I see a triathlon team in my future

I'm much more obsessed with the whole triathlon thing this year than I was at this point a year ago. Work has blocked the stupid villages game so I've been forced to read blogs and NYTimes for distraction during simulation runs. All the blog reading, plus some talking with my favorite exercise instructor lead me to RSVP for an information session about a real training group, so I'm going to go learn more about them tomorrow afternoon.  I'm particularly curious about the fees, because it seems like this group is providing a lot more support than other local clubs, which is cool and all, but probably means they would want more than $35 a year. 

Last night was a jog with some coworkers who are doing the 10 miler later this year. It was exciting to happily keep up with the slow group. We did 4:1 jog/walk with a long walk break between the 1st and second mile and I loved how good it felt. Not like I could actually breathe steadily enough to say long sentences, but I did wheeze multiple words in a row sometimes. After all these years of trying jogging and giving up and trying, it actually is getting better! Crazy!

I've ordered my road bike and am excited to pick it up tomorrow. I have to make sure that I don't get 20-miles-worth of excited the first time I head out because I'm doing the GW Parkway 5K on Sunday, and that will be less fun to try hard at if my legs are jello.

I'm also looking forward to trying to eat all the kale that will be starting in about a month. I've signed up for my farm again.  It turns out they do a group delivery to the building next door to where I work for a $100 discount off of the normal door-to-door delivery price, so I'll have to lug my veggies home and up my own stairs once a week,  but I think the +$100 is worth it.

Basically there is lots of excited feelings out here right now. I'm sure that it is intricately related to the fact that Spring Is Here!! It's been beautiful outside, it's finally not dark so early at night, and it's not humid yet! YAY Spring!

(Is it worth suffering the coldest winter of my life to feel this excited? Actually, maybe it was)

No bike yet

I still haven't got the bike. The bike stores I like aren't big enough that I can wander around and be anonymous, which is my favorite way to shop, so working up the courage to go in and actually talk to someone is taking a while.
I did however buy myself some other presents, including a set of paperback Harry Potter books 1-6 which was deliciously discounted and a heart rate monitor/watch thing, but it was sort of gigantor on my wrist, so I'm waiting to hear back from the people about whether I can return it for a slightly smaller watch part

I'm on track to justify the HRM/watch as I gear up to this summers activities. Overcoming the winter-of-sloth feels wonderful. People from work are doing a sort of group training thing to get ready for the Army 10-miler in October (which I did not sign up for), but I'm hoping to keep up with their training and do the Navy 5-miler at the end of September. Yesterday I had a nice (as far as jogging slowly can ever feel nice) 3+ mile outing and am excited for the 5K coming up two Sundays from now.

Besides running around (literally) I've signed up for a glassworking thing. I think that I will not actually be doing much of the hot glass stuff, but it will be neat to go and see the workspace. It's not particularly metro close, so (circling around to my first point) I need to get a bike!

Last point, I'm excited that I might've found some co-workers who will come swim laps with me occasionally. And one of them might sign up with me for a lake swim at the end of May. It will probably be cold. I'm still trying to talk myself into paying someone so I can go do a mile of splashing in cold water.

Summary

I spent last weekend out in CA for a beautiful wedding reception and a great time visiting friends and realized, in talking with them, that while I am apparently capable of updating facebook with meaningless nothings, the non-archiving nature of facebook means that when I try to remember what I spent the last 6 months doing, I have nothing to fall back on. So I'm going to try to put up a little more here, even if it's as brief as a facebook update.

• I was totally looking for a way to rent sewing machine time a few weeks ago, and now there is one! Awesome! And it's super metro close
• I'm madly in love with turkey, brie, honey mustard and baby spinach sandwiches (on thick multigrain bread of course!)
• I bought a macbook in January and am loving it. I try to do the two finger scroll thing on all laptops now and basically look like someone who has no idea how to use a trackpad.
• I hope to buy a new bike this weekend to replace and surpass the one that got stolen last summer. I can't do another triathlon unless I have a bike.

Click-in, aka clipless

4th of July was slightly underwhelming. Hazy light rain made the big DC fireworks show less awesome. But the weekend wasn't all that lame. I went to REI and found real bike shoes on sale and got click-in pedals!

Then I was excited by my new toys and was playing with the pedals and shoes and ended up getting my left shoe locked to my right pedal. I couldn't get it unattached so took it to my local bike shop and they couldn't do it with their hands either, so we ended up putting the new pedals on my bike and then using the leverage of the bike to get the shoe detached. oops.

This meant that I got the teeny tiny pedals on there sooner than I wanted, but it wasn't as hard as I'd thought it would be to get the hang of clicking in and out. I didn't fall at all while practicing on a flat empty road, and then found it easy to ride in to work this morning. Then this evening, when going on a bike ride, I slowed suddenly as I realized I was missing my turn and toppled straight sideways onto my elbow and hip. oops, again. I'm fine, and it actually was a little reassuring. While I hope to not fall over too many more times, it really didn't hurt much and it was pretty much the worst surface to fall slowly onto (packed dirt path with some gravel), so now I can believe everyone who told me that it wouldn't hurt too much and would mostly just be embarrassing.

I did however learn that I need tighter helmet straps because my helmet wobbled much more than I'd like it to if my head were about to come into contact with the ground.

I've been really tempted to jump in and get a road bike, but the used bike venues aren't presenting any reasonable opportunities and it would be sort of financially dumb to buy a new one this summer. So my goal is to get a whole bunch more miles on my clunky hybrid (now all frankensteined up with clipless pedals) and then I will feel justified spending money for a new one next spring/summer.

mmmm shiny

Karmic food balance

Since the last post was so tasty looking, the world decided to karmically balance my luck with food.

Today I made a giant salad for lunch with the snap peas and broccoli.  And! I discovered after tearing up half the lettuce, I got extra protein because the lettuce had aphids!

I washed them off of the second half of the lettuce and killed the ones that crawled onto my desk, but mostly just tried to chill out about it and think of all the dirt I must've eaten as a child.

Aphids apparently are very robust because the lettuce had been in the fridge since Thursday and the ones that made it out onto my desk had been salad-dressing-ed in addition to being refrigerated.

Sadly, even without the aphids, it wasn't a very tasty salad. Maybe some dried cranberries or other sweet sort of thing would've helped.

CSA Week 4

It was a very green week for vegetables.  Lettuce, spring onions, broccoli, snap peas, a massive amount of collard greens, and some herb of some sort.

I was feeling sort of daunted by the extreeem  mass of collard greens, but luckily a friend sent me a link today to a blog that had an appealing looking recipe on it: Greens Gratin So I stopped by the store on the way home to buy some gratins :)

To start with I tore up a big pile of collard greens, and could've put in even more. The rectangular pan there is about 8x12 and the greens were a little heaping, but could have been more stacked in there. I sort of steamed the greens by putting the pan on heat with a little water sprinkled on the greens, and then loosely covering the dish with a round lid from a different pan.  Meanwhile, I chopped up two of the spring onions and started cooking them in butter. (As an aside, I've been loving my spring onions cooked in a frying pan with little or no oil, but these, swimming in oil, smelled delicious, and might've spoiled my taste buds for the basic onions)

After the steaming, the greens got bright and tasty looking.  The buttery onions had flour and milk mixed in to make a sauce. Then parmasan cheese was stirred in to make it a tasty cheese sauce.  I had to add more milk to make the sauce less thick so I could goop it over the collard greens.

Once the greens had sauce on them, I sprinkled on feta cheese and walnuts and put it in the oven to bake for about 20 minutes.

Tada!

I liked this dish much more than last years polenta based effort, but will probably make the polenta dish with the rest of the greens

Bikey dreams

I got my first CSA box of the year today and was good and ate some vegetables. I took pictures and will probably be posting weekly vegetable pictures like last year, but not today.

I cooked some spring onions and asparagus until the onions were browned and deliciously sweet. mmm. That was the good part of dinner. I also cooked up a giant handful of kale (wait until you see the pictures of how much kale I have to eat in the next few days!) and enjoyed that much less, but seasoning salt makes most things (except for my truly disgusting crab pasta adventure from a few months ago) taste better. That part of dinner was virtuous. But not really tasty.

I also got a pint of strawberries and was sad to find they were much less tasty than the strawberries I'd picked myself last weekend.  However I overcame this disappointment and ate all the strawberries because they surely wouldn't start tasting better with time :)

I will stick with kale-sausage-pasta as a relatively tasty way to get myself to eat crazy amounts of the stuff.

I also went for a bike ride on the new hand-me-down bike and am thrilled to report that I am less slow on a road bike, but I am sad to say that the hand-me-down is really too tiny and hurts my arms in weird ways and makes my knees almost hit my arms in a clown-car-like fashion. So maybe I will get a more my-sized used road bike this summer. Or maybe I will just be tough on my extremely un-sporty looking toodling bike (aka hybrid)

Also also, it is officially summer. There were thunderstorms multiple evenings this week and it is almost 80 degrees and 75% humidity at 10:30pm. Gah.