The Blog: Spellbound by our own imperfect lives...

#1 sign of spring. Here's a pile of my winter clothes ready to go into storage. Regis says he loves this about Minnesota that we don't wait for warm days and the official start of spring, we just get out the stuff and act as if it's here. Velour and faux now leopard are just not done after March 1st with that as your philosophy. I hung the down coat in the closet and had Peter carry all the winter sweaters to the basement. The long underwear are gone for the year.   #2 sign of spring. Regis went out to pick up dog poop in the back yard. He always takes a box and I thought there was some great irony in his choosing of this box. Read the label at the top.                                         Even Kramer has been seeking the sun. He sits by the back patio door all afternoon and waits to go outside. He gets cold when he's out very long but as soon as he comes in, he wants to go out again.     #3 sign of spring. Anyone who has a dog knows what this mess is all about.

        I shipped out to Mankato early this morning for shopping. I intended to check out the clearance sales at Kohl's and TJ Maxx. I shopped Kohl's pretty well...found a skirt for nine bucks with a 20% discount. Great deals on some Vera Wang stuff that I love. Got a great Jones New York leopard t-shirt at TJ Maxx for $3.00 . Good grief it was a hoot. After shopping, I headed to Eagle Lake to celebrate Elliot's first birthday with his mama and his other grandma and grandpa. He seemed to be unphased by the continued hoopla but we had a nice time.   Elliot's getting the idea of unwrapping packages but he still likes the paper almost as much as what's inside.      Elliot for bath toys and books. He's examining the Elmo bath toy here. He loves Elmo. And his mama.      He can't believe we kept cupcakes from him for the first year of his life. He certainly knows how to get every crumb of pleasure out of a cupcake!   This is Elliot with his blow-up clown

It was a rough week, sports fans. I had a bad case of the winter blues yesterday that required a glass of wine to subdue. Thank God for the grape. I think I said that earlier in the week, too. We've been watching the Olympics. I love the human interest stories but I'm tired of the medal race. Isn't it enough competition that they race to the bottom of the hill? There was a funny column in the paper last Sunday about what (in the opinion of the writer) is or isn't a sport. I have some opinions about that myself. I went on a rant one day at lunch (did I write about this before?) about the player for the Twins who is thinking about whether or not to accept a contract for, I think it was, twenty million dollars. That is obscene. Of course, the sports fans think I'm a lunatic and that might have something to do with my rants about the sports section of the newspaper. Never mind about that right now. But really, whatever his name is....twenty million dollars and you

I've tried to fix the stupid paragraphing errors in the post below. They will not fix. Regis is learning about html but he doesn't get my questions.

Sometimes I write a brief version of what appears on Facebook here later and in a fuller form. This is one of those times. I'm in transition to the hyper-fast electronic media. Thinking I won't make it all the way being the slow processor that I am. I was going to exercise yesterday afternoon but when I went in the bedroom, there was this big patch of sunshine on the bed so I took a nap in it instead. I opened the drapes wide and moved my pillow so I was right in the sun.   Last week, I ran three miles one day. I have piddled around with running a few minutes here and there and I decided I was going to do it, run three miles. On Tuesday, I went in, got on the treadmill and away I went. It nearly killed me but I made it to three miles. I guess that's what people mean when they say they sweat. I have spent most of my life avoiding that particular body function, preferring more sedentary activities like reading, so this was a new thing for me.  I can't say I enjoyed d

I bought this cool faux snow leopard vest at the HyVee gift shop today. It had been 60 bucks and was on sale for 16. What a deal. When I walked into the house wearing it, the men couldn't quit laughing. Regis had to hunt up this picture of Sonny and Cher right away. I get no respect.

  This is our Valentine tree. It has red chili peppers and paper hearts on it. I love it. It's been a very nice weekend. Tiffany and Elliot came over yesterday and spent the day. Elliot toddles all over the house, laughs at his mama's antics, and likes to play with his toys. We had dinner at Whiskey River before they left. Good day for laughing. I had taken two naps during the day so Regis and I could attend the New Primitives show at Patrick's last night. It was great fun but we got jostled around quite a bit by the youthful crowd. I think in all the years we've been married, we've been out past midnight twice. Last night was one of the nights so today we're dragging a little. Good day for music. We went over to see Alex and Ella today. Ella told us she was very sorry but Valentine's Day was over last week. She's such a hoot. We played a couple games of Hungry Hungry Hippo and saw the new room they're putting in the attic. Good day for little ki

I was reading a Runner’s World magazine this morning on the treadmill. My knee pained me yesterday so I took a couple days off from running and was doing a nice, slow paced walk so I could read. The article is by John Bingham and is called Rust Buster . I couldn’t find it online to provide a link but I’m going to copy a couple paragraphs here. I think this could apply to any kind of exercise that we embrace. (The whole essay is on page 50 in the Best of Running December 2009 issue.) In a column a few years back, I wrote that I had come to think of my running shoes as erasers. Each footstrike rubbed away damage from earlier years, when I had smoked, drunk, and eaten too much. Little by little, I was wiping the slate clean. Now I realize my running shoes are more powerful than erasers. They are the steel wool that scraped away years of rust that had accumulated on my body and my spirit- and kept it from coming back. George Sheehan, one of our sport’s great philosophers, wrote that ru

The other day our coffee maker took a turn for the worse. We debated about ordering a part that might fix it, sending the broken one to Iowa to exchange for a new one, ordering one from Amazon, or just going down to the local hardware store to buy a new one. Regis went the local route. Those people are so nice and so helpful and we like to support the local economy. Except when we buy from Amazon, which we do a lot. The new coffee maker arrived today (the hardware store had to order it...probably from Amazon) and we'll have coffee in an hour! Hurray! I love Thursday night before a long weekend. The three days lay out there like the yellow brick road. We have no big plans which means we can decide from moment to moment what we want to do. Regis has to work through some puzzle about web development....html something or other....but not me. I can turn my brain off tomorrow at 3:00 and not turn it back on until Tuesday. Hurray! There's an article in the new Rolling Stone about

The bunny ears are gone. See picture below.

  Here's the synchronized snow blower action going on in the neighborhood this afternoon. There were two more snowblowers down the street that I couldn't get in this shot...and several people across the street with shovels. You can see how high the snow banks are. We have a hard time backing out of the driveway because you can't see what's coming down the street.   This is the apple tree with the little shriveled up and snow-covered apples left from last summer. On warm days, the squirrels wake  up for a while and eat them. I suppose they taste good if you're that hungry. Aren't they pretty? I have a concrete bunny in the garden and these are his little ears peaking out of the snow. He's about two feet tall so you know the snow is deep. I can't remember the last time that the garden was completely covered in snow all winter. I'm grateful that football is finally over. Regis doesn't watch it much but it seems to completely invade the cultural

I've always been a list maker and have passed that on to Tiffany. When she started school this semester, I gave her a small notebook which is what I use at home and at school. I keep a running list of things to do. Not big projects like "paint the bathroom" but things like call the dentist and those kinds of details that I tend to forget. And so, I was excited to hear this author on the Daily Show last week... I started reading a book called The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. He's a surgeon and he talks about an idea for using checklists in ICUs to decrease incidents of central line infection (he explains this very well and the results are dramatic) can be used in many other fields. It might sound like my past obsession with the book Oranges (John McPhee) but it's really very good. I like non-fiction a lot when it isn't about disasters and disease and zombies. I copied the weather forecast from the National Weather Service at the bottom of this pos

  Regis made the President's List at South Central for fall semester. Here he is contemplating one of the more difficult spreadsheet assignments. He worked very hard and he deserves the honor. I've had a very nice Saturday. (I'm having a bear of a time typing this, though, because the dog has his head laying on my arm.) I got up at 7:00 which is like way over-sleeping for me. What happened to the 4:00 wake-up call? I sat around and drank coffee for a while, thinking I would skip the workout this morning. But then I felt drawn to go, so I went. It was a satisfying session, which they all are not. Hard to say why. I planned to pick Ella up and go to Target, but she wasn't feeling well so I went by myself. I poked around for a long time, looking at Valentines, St. Patrick's day t-shirts, baby pajamas, and kitchen stuff. I bought Ella a pair of Valentine's Day leggings and a t-shirt with sparkly hearts. I wanted to get something equally flashy for the littl

Regis looked at my blog stat counter the other morning and noticed that I’m closing in on 10,000 hits. Maybe because we watched Julie and Julia last night, he got interested in how many readers I have…and maybe he’s thinking I’ll get a big fat book contract and be rich and famous. Or maybe not. He thought I should write a special commemorative piece for the big 10,000 roll-over like when you were a kid and your car’s speedometer rolled over to some big milestone. We started this blog in October of 2006 as a way to document our efforts to walk 500 miles in a year. We amused ourselves along the way by thinking of witty and sarcastic things we could put in the blog. I would write, then Regis would retort. Pretty much like our real life. We didn’t make that goal because, as we quickly realized, the math was against us. If you’re going to walk 500 miles in a year, you can’t take a day off without racking up future miles. It started to look painful. So we quit the 500 mile walk but we di

Elliot and Tiffany came for a visit on Sunday. Elliot, as you can see in the picture, has learned a new funny face. He squints his eyes like Clint Eastwood and it's hilarious. He's quite the little toddler. We all had a fine time making French bread and lasagna. I had chosen a Tyler Florence recipe for something he called ultimate lasagna but we opted for a different one. Tyler's recipe had a lot of wine thickened with flour that didn't sound appetizing. It also called for four pounds of meat and two quarts of ricotta cheese. I think that would have flowed over the sides of the pan. Regis and I are watching Julie and Julia. What a hoot of a movie. I ordered a Kindle and it came in the mail today. Amazing. When I opened it up and started it, it said Teresa's Kindle at the top. I can access the Amazon store and buy a book and minutes later it appears on the home screen. Kind of a dangerous concept. My first book is the sequel to Dalva by Jim Harrison. I keep g