Kristin’s Playground

A couple of accomplishments for the day - I had my 7th day of earning both my green check marks, meaning I stayed within my calorie goals for the day, and I had 30 minutes of some sort of exercise. One-third of the way done with item 78.

I also got a pleasant surprise that will let me go see my dad play a gig back in my hometown on Thursday. I’d been planning on going back over the weekend for a reunion, but I’m happy to get to go a little early and spend some quality time with my folks. And I’m extra-happy that I won’t have to drive! (Thanks, Dad!)

I spent this evening baking. It was a little more complicated than things I normally make, so I was nervous, but it looks like it’ll turn out. It’s a surprise for now, but I’ll have pictures later, fear not! Also, I have my picture of the day for you. I had an idea kicking around in my head because Utata has an “Iron Photographer” challenge. It needed to involve a curved piece of wood, something white, and it had to look old. This is what I came up with given my baking evening:

It’s been a busy weekend. Yesterday I went and donated blood when I got up. There’s a real need in the area for donations, and they’ve been calling me every other day to make an appointment. I last donated back in February I think, so it was long past time. I was pleasantly surprised at how it went. My past experiences at the local donor center were less than pleasant - waiting too long, etc, but this time went really well - hardly any wait, the nurse found my vein right away, no problems, etc. They even have comfy new chairs!

On my way back I had an interesting spread of gas prices. I saw regular gas for everything from 3.75 to 4.09. Crazy what less than 8 miles can do. Also, I bought myself a tart pan. I’ve got plans for it too in the next few days!

Saw WALL-E in the afternoon with Kelly. It was great. I didn’t really know what to expect from the previews, but the story was wonderful. We grabbed some dinner, I mowed the lawn, and then I went over to Kelly’s to try out a Wii-fit. I hadn’t been too impressed by the trailer (although its parody was quite funny), but it was actually a lot of fun. Turns out my fitness age is 29. Who knew? Now that I’ve played with one, I kind of actually want one. Not sure if it would actually help get/stay in shape or not, but it was fun. And it has charts and graphs! I love charts and graphs.

Today is a day for catching up on chores and things, although Kelly, Beth, and I did go running. We went about 2.2 miles in around 25 minutes. It was hot and painful. But don’t we look happy about it?

And, so as not to disappoint, here is my photo of the day. When I was experimenting with my “make the photo look old” bit, I learned that one way to do things like that is with textures in photoshop. And then I found ghostbones on flickr who has a lot of good textures to share. So, naturally, I want to experiment with them. Today, my photo was a broken hanger from the front hall closet. I guess my winter jacket was too much for it. Anyway, it was fun to play with. Forgive me for overusing textures in the next little while, but their novelty will probably take awhile to wear off.

Hi all!

It’s been a busy day - you’ll hear more about it later, but for now, I wanted to give you all a heads up: my friend Linda is participating in the Day of Blogs this year. That means she’ll be posting every half hour for 24 hours straight to benefit the Christian Children’s Fund. She starts at 10 EST tonight, so go visit her and cheer her on. There will likely be contests and things, and it’s always great fun.

I’ll be back later, but for now I’ll leave you with my picture of the day. Both of my sunflowers have flowered! Hooray!

However good I felt about going on a run yesterday was fully made up for it by how sore I was today. Oof. I’ll have to do more stretching and I’ll probably have to run more often if I don’t want to hurt like that each time I get the idea to go for a jog. On top of being sore, my alarm didn’t go off this morning, so I had to rush off to work. At least it’s a Friday.

I just finished watching the 1983 Best Picture, Terms of Endearment. Such a sad movie! My friend Kelly had warned me, but I still cried. ::sniff:: Amadeus is the next Best Picture if I go chronologically. I think I’ve seen it before - or at least parts of it, but I’ll watch it again to be sure.

In other news, my first quest for a week of green check marks continues. I think today’s exercise will consist of some yoga before bed; the waking up late and the hurting made biking to work seem like a bad idea.

My photo of the day comes to you from the diag; I saw these flowers hanging from a chain by the sidewalk. They seemed like an odd pairing, so I had to stop to take some photos. When I starting looking at it in photoshop, something about it reminded me of an old, grainy photo of a bouquet someone had hung up to dry, so I ran with it. There’s a photo challenge over at Utata that involves a photo appearing old, so I thought it’d be good practice too. What do you think?

Tomorrow I’ve got an appointment for giving blood, and plans to finally go see WALL-E. Should be fun.

I came home from work today - a beautiful summer evening - and realized I still needed to do 30 minutes of exercise to earn both my green check marks today (today would be the third day in a row - I’m going to make a week!). So I went running. Me. Running? Okay, so me running is really more like most people walking quickly, but still. I changed, dug my gym shoes out of the corner of the closet and took off. I think I’m a little nervous for my upcoming 5k. I told my friend, Kelly about my 101 list, and she asked if she could do the 5k and the 10k with me. It’s a great idea, and now I really have to be committed to doing it. We’ve even picked a 5k: the Big House, Big Heart run in September. So, I should probably do a little training before that day comes if I don’t want to embarrass myself.

I was actually pleased with how far I went before I stopping jogging and started walking. I jogged for almost 10 minutes to get to the park and the river. In all, the google maps pedometer tells me I went around 2.5 miles, and it took me about 30 minutes with my running/walking. I’m pleasantly surprised, and quite proud of myself for getting off my butt and doing it. Maybe the 5k won’t be as painful as I thought.

And, to keep up with another daily task, here’s my photo of the day from my “run”:

Huzzah! A pic a day - and I’m caught up. Think I can keep it up for a week?

21 July 2008:

I was jealously glancing at the Brie section of Trader Joe’s when this caught my eye. Light brie? Couldn’t be! So, I had to try it. While it’s tasty, it’s not the delectable creamy goodness I have come to associate with the word “brie” in my head. Ah well. Thought it had to be too good to be true.

22 July 2008:

There are a bunch of these plants near the physics building, and they contain masses of spider webs. These webs are often dewy, even in mid-afternoon!

23 July 2008 (ie, today!):

The sunflower is opening! Hooray! The color! The happiness!

I admit - I tried to hurry up and finish my 101 things list on Thursday; we had plans to go camping on Friday, and I wanted to get off on a good start.

Early Friday afternoon we headed out to go to the Indiana Dunes Campground. The campsite is very near Michigan City, IN, and it was a little bizarre to me to be camping so near civilization. Within a couple of miles, you could see a giant cooling tower for a power plant, and just a couple more miles you can go to Meijer, just in case you forgot anything. On Flickr, jcburns shares this photo of the cooling tower. It’s looks like it’s right out of the Simpsons.

When we arrived at the campground mid-afternoon, Logan’s friends were still at the beach, so we took our time settling in. Eventually, everyone made it back to the campsite, Anya met the other three dogs staying there (not terribly well, unfortunately, though they learned to mostly ignore each other later), and we started to think about dinner. The boys took to starting the coals and grilling some burgers - both beef and black bean. Quite tasty. As the sun started going down, we all continued to sit around and talk by the fire, roasted some marshmallows and made little dessert sandwiches with a sandwich iron. I swear, sandwich irons are brilliant. You can take two slices of bread, coat the outside with some butter and fill the inside with whatever you like - cheese, or pie filling, or nutella and marshmallows. Yum. I took a couple of pictures of the campfire. The auto white balance made some look bizarrely purple, but this one was a bit more realistic:

We went to bed late, and unfortunately, I woke up a couple of times during the night to the sound of rain. We stayed in our sleeping bags, hoping it would let up and we’d be able to have a good day, but it didn’t look likely. So, we tried to quickly pack up all our rain-soaked gear, got ridiculously soaked ourselves, and our camping trip was cut unfortunately short. I didn’t even have time to go see the beach. At least I can see it on Flickr, thanks to people like lapstrake:

We did manage to get one good night of camping, even if we didn’t get to do the hiking or photography I normally like to do on camping trips. Now, if only it will stop raining here long enough for us to set up, dry out and clean our tent!

And before I go, I can’t help but include destabee’s photo of this squirrel found there in the winter. Too amusing!

You may have noticed (you probably didn’t) that my site was down for most of yesterday. Our server got corrupted, and Logan has spent a great deal of time getting us back online, mail and all that included. Our main backup was a few days old, so I had to repost my TT from yesterday. I also need to redo my plugins and a few other things that didn’t end up in our backup, so I’ll probably be playing around with the site for awhile tonight in case you see anything as broken.

So, it’s been a very busy two weeks. Italy was wonderful, even if the internet connectivity was not as consistent as I might have hoped and the trip home took far longer than it should. Then we turned right back around to go to a second conference - a little closer to home this time. Returned from that on Friday, went to a wedding yesterday, and I’m finally getting a chance to breathe. It will take me awhile to catch up on the pictures and the blogging, but I’ll have some stories to tell and some pictures to show of the time that I’ve been gone. For now, I need to go to bed, but I’ll leave you with the oldest picture of the day - when we were leaving for Italy:

8 June 2008: Flying Corn
The Atlanta airport had a number of flying vegetable sculptures. I had to take a picture of the corn jet.

Last week was crazy. I spent far too much time at work trying to get everything ready for the conference. I learned a lot about Illustrator in the process, and thankfully the posters are done! Of course, every time I look at them now, I see something that should’ve changed or didn’t print correctly, or… but that’s all right. I just need to smile and nod and let it go.

Anyway, I meant to do this before I left, but here are the pictures of the day from last week. There’s clearly internet access for me available, so I’ll share my Italian adventures with you later, but for now, enjoy last week’s pictures!

Tuesday, 3 June:

I made my own egg rolls on Tuesday night. I had some friends who were in town (more on that another time perhaps), so I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the process, but they look like egg rolls! (And I thought there were pretty tasty too.) Go me!

Wednesday’s picture was already up. I got a new haircut! I needed a trim anyway, and I thought I’d get rid of most of my blonde highlights from last year. I tend to grow out my hair, cut it all off and donate it, rinse and repeat. Locks of Love doesn’t accept bleached hair, so I thought I should cut it off before growing out my hair in earnest again. Besides, short hair is nice for the summer.

Thursday, 5 June

It was getting late and I hadn’t yet taken my daily picture, so I started looking around the office for inspiration. I settled on this Einstein action figure my uncle got me a few years ago. He looks mildly frightening like this!

Friday, 6 June

Here you get a glimpse of my poster. The dotted lines printed with the dots spaced too far apart, so I had to fill them in with a fine-tipped marker.

Saturday, 7 June

The day before leaving! I was a bit burned out after working all week, and didn’t really want to do much, even pack. Still, some things needed to be done - like transpanting the tomato plant into a larger container. So we did. And we transplanted the sunflowers into the tomato plant’s old pot.

And now, I leave you. Until next time!