Fitness Mojo

I officially hit my first weight-loss milestone yesterday. I am now down 16 lbs to my pre-Semester at Sea weight. I have been working on lifestyle and diet changes and for the most part I’m enjoying the journey. I seem to have hit both a physical and mental plateau, so I need all yall to send me some good “get your butt in gear” mojo. Work has been crazy (but good) and I’m heading to Canada in a few hours so….wish me luck!

Reset Button?

I am so ready for it to be Friday.

[1] Dear Distracted Driver: Thank you for almost side-swiping me and making my life flash before my eyes. It put a lot in perspective and made me feel a giddy rush of gratitude that I am alive. Actually that feeling hasn’t quite worn off yet. Please watch for crazy chicks on motorcycles, we’ll love you for it.

[2] Dear Karate class: Please stop kicking my @$$. I couldn’t close my fist and I have a helluva purple bruise on my left forearm. It is ON!! No more Ms. Nice Chick!

[3] Dear Frost: Go away. I’m not mad about having to scrape my windows on monday, but I am mad that you’re signalling the end of golf season. I need a few more weeks, you’re like a parent coming home from vacation early without warning.

[4] Dear motorcycle: I’m sorry that I dropped you in the driveway, I am distracted and busy. Forgive me, I promise to always feed you premium unleaded fuel and polish your chrome.

Last week was so…sublime, this week? Not so much. Let’s all turn off the lights, get under the covers, snooze and wake up and forget all this has happened.

And yes, I know that life is good. Great in fact, but even us eternal optimists have an “off” day every now and then.

Happy Halloween Ya’ll!

Not Drunktastic

 

Sorry I’ve been off the grid the last few days. Work is getting busier by the week including new trips on the horizon (a return trip to Miami and a trip up to Toronto and Montreal). After the hustle of the last few weeks I was ready for a mini-road trip and headed down to Maryland where I met up with The Entreprenuer (TE) and The Attorney (TA). TE is a photography aficionado and TA is a “culture vulture” so we hit the Corcoran Musuem for the Annie Leibovitz exhibit: A Photographer’s Life.

The exhibit was really amazing. I loved her portraits of Jamie Foxx, Oprah, Colin Powell and a couple of shots of Serejevo and Rawanda the most. Wandering the museum with TE and TA was also a pleasure because we all felt comfortable going our own way so that we could linger where we wanted and get drawn into whatever compelled us. I loved how most of the photographs were black & white, but every now and then there’d be something in glorious color. Likewise most of the photographs were pretty large, but there were groupings of small prints that forced you to get intimate with the exhibit (wait, that didn’t come out right).  There was also an Ansel Adams exhibit in-house and that was interesting though I’m not a big fan of landscape photography.

We ended up acting a fool and having a good time which led us to drinks and bad, bad (but oooh so good) food at Gladys Knight’s Chicken and Waffles in DC and a late night, raucous showing of Tyler Perry’s new movie: Why Did I Get Married? Now if you’ve ever been to an African American film, at an African American theatre, with a packed African American audience, I don’t need to tell you what went down. Let’s just say that everybody had a good time and thought that the characters on the screen could hear their individual comments.

Sunday, TA insisted on watching Inside Washington so I mustered up the energy to hit the workout room and put in some time on the treadmill to combat the previous evening’s fried goodness and preempt the afternoon’s revelry.  TE picked us up and we headed out to Linganore Winery where we met up with The Politician (TP) for the Jazz and Wine festival. And by festival I mean hundreds of people, in camp chairs with coolers full of crackers, cheese, grapes and summer sausage. It was great to see a diverse crowd (ethnicity, age, families, LGBT, groups of friends, etc) and to relax in the sunshine on a near perfect day listening to the David Bach Consort and wondering when exactly we became our parents? Wait, we’re not our parent’s yet but these two are.

Despite the wonderful nectar available (I highly recommend the Skipjack, TE’s favorite and the Sangria, TA’s favorite) no one was “Drunktastic” at least not in our group. But there were a few others who may have been. To include the 3 women next to us who drank at least 5 bottles of wine, the old white dude who kept hitting on all the older black women, the barefoot hippie teenagers twirling and kicking up dust, and the saxonphone player who kept coming out into the crowd to check out women. I joked at one point that there was only two ways that the day could be better, and one of them actually came to fruition. And thats all I’m gonna say about that!

My Cheating Heart

It has been raining here in New England the last few days and people are startled to find out that I’ve still ridden my bike to work each day. The chief reason is that if you don’t get into the office by 7:30am there’s NO parking left. Seriously, there’s like 100 spots for 300 people. No matter, I actually am finding that I like driving less and less.

The other reason that I have pushed myself to ride my motorcycle in the rain and at night is so that I can get more comfortable with those conditions and situations. I don’t want to be riding somewhere and the sun set or the weather turn unexpectedly and I “freak” out. So I’m trying to learn as much as I can about how to handle conditions now, while I’m in a small town that is VERY motorcycle friendly.

It is starting to get to the point where it may be too cold to be doing a whole lot of outside activities. But I’m going to hang in there as long as possible. I need to find some new hobbies and obsessions because soon it’ll be too cold for golf, too cold to ride, and I’m too committed to what I’m doing now to pick up and travel.

So, my cheating heart is looking for new loves and returning to the old stand-bys.

What are your hobbies? Do they change with the seasons?

A Traveller’s Heart

 

Last night I dreamt and the conversation I was having was in spanish. It was lovely, the sensation, not so much my skills. But it flowed and the feeling and sound of the language on my ears and tongue were….amazing.

I know that I’m starting to get that “itch” to travel, I’m happy where I am right now, but I can’t help but wonder where I could be, who I could be meeting and what I could be learning if I were on the road right now. Is the sun shining in Guanajuato? What kind of classes could I take in Thailand? Can I afford an overland Africa trip?

It doesn’t help that a good friend is off in Latin America hiking Machu Pichu, then heading to the Chilean winelands. A fellow travel blogger is off to Ghana. I’ve been getting Facebook notes from Green Tortoise Travel.

I’m sure part of it is that it is starting to get chilly here in New Hampshire. The days are shorter, the nights longer and I know it is going to be a long, long time before I feel sweat on my brow from the rays of the sun.

My life now consists of a Healthy Eating cooking class that I took a couple of weeks ago, wherein I learned new and amazing things to do with Portabello mushrooms. Cultural pursuits like an evening of woodwind quintent music and artsy fartsy film festival treats. My decisions now are things like: Do I try ice hockey or intro to karate? I’m engaged on a totally different level than when I’m travelling and I like it. But there’s still that….”itch” There’s nothing like the freedom of travel.

So…I’m trying to coerce my family into a destination christmahanukwanza vacation at some resort with sunshine, golf, massages and sand. Because you can take the girl out of the vagabond lifestyle, but you can’t take the vagabond out of the girl. And yes, I realize that a resort vacation is not quite vagabonding, but you try to convince my mom to bunk up in a hostel dorm!

So, do you all have any travel plans in the near/long term? Holler at us in the comments.

Amen to That

 

add more wine, originally uploaded by funchilde.

[1] Thanks to everyone for the well wishes and support for my Mom and My Grams. Things are still kind of ??? but, holding steady for the moment and sometimes that’s like the best thing in the world isn’t it?

[2] Happy Belated Birthday to my most loyal Blog Reader and favorite Ex-Mother-in-Law: Ms. Darleen! In the midst of the madness I totally forgot her special day which I haven’t done in…what 10 years? I’m not going to worry about early-heimers just yet.

[3] Thanks to one of my best buds The Entreprenuer (TE) who called me on Friday afternoon and said:

TE: What are you doing?
Me: I’m at work fool! What are YOU doing?
TE: I’m gonna hop the 8pm flight up to New England, pick me up at the airport.

Fortunately, TE and I are very similar in temperament and expectations and whenever I started to plan out the day(s) she would yell “Quit Planning!” and well, everything worked out. It was just what I needed after the emotional upheaval of the previous week, all the travel of the previous weeks and the fact that there are 4 black folks up here and a familiar caramel brown face was much appreciated and needed more than I knew.

[4] FYI, Heineken Light is awesome. sort of. You can drink 3 in a row, not blow your calorie budget, your cash budget or your “cookies” –whatever that means to you–however you will also not: a) look at all cool b) get any kind of buzz and c) you WILL have to pee seventy-eleven times that night. Just thought you might want to know. 99 calories of goodness. Oh…I just found out Rolling Rock Light only has 86 calories!

[5] The Entreprenuer & I met up with Papaya (1 of the 4 other brown people in town) and her colleague McNutts for drinks and dinner, wherein we discussed: a) Best Dates b) Worst Dates c) Gay Male Identifying paraphenelia (sp?) d) My firmly held belief that anyone who doesn’t own Michael Jackson’s “Off The Wall” album is not “dateable” e) the clarification of “Back Room Racoon” –I can’t even get into that right now f) How I am determined to set Papaya up with one of my best friends aka “The Attorney” because “The Doctor” is currently in lurve with a woman he met at the Burning Man festival and g) Papaya’s firmly held belief that anyone who attends or wants to attend the Burning Man Festival is not “dateable”…..so, I may not have learned anything, but at least I only consumed 297 beer related calories. Amen to That!

Parent’s Parents

Crying, originally uploaded by funchilde.

I wanted to write something tender, poignant and thoughtful about my trip home to accompany my mother to see her mother who is in the last stages of dying from cancer. Unfortunately, I feel strangely detached, like this is someone else’s movie and I just wandered on the wrong set and I just need to back out quietly and no one will be the wiser.

 

Obamania at Dartmouth

 

Obamania at Dartmouth, originally uploaded by AndrewCline.

The Presidential Debates are on campus at Dartmouth tonight. You guys might be watching it live now. Well, so am I because I didn’t win tickets in the campus lottery, but I’m taking my ire out on the hundreds of people milling in the streets in the path of my motorcycle.

This grand event has shut down parking everywhere within a couple miles of The Green (center of campus) and it has been a very great asset to have a two-wheeled method of transport.

This hotbed of cosmopolitan activity also hosted the Telluride Film Festival this past weekend. I DID in fact get tickets to that. I caught 3 of the six films showcased.

Margot at the Wedding, Into The Wild (to be released nationally soon I believe) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (go see this if you ever get the chance-it was amazing).

So, on my last evening in town for a few days, I’m happy to report that I kind of feel like a New Englander. But with a southern drawl yall.

All There Is

I played golf with one of my housemates yesterday. We went out to the local practice holes (free) and walked the course, shot the breeze and enjoyed the sunshine and New England fall weather. There was no one else around and as we crested one hill, we saw a huge doe and her two fawn.

We were crazy close, so close in fact that I was wondering what I would do if she charged us. But I was nonetheless captivated by their beauty, it felt like a gift to happen upon them there. They looked at us, we stood as still as possible so as not to ruin the moment. All there is, moments like these, stretched between bills, work, heartbreak, disappointment, expectations, new directions, second chances, the first blush of love, responsibilities, maturity. Life is so amazing.