This is How We Do Winter-Well, One Way Anyhow

Stand on the bulk head

Forgo a sled-use your back instead

Do some American Gothic s'more eating

use the buddy system to eat more s'mores

enjoy said s'mores

have a fire

invite the dog

so she can guard your s'mores

Some of the Things That Have Distracted Me From Attending to This Blog or How My Pagan Ways Brought Snow to Maine

As Spring approaches I get melancholy and suffer in the throes of my self-diagnosed  SAD (seasonal affective disorder) Atypical. I LOVE Winter. This winter started off extremely promising with measurable snow on the ground at Thanksgiving, but by Christmas-nada. On 12/27/14 I predicted in a month's time the ground would be covered. It wasn't, but I was only off by a week or so. After a long ski weekend back home to the Adirondacks it began to snow. 

 And snow. 

And then snow some more. 

love the fish bones pattern on the snow from the picket fence and the winter sun

 I attribute this great fortune to my purchase of lapel pins at Lapland Lake XC Center

 and my hanging snow altar.

 

You're welcome to my "snow mates".  For all the others, I encourage you to embrace Winter.

Exhibit A

she's from Georgia

but still gets her kicks from the white stuff

C'mon, get out and play.

Thanksgiving

This has always been my favorite holiday.  This year is somewhat reminiscent of when I was 5 or 6 years old (circa 1969) and there was a significant snow in upstate NY.  As I remember it, we went into my Grammy Grunt's, ate, came out to get in the car to go home, when we discovered over a foot of snow had fallen!
This year (2014) it is Thanksgiving eve and we are in the midst of a snow storm that is expected to dump between 6 and 10 inches of the white stuff. For this I am thankful. I am thankful for my family and friends, without whom I would be lost and hollow and my furry loved ones, past and present. The past few days have been emotionally challenging and unsettling for me but has offered up an opportunity for me to truly recognize and appreciate the value of sincere, reciprocal and deeply meaningful friendships and to jettison others that come up lacking.

Peace and plenty be with you and yours this holiday season.

It's The Wood That Makes It Good

I have had a life long love affair with wood. I am reborn being in the woods, especially hardwoods (add snow and I am floating on air), I love the smell of it-burning, being chopped, sawed,,standing, the sound of it, the feel of it. Splitting wood, since I was a teenager, is therapeutic to me. I recovered from a broken heart in high school while splitting more wood than my folks could use-thank goodness there was plenty needing splitting as I am rather morose and dramatic when it comes to love loss.
There was a national television show about wood in Norway a few winters back and a book about it that was quite popular in Scandanavia; I can relate.

So this weekend, we went from this

to this

It was a very good weekend.

Reading is FUNdamental

I have never self-identified as a reader of books. Although, in retrospect, there are a number of books from my youth I remember-  The Children's Pictorial Dictionary ( originally my father's, and I still continue to count it among my possessions), books about animals, outdoor survival skills, horror movies, dogs, science...Golden Books, various field guides.  During summer vacation a trip to the Book Mobile at the fire station was a highlight of the week.  I read a wide array magazines, usually cover to cover.  I enjoy puns and semantics, scored high on the verbal sections of the SAT, GRE and MAT and abysmally low in the math portions. Perhaps, it is best to say I am not a reader of fiction. I have thought about pursuing a degree in creative writing, but am always turned off by the required reading.

Maisie, my six year old, is at the age when reading is truly fundamental to her scholastic success (and beyond).  In an effort to model the joys of literacy to her, I began, this summer, to make an orchestrated effort to read books. Non-fiction. I read Adrift by Steven Callahan,  Yossi Ghinsberg's  Jungle,  Barbara Ehrenreich's Living with a Wild God and Curious Minds; How a Child Becomes a Scientists.  These last two have steered me toward a return to more science -related material-I just finished Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll. Tonight I picked up Melissa Coleman's This Life is in Your Hands and ordered a book about Alaskan prostitutes during the gold rush by Lael Morgan, a former employer, Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush: Secret History of the Far North.

May we both reap the rewards and benefits of a lifetime of reading and learning.

Crossfit Hack

For the past few years I have been interested in Crossfit.  I've taken an "On Ramp", which just about killed me but also showed me the degree to which I have to focus in a workout to see results and I did-shaving off about 3 minutes of one of the workouts in about 3 weeks time. For me, the cost of joining a "Box" is outrageous and impractical. I pay 150% less at the "globo gym" I go to.  Sure, I don't have the group experience, but that's ok for me and I might not have all the Crossfit related equipment, but I scale most WODS (workouts of the day) anyway so I am happy where I am at, for now at least.  The biggest boon came for me when I changed my eating.  There is still room for improvement but I use My Fitness Pal to stay below a caloric intake and try to eat more on the Paleo side and I have lost about 40 pounds, dropped a few sizes and generally feel better than I have in years.  I have some aches and pains, mostly knees that get banged up in basketball (Senior Games), but even those are better because of my diet and working out.

Here is a sample workout I did today.  I call it Bringing Sexy Back.

warm up: 13 mins. elliptical trainer
stretching

strength building: chest press: 5 sets as many reps as possible adding weight each set until you can only bang out one rep max ( I got to 80lbs of weight not counting the bar on the Smith machine )

For time: 3 rounds of: 5 mins on Crosstrainer GO HARD
                                   21 swiss ball hamstring curls
                                   21 hollow rocks (a type of sit up)
                                   7  dumb bell biceps curls with heavy weight ( I did 25 lbs.)
GO HEAVY...go with it.

Stirred not Shaken

There's a line from a Mary Oliver poem, School, that questions "How many summers does a little dog have?"  In the poem she is talking about the undisciplined nature of the dog in question, chastising

“You’re like a little wild thing that was never sent to school".  In the end she encourages the animal to embrace his life, freedom and vigor  because all these will end too soon.  I have thought of this line so many times since first reading it this past early Spring. I think of it in regard to my daughter, Maisie, who is six.  I think of it for myself as I feel the speed of life quickening. 

I am nursing my third "knee event" since last year.  No direct trauma, no known structural issue-simply overuse- the demand (basketball, Crossfit) is greater than the resource (healthy meniscus, joint lube). It is like I have a mirror- distorted I hope- where I take measure of my own physical changes of aging. On one side of this mirror is Abby, our Keeshound who died last November; the other is Maisie.  Maisie is youth personified- a hard little body of muscle and sinew, all flexible and corporeally confident.

Last night I dreamt of old dogs, young girls, grandmothers' homes, childhood into adulthood friends, rogue waves and sharks. I won't bore you with the details or the tedious drivel of interpreting this neuronal  processing of the day or metaphysical coded message As an aside, dreams, if they indeed are messages from somewhere or someone are frustratingly like all spiritual communication- there never appears to be clear didactic sharing of information. 

The knee, the way this summer is playing out weather-wise as I find it cool, wet and very unsummery, the nature of my work, my current readings of Adrift and Living with a Wild God, and the unfolding of our child from one developmental stage to the next has me stirred up.

Let it suffice to say,  I am a work in progress.