Updates in list form

Today I offer updates in list form:

1. We are leaving on Friday for a month-long road trip. Most of our time will be spent in Oregon, with stops in Calgary, Seattle, and wherever else we may desire. The trip out is set, but the trip back will be determined later. E-mail if we should add you to our agenda!

2. We have been working hard to get everything ready for our departure, including making sure the yard and garden are all planted and prepared to have someone else look after them with minimal effort. We have planted our new fruit trees, planted the garden, put in sod over the area that was all just dirt before, and made some efforts at weed control by putting down cardboard between rows in the garden and putting compost over the top (we have a bit more interest to do). We even bought a new timer for our sprinkler, so that watering should happen without any intervention.  Our plans for our backyard are coming along nicely, and if all goes as expected, we will come home to a lush green garden.

We even bought a little stone bench to sit on for rests in between bouts of garden work, and those planters are filled with strawberry plants. There is a little blue solar lantern hanging from what was meant to be a plant hanger, but which serves as a little handrail helping me get up into the raised garden area.

I am actually kind of amazed that we have been able to create pretty much exactly my vision for our yard. It has been lots of work, but I'm really happy that I have been able to participate so much in making it happen.

3. Also as part of our preparation for departure, we are hanging out with several friends here this weekend as our last social events before we leave. Last night we stayed at a friends house until midnight, which we never do. However, these friends will be leaving for a two-month trip that begins just before we get back from our one-month trip, so we won't see them for about three months. That meant that I was quite tired this morning and slept in much later than usual. Today was a rare gray rainy day, and it seemed like the perfect thing to do on a lazy Sunday morning in weather like this was to bake some cookies. The other impetus for baking was to get rid of some butter and eggs so that we didn't have to leave them or throw them away before our trip.

The friends we saw this afternoon, and the friends we will hang out with this evening, were/will be the beneficiaries of my baking.

4. I have been able to do a tiny bit of running practice. There is a park about 2 1/2 blocks from our house that has a huge flat grassy expanse that gets very little use. It is the perfect place to practice running. A few days ago Jeff and I went out to this park and did a little bit of running from one tree to another, with rests at a picnic table in between. It did not take long before I was extremely tired, and Jeff noted that I was running sideways instead of ahead. I have a tendency to veer to the right, and apparently this becomes quite extreme when I get tired. The longest stretch I was able to do was probably somewhere between 30 and 40 feet.

All this is somewhere between encouraging and discouraging – one of those times where it is awesome to be able to do something categorically different, something that I absolutely was not able to do a few months ago. But at the same time, it reminds me of what I used to be able to do, and just how far I am from that. It's sort of like this: when I am completely unable to do something, it's a little bit like out of sight out of mind. But then when I can sort of start to do it, there's a new goal, and the difference between where I am and where I want to be seems so huge that it gets a bit discouraging. It seems that I have to deal with this over and over again unless I just want to stop getting better and accept things exactly where they are. But I really don't know how to do that.

5. We accidentally washed and dried a mouse. Jeff opened the dryer door yesterday and right in front of the door on top of the load of laundry there was this little mouse (dead) who apparently had quite a clean shiny coat. A few days ago, Maddy apparently brought a mouse into the house and lost it. We were in the basement when she became extremely interested in something under the couch (which I was sitting on), and Jeff confirmed that there was a live mouse. Then, it was gone. We couldn't find it, Maddy couldn't find it, and although we knew it was not going to end well we did not predict this particular end.

It must have crawled into a laundry basket full of dirty clothes that was in front of the washing machine, and hidden itself so well among the clothes that it got scooped into the washing machine, and then somehow scooped into the dryer. Fortunately, a second wash got out the dead mouse smell from the load it had been washed and dried with, and there was no lingering smell in either the washer or dryer. I am just really hoping that the mouse somehow died peacefully before getting washed and dried.

6. My next blog post will be from somewhere on the road!