Moses Runs

A few weeks ago, Moses started a blog to chronicle his training for Imogene. Yes, he's training! I think he was afraid of the 8 hours of evil looks he was bound to get on the way home from Imogene if he didn't train and was still alive at the end of the race. Anyway, Moses has been taking my Garmin with him for his training hikes and is documenting his training with lots of graphs and statistical analysis. It is very scientific, yet charming and entertaining. Just like Moses.

Swimming Lessons

To the left is a really bad picture of Garion's first day of swimming lessons for this summer. Garion is the barely visible blob just to the left of the ladder. This is Garion's third summer of swimming lessons. Up until now, he has hated every second of them. I didn't even tell him he was starting swimming lessons this summer until about 4:00 yesterday afternoon (the lesson started at 5:00). Surprisingly, this tactic seemed to work. Garion gave me five minutes of the usual "I REALLY don't want to take swimming lessons." I have him a thirty second answer that boiled down to: tough pattooties, you're going and we're not discussing it anymore. He then asked me how many swimming lessons he had to take and I told him when he could show me that he could swim across the pool by himself, without touching the bottom and without a life jacket, he would be done. He seemed to be heartened by the fact that he might not have to take swimming lessons every summer for the rest of his life, and pretty much sucked it up. I was very proud. Then, miracle of all miracles, I think he actually had fun during his lesson. Whew!

We arrived at the pool about 15 minutes early because I have still not adjusted to the fact that Flagstaff is small and you can get all the way to the other side of town in 10 minutes. While we were sitting there, I told Garion that this was the pool where I learned to swim.

"Really?" he asked. And then eying a group of teachers in the corner, "Which teacher did you have?"
Me: "Well, it was a long time ago, so I didn't have any of those teachers."
Garion: "Because none of them were even alive yet?"

I started to say, "no." Then I stopped and looked again at the group of teachers. They all appeared to be maybe between 18 and 20 years old--college aged. I think I was 12 the last summer I took swimming lessons.....about 20 years ago.

Me in the agony of the realization of the passage of time: "Well.....yes, I guess they probably were not alive yet."
Garion, very helpfully: "Or they were babies."

Dear God, Please Save Me from Myself, Thank-you

For the better part of the last year, I have been contemplating adopting a dog. I have asked everyone I know for advice and we even had a doggie-prospect come visit us for a day. The doggie-prospect didn't like us too terribly much and ate the wooden blinds off of our front door to demonstrate his feelings. He went back to his foster-family. Since the day of the ill-fated visit, I have been unable to commit to the adoption of a canine friend. I would very much like a running/walking companion and I like the idea of having another living being in the house with me during the day. I'd also like Garion to have the experience of caring for living things and the life lessons that go along with that care (although I realize of course that any pet will ultimately be my pet in terms of daily life maintenance and cleaning which is what makes today even more unbelievable--what was I thinking?). To be honest, I could live without the running companion bit and be very happy with a cat. But Moses and Garion are allergic, so cats are out. What I can't decide is whether I would really like to have a dog or if I just like the idea of having a dog.

Anyway, after the doggie-prospect went home, while trying to decide whether I have what it takes to be a dog-owner, I asked Garion if he really wanted a dog. He said yes. I then asked him, if he could have any pet in the world, what would it be? He lit up like a Christmas tree, and with a look of complete rapture said, "a mouse!" Dang. That is not at all what I had in mind. I said, "what about a hamster or a gerbil?" "No." A mouse, and no other creature great or small could it be. Sigh.

So a month later and after lots of big puppy eyes from Garion (maybe I really don't need a dog?), and a few chores later to earn the money for their purchase, this is what came to live with us today:

Ugh. Do you see its little mousy tail hanging there and taunting me with its not-at-all-charming, rat-like hairlessness? They would be so much more tolerable if they could have a nice little furry nub, like a bunny. This mouse also has a twin that's a bit camera shy. A little reading on the internet informed us that mice are social creatures and prefer not to live by themselves. Check. We went the pet store and asked for two male mice. The lady asked us if they were feeder mice or pets. Pets. She then tells us, "they are a little territorial so just keep an eye on them or they'll....basically eat each other." But they don't like to live alone. Lovely. And exactly what am I supposed to do if I notice them eating each other, I wonder? Because I really do not have a contingency plan for mouse-on-mouse cannibalism. I just was not born equipped with that skill-set. "What about female mice?" we asked. "A little better," she said. Hmmm. Not really confidence inspiring but, okay, give us two females.

The original plan was to name the mice Stuart and Ralph after Garion's favorite mice in literature. I have re-christened them Ralphina and Stuartette, but Garion is skeptical, so they might be re-named. Garion is, of course, elated to have his new roommates and I on the other hand am not sure I will be able to sleep tonight. They scurry around with their hairless little miniature rat tails, and climb the walls of their cage, and if they get out I think I will probably have a heart attack and then have to move out, housing market be damned. Maybe I will have to adopt a dog just to have something warm and fuzzy and not-willies-inducing, with a furry tail for crying out loud, to take my mind off the mice. That live in my house. That I am actually consciously feeding. (On the way home from the pet shop, Moses said I could always get a rat terrier--ha.ha.)

A Happy Father's Day

Yesterday we went out to "The Land," also know as "White Turtle Ranch," also known as Moses's dad's place, for Father's Day. We brought out lunch and fresh peach pie from the farmer's market and had a great afternoon eating and visiting. A little while ago, Moses's dad had picked up some wooden cars that he thought Garion might like. Garion was a of course ecstatic to get presents when it wasn't even his birthday and even more ecstatic at the promise of painting those cars if he brought them back out to The Land. So, Sunday afternoon found grandpa and grandson completely engrossed the project of painting four little wooden cars--they each painted two. This was the kind of afternoon that makes me grateful once again that we got the chance to move here and be closer to our families. I'm so glad that Garion's getting the opportunity to know his grandparents better and even if he doesn't remember painting cars with his grandpa in a few years, I will. And every time I see those cars I will think about their two heads bent over a table of cars and paint in very serious discussion about the merits of polk-a-dots and stripes and whether wheels deserve paint too.

So Exciting

This morning, as per my usual Monday morning routine, I went into the local office to pick-up my mail. The stack of mail waiting for me was soul-draining-ly enormous and I felt that I needed an iced coffee to give me strength and sustenance for hauling that stack home and then summoning the courage to sift through it. So I trotted over to the Late for the Train coffee shop where I procured a delicious iced caramel latte. It came in this cup:


It says, "This cup is made from corn, environmentally sustainable, and 100% compostable." Yes! I have a compost bin! I will put this cup in there and in a couple of months it will be gone. I think that makes the whole process of buying a ridiculous--but oh so wonderfully tasty and sweet and creamy--coffee drink from a shop at least 10% less bad than it was before.

LibraryThing's Top 106 Unread Books

Anali posted this meme on LibraryThing books that are tagged unread. In bold are those books I've have read, in bold with asterick* are the titles I've read for school, and italicized are those I've started but didn't finish. I'm a total busy-body when it comes to other people's bookshelves and what they've read and are currently reading and I loved going through Anali's list. Fair's fair, here's mine:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities*
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner (on the to-read list)
Mrs. Dalloway (I've never even heard of this book, so now I'm feeling a little dim)
Great Expectations*
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver (this is sort of a prequel to Cryptonomicon--someday I'll pick it up again)
Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera*
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses (a book with kind of title ought to be more interesting)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest*
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune (I don't feel too bad about this one now b/c Anali, the queen of sci-fi hasn't read it either)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes: A memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon (yep, this book has made it onto three separate book lists on my blog)
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake (coming back to this one)
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down (I've heard people talk about this book in life altering terms, someday I'll get around to it)
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island David Copperfield

I look at this list and see lots of ambition, but not a lot of follow through : )

This Year's Crazy Things

You might remember that last year, I entered and competed in my first triathlon and ran in the Tucson Marathon Relay. And you might have thought that training for and competing in such events would have gotten the competition bug out of my system, especially since I had never competed in anything requiring physical exertion in my whole entire life. Not so. Turns out, I'm a lot better about maintaining a work out regime if I have an event to work toward. More accurately, I train better if I have the possibility of failure, mortal embarrassment, and excruciating pain hanging over my head. So this year, I upped the ante. Why up the ante? Why not just enter a few more races of similar caliber as last year's and enjoy the ride? I don't know. Probably I need my head examined. In November, I will be running the Big Sur Half Marathon, my first half marathon. I really don't know why I feel the need to do a half marathon but there it is so I might as well get it over with. A friend of mine from work was at this event last year and she said the course is beautiful. Also, wuss that I am, I thought it'd be really great to run my first half marathon on a relatively flat course at sea level after having trained on hilly terrain at 7,000 ft. I'm hoping that all that extra oxygen will turn me into Wonder Woman, and I will feel buff and invincible with the knowledge that I possess the superpower of extra lung capacity.

Personally, I thought that a half marathon would be enough craziness for one year. Then, Moses and I were talking with my brother (Robert) and his wife (Lisa), who enter the Imogene Pass Run every September with Lisa's family, and they invited us to join in this year. They actually make this race sound like a lot of fun. Lisa's brother informed me that one year he and Robert trained for the race by cutting their daily beer intake from 4 to 2. Great! Sounds like a race I can do. As my brother and his wife are cool, young people, and Moses and I would like to be cool, young people (even though I don't think that's possible anymore since we are some one's parent and I think that unless you're Madonna you instantly loose your cool-cred the moment you give birth), we thought we'd look into this.

Here's the course description:
The Imogene Pass Run (IPR) is a 17.1 mile point-to-point mountain race within the western San Juan mountains of Colorado, run along a route which connects the towns of Ouray (7810 ft.) and Telluride (8820 ft.) by way of 13,120 foot Imogene Pass. The IPR is held on the first Saturday after the Labor Day holiday, at the seasonal transition from late Summer to early Fall. Mountain weather at this time is famously "squirrelly" (rapidly changeable), and participants through the years have encountered a variety of weather conditions ranging from virtually perfect to terrible. This spectrum of weather during the race is in fact part of its lure and mystique. In good weather years the challenge of the mountainous traverse is rewarded by unsurpassed vistas and no small feeling of accomplishment upon crossing the finish line. In bad weather years, the wind, fog, rain and/or snow along the course make the successful arrival in Telluride a virtual rite of passage into the realm of true mountain running.

That would be lots of hills at altitude in possible nasty weather. That would be a really long race that typifies everything I strongly dislike about running in Flagstaff.

Yesterday, I hiked Mt. Elden with a friend. It's about 2.5 miles to the top of Mt. Elden, on a pretty steep trail (about 9,000 ft. elevation at the top). It took my friend and me 3.5 hours to do the hike (round trip) and my legs were shaking at the end. So I began to think that maybe Imogene wasn't such a great idea, that I don't need to be as cool or hip (since I can't ever be as young) as my brother. I was thinking that I would just resign myself to not being cool and I would just admire my brother and his wife and their coolness from afar. And I would be happy because I would not be in pain, and that is one of the major goals of my life, and my brother could just be in charge of maintaining coolness in our family and that would be totally, completely fine. And also, I would not be making a public spectacle of myself and my wussy-ness, which would also be nice.

But then . . . Moses registered for the race this morning. And then informed me that he also registered me for the race. I guess that means I'm doing Imogene. I suppose that I always have the option of backing out, but now that I'm officially in, I probably won't be able to let it go because, as much as I hate to admit it, I have a sort of stubborn competitive streak and now that I'm in, I'm in. I informed Moses that if we're going to do this thing together, he is not allowed to beat me by a substantial margin. He also is most definitely not allowed to beat me if he does not train. And since he's tall and has long legs and can walk really fast, he is really, most definitely, NOT AT ALL allowed to walk right next to me while I am running, because that will make my head explode.

Imogene is made more interesting by the fact that participants have to make certain cutoff times. Most notably, if you don't make the summit 4.5 hours after the race starts, they don't let you finish. So, my goal will be to make the cutoffs and finish this baby in under six hours. My game plan is to walk/hike the uphill and run the downhill and also not to die (although I'm thinking I should try to get my will in order this summer before I go, just in case). As icing on the cake, I would also like to not embarrass myself in front of my brother, his wife, friends and in laws. Because they are cool.

That's the line-up for 2008--wish me luck and lots of lung capacity.