Arizania

Winter?  What winter?  Today it reached 76 degrees in Tucson.  Sadly, we had to wear shorts.  We drove to Sabino Canyon to run up the 3.7 miles to the end and back, and finished off the trip with sammies & Tecate.

We are ensconced here in the casita of our Bisbee pals, Paul & Lynne, right in the middle of Tucsonia, and have been enjoying some down time just with our own personal selves after holidaying it up with Nancy's parents in Sun City, as well as her brother David, gorgeous wife, Judy, and typical teenage son Alex (what, me smile for a picture?? No way, man).

After the Christmas thang, we drove up to Sedona to see Nancy's college friend, Nancy Ho, along with her sis Judy & mystery boyfriend, David, who is also internally 14 years old, just like Steve.  Two days with them and too many cookies (is there really such a thing) equals happy Christmas fulfillment.

We are looking forward to New Year's Eve with Clay & Lisa (who made a brief clandestine tequila rendezvous Sunday PM to our delight) and Paul & Lynne and other folks when we go see Los Lobos at the Rialto.  And then three more days in Bisbee with them as we celebrate Steve's birthday on January 3rd.

Stay tuned.

Fall

We are on the waning side of the season. That's okay, though - it's been a pretty outstanding October.

We started the month celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary on the 8th by spending two idyllic nights at one of the octagonal "villas" at the top of Spirit Mountain overlooking Duluth & Lake Superior (www.mtvillas.com). Since I was in marathon taper mode, I could eat anything and everything, especially if it was full of carbs. This was fun.

Next, we drove to Bayfield where we stayed with Michelle, Tom & Isaac for the weekend. On Saturday the 11th, Steve & I rose early to get to the buses taking runners to the full & half Whistlestop Marathon starting lines (www.whistlestopmarathon.com). Steve ran the half - a great accomplishment considering he'd been hobbling around on crutches just 3 weeks prior (some kind of Achilles inflammation). I ran the full marathon and had a great race till the last 3 miles, when I wanted to die. But I sucked it up and ran those last 3 million miles anyway, finishing in 4:14:04. This is under 10 minute miles (9:42s). Considering I was hoping to finish in 4:25 at best, I kicked some serious butt. Mostly my own. But still. The next morning I could barely walk down the stairs. This pleased Tom, who said it was nice to see someone younger than he is feel the way he does every morning.

We got back home on the 12th, worked for a few days, then headed west to Seattle on the 17th to visit Rob & Kim and do a little road-tripping. After the traditional oyster feed at the Brooklyn, and accordian rhapsodies by Kim (with Steve on rhythm accordian), we bid farewell to Rob, who was heading out on yet another fishing trip for his job. Poor Rob. He gets paid to fish.

Monday morning we rolled bleary-eyed out of bed at 4:45 AM to drive up to Anacortes and catch the ferry to Sidney, BC, on Vancouver Island. We had, surprisingly, wound up renting a hot red Mustang (the other choice was a Crown Vic, which intrigued Steve for its cop car qualities, but which was about as long as the ferry). We expected to get at least one speeding ticket, but we must drive like old people now. We didn't even get pulled over.

From Sidney, we drove south to Victoria, where we had lunch above a dive shop & talked to the divemaster there for awhile (totally unpredictable vis, he said; totally teeming sea life). Our Vancouver Island destination was Nanaimo, where we were staying a night at the Pine & Picket, a B&B that had good verbiage on Trip Advisor (www.thepineandpicket.com). We weren't disappointed. Our hosts, Ania & Ingvar, were really nice. Ingvar shared a bottle of homemade wine with us, and Ania made the best eggs benny & scones I think I've ever had. Nanaimo was a little weird, though - can't really say why. It just had kind of a weird vibe. It might have been the bar we stopped into in the old part of town. An old guy came up to me and said, "Who do you work for? Who do you work for??" I said, "General Mills. We make cereal," all the while thinking, "I hope he likes cereal." (Note - I won't make a cereal killer reference here.) Then he scuttled away.

The next morning we boarded a cruise-line-like BC ferry for Horseshoe Bay, just north of Vancouver. An hour & a half later, we were cruising along the mountain road in our red Mustang, just like a car commercial. We took a little side trip up to the Cypress ski area, where some of the 2010 Olympic events will be held. Lots & lots of building and activity. Then we headed to our hotel, the Sylvia. What a great location! We were just south of Stanley Park, a beautiful, pristine park on the northern tip of the peninsula where Vancouver is. It reminded me of San Francisco. We explored Stanley Park on a couple morning runs, and rented bikes one afternoon to go around Stanley Park, False Creek & Granville Island.

Though Steve tried valiantly to find Cuban cigars at a reasonable price, he was thwarted in his efforts, and we crossed back into the US with no contraband in our hot red Mustang. We spent Thursday night with Bob Hal & Rebecca in Seattle - Steve & Bob went out to Connie's Rimrock (fave neighborhood haunt) and stayed up till, like, 3 AM, which didn't hurt Vacation Boy too much, but which I am sure caused poor Bob some pain when he had to get up at 7 for work.

On Friday we headed to the Hood Canal "cabin" of some friends of Kim's to meet up with Kim & her parents, Mike & Joni. It was a gorgeous place with a very cool beach, especially at low tide when Steve & I discovered that oysters & geoducks under the sand like to squirt water up like a mini geyser and get your jammy pants wet. Kim made us puffins, her new, accidental invention using Self Rising flour in the pancake mix. They were yummy.

The five of us headed up to Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics on Saturday afternoon - a stunning place with insanely spectacular views and a great hike to the top of a mountain. The path was all paved. Even Steve, who is terribly afraid of heights (except when skiing - go figure), was able to navigate the trip without barfing & screaming.

Saturday night brought us back to Seattle and one last dinner with Kim & her folks before all us midwesterners headed back home, Joni & Mike in the morning and Steve & I later in the afternoon. What a nice vacation! (Many ginormous thank-yous to all the people who put up with us, er, put us up during our ramblings!)

Bayview RARA

After a nice Labor Day weekend at the Port Wing Fish Boil (50th) and dominating the Fall Festival 5k and 10k races, we like to head east to Bayview Lodge for some R, Action, R, and ...  Bayview Lodge is located on Presque Isle Lake in famous Presque Isle, Wisconsin.  It is the lake of Steve's youth.  Grandparents John and Della Brissee had a place there and reside there now in the boneyard.  It's a sentimental, pristine oasis of Northwoods splendor.  It has become our place to go, and chill, on an annual basis.  Time hasn't changed things much there as you can see via the photo gallery.  We manage to fill the too quick days with lots of Actionpea activities in a slow, easy mode.  We run, eat, fish, and cocktail in  a classic style.

Two weeks, next year ???

Sound and Fury?

It's a serious wind blowing through the screen porch.  The ever-skittish Kismet's ears are perked up, and while she appears to be sitting calm as the Buddha, inside you can tell she's lit up like a radar showing the incoming storms.  There's something just on the other side of the screen that's creak-creak-creaking in the wind, and somehow it reminds me of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is talking with the fortune teller and looking into the crystal ball, and outside the storm is brewing and building.

Maybe I'm overplaying it.

This happens here, you know.  You think some kind of massive superstorm is rumbling your way like a crazed, relentlessly advancing sky army outfitted with lightning bolts and tornadoes, and you go outside and look at the weird, green clouds bubbling up out of the west, and then ... nothing.  Well, nothing as spectacular as you imagined.  Just a lot of rain, and maybe some hail and whooshy wind.

It's a little disappointing, actually, but when the left brain kicks in, you realize it's probably for the best.  Tornadoes tend to leave a lot of badness in their wake.  Big storms with big winds and big hail can be destructive in a big way.

I think it's because I've watched too much TV and seen too many smash 'em, crash 'em movies (which I admit I kind of like).  I want lots of sound and fury, but in the end, I'd like it to signify nothing.

Is this thing on ?

Hi, It's Stelvis.

It's 3:30 am do you know where your thoughts are ?

Old guy syndrome dictates nocturnal ramblings. The brain turns on and the thought machine starts...

This has been happening since the start of the big project. This week the French doors go in, something to appease the city inspector. It's 2 stories of monolithic whiteness. The roof looks good, soffits pretty, and trimboards nifty. I like the Tyvek siding, the Hardiboard can wait.

It's getting nigh on time to crack into the existing house and kick some *** !

I'm quite excited , wifey = nervous.

Yet, there are marathons to relay, fish to catch, and Summers to savor before it goes away. Better to slow down and appreciate warm days and sunny porch time.

We've got plenty of time...

Anticip ......... pation

It's goofy, I know, feeling amped up about a run.  But it's a long run.  Very long.  I'm ratcheting up the marathon training, and tomorrow will be my first 20 mile run.  21, actually.  The marathon is the Whistlestop on October 11th (www.whistlestopmarathon.com), and it goes from just east of Iron River, Wisconsin, along a rail-bed-now-recreational-trail to Ashland on Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay.  The trail is all crushed limestone, going through mostly forest and a little farmland, and in October it's beautiful - the leaves are changing, the air is cool and dry, the trail is isolated and the race small enough that there's a marvelous quiet to run in.

But tomorrow's run is strictly urban, though it will feel like country in some spots.  I'm running from Lake Minnetonka along the LRT southwest corridor (another converted rail bed) to the north end of Lake Calhoun, then south to Lake Harriet and east along Minnehaha Parkway to Minnehaha Falls.  There I'll meet up with our running club, the Minnehaha Marathoners, for our annual Lake to Falls pizza picnic.  It used to be that many club members ran from Minnetonka to the falls, but we're all getting older and things don't work as well as they used to.  For old time's sake, I thought I'd renew the tradition at least one more year.

I run alone and without music.  There are a few of us purists out there.  Not that one way is inherently any better than the other - I've run with music and loved it.  It's sort of like heroin, I suppose, or cable TV.  Once you start, you can't stop.  I'd just rather not be dependent on something with batteries that could run out and spoil my run, and I don't like to carry stuff with me, generally.  But mostly I like running without people and tunes because I like the connection with my body and the world around me.  I like hearing the loons when they call each other around the lakes.  I like hearing the cardinals and trying to find the spot of red in the trees.  I like the sound of the wind through the tall poplars along the trail.  In the winter, I like the crunch-squeak of my shoes on the snow.

So tomorrow is 21 miles, followed by pizza at the picnic and Cliff's cookies, and a rest of the day filled with well-earned lying around.  And a cocktail at cocktail hour, of course - strictly medicinal.

Our Porch

Nearly 10 years ago we bought our humble, antiquated abode.  There are some changes going on.  And it seems those changes will keep going on until hell freezes over.  But there are a couple things about this hovel - it may be 100 years old this year, but some of that old stuff is pretty good.

Like the porch.  The porch was an add-on or a revamp of a more primitive open porch.  Somebody had a lot of mosquito bites and put screens in, and now we find ourselves enjoying the setting sun and cocktails, just like our predecessors.  We found the house by sheer luck.  There was a FSBO (for sale by owner) sign in the front yard that Steve just happened to see.  The timing was awful - Nancy had just graduated and had a major education debt with promising career prospects, but we had no money in the bank.  Fortune or rash judgment smiled on us and we got the place for what now seems like a song.

Now that the economy is going to hell in a handbasket, we still think we made a good decision, because the porch rocks.  The addition on the back may eventually turn us homicidal, but as long as we're on the porch, we're like The Buddha.  At peace.

Sound and Fury

There's nothing like a good, old-fashioned midwest thunderstorm to rattle your eardrums like no woofer ever could. We, having never actually experienced a tornado, are of the school of idiots who run outside to see what's going on when the tornado sirens go off.

They went off last weekend while we were a couple hundred miles away in Rhinelander, and the forewarned tornadoes destroyed a a huge swath of the town of Hugo east of Minneapolis.  They went off again tonight, but the storms were contained and non-rotational.  (Every Minnesotan is an amateur meteorologist, in case you didn't know.)  Nonetheless, they dumped lots of dime-sized hail, which pelted the monkeys on our welcome mat, and when they continued to produce rain after the setting sun broke through the western clouds, they created a beauteous rainbow in the eastern sky.

MacPeas

It's been a ridiculously long time since our last update. The winter was so long and relentless that any creative spark was doused by the cold and snow. Mostly we curled up and napped, went to work when we had to, and ate a lot. Now the sun is warm enough that we're crawling out of the den, squinting into the light, and thinking it's time to get busy.

So we went out and bought a MacBook. This may not help us get off the couch, but at least Steve may find it a little easier to get online. We plan to tie a rope to our old PC and use it as an anchor when we go fishing in Rhinelander next weekend.

Surviving Minnesota

I think the key to surviving winter in Minnesota is getting out and rubbing your nose in it, just like a big old stinky dog, rolling around and revelling in it – rawrrrrrr! That said, I have not been good at being a big old stinky dog this winter. No, I’ve mostly stayed inside like some kind of fat, white Persian cat with big brown eye goobers and, as the weeks of eyeball-freezing cold have marched on like our own personal glacial age, I’ve just griped. Yowled. This is not good coping. The Catch-22 is that it’s so hard to get out the door when it’s like the south col of Everest in a storm, and yet getting out there is exactly what you need to do to stop being a miserable gripe-o-maton. Then, once you get in the middle of it, you see what a beautiful place winter can be.

Today it was 37. I went out for a little run around Calhoun. It was misty and white and lovely, the lake frozen and covered with snow, the snow soft and wet from the relative warmth. One of the beautiful things about Minnesota is that when it starts to get above freezing and there’s still a good snowpack, the snow evaporates and makes thick fog and hoarfrost on all the branches. It’s magical.

Miniburgers

In this age of supersized
Of overlarge with megafries
Your cheeks they bulge
With wads of food
With greasy chunks
Of meaty crude
You stop and cry
“This is enough!
“I can’t have more
I’m full, I’m stuffed!”
When comes as if
From heav’n above
The burger small!
It’s made of love!
The size of it
It’s manageable
Barely an ounce
It’s palatable
An order has
From three to five
Small burger bombs
Sometimes with fries
I’m glad I’ve lived
This long to see
A burger sized
Just right for me

The Dentist

He had the kindest, bluest eyes. As a child in the 60's, going to the dentist was a minefield. The best tooth protection we had was fluoridated water and Crest. I remember one time having five cavities. It would've been awful, except for Dr. Dale, my next-best-thing-to-having-your-dad-be-your-dentist, dentist. It somehow wasn't quite so bad with his sparkling, friendly, winter blue sky eyes there showing his care for my dental health, and somehow for my general happiness.

Dr. Dale was my dentist from the time I had teeth until he retired in 2005. I don't know how many people have the same dentist for 40 plus years, but I learned that with Dr. Dale, it wasn't that uncommon. It was a unique relationship, mine and my dentist's - someone who knew me almost my whole life, who I saw only once a year, and who caught up with me on the whole last 12 months in the time it took to examine my mouth. He always asked about mom and dad and my brother, and when I started to travel, he always asked where I'd gone that year. As a lover of travel himself, he had his own stories to tell during the time my mouth was gaped open as the exam was going on.

Yesterday I went to Dr. Dale's funeral. I sat in the pew and cried. The large church was almost full. There were a lot of healthy white teeth, artfully created bridges and crowns, and amalgam fillings: all the work of one of the nicest dentists in the whole wide world.

Balmy Sunday

We lounged this morning: read the Sunday paper, fell asleep sitting up on the couch, woke up and decided to run around Calhoun and Harriet to redeem the day and soak up the few atoms of vitamin D produced by the wan January sun. People around the lakes had a look of contentment - little half smiles sometimes blooming into a full grin on eye contact. This is a common expression - people are so happy to be out, even in pale sunshine, after two weeks of subzero death cold.

On TV this afternoon is a story about a group of guys replicating the Peking to Paris auto race of some time in the early 1900's. They alternate between great adventure, great fun, and being really ticked off with each other. They're driving the cars of the era, dressed in the clothes of the era, but they have a sag wag tagging along with them that I'm not sure the original auto racers had. Hey, a guy's gotta be comfortable, I guess. They're in Siberia, which looks a little like Minnesota, and should help explain why much of this blog has so far focused on the weather.

Heat wave in Minnesota

It got up to 30 today. As a measure of just how freaking cold it's been the last couple weeks, 30 degrees made me feel like running in shorts. But I stuck with my good ol' Minnehaha Marathoner greenies. The club ran in our centipede costume in the St. Paul Winter Carnival 5K this morning. We had a full contingent of 13 heads and 26 feet, and completed in a blistering 42 minutes. We burn up a fair amount of time surrounding police officers stationed on the course and giving high-fives to the runners coming back in the opposite direction. Steve stayed in bed. He woke up to his own personal morning pukefest, triggered by, a) the scallops we had for dinner, or b) the copious amount of wine we had at dinner, or c) some kind of evil-but-brief stomach flu. He seems to be better this afternoon. At least he's talking about what we'll have for dinner tonight.