Training for the Trail, Suburban-Style

We recently planned a hiking/camping/backpacking trip to the Smokies for the end of September/early October! We are super excited but knew that we needed to get in better shape to really enjoy ourselves on the trail, especially considering we'll be taking Amy Grace along too. Our last trip to this area was back in the fall of 2007, which was a lot of fun, but we definitely were not in good condition to do a lot of hiking, like we'd planned.

Luckily, this time around we both have been eating well and exercising for about 3 months and have each lost between 20 and 25 pounds (yay!), so we already had a great head start. However, there is a very steep hill a short drive from our house, and we have been "hiking" up and down it several times a week to help get our bodies used to the demands of hiking in the southern Appalachians.

Just like in the Smokies, you are rewarded with a great view from the top of the "mountain," even if you do have to watch out for cars careening around the curves! From this pic you can definitely tell that the Birmingham area is, in fact, the southern terminus of the Appalachian mountain range. It's like look out over a mini-Smokies, some days even complete with the haze that gave those mountains their name. (For the locals, I believe the last ridge you can see is Oak Mountain, though you can't really see it well here.)

Here is the view from about halfway down:

Garden Harvest

Back in May, we planted our first garden! It has been an adventure and a good learning experience over the last few months, and there is just something about eating food you've grown yourself. We planted tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapenos, squash, strawberries, onion, and cucumbers (and maybe a few others that I can't recall because they never grew!). The jalapenos have done the best of all, producing a steady crop of tasty peppers. The tomatoes were second best, with one plant producing a ton of tomatoes, but they were all a little over grape tomato size! We got a few cucumbers, which are wonderful in cucumber salad. The squash have yet to mature, but from the looks of things I think those will turn out well, too.

Our other plants did not do so well, however - the onion and strawberries never produced anything, while the bell pepper plant has produced lots of peppers -- all the size of a tiny ball!! We are grateful, though, for what God did bless us with and look forward to next planting season.

Speaking of nesting...

I totally nested at my cubicle desk today :) I've learned (thanks FlyLady) that one of the best ways to tackle overwhelming-looking tasks, especially those you've put off for awhile, is just to take 15 minutes to work on it and see where you get. YOu can stop after that, and the whole point is to NOT take 3 hours making the project way more complicated than it is (perfectionism), and yet still not get anything done.

The great thing about this is that often those 15 minutes are enough to get the entire task done anyway! (For example, I know that it takes just 5 minutes to unload the dishwasher and 10 to change the bedsheets, so there are never any excuses to put it off.) So after a couple of meetings meant to nail down some production details for while I'm gone, I was feeling buried under mounds of paper and just general junk that had accumulated on my desk. While these things never get as bad as they used to anymore, it had still reached that "overload" mode. I was trying to get some edits done for our Holiday package and wanted to keep working on those, but told myself "hey, I'll take 15 minutes and get as organized as I can."

Well, it really took me 25 minutes, but before long I had a organized, sparkling clean desk once again. (Had I not attacked the, let's face it, DISGUSTING buildup on my desk and under my keyboard, it would have easily taken just 15 minutes). Papers were filed, meaningless post-it notes thrown away, and general paper clutter was tossed. Amazing what a load straightening up takes off of your mind! I capped off my busy-bee-ness by noting a list of things to do/work on AFTER maternity leave, so I wouldn't forget about them. I can only imagine what 3 months spent at home with an infant might do to my memory power when it comes to going back to work!

Nublette's First Photo Shoot

For whatever reason, both the site I work for, MyRecipes.com and our sister decorating site, MyHomeIdeas.com, decided to produce features on hosting baby showers at the same time. So, yours truly was asked to be the model for both - we are just crossing our fingers and hoping that no one notices the similarities :) In any case, while the MyRecipes.com article won't go live until next March, the MyHomeIdeas.com gallery feature was published this week! Incidentally, it also features Katherine Culp (in the pink shirt), one of my friends from Davidson, who luckily had some time off from med school to join us!

You can see the gallery here.


A funny sidenote: The present that I am opening in the first slide is actually a kids' dining set shaped like a turtle, which my coworker Ashley received in the mail from a vendor. The MHI team had only an empty bag, but wanted the actual "present opening action," so Ashley ran upstairs to get the turtle dining set sampler, and all was well.

Dragon Strikes Again...

Lately we've taken to calling the ever-amusing Star (our 4-year-old English lab) "Dragon." Now, Star has a number of personality quirks that make her the loveable Star-Baby that she is today, but she's definitely a unique dog. One of her defining characteristics is her snorting and snoring, which tend to get worse when she's excited or otherwise trying to express herself. At time she actually sounds like a little pig! While the allergies have gottten a lot better since we got her on a better diet and some supplements (mmm, fish oil!), Star still snorts. It's really only a problem in the mornings, when she will snore if she's still asleep, or snort/growl at Bojangles when he wakes up and wants to play, but she hasn't had her morning coffee yet. Combine this snorting with the sound of their nails scratching on the polyster dog bed, licking, and scratching so violently that they bang the closet door, and you've got a very noisy bedroom once the alarms go off and the dogs wake up. It's pretty hilarious (once we're awake enough to appreciate the moment).

Besides being her own percussion set, Star is known for her stealth food burglaries. She's smart enough not to beg for human food, but waits for the "opportune moment" to make her move -- and always manages Houdini-like maneuvers that seem far beyond the capabilities of any normal dog. For instance, at Brent's bachelor party at the farm, she snuck into the kitchen at night and devoured an entire plate of brownies that had been sitting on the table. She didn't get sick, but Brent did wake up at 5 am to Star-Baby staring at him with a crazed look in her eye. While we were at the beach, she somehow got the remains of a fish filet out of the kitchen trash can (easily taller than she is) without disturbing anything else. That time we did catch her with the fish skin guiltily hanging from her mouth.

Dragon's latest crime involved at least half a bag of White Cheddar Cheetos. Some friends (and their dog) joined us for dinner last weekend, and while we were all inside eating, we left the dogs on the porch and thought they were all behaving quite nicely. Little did we know that all the while, Star was plotting her next food-napping. After dinner we discovered that all of the Cheetos were gone, and the bag had been ripped open! The situation had Star-Baby written all over it (nothing was knocked over), but we couldn't be sure -- until one of our friends discovered the black dog hair stuck all inside the bag. (The other dogs were yellowish). Brent asked for a replacement bag this week, and needless to say, we're keeping it safe inside our kitchen cabinets this time!

It's Been Awhile!

Between going on vacation for a week and trying to get back in the swing of things at work, haven't had much of a chance to post about all the goings on!

First off, our vacation was great! We loved having the dogs with us at the beach, and they loved the water and sand and everything! We had a nice, relaxing time and enjoyed having some friends down over Memorial Day weekend as well. Ate lots of yummy seafood and we both managed to get pretty sunburned at times!! Hope to post some pictures down the road - and maybe even a video of Star not only retrieving a ball, but retrieving it out of the OCEAN! She denies it now, but the camera don't lie.

I'm somewhere in between 17 and 18 weeks now -- had an appt on Friday at 17 weeks exactly. Everything looked good, and my doctor found the heartbeat pretty quickly, which was a relief. Though apparently I spoke to soon on the last post when I said I all of a sudden looked pregnant, because no less than THREE people told me on Friday that I didn't look pregnant yet! Oh well - maybe just to me and Brent :) (and thanks to some creative dressing as well). But, the good news is that we got our appointment for the "big" ultrasound! On June 25th we should get to see the Nublet and find out if it's a boy or a girl, assuming he/she cooperates with positioning. Yay!!!

I've been reading a bunch lately as well - pregnancy books don't really interest me much because they all say the same thing and well, it's all going to pretty much take care of itself if nothing out of the ordinary happens. "Sacred Parenting" by Gary Thomas is great - talks about looking at parenting as a way that God sanctifies us, much the way that marriage does (as he talks about in our favorite "Sacred Marriage" book). Ina May Gaskin's "Guide to Childbirth" is also a great book with lots of positive stories and a view that birth is a natural process, not a medical emergency that needs to be helped along by doctors every step of the way or else something will definitely go wrong - a breath of fresh air among all the other books about it. (I recently ran into this attitude again when I tried to reschedule my Fri appt for a couple of weeks later so that we could go ahead and get the "big" ultrasound - the nurse freaked out and told me that was unacceptable to have more than 4 weeks between appts so that they could check on me, and tried to guilt-trip me by saying "you know, I would THINK that your appointments would be a PRIORITY." I mean, of course it's a good idea to make sure everything's ok on a regular basis, but it's not like the doctor does much to keep you pregnant, or can do much if something has gone seriously wrong.)

"Baby Bargains" is another good book, kind of like the Consumer Reports of baby stuff - what you do need, what you don't need, how much you need, when to buy it, which brands are best, etc. I've started researching some of the items and we started reorganizing the house this weekend, so that was exciting! Also got to help a pregnant friend pick out colors for her nursery (she was repainting), which was a lot of fun - and I surprised myself in actually feeling like I contributed something to the process. A couple of years ago I would have had no idea of what to suggest - maybe working in the South's ivory tower of decorating knowledge has rubbed off on me through osmosis or something :)

Strangers in a Strange Land

It's been a long couple of days - I was in charge of organizing and carrying out the itinerary for a couple of our New York office visitors.  At nearly every turn, something went wrong - the projector wouldn't work, I blew out the motherboard on my two-week-old laptop by plugging the ethernet cord into a digital phone jack (since when are those jacks the same size??), a program we were demoing as part of the visit wouldn't work as well on my Mac laptop that we used as a replacement, the woman who normally helps set up all these things had to go home sick yesterday, etc...it just started being funny, and I had to laugh.  "But of COURSE that broke!!" I started saying.  But I digress.  I'd met one of the NYC-ers before and had been up there myself, so I knew there were cultural differences.  Not just between NYC and Bham, but between the Time Inc Interactive offices and SPC.  A few choices moments:

Upon arrival at SPC:

New Yorker #1: Where could I get some coffee?

Me: Well, there's some regular coffee in our break room right there - and a fancy coffee machine downstairs - and Starbucks in the cafeteria.

NYC #1: Starbucks drip? 

Me: Um, yes?

NYC #1: What about espresso?

Me: No.

NYC #1: No espresso in the whole building?

Me: No...there's something like it in the fancy machine...but that's not really what it is.

NYC #1: Ohh...[shuffles off to get regular coffee with amazed look on face]

In the cafeteria:

New Yorker #2:[Holds up Mr. Pibb Zero bottle]  What's this?

Me: Um, I think it's Diet Mr. Pibb - you know, like how they call Diet Sprite "Sprite Zero" now.

New Yorker #2: [blank stare]

Cashier: [yells from across the room] It's like Dr. Pepper - it's the Coke product.

Me: Ohhhh...I didn't even realize that's what you were asking!

At lunch:

New Yorker #1: So um, this is going to sound kind of ignorant...

Me: That's ok. We get that a lot.

New Yorker #1: Ok - um, you know the movie Forrest Gump?  Where could I see a house like that?  You know, big and white?  And a pond?

Me: Well, you'd have to go to South Alabama.  About 2 hrs from here.  But we do have a pond on campus, just down the hill...

New Yorker #1: [looks sad] Ohh.

Anyway, good times with that - glad the two days of craziness are over, though!