My dorkiness knows no bounds!

This time it's swimming dorkiness. I don't talk much about my swimming, because I don't race any more, but it's still a very large part of my life. I grew up around water (we're one of those families where you learn to swim about when you learn to walk) and competed through high school. I have competed, guarded, taught lessons, coached - you name it. If I'm around water, I'm a happy camper.

Anyways, when I did compete, I was a distance swimmer. Distance freestyle and butterfly. Yeah, the fun, masochistic events! Honestly, though, can't sprint worth beans. Kinda holds true in my running now! I have one speed, but can hold that speed for quite a long time :)

As I was searching for something else online the other day, I stumbled across this T-shirt. It's also available on other stuff - mugs, stickers, etc. - being a CafePress shop and all.

Yes, it's a reference to the SNL sketch a few years ago with Christopher Walken with his 'fever for more cowbell.' But it's also a hysterical shirt for me, swimming wise.

Distance swimmers have counters at the end of their lane to help them keep track of how far they've swum (hey, you try swimming 500 yards or 1650 yards at race pace and not losing count!). They also have an auditory signal for the swimmers as they start their last lap. In our area, a cowbell was rung near the lane of the lead swimmer in the heat as they started their final lap. Everyone could hear it, so you knew you were just about done when that cowbell rang, even if you weren't in first.

It's one of those little things that sticks with you, too. One of my first long races in VB ended on the Boardwalk for the last few miles (the Shamrock, if you care) and as I turned the corner onto the Boardwalk, it was about mile 11 in the half marathon. Some spectator was there at the corner cheering for the runners and ringing a cowbell (one of the sponsors had been handing them out at the race expo). Hearing that noise, I had a very strong thought, "Almost done!" I had to think hard why I was thinking that so strongly, and realized it was connected to the noise of the bell! And this was several years after I'd stopped competing swimming! I still laugh at myself for that one :)

So what do distance swimmers want? More cowbell!

So cool!!

I'd seen this company at a race expo, but stumbled across them again the other day. Thought it's worth sharing!

Mile 22 Bags is a company that will take whatever race memorabilia you send them (bibs, t-shirts, mylar blankets, etc) and turn it into a bag. They've got a few different styles of tote bags, even a backpack and a wallet.

These are just too cool!! Gym bags with bragging rights! And they'd be perfect race-day check backs (though if it's one of the totes, I doubt I'd be using it for just race-day - too much fun to just be tucked away!) The backpack would be perfect for the water-bottle-and-keys sort of light load I take to the gym, too.

And I'll admit it - I keep a lot of my race memorabilia. Zach would probably describe me as a pack-rat (in some cases, I would too) but for race memorabilia, seeing the numbers or the shirts helps me remember the things I've done. I'm a very visual person, and seeing the medals or shirts or bibs triggers the memories. It makes me very proud of what I've accomplished, and keeps me motivated for races I've got coming up. So I've been scrapbooking a lot of the bigger races I've done, and I have a collection of the cotton T-shirts from races ready to be cut apart and made into a T-shirt quilt. My medals are hanging on the wall, and I've a motivational poster surrounded by a bunch of my older race numbers too. So, for me, it's really a question of what race memorabilia would I want to send in for a bag? :)

Oh, and the pictures are all from the Mile 22 website (gotta give credit where it's due!). I just had to link to them, since it's impossible to explain how much fun these bags are without the visuals :)

Review: 11:14

Another one that Zach pulled up from off the Netflix Watch Instantly queue. Hadn't heard of this one before (Zach had added it to the queue), but here you go: 11:14.

Plot: Crazy things happening in small-town America late one night. The movie tells the story of about a dozen people involved in separate story lines that all coincide with disastrous results at (you guessed it) 11:14.

Another dark comedy. We seem to be on a roll :)

Like in many dark comedies, you have people in serious situations making the most awkward or incomprehensible decisions in response to their serious surroundings. My favorite comment from one of the IMDB user reviews is "Bad Decisions Make for Great Entertainment." That really sums up this movie. These people are making the most bizarre choices as these things happen to them, and you just sit back and watch how it all plays out.

Not a classic, but definitely worth a watch. The cast is great, just a very, very strong ensemble. The teenagers are all very real characters. The three guys joy-riding (Ben Foster, Colin Hanks and Stark Sands) are hysterical, watching their simple pranks go so horribly, painfully awry. Hilary Swank is nicely cast, in a part originally written for a male until she expressed interest. She's the epitome of the characters choosing the worst possible option instead of using a little common sense. Patrick Swayze, so often overly dramatic in parts, is perfect as an overly dramatic, overly protective father, while Rachael Leigh Cook's character, his daughter Cheri, is a nice blend of malice, manipulation, and naivete, who sets in motion all the night's events.

The direction is very well-handled, too. Movies like this, with multiple intersecting story lines, can be so good if handled well, and so bad if not (yes, I am still quite bitter about Magnolia, a rant for another time). The direction here was great. The storylines intersected nicely, and you were allowed to see the puzzle pieces start fitting together, as you got shots of the other storylines as you were watching another one happen.

Overall: 4 of 5. Very fun. Don't think it's one I'd watch over and over, not really a classic, so probably not one for the shelf, but certainly one to check out on Netflix Instant :)

FL Trip - Pt 2

No trip to north FL to see family would be complete without a trip over to Mandalay. Best-est place in the world, as I might have mentioned before ;) I am writing about this particular trip, because it was Zach's first trip in the summer - a rite of passage in our family! Worthy of note!

Mandalay is an old house on the Aucilla River, and is perfect for spending time outside and appreciating nature. This dock has been appreciated for generations in our family as a place to sun oneself, to swim, to sit and watch the river flow past. My cousin is demonstrating below the proper use of the dock :)

Getting out on the water is also key at Mandalay. It being Zach's first trip there in the summer, we took the canoes out and paddled up the river. The bridge is about a mile and 3/4 up river from where the house is, and it's generally used by the family as a turn-around landmark when we go out paddling. So, of course, I had to take a picture as we arrived there :)

It was a day full of wildlife to see, too! Besides the standard fiddler crabs and little birds (lots of hummingbirds!), Zach saw his first gator! We do have gators on the Aucilla, and this one was chilling out near our neighbor's boats. Never got really close to us and our dock, (I think we were too noisy), though he was definitely close enough to watch! We saw another one as we were paddling too, though not as close as the one at the docks. Prompted the question, "Have the gators around here ever been know to do something... stupid?" No worries, though - much easier prey than us around here!

The osprey nest was very active too. There are always a few nests up and down the Aucilla, and we passed one as we were paddling. There was a baby (well, juvenile at this time of year) in the nest crying for food, and two adults swooping up and down to the water from the trees to go fishing for the hungry one. We paddled slowly as we passed, so we could watch them flying about and fishing. Beautiful birds!

The unusual wildlife was the raccoons! A pair of young raccoons came right up to the rushes near the house and were just hanging out!! We could hear them crunching on something, so I think they were hunting the fiddler crab that live in that area of the bank. 25+ years that I remember of going down to this house, and this was the first time seeing raccoons there, and certainly the first time this close to the house! They climbed the trees when I came out to take pictures of them. Sorry, little guys! We did get some very good pictures though :)

FL Trip- Pt 1

So, two weeks in FL and it was AWESOME!! Besides all the craziness that is inherent to a large gathering of my family (or a small one, for that matter), it was really nice simply being back east again.

I mentioned the weather there the other day, from when we went over to St Augustine. And, true to FL, it did rain just about every day. There were some down sides to that, obviously, like in St Augustine we couldn't go up the lighthouse... lightning warning - some sort of safety issue with lightning in the area... Oh well, can't win 'em all. Still got to visit the museum, just couldn't go up for the view. :( Guess we'll just have to go back and visit again! Oh, darn!

That same weather in St Augustine was really nice, too! Didn't mention it the other day, but it kept almost everyone home, even after the rain started. We stopped by the beach, and the only folk there were the sandpipers and the hard-core surfers enjoying the waves. You never get the beach to yourself in August in FL unless it's bad weather! We walked along the beach for a little and enjoyed watching the waves. There's just something so pretty about an ocean after a storm. I miss it so much...

The nicest thing about the weather, though, was being outside again. Yes, it was ridiculously sticky and humid, as FL summers are known to be, but it was REALLY nice running outside again. In the desert, with a total lack of humidity, it hurts to breath when you run. Or walk to the mailbox for that matter. Yes, I was sweating like a pig when I ran during our trip, but I could BREATHE without feeling like my lungs were bleeding. Running out here can be painful - the wind and the dry air just rip all moisture from your lungs. A friend is an aerobics instructor and is very conscious of proper breathing when she works out or rides her bike or runs or whatever. She laughed "I've become such a mouth breather since moving to the desert!" You just CAN'T breathe through your nose here. You don't feel your sweat in the desert, which some people like (it just dries SO fast on your skin), but I can live with feeling sweaty - it's a run, for cryin' out loud! You're supposed to sweat! :)

Beyond the breathing and moisture for my lungs, I really liked running in both Tally and Gainesville because of the park systems available there. Gainesville has a State Geologic Park at the Devil's Millhopper. It's a big ol' sinkhole, and there are stairs leading down to the bottom of the hole. 220, if I remember correctly. At any rate, it's 120 feet deep and the stairs go all the way to the bottom, and there's a little half-mile trail circling the top of the hole. Makes it a perfect place to do a stairs workout! Lots of greenery all over the sides, water flowing in and out of the hole, very pretty place, too, so even better!

We dragged Zach's sister along on the run, too. She's in FL now, so it was easy to see her as well as all my side of the family when we visit! Fun!! I love my family :)

Tallahassee has really been working on expanding it's trail system. Besides another state park I like to run in, the city has the Miccosukee Greenway, a trail system of about 17 miles of trails along Miccosukee Road, one of the old covered roads in the city. Lots of old oaks, Spanish moss, flowers... beautiful to drive too!

I have to say, I was nearly in tears my first run back here in CA desert. It was very windy and obviously dry and not nearly as scenic :(

R is for...

Ravelry!

Any knitter knows what Ravelry is, I think. For my not-so-fiber-crafty friends, Ravelry is like Facebook and a reference library combined for fiber folk. The last 5 years of my life, I have lived in areas where there weren't a lot of knitters, or where there weren't knitters I could easily meet up with. My job schedule over the past few years has prevented me from meeting up with knitting groups, and then we moved to the middle of nowhere, where our nearest 'local' yarn shop is an hour and a half away (the second closest is 2 hours away). Means that I look online a lot more for support!

Ravelry opened up a lot for me. I can search patterns, search yarns, see what other people have made with yarns I have in my stash, see how the same pattern will look on different body types, in different yarns, with different modifications. And there are tons of patterns to download, too, either free or for a fee. If I lived in an area with a LYS or two (or 5, like VB), then I might not have depended on it so much, but given where I've been...

And it's a social site too. Lots of groups to join - knitters who run, who are men, who travel, who are fans of particular TV shows or movies or sports teams, who have preschool kids, who don't have kids, who have red hair, who have had cancer, who knit for different charities, who live in certain areas... anything and everything probably has a group on Ravelry. It's actually how I met one of my best friends here on post too! One of the groups I'm in is for military-connected folk (service members, spouses, kids, whatever) and we were swapping who lived where, so that we could meet up with folk in our areas. There wasn't anyone on my post at the time, but Sarah found me and was moving out here soon! As soon as she moved out here, we met up, and that was nearly 2 years ago! Having a knitting buddy has definitely helped us both stay sane in this crazy place we're in!!

Ravelry will have events semi-regularly too. The Olympics are a big one. That started in 2006 after the Yarn Harlot suggested it as a way to challenge ourselves as knitters (or crocheters, not to discriminate) while we watched all the international athletes challenge themselves. In 2008, Ravelry allowed it to be an even bigger event in the knitting world (and again in 2010, for the Winter Olympics). I participated in 2008, on the Futurama group's team (Team Robonia- "Hail, Hail, Ro-bon-ia! A land I didn't make up!"). My schedule was too crazy this winter to do the 2010 one, unfortunately. 2012, though, I'll be there!

I know some aren't as fond of Ravelry. Anne and a friend here each have mentioned that their minds and project organizational systems just don't coincide with how Ravelry works. That's totally OK. I know sites like this aren't for everyone. I just know that it works for me, and anything that helps me keep an eye on my stash and queue is a good thing :)

Q is for...

Quick and Easy!

Bet you thought it'd be Q is for Qivit, right? Unfortunately, that's both a little expensive and a little too warm for my knitting right now :)

Q could also be for Quality Time, but I don't have any pictures of our Knit Nights :)

So, onto what I did choose!

Quick and Easy projects are a necessity for a knitter. Sweaters or involved projects (like the two lace scarves I'm working on now!) can just be such involved undertakings. They give a great sense of accomplishment when they are done, but those accomplishments are such a long time in coming! When you are in the midst of a slog-along sort of project, you just need something quick to finish, have that nice feeling of "Ta-da!" Hats, scarves, simple baby clothes, some sock patterns... all sorts of things with a short time span as a break from something more involved!

The project I pictured above was a pattern that I made up on my own. Haven't written it up, but have found a very similar one on Ravelry, if you are interested. It's a great pattern to use up extra bits of skeins, and being such think yarn (or multiple yarns held together), it's a REALLY quick knit! I made two of the ones shown above for Anne and I, and I think they were both done in a week! They do require some long circular needles, and there are lots of stitches on a given row, but when you only have 10 rows to do, no big deal!

Because it's knit horizontally, it's self-fringing too, for an added bonus :) Hey, no ends to weave in!

It's an easy pattern to adjust to personal taste, too. Anne's scarf is pictured below, and if you look closely, it's a little narrower than mine - you can see fewer stripes. If you saw them side-by-side, too, you'd see that hers is a little longer too. That's just how she likes her scarves :)