Road Trip

The major plot point in my 2013 nano novel was a road trip.  Yesterday I had the luck to be able to take an unexpected eight hour road trip.  Leaving my honey at home, I travelled to the outskirts of St Louis to coach a team at a women's water polo tournament.

We started at two o'clock in the afternoon to sunny, clear skies.  Our incredible driver managed over four hours straight in the driver's seat before we had to stop for gas.  Amazingly enough, that means I went more than four hours without stopping to go to the bathroom.  I'm not sure that's ever happened on the road before!

Once I started driving, it got interesting.  The forecasted snowstorm decided to finally show itself.  It looked a lot like this photograph except that it was darker and thankfully our highway was divided.  

My knuckles were white, and the car was slow, but I kept us safe and we kept on going.  

Then we were through the storm and our first fearless driver got back behind the wheel to finish off the trip.  We had some rain, some icy roads, and we passed a huge accident, but we're here now and we may even get a chance to see the Gateway Arch in between games.  

Plus, no matter what happens at the pool, we've got the return trip on Sunday to look forward to!

January Review

Looking back on January from the end it seems like it's been mostly cold and snowy here.  Five extreme cold days with no school, and lots of shovelling snow.  On the other hand, I started out the month in Florida, so I might just have a very short memory.

It's fun to spend a few moments to look back at what people have said in the comments section, in emails, on the phone or in person.  One thing I have realized is that different people read this blog in different ways.  Some read every day, and others binge read.  That is, a whole bunch of posts at one time to catch up.  Makes me no never mind how you read, just so you do!

tRa spotted my reflection in the glass as I took a photo of the cat and puzzle.  Excellent eagle eyes!  I didn't realize it was there, as I am usually quite careful about showing pictures of myself in the blog.

Kelly reminds me that just because I can't post doesn't mean I can't write. I can always double post when it gets fixed.  Good point to remember if the website goes down again.

Over twenty people liked the news of my puzzle championship.  I posted here and mentioned it on facebook.  It's easier to like things on facebook than on my blog.  

One of my cousins appreciated the strategy of the big calendar with big red Xs.  She thought it might be obsessive to run out and get one, but I think it's efficient.  Of course, I just printed a small one off because I'm too lazy to hang anything on the wall.

And finally, thank you Jim for posting another awesome youtube video of the master Pete Seeger.  I could watch him over and over again.

Chemical Reaction

Science has never been something that I am good at.  I barely made it through Biology and Physics in high school, and I chose Marine Biology and Marine Geology in college for a reason.  (I actually managed to dissect a clam.)

My honey can't quite get his head around the fact that I managed to get out of higher education without any knowledge of chemistry.  That's probably because he is pure scientist.  He is also a little nuts.  You see, lately it's been a little cold here in the upper Midwest, but he continues to ride his bicycle to work every day.  Even when it was 25 below zero.

I bought him some hand warmers because I thought they might help him stay warm in cold weather.  And he loved them, but was dismayed because they are designed to be used only once, good for ten hours of toastiness.

Then he realized that the warmth generated was from a simple chemical reaction.  The hand warmers need oxygen to generate heat.  If you deprive them of oxygen, say by putting them in a jar, as soon as the presence of a reactant is removed, the reaction will stop.

And if one jar is good, aren't two jars better?  Yes, they seem to be, as the same pair of hand warmers has been warming his hands on his bike rides since last Thursday.  Not every ride, as tonight's temperature of 20° doesn't require hand warmers.

My honey is tickled by the following answer to an FAQ on the product's website.

Are the warmers reusable/rechargable?
No.  Our warmers are designed for one time use.

Sorry to contradict the company, but it's looking like they'll be good for intermittent one hour periods over more than a week.

Better living through chemistry!

We'll miss you, Pete!

Pete Seeger always loved to get the audience to participate.  He supposedly said, "There is no such thing as a wrong note, just as long as you're singing along."

We'll see you in our dreams, Pete . . . 

2014 Puzzle Champeens!

This past weekend I had the pleasure of competing in a jigsaw puzzle contest.  Sponsored by Wells Fargo, teams of four race each other to put together a 500 piece puzzle as fast as they can.  We were a team of three in the family division, our fourth laid low by illness.

It all started way too early for our high school competitor, who was quite tired from a sleepover.  But we got there in time to get a smaller table under the skylights, which was what we wanted.  The girls went off to a local Starbucks to bring back hot chocolate (our team name) and sweets for breakfast.

At 9am, the go signal was given and we started working.  The youngest on the horses, the high schooler on the frame, and I took care of sorting and organizing the pieces.  Then I worked on the all white sky.  Ninety minutes later the first team was done.  Luckily for us, it was an all-adult team, so we continued on.  The second and third place adult teams soon followed.

We each had different ways of working the puzzle and we changed sections frequently, but we were humming along in harmony.  We knew we were doing well because the volunteers kept coming by our table to look at our progress.  At 11am we were told that they were extending the contest by an additional half hour, as no family teams had finished.

And, in fact, no family team did finish.  However, our team had the fewest pieces (20) left to be put in when time was called at 11:30.  So Team Hot Chocolate! was declared the winner of the family division!  The girls were extremely excited and our news was immediately tweeted.  While we were waiting for the prizes to be awarded, we put in the last twenty pieces so we could take a photo of our finished puzzle.

The awards were four winter carnival scarves, one for each team member, plus $50 in gift cards for movie theaters and $50 in gift cards to a group of restaurants.  Plus the awesome reward of just being the fastest family puzzlers in town.  Sweet!

An interesting final note:  You might notice in the photo that there is an extra puzzle piece on the table. That is a double of one of the edge pieces, so our puzzle actually had 501 pieces in the bag.  Wells Fargo needs to have their puzzles made of a better quality next year, 'cause Hot Chocolate! is planning on a repeat!

30-day fitness challenges

Back in December when I wrote about trying to get fit, a reader asked if I had seen the 30 day fitness challenges website.  I hadn't, so I checked it out.  There are a lot of different challenges and as far as I can tell, they are all brutal!  Most of them I couldn't do to save my life, but I thought that I should try and find one that I could at least attempt.

After looking at the squat, abs, burpee, plank, butt, splits, and crunch challenges, I rejected them all as too difficult and likely to cause injury to my soft body.  I was intrigued by the Beach Body Challenge, but I had never heard of so many of the exercises, I figured it was unattainable.  There are more challenges, but most of them seemed even worse.  

I finally settled on the easy push-up challenge.  It starts at 3 push-ups on Day One, and by Day Thirty you can do 20 push-ups!  Unfortunately, by Day Three my arms were killing me, and even after a day of rest, I was unable to complete Day Five.  Apparently, I can't do very many push-ups day after day after day.

Obviously, I needed an easier exercise in order to build up my arms.  I decided to do wall push-ups. But the easy push-up challenge was definitely too easy, if all I was doing was wall push-ups.  So I started the regular push-up challenge.  That starts at 15 push-ups on Day One and climbs to 40 by the last day of the challenge.  Plus, there are fewer rest days, which seemed reasonable for wall push-ups.


What's cool is that if you look closely, the poster shows the woman doing one-arm push-ups.  Maybe on Day Thirty I could do some one-armed wall push-ups!

Currently, I'm on Day 18, which means that I will do 29 wall push-ups this morning.  And my arms will be sore by the end of the repetitions.  I'm already looking beyond the end of this challenge though.  Will I be strong enough to return to the easy push-up challenge?  How far might I make it before failure this time?  Should I double down on the wall push-ups, one set in the morning and one in the evening?  Should I move on to some other challenge, most likely adapting it to make it easy enough for me to actually accomplish it?

I don't know yet, but I have twelve more days of wall push-ups to figure it out. What's fascinating to me, is that I'm in shape enough to tread water for an hour or two all the while playing strenuous water polo, but I'm still in really bad shape on land.

Working on changing that . . .

Hubris

Pride goeth before destruction.

Proverbs 16:18

The day after I bragged about writing 211 posts without missing a day, I had an hour of panic.  The server that I use for this blog was not working.  At first I thought I was doing something wrong, but no, the site was definitely not functioning correctly.  

Great timing, my sarcastic brain reasoned.  I kept checking every few minutes, but after it still wasn't behaving itself, I decided to limit my obsession to trying to connect every fifteen minutes.  I had plenty of other writing and reading to do anyway.

Luckily, whatever bug was hanging things up got taken care of by some really smart, invisible bug fixers, and I could write and post my blog as usual. Whew!  

The situation reminded of a mistake I made a couple of weeks ago.  I scheduled the post for the wrong time, and my post didn't come up at 6am as it usually does.  An alert reader called me to make sure everything was OK. I quickly fixed my error and I'm not sure anyone else even noticed.

Those two incidents got me thinking.  As proud as I am of my streak and as much as I will do my best to continue it until I go back to teaching full-time, failure is an option.  The server could be down, the power could go out, or heaven forfend, I could make some bigger mistake, and there would be no post.

And that would be allright.  I'd be sad and probably mad, but I would survive. (I'm sure all my readers would manage to endure.)  I would start counting at Day One again.  Because failure is just the chance to have a new beginning. And don't we all love a new beginning?