Month: May 2011

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My first 5k in at least a year and a half

Is coming up on Saturday morning in our neighborhood, so I decided to try out the route last night to make sure I could finish it. I knew I’d be able to complete 3.1 miles, but I wanted to be able to do so without stopping or walking. And I did. Turns out I actually did more than a 5k last night. I had written one of the streets toward the end of the race route wrong on the little map that I took with me, so I just improvised what I thought would equal the full 5k. Guess I improvised a little too much. I ran 3.82 miles in 34:17, which comes out to a pace of 8:59. Since I thought I was only running 3.1 miles last night this would have put me at roughly an 11:00 pace, so I was kind of surprised. I knew I was purposely going much slower than usual, but I was hoping to be able to finish the race on Saturday in 30:00 or under. Now that I’ve plotted the route I did last night I feel a lot better about that 34:17 time, and I think I’ll be able to reach my goal this weekend. I’ll keep you posted.

The race route goes right past our house, so I told R that he and D can sit on the porch and cheer me on as I go by. 🙂 I’ve been trying to think of the last 5k in which I participated, and it would have to have been at least a year and a half ago, before I got pregnant. It’s probably actually closer to 2 years now, sometime in the summer of 2009 I’m guessing. I honestly can’t think which one it was, or when. I did do a 4 mile race last summer, but that doesn’t count – I was almost 8 months pregnant and I just walked it. Well, I did jog the very end of it, but that part was all downhill into the finish line. When you’re that big, you’ll definitely use gravity to your advantage whenever possible.

We also heard some great news last night – our dear friends the Ds welcomed their second baby yesterday evening, a little boy, K. Congratulations!! I can’t wait to meet the little guy. They now have a girl and a boy – how awesome. I’ve noticed the waves of new babies kind of go in spurts, and right now is apparently high tide. This little man, a girl I work with is due with her second boy in just under a month, my old boss is due with her first (a little girl) the end of June, we have 2 friends here that are both expecting boys in August, and another friend in Madison is also due in August, but I don’t think they have found out the sex.

I must admit, all these wonderful new little angels joining the world… I’m starting to get a yearning in the uterus area… 😉

 

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Random

I really like raisins in my oatmeal, but I much prefer when they’ve been cooked right in with the oatmeal itself as opposed to just put on top. They turn out much plumper and juicier, and give the whole batch more flavor. I guess if I let them sit in my oatmeal with some milk long enough they’d plump up, but then my oatmeal would be cold. And what is the fun of cold oatmeal? Not much that I can see, even if the raisins are plump and juicy.

 

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Any old Friday

I apologize – I am remiss in my food reporting duties here. I totally forgot about the culinary highlight of the weekend…

R bought lobster tails Friday night – hooray!! We met at the Milwaukee Art Museum Friday afternoon after work to check out the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit as this was the last weekend of the tour, and he swung by the Milwaukee Public Market on his way to pick up the frozen delicacies. These he steamed and served with drawn butter (because really, what is lobster without the clarified butter?), then concocted another fantastic batch of his mushroom risotto. But what catapulted this risotto into stratospheric status was the topping – homemade bacon! Yes, R now makes his own bacon too. If you’re interested, he is cataloging all of his charcuterie endeavors in a new blog, TinySausage.

We paired 2 great bottles of riesling with the meal, but unfortunately I didn’t take note of the names.

Completely unrelated to our magnificent regular ol’ Friday night meal, check out this bloody mary! It’s from INdustri Cafe in Walker’s Point. I’ve never been there, but since garnish is my favorite part of a bloody, I will definitely be going to get one of these! Is that a block of cheese on top?? ::i die::

Yum!

 

 

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A closer walk

This weekend we took R’s parents to The Fireside, a dinner theater about an hour from our house, to see “A Closer Walk With Patsy Cline”. I’d never been to nor really heard about this place, so I didn’t quite know what to expect, but it was outstanding. Your show ticket includes a meal beforehand, and ours consisted of cream of watercress soup and their homemade bread to start; a breaded chicken breast, 3-4 ribs, a steamed veggie medley, and scalloped potatoes for the entree; and panna cotta with berries and a little pecan pie bite for dessert. It had a very supper club-type feel, but the food was delicious.

And the show? Phenomenal. The theater has a very unique floor plan – think of something similar to how a boxing ring is situated, but on a much smaller scale. It’s designed so the stage is in the middle at basically floor-level, with seating on all four sides plus 2 rows of balcony seats. The rows have plenty of leg room, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a bad seat in the house. It was a layout like I’d never seen, but it worked perfectly. The actors ran to/from the stage from the aisles within the seating area, as well as rising up through the movable floor in the stage itself.

The storyline of the show revolved around an old-time radio dj playing through Patsy Cline’s records, detailing her life as he went. Throughout each segment the actors sang her songs, and the woman who played Patsy herself was amazing. Her voice gave you chills she was that good and that spot-on to Patsy Cline’s voice. I never knew she had such a tragic life, dying at age 30 in a plane crash, just as her career was finally taking off.

If you’ve never been to The Fireside, I highly recommend it. We were definitely some of the youngest there – a number of 40+ year anniversaries and 90+ birthdays were being celebrated – and the whole place has kind of a Branson, MO, vibe (i’ve actually never been there either, but this is kind of how i’d picture it), but the talent they attract is unbelievable and well worth navigating through the sea of bus tours that visit daily. They have a Scrooge Christmas show playing next year that R and I both thought looked really good.

Plus their gift shops aren’t half-bad. I’m definitely not big on gift shop trinkets and junk, but I actually got a beautiful new hummingbird feeder (totally random, yes) and a little something for D. I mean seriously, how could I pass these up??

Go Badgers!

 

 

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We need to teach her to say thank you

Because D hears “Oh my gosh you are the cutest baby!” everywhere we go, multiple times. Seriously, every person that sees her when we’re out in public comments on the living cuteness that is our daughter. And I’m not gonna lie, she is stinkin’ cute. I’ve remarked countless times that I really can’t even believe she’s mine sometimes. I look at her and see that little cherubic beautiful smiley face and just think, “Did that one really come from me? That is actually my kid?”

Today she ran errands with me for about 2 hours and was absolutely awesome. Not one fuss, not one peep of crankiness until in the car right before we got home. But she was hungry and tired, and I couldn’t blame her one bit. She’s too heavy for me to carry around in her infant car seat anymore, so this was my first time holding her while shopping. And I think my left bicep is twice as strong as when I woke up this morning because of it.

Our first stop was the shoe store, which she loved. Takes after Mommy in that regard, much to Daddy’s chagrin. 😉 She helped me return a pair then try on a bunch to ultimately pick out 2 winners, so that was fun. Then we had to run to Target. Or as I like to call it, the $100 store; for no matter how few items are on your list when you walk through its doors, you can never leave without spending $100 or more. Fortunately here I could put her in the cart, saving my arms. She’s never actually sat in the cart seat before, we’ve always snapped her car seat onto the seat rails, so I took in one of those shopping cart seat covers that someone had given us at one of our showers. I liked it – I’m not so much freaked out by all the germs on the carts, even though I did wipe it down with a cart wipe on our way in, but it just helped keep her in there a little better. She’s still pretty small for the cart seat, so the extra padding from the cover helped. She had a blast playing with various items I bought and trying to monkey her way out of the seat and either into the back of the cart or over the handles. We saw our good friend K there, too, so D had some stories to tell her about all of our adventures thus far.

Mom, this is so much fun!

 

Now, how do we get this good behavior to last through her teenage years? Anyone, anyone?

 

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Foreshadowing?

Last night I had my first pregnancy dream since I was pregnant. Odd. I dreamt that I was in labor with really bad contractions, but when the doctor went to check to see how far dilated I was she just pulled the baby out instead. Like it was nothing. And I don’t mean like she pulled the baby out after I’d been pushing as would be standard procedure. She just all of a sudden had my baby in her arms without me doing anything. It was utterly and totally bizarre.

But it was another girl. And she had a really big nose. Not like a big, old man nose, but really long. And it was all smushed down and sideways as it very well could have been had she actually passed through the birth canal with a nose that long, but she hadn’t. She’d been magically lifted from my womb like a ghost passes through a wall – nothing to it. And she had a really long belly button area where they were trying to snip the umbilical cord off. Like it would have left her with a 2 inch long belly button. Gross. I hate outies. (no offense if any of you have an outie, mind you. i just prefer innies)

Then after this long-nosed, long-belly-buttoned little girl was born, the most disgusting part of the dream occurred – the afterbirth. I won’t go into all the gory details (unless you really want me to), because it was a bajillion times worse than what actually did happen after my own real-life labor, but let’s just say it involved a lot of bloody goopy mess falling onto the floor, some of which was frozen. Frozen?? Yep, frozen. I told you I have truly incomprehensible dreams.

No, I am definitely not pregnant.

And I woke up with really bad gas pains.

 

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FF

It’s Friday the 13th today – look out! I always associate Friday the 13th with Halloween for some reason, even though Halloween isn’t even on the 13th of the month. Don’t you? So watch out for black cats, ladders, broken mirrors, cracks in the sidewalk… you know, all the typical omens that will render you unlucky for the next 23 lifetimes if you happen to be so unfortunate as to experience one today.

For some Friday the 13th FF cuteness, get a load of this little guy:

 

Don’t you just want to scoop him up and stick him in your pocket?? TGIF, y’all!