Monthly Archives: February 2011

Unplugged

Posted on February 23, 2011 | 3 comments

Early Friday morning, after a crazy week of midterms and tradeshow prep, I paced my front porch before dawn, waiting for the cab to take me to the airport. I had gotten home from class at 11 PM the night before and frantically packed for a weekend away and a tradeshow, finally crashing into bed around 1 AM before rising again at 4:30. I tossed and turned in between, fretting I wouldn’t wake up with the alarm.

To top it off, my cab was 30 stress-filled minutes late.

But Friday at noon, I rented a brand-new Corolla and drove away from all of that, windows down, hair whipping around, sunglasses framing my gaze at palm trees. I had miscalculated my layers and was sweating in running shoes and jeans, but the sweat felt so good – warm and summery.

For two hours I drove south into increasingly rural Florida. The speed limits increased as the scenery changed from Orlando sprawl to orange groves and cows.

And then I arrived. I stayed a wonderful weekend with my 85-year-old grandma at her senior retirement community, comprised of a couple hundred small homes, many of which are converted RVs. The pace of life is entirely different: my cell phone picks up only the weakest single bar of Edge network signal, and the internet is an optional expense and experience. As we watched TV Friday night, my grandma asked if I had heard anything about “that Facebook thing,” and I smiled, telling her that indeed, it’s part of my job and I’m always connected.

All day, we watched people walking and biking  (and golf carting) up the street to the community center, where the pool, laundry facilities and a host of daily activities form the nucleus of the little neighborhood. A schedule of activities on her fridge lists several options for each day, from bingo and crafts to health screenings and shrimp boils.

It was exactly what I needed. I sent a couple idle tweets as we were in town to eat out, but for the most part, I was cut off, and after the initial twitching, it was bliss.

Saturday, I slept in, waking up with a face full of Floridian sunshine, and after a light breakfast, went for a fabulous run. Since the community is hemmed between a highway and a lake, my route was limited, so I zig-zagged up the streets and around a pond, and then through an orange grove, with trees dotted with fruit ripe for picking. Afterwards, I went for my second swim of the weekend, soaking up sunshine and warmth and peace.

Sunday morning we went out for a leisurely breakfast. “What would you like to do?” Grandma asked once we returned, bellies full of French toast and coffee, facing just a few hours before I had to leave.

“Sunshine,” I answered, knowing that although I would spend a few more days in Florida, I would be trapped inside a windowless, over-air conditioned convention center.

So we sat on her patio in lawn chairs, our books unopened as we chatted idly in the sunshine. We didn’t talk non-stop, and the comfortable silences were filled with enjoying a beautiful summer day – in February.

Reluctantly, I packed up the car, grabbed a couple oranges off her tree, squeezed Grandma tight, and drove north. Soon my phone dinged with emails and missed tweets, but I ignored them, trying to savor the unplugged peace as long as possible.

I need to do that more often.

How do you unplug? I often unplug for a few hours on a weekend – or an entire weekend day, when possible – but this was so much better.

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Posted in Musings

Ritual Caffeine

Posted on February 13, 2011 | 3 comments

I keep hearing an ad for 5-Hour Energy that touts the product as a better caffeine-delivery system, without the “making, waiting and hassle” of coffee.

But I rather like that “hassle.”

For years, I didn’t drink coffee. I drank tea. I enjoyed filling the kettle, wandering off for a few minutes, and being summoned back to the kitchen by the high-pitched whistle. Then I measured out my loose leaf tea into the little ball. As I poured hot water into the mug, you would smell a hint of the tea to come, an aroma that grew and blossomed over the next 5 minutes until I was ready to settle in with a mug of warmth.

I started regularly drinking coffee about four years ago when I realized that the occasional latte really helped me focus and power through work, so why not switch to coffee in the mornings? A friend gave me a coffee grinder and a bag of beans and recommended I buy a French press. I was in heaven. I could follow the same ritual – filling the kettle etc – and pour the water over freshly ground coffee. The aroma was heady and intense. Growing up, the smell of coffee meant morning, as it wafted upstairs in the wee hours before I had to get up.

Of course, life has gotten busier, and I welcomed the Keurig single cup brewer I got for Christmas a year ago. It really is much quicker than the kettle/French press method, with less clean up required. I got a refillable k-cup that I can fill with my freshly ground beans.

But on weekends, when I have time, I still fill up the kettle and break out the French press for my favorite cup of coffee of the week.

Since school started, my caffeine consumption has roughly tripled, but I still enjoy the ritual of every cup of tea or coffee. And when I get home from class, late at night, there’s something soothing about starting the water, changing into my pajamas, and curling up on the couch with a mug of mint tea while my brain slows down for the night.

What’s your caffeine ritual?

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Posted in Cooking

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Why I Lift Heavy Things

Posted on February 9, 2011 | 4 comments

I love strength training.

I love lifting heavy things, making myself stronger, making it easier to haul groceries or 40 lb bags of kitty litter or 6×8 ft fence panels.

Last year, I followed the New Rules of Lifting for Women program, which introduced me to a world beyond 3 lb, neoprene coated dumbbells. I scoured Craigslist and assembled a kick-ass gym in my (very cold) basement. I did deadlifts and squats and rows and cleans.

It was rough going at first, but once I got through the initial what-the-heck-am-I-doing phase, it was golden. I looked forward to my lifting workouts and always felt great afterwards: powerful, energetic and ready to take on the world.

But in late spring, the siren call of the outdoors got stronger. After spending all day (and all winter) indoors, I really didn’t want to go down to the basement and lift. I was running more, and loving that, too.

Strength training went by the wayside. I was lifting only once every five or six weeks, and paying for it each time with a week’s worth of achy muscles. I was still adhering to New Rules of Lifting (NROL), but by rarely lifting, I wasn’t making any real progress.

Once it got cold, I returned to strength training, and remembered why I loved it. But I had lost a lot of my baseline strength, and while Stage 6 of NROL ostensibly prepares you to do a chin-up, I definitely couldn’t. No big deal, though, as I finished the 7th stage of the program just before Christmas and felt pretty good about it.

I’ve learned that I need to follow a prescribed program that tells me what exercises to do in which combination, so I picked up Rachel Cosgrove’s Female Body Breakthrough. Though the tone is way too girl-talky for me (and the liberal use of exclamation points makes me cringe), the program itself is well-designed, with plenty of core work and a good variety of heavy weights and body-weight exercises.

Once again, though, Cosgrove’s program includes chin-ups. And once again, I screwed my chin-up bar into the door frame – and hung there, a dead weight.

Damn it, I want to do a chin-up. Just one is fine.

So I will. It may take all year.  But mark my words, I will be able to do a single chin-up.

And this summer, I’ll keep strength training as an integrated part of my weekly workout schedule. Maybe by cooling down post-run at the playground around the corner. Monkey bars would work for chin-up practice, right?

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Posted in Fitness

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Snowpocalypse 2011

Posted on February 5, 2011 | 4 comments

As you might have heard, we got a bit of snow last week. Snowpocalypse, or #snOMG as Twitter was calling it, was unlike anything I’ve ever seen or experienced. I vaguely remember the 1999 storm, but I was a senior in high school still on Christmas break.

This storm was incredible for its fury. All week, Skilling and others kept raising the expected accumulation totals and narrowing down the exact hour the storm hit. And they were right.

I woke up Tuesday morning to a fresh inch or so of snow and word that Metra was rearranging their afternoon schedules to help people get home ahead of the storm. All day, the skies were relatively clear. Until 2 PM, when suddenly, I looked out the 22nd floor windows and saw snow blowing horizontally, swirling violently.

The few coworkers who had come into the office started leaving to catch the special early Metra trains. I heard that Union Station was chaotic, so I decided to wait an hour to let things thin out a bit.

I left work at 4:15 and hunched against the wind and snow until I got to the eerily empty Union Station. I boarded the 4:50 train, which closed the doors right on time, with several empty seats. We sat for 10 minutes and then departed. Just past Western Avenue, we stopped. And sat. For nearly two hours. The conductors had no information, but I was able to learn from Twitter that there was a switch failure ahead. We sat on a bridge, near Damen and Grand, as the wind rocked the train back and forth. I was hungry and cursed myself for leaving an apple on my desk. Another passenger joked about ordering a pizza, if we could convince someone to come to the rail bridge.

Eventually, we pulled into Elgin just before 8 PM, and I made a very difficult walk home, as the 40 mph winds flung snow at and around me, obscuring my vision and sucking my breath. Scenes from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Long Winter filled my head, as I thought of pioneers getting lost in blizzards, stringing clothesline to navigate from house to stable. I wish I had a rope to follow home.

As I killed time on the train, I had seen several Twitter friends mention power outages. When I finally got close to my house and saw the porchlights, I breathed a sigh of relief. But as I trudged through the drifts on the driveway, I found a couple shingles. I think they’re from my roof, but I’m still not quite sure. I had made it home, but had to dig out my back door, which was already encased in snow nearly up to the doorknob.

As I left work, I had hoped to settle in early and study, but after a four hour commute, I curled up with a glass of wine and listened to the storm. I’ve been in this house nearly five years, and I’ve never heard it rock and shake and creak quite like it did Tuesday night. I followed the storm on Twitter, as Elgin’s city manager tweeted from a snowplow, and crossed my fingers every time the power flickered. Finally I went to bed, but laid awake, listening to the howling storm.

No wonder my kitchen was so dark! That's a six-foot tall fence

When I woke up, the winds had died down quite a bit, but the house seemed very odd. I realized it was because nearly every window was covered with frozen-on snow, obscuring much of the light. I surveyed the damage: officially, we got 20 inches, and I had drifts nearly 4 and 5 feet tall, some next to bare patches of pavement. A piece of my garage roof soffit was lying in the backyard.

The driveway: 4 ft drifts next to bare pavement

But since I was working from home, there wasn’t really a snow day. I went out at lunchtime and began shoveling – after I tunneled to the garage to retrieve my shovel.

I went out for a couple brief spells in the afternoon, thankful I didn’t really need the car until Saturday.

My tunnel, from house to street

Late in the afternoon, I started to dig out the end of the driveway, where it was drifted pretty deep, and finally had a tunnel to the street. My neighbor stopped by with his ATV, to which he had strapped a plow blade. He had a great time, riding up my drifts and then barreling downhill towards the street, pushing mountains of snow as he went. As he plowed, a former neighbor pulled up with his snowblower and asked if I wanted some help. Other neighbors also offered help. (I love this town.)

Luckily, I had no pressing need to take out the trash.

Later, I met up with some neighbors and helped clear the sidewalks of the main street in the neighborhood. Afterwards, we went to the local bar for chili and beer.

So while I didn’t get a traditional snow day, it was still a pretty good day. I even settled in with a mug of tea and pulled out The Long Winter before bed.

But that said, I think I’d be okay if we didn’t get any more snow this winter.

Though it was kind of pretty.

I do love the view over the river.

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Posted in Elgin, Weather

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