One week to go

May 20th, 2013

I’m running the Madison half marathon in just 7 days. Today I ran the last long run of my training plan. It was 8 miles, and a pretty good run. I ran it with Ethan and we did a good job of sticking to a target pace of about 11 min/mile. When we had about a mile and a half to go, Ethan pointed out that last year, we couldn’t have run just the distance we had left without stopping, not to mention the 6 and a half miles we had just put behind us. Thinking of that made me feel like I’ve really accomplished a lot.

At this point I’m somewhat nervous, because 13.1 miles is a long way to run! I do feel like we’ve trained adequately, and unless one of us gets injured, I think we’ll both finish. All the things I’ve read about running say that your first race of any distance, don’t run for time, run to finish, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. I have an idea of what our time will probably be based on our 12 mile run a couple of weeks ago, but there are going to be more hills on the course, and it’s earlier in the day than we usually run, and we don’t know what the weather will look like. I’ll be happy as long as we finish.

Saving for a Down Payment

May 13th, 2013

A little over a year ago, Ethan and I started saving up for a down payment on a new house. We want to save up enough to put a 20 – 25% down payment on our next home to avoid mortgage insurance, plus cover moving expenses, and possibly cover any gap between the sale of our current home and its mortgage.

When we started saving up, we figured out an amount that seemed reasonable, and tried to determine how long it would take us to save up that much. The shortest timeline we could come up with was about 3 years, if we tightened down our expenses a bit. Ethan and I have always lived pretty frugally, so I was initially concerned with our plans, but I figured that at worst, we’d have to adjust them and push back our move out date by another year.

So what did we do to bring down our expenses and increase our savings? Primarily, we made a conscious decision to spend less money on restaurants and alcohol. Read the rest of this entry »

Scottish Ale Status

May 11th, 2013

Two weeks ago, I brewed up a batch of the Northern Brewer Karl’s 90 Schilling kit and started it fermenting. Today Ethan helped me transfer it to a carboy for its secondary fermentation, which should last 4 – 6 weeks.

This is our second homebrew and I’m excited to see how it turns out. I learned a few lessons on our first batch (which did turn out pretty well), and I’m hoping for a smoother taste.

We discussed the possibility of buying a second keg so we can brew two batches at once, so depending on how quickly we execute on that, we might have a second batch brewing soon.

How I Became A Runner

May 6th, 2013

I’m currently training for a half marathon on Memorial Day. This involves more running than I’ve ever done before, and that running has given me a lot of time to reflect on how I became a runner in the first place.

When I talk about running and fitness with people who have only known me for a short time, they often assume that I’ve always been into fitness. They think I probably played sports in Jr. high and high school, perhaps ran cross country or track and field. This could not be further from the truth. I hated sports, running and anything athletic all through school. I was slow, I had no endurance, and I was uncoordinated. Phy ed was the only class I struggled with, usually only getting a B or C, based solely on effort. I knew I was bad at sports, and I also believed that it was because I was inherently weak and physically slow. Neither my parents nor my gym teachers made any effort to change that belief. Read the rest of this entry »

Reboot

May 5th, 2013

For the last few months, I’ve had ideas for things to write about, but each time I thought about starting a new post on my blog, I thought of how much work my blog needed, and I would set the whole task aside for later. Yesterday I took the first step into getting things sorted out: I installed WordPress to simplify everything.

This morning I imported all of my old posts. I left out the few comments and tags for now, because it’s better that I get the posts imported and move forward than stall endlessly on those details. There are probably some old posts with horrible formatting issues, broken links and things like that, and I might eventually fix them, but not today.

If I do start posting regularly again, I will almost surely add more features, plugins, links, and all that other good stuff, but for now simple is best.

Cheers!

Why I Won’t Practice Hot Yoga

January 30th, 2011

A coworker recently gave me the idea to try early morning yoga before work, to get some exercise in before I’m tired from a day behind a desk. I’ve been practicing yoga for over a year now, and it sounded like a good idea. I checked my regular yoga studio, but they don’t offer early morning classes. I began checking around and found several studios that do, but all of them are ‘hot’ yoga classes, meaning the room is heated above normal temperatures, into the 80s, 90s or even up to 105.

The idea behind hot yoga is that you will sweat more, and that will release toxins from your body. What could be bad about that? Read the rest of this entry »

New Photos

August 15th, 2010

I’ve uploaded a few more photos to Flickr.

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Check them out.

I write when I’m bored

July 5th, 2010

So, I haven’t posted anything in months and months because apparently my life has been just peachy and I’ve had nothing to write about. Does this mean I only complain? I refuse to read through the pages and pages of previous entries to find out if this is true or not.

In case you are the only person who reads this, and you read about how I was going to get surgery on my jaw, and you’ve been checking on a daily basis to see how that went, the answer is that it went great. I had my surgery on February 18th and everything went “by the book” or so my surgeons told me. I had a completely painless (though tedious) recovery, during which i could only eat foods I didn’t need to chew. Culinary creativity saved me from a total food meltdown, and this was good.

Why am I bored today, having not been bored enough to write for half a year, you ask? It all started a few months (was it a full year?) ago when my brother-in-law and his long-time girlfriend decided to get married. Because it’s what brother’s do, he asked my husband to be his best man. Read the rest of this entry »

Bird Feeders

June 21st, 2009

Shortly after moving into our house, I decided to get a small thistle seed bird feeder, to attract birds to our yard. We had the feeder out and usually kept it full for almost a year, and attracted plenty of finches and sparrows.

I mentioned to my mother how it seemed like those were the only birds we got in the cities. I never saw cardinals, bluejays, chickadees, or nuthatches. She suggested I get a sunflower seed feeder, and said it would attract more birds. Since my parents have several feeders out year round, and plenty of birds to go with, I asked if they had any that they didn’t use on account of squirrels and they gave me one that had been sitting out in the garage. We hung it up in our back yard and filled it with sunflower seeds and waited.

It has been two weeks, and now we have a variety of birds I didn’t see before. Purple finches, way more gold finches, cardinals, and a mourning dove have all become frequent visitors.

With this success, I’m tempted to get a suet feeder, and make some vegan suet, as well as a humming bird feeder, and possibly a mixed seed feeder. I would also like to get a bird bath and see if that attracts even more birds.

Jaw Realignment, Step 1 continued

May 23rd, 2009

Okay, first in response to the couple of questions I’ve gotten, because my case is minor, the only adjustments needed during surgery will be to separate my upper jaw, slide it forward, and then anchor it in place with plates and screws. My jaws will only need to be held shut with very tight rubber bands, not wired shut.

In more severe cases, if your jaws are very different lengths, the surgeon may have to adjust both the upper and lower jaws, requiring the jaws to be wired shut, post op. If your jaws are canted, front to back, or side to side, a wedge of bone is permanently removed during the surgery, and again the jaws must be wired shut. Both of these operations are somewhat riskier than the basic operation I require, and can have a longer healing time.

Upon receiving my request for pre-approval, my insurance company refused the claim because my “malocclusion could be treated non-surgically.” Which prompted me to call them, and ask “what if I already had orthodontics for this and it didn’t fix it?” After a lot of back and forth between my new doctors and orhtodontist, my old orthodontist, and my health insurance company, they decided that it is, in fact, covered.

I have scheduled preliminary appointments with the new orthodontist but at the moment I don’t have an appointment to get braces on yet. The earliest that could happen is in a few weeks.