all weather, except on the coldest, freeze-your-chin-and-legs-off days. There weren’t many weeks I missed in the Winter semester.

And then the weather got nicer and running became easier. You would think it would last and even increase during the summer, except on the hottest, sweat-dripping-in-my-eyes-the-moment-I-pick-up-my-pace-past-a-shuffle days. But no. Is it possible that I enjoy running far more when the weather is less than ideal?

I went for the first time in weeks last night. M convinced me to go, really. He had been out for a quick jog yesterday morning and said something along the lines of “Even a short 10 minute run is better than nothing.” So, after watching him win his volleyball game last night, I put on my running clothes, grabbed my watch and did a quick, 10-minutes-out-9-back run.

It felt good. And I felt 50% better after than I have in a long time. But I can’t say that I loved it. I can’t say it will be easy to push myself out the door again tonight. I can’t say running is the favourite of my past-times.

But all I can do to change that is to get back on.

9000+ stitches

My mother used to do some embroidery. Not a lot of it necessarily ended up on our walls (though I wonder how much of what was on our walls was cross stitch or embroidery of some kind, and I just never noticed). I remember a “Home Sweet Home” cross stitch hanging by our main entry way and, my favourite, hanging in the kitchen beside the bathroom door, a scene from Nobody’s Boy, of Vitalis and Remi walking down the road with the two dogs and the monkey. (This one is the only one they hung up in the new house; it’s in the sun room now.) It was this cross stich that made me want to try my hand at it.

In elementary school, I made a bunny. It was a kit for kids and didn’t even require separating the strands of embroidery thread, if I remember correctly. I tied knots to start and probably had a matted mess at the back of my canvas.

Last fall, I went to Michaels and took a look at cross stitching kits. I was looking at the big ones, thinking about something to put on my wall, something extravagant that my kids will admire in 15 (or 20, 25, whatever) years. They’re expensive! I almost left, discouraged, unable to justify the money spent on something I might not enjoy, especially on a student budget.

And then I found their clearance bin. Instead of a $50 large canvas, I found an $10.00 5×7. This one:

Isn’t she pretty?

Anyway, it was a good thing I didn’t spend much money on it, because it ended up gathering dust for six months or so. I finally pulled it out about two, maybe three months ago. For the first while, it was a mess and the more colours I used, the more tangled my threads got and more difficult to manage.

And then I went home and got help from my mom. (Has anyone else noticed a recurring theme in these posts?) She gave me a colour palet for organizing my threads and a proper embroidery hoop. I can’t say I’ve actually made leaps and bounds of progress since then, but it’s far less frustrating. And it’s become something relaxing in it’s repetitiveness. I work on it at M’s house while he and his roommates are watching hockey or soccer or doing various engineering-like assignments.

Some pictures of my progress will follow. Eventually.

Crucial skills: the granny square

I love to crochet.  My mom, as far as I can tell, was primarily a knitter.  She’s made me upwards of five sweaters throughout my lifetime, not counting baby clothes, and who knows how many for my two siblings and dad combined, not to mention herself. Of the afghans I can think of in my parents’ afghan chest, the majority are either quilted or knitted.  There’s maybe one that was crocheted.

But somehow, despite the influence of my mother’s craftiness, I rejected knitting after a (mostly) failed attempt at a shrug in first year.  It was boring and I had issues with the counting. (I’m an English major for a reason…) I’d lose track of how many rows I had decreased by and found it difficult to identify individual stitches and rows enough to count backwards.

I love the feeling of yarn passing through my fingers though.  Maybe it’s because my baby blanket, tattered and fraying by the time my parents took it away from me when I was seven, was a knitted blanket. There’s something comforting about it.

The first time I ever crocheted was, I think, while I was a member of a girls club at my church called GEMS (Girls Everywhere Meeting the Saviour). One of the main activities in this girls club is the completion of various badges. (My original goal was to complete all 150 or so.  I managed around 34, and was one of the top badge achievers in my year.)

My mom was my counsellor. In a couple of the evening meetings, she taught a group of five or six 10 year olds to crochet granny squares.  I don’t know how she did it.  I tried teaching a friend once and failed miserably. Anyway, she bought a selection of crochet hooks, sparkling and bright colours.  I believe I picked metallic blue.  And, using her own leftover scraps, we each picked two colours and began the laborious task of learning chain stitches and double crochets, the pattern of threes and the switching colours.  The first ones weren’t perfect.  I remember unravelling whole sections just to add three more simple stitches. It wasn’t easy, and it often wasn’t pretty.

I think I made 10 granny squares that year.  My mom had a lot of scraps and each one made a completely different, often clashing square.

And then, they sat in the crafting cupboard as I dragged myself through high school and broke through into university.  And then, something made me finish the afghan. Perhaps it was the cold, somewhat hostile dorm room, perhaps a subconcious home-sickness.

I made 10 or so more squares, crocheted white yarn in between the squares and finally ended up with this:

I wouldn’t exactly call it pretty,  It’s not even finished: I never did get a chance to work in the ends. But it reminds me of me, 10 years ago.  (And here comes a sappy metaphor…) This blanket has grown with me, from a wonky start, to a small, semi-finished work, not useful for much at this point, except curling up in on camping trips, when my other, prettier afghans are safe and clean at home. And maybe someday I’ll finish it.  Or, maybe I won’t, as a reminder that I’m never really going to be finished myself.

New shoes and a new obligation

My mom came to town last night to take me shoe shopping. Normally, I would never go shoe shopping with my mother. I have somewhere over 20 pairs of shoes, mostly impractical, scuffed, second hand, and painful. Of course, she doesn’t understand the desire to have as many shoes as absolutely possible and, as mothers are, is really good at saying, “Are you sure you really need those?”

But, this is a special occasion, of sorts. And there was no way I was going to buy this pair of shoes without her help.

These are the shoes we bought:

They’re ASICS Gel-Kayano, and they were, unfortunately, the second most expensive pair in the store.

This is the story. I’m not really into sports much. I’m not good at them. When I played baseball as a 7 year old, my coach put me way out in the field where 7 year olds can’t hit the ball to. When I played soccer, I was left-outside.  In the last year I played (grade 8), I was the only person on my team to not score a goal. Besides that, I could never understand the team comraderie. I didn’t like the girls who were good at sports and they didn’t like me. And the boys… mostly just scared me.

So, come high school, I did all the artsy stuff instead. I was in band (oboe), the creative writing club (NOT fan-fiction), Faith Alive (until our teacher supervisor moved to a different school and the club died an agonizing death), and choir. I took English, music, art and history and dreaded the required grade 9 gym class.  For a while, it was fun.  And then I got sick of it all.

By grade 12, I wanted something new.  Of course, at that point, find a place on the soccer team or trying my hand at volleyball were laughable ideas.  Instead, I discovered the cross country club. I ran one race that year, came in second last with a time of 33 minutes for 5km, and was so proud of myself and excited about it that I joined the track team later that year. By that point, my motivation had dried up and stayed dried up until the winter of 2009, this year.

To give myself some credit, there has never been a year between now and then when I didn’t spend at least one week or two a couple times a year running steadily.  But my desire to run peaks pretty quickly and fades pretty quickly.

In January, for some odd reason, I decided to go for a run.  If I lived in California, it probably wouldn’t be so weird. I don’t.  I live in Canada. But, in January, I decided to go for a run and four months later, I’m still running regularly.  Granted, last week was a failure because I got sick and three weeks before that was not entirely successful either. I didn’t say running regularly meant running every day, or even every week.  But it’s still regularly.

And so, we come to real reason I bought the shoes.

My mom wants to run a half-marathon. (She did one last year.  She’s almost 49.  She is beyond amazing, if you ask me.)

With me.

Surprisingly, this thought doesn’t scare me too much, though I suspect that really, it should scare me a lot.  The half-marathon we’re going to do is at the end of September.  That’s not very much time to train. And until yesterday, I had shoes that squashed my arches flat or gave me a regular blister along the side of my foot.

Hopefully, these ASICS will provide new motivation.

If they don’t, I’m sure the fact that my mother put down the plastic for them will. Now, I have to run the half-marathon with her. I have been bought!