Resolutions

For various reasons, I didn't go ahead with a planned post for my favourite albums of the year, but I just couldn't let 2010 slip away completely without mentioning this one. It's amazing. Brilliant. Thrilling, even. I listened to it nearly every day since I got it last spring. I listened to it while I worked, I listened to it while I cooked and cleaned. I listened to it when I walked to meet my best friend on her wedding day. I listened to it while I prepared for my New Year's guests. I listened to it this morning while I nursed my hangover. This album will forever be 2010 to me.







Onwards to 2011. I was thinking long and hard about my new years resolutions. I love resolutions. The word sounds so strong and stalwart, and opportunities to improve myself, to challenge myself are always exciting. I'm not great at keeping New Year's resolutions, however. 12 months is a long time, and it's hard to predict how your needs will change.

So this year, I resolve to make monthly resolutions. The first of every month I'll start with a few resolutions for the month ahead. I'll take stock of how I did the month previous and what I need in the month to come.

So, without further ado:

January Resolutions

1. Run 15 times. 2010 was not a good year for my fitness. I kept a half-hearted workout routine going, but I was no where near competition. I pretty much embarrassed myself at the one race I ran. Then, a few months ago I realized that my sporadic running (along with a few other factors) had resulted in an injury. My physiotherapist had me stop running entirely for a couple of months, and it sucked. It also strengthened my resolve. Now that I have his ok, I need to make running a part of my lifestyle again. But I'm out of shape and not sure how well I can do. So instead of setting a goal for distance or time, I'm just going to commit to pulling on my running shoes half the days of the month.

2. Stick to the January Budget: Like I said above, 12 months is a long time. As it's impossible to predict what my needs will be that far in advance, I'm going to do month by month budgets.

3. Have the house as clean on February 1st. as it was today. Boyfriend and I get pretty slack with the cleaning, honestly. Yesterday we scrubbed from top to bottom, and it looks fantastic. Except for some dirty dishes it was nearly as clean today. I'm going to try to do that again.

3.(a) Fold my laundry and put it away. I have a terrible tendency to leave my clean laundry heaped in a basket unfolded, and just haul things out as needed. It's not a good system. In January, I'm going to try to stop that.

4. Study French. I don't know French, at all. Can you believe it? It's so embarrassing. I took French until 9th grade, but due to lax teachers I didn't learn much. I opted out in Highschool, and in University I studied Latin and German instead. I start French classes on January 13th, and I'm going to make a real go of it this time.

There are my four for January. Wish me luck, I'll let you know how it goes.

A hard admission

I only started this blog a few weeks ago, but something fairly major has changed since then. When I started running was one of the most important things in my life and my goal of running the Cape to Cabot was uppermost in my thoughts. If you've been reading through, you may have noticed I stopped writing about running, or only mentioned it in passing. The reason for this was that I was grappling with myself, slowly coming to terms with the fact that I had been too ambitious and set a goal I wasn't ready for.

The workouts began to overwhelm me. They took everything I had, and it took me too long to recover from them. I started to dread them. There have been plenty of times that I've had to force myself to run, but this was different. Running had lost it's joy. I tried to push myself forward anyway. I told myself that it wouldn't be a challenge if it wasn't hard, and that if I just got through I would feel much better.

But that simply isn't the case. Last night my father and I had a long talk. We went over the runs I had done, how I felt, and what my expectations were. The conclusion was obvious. I would probably be able to finish the race, but it wouldn't be a good run. I may have had to walk parts and I was risking injury. It was a hard thing to decide. I've been telling people for 9 months that I was going to do this, and I've got a lot of pride. But I want to recapture running. To enjoy it and do it for fun again. I'm worried that doing this race now would ruin that. So I'm leaving it to next year.

In which Emily runs 18k, witnesses an accident and makes soup

Before today the longest I'd ever run was 16k. I've done this distance a few times but never gone beyond it. Today the schedule called for 18k so away I went. I tend not to think about running while running, but it was hard not to today. I was very aware of how everything felt, and not in a good way. It was even worse because I ran over the same terrain three times. The time dragged and it felt very long.

I was heading up the last hill, about half a kilometer from home, I heard a crunch and scream of metal. I broke into a sprint as saw a car hit a building and careen through the intersection. It came to a stop on the other side, and I ran forward as fast as I could. As I got there, people were starting to converge and two were already calling for help. Fortunately, no one seemed to be hurt, but the older lady who was driving stayed in the car just in case. We were close to the central fire station, so it didn't take long for help to arrive. I gave a statement to one of the firemen and then ran the rest of the way home. It was very hard to start running after being stopped for so long, my knees felt creaky, but it was only about three minutes.

After two big glasses of blueberry juice and a very hot shower, Andrew and I started Sunday's soup. Being so tired, I decided to take more of a supervisory role so I could sit with my feet up. It was a very simple soup, potato and leek. Basically, you just boil a whole mess of leeks and potatoes for about an hour, then mash and stir in cream, butter and parsley. Very simple and good.

Yesterday's hill sprints really took a lot out of me and work was really stressful. So, to relax on my first evening off of the week I decided to cook pasta sauce and bake chocolate chip cookies from scratch. I should confess, I have a kind of "from scratch" complex when it comes to baking. I got it from my mother, who has never and will never use a mix. There are four main reasons I will never use a mix:

1. It doesn't taste as good. It just doesn't.
2. Most mixes contain weird ingredients and additives. Why bother with that if you don't have to?
3. Mixes don't really save you that much time. I've seen mixes where you have to add milk, eggs and oil. So all the mix does is combine the flour, baking powder and sugars for you. Is that really that difficult.
4. In "from scratch" baking, you can taste the love.

Anyways, I consider myself something of a chocolate chip cookie connoisseur, and there's one recipe I always found trumps all the others. It's the recipe that comes on the back of the Baker's brand chocolate chips. It can't be improved upon. I don't always use Baker's chips, but I long ago copied down the recipe and fixed it to my Betty Crocker Cookbook. My only advise is to turn the cookie sheet every five minutes while to cookies are baking, so they cook more evenly.

As for the sauce, it was nothing original, but impossible to mess up. Dice about 6 cloves of garlic (Did I mention I have a pop chop? Envy me.) Cook the garlic in about a half cup of olive oil until it's soft but not brown, add a can of diced tomatoes, oregano (fresh if you have it, and I did!) salt, pepper and whatever other seasonings you fancy. Give the tomatoes a quick mash if you don't like big hunks of tomato in your sauce (I don't) and let simmer for as long as possible (at least an hour). We had it over cheese totellini that was on sale at the grocery store.

It was a good time and made for a delicious dinner, but I probably should have been resting more. I completely collapsed afterwards and realized there would be no way to get my 8k in this morning. I'll try again this evening.

What a difference a day makes

Yesterday at 6:30am it was light enough for me too get dressed without turning the light on. Today I needed the light. It's that time of year now. I don't know what time it was, but I was on my fifth hill sprint when I noticed the sky over the harbour was a bit pink. (Oh yes, I was doing hill sprints at dawn)

To make up for two days off I spent two days working. As in, I worked from 9am to 5pm and then from 6pm to 10pm. Factor in a combined total of 2.5 hours on the bus and a 6k fartlek and you can see why those 48 hours took so much out of me. I was so busy I needed to get my mother to bring bread to my office because I didn't have time to get to the grocery store. Also, by September 15th I had already broken 4 Christmas ornaments. Still the Queen of Clutz!

These early morning runs are really starting to get to me. I'm barely awake from them and they leave me spent for the rest of the day. Especially now that they're getting longer and I need to start getting up earlier to compensate. It's only a few more weeks, I suppose. Great, now I'm freaked that the Cape to Cabot is so soon...

Yesterday turned out to be pretty good after all.

The run wound up being one of the best I'd had for months. I started out slow so I promised myself that if I got to the end of Bannerman Park and I still felt like going home, I could go home. Well, by the end of Bannerman Park I was flying. Once I was over the large hills at the start of my run I hit the level ground with a renewed strength. The golden slanting rays lit up the final burst of green and made my eyes ache. I passed a ballpark that had just had it's final mow and the sweet smell of grass on the sharp autumnal wind opened my lungs and my chest and sparked a store of energy I didn't know I had. By the time I reached Quidi Vidi Lake I felt as though I were a machine, well oiled and indefatigable. I felt fit, I felt strong and I ran back up faster than I had run down.

Meanwhile my lovely boyfriend had decided that if it had to be premade sauce it ought to at least be loaded with cream and cheese, accompanied by chilled white wine and followed by peanut M&Ms. After a hot shower I was able to slip my aching legs into some fuzzy sweats and curl on the couch with fettuccine alfredo and old Blackadder episodes. You can't ask for more out of life than that.

Today there is no running, but there is work, second work and a birthday party for a friend. Off I go!

A bit of whining at 3:30 on a rainy Thursday

Ever had a day when everything seems to be a dark blue? Everything is normal and fine, but all the zing has gone out?

As you may have guessed, I'm having one of those today. I slept to late to run before work. Thankfully I'm not working tonight so I can run then. But I feel so tired and heavy. It's 8k, which isn't that long, but it seems an impossible stretch righ now. The boyfriend and I were going to try a new recipe for dinner, but as I won't be back from my run in time we're probably just going to have spaghetti with sauce-in-a-jar again. There's very little that's as depressing as jarred sauce when you were hoping for something a bit more special.

My other big complaint is about microsoft word. Four pages into a project for work I realize that I need to adjust the tabs so that everything is nicely lined up. I need it to look like columns, without actually having the dividing line. There is no way to do this. I can't even just line things up with the spacebar, as whole paragraphs will start jumping around unexpectedly. I'm not one to rant about computer companies, but does Microsoft think we can't be trusted to create our own paragraphs? Must they protect us from ourselves getting wildly out of hand with margins? Will the world end if we abandon the standard half-inch indentations?