fences, fishes, and bowls...

It's been a busy spring. After many many days last month of many many hours in the garden, things are really looking wonderful! Nearly all of the things on the "to do" list from my last post are finished. Shocking!

Last month, I found a fabulous handyman to take down the too-big cedar in the front yard and to finish fencing in the rest of the yard. Yay!

The landscaping around the pond is really starting to come together, and the fishes are growing like mad! Kayaked a bit, danced a bunch, spent two days reveling in the National Road Garage Sale with Valerie and Darren (yay! lots of fun stuff!). I also took a pottery class, and am finally getting work done on the kick wheel that Doug borrowed for me. Just got my first set of bowls back from their final firing. Shiny, pretty bowls!



The rest of the summer is starting to look even busier. Lots of visits with families and friends, and hopefully lots of kayaking, camping, and dancing. My yard is going to see a lot of activity next month as well! I've been asked to be on two garden tours, the Cool Ponds Water Feature Tour on July 10-11 and the INPAWS Native Plant Garden Tour on July 18. The Native Plant Tour is overlapping with my big yard party, which has a pirate theme this year. Some of the tour people may be shocked and entertained to see pirates playing croquet in the garden. :)

Not just a giant hole in the mud anymore!

Yay! The pond is finished! Progressive photos of the project can be found in the album.

It took the guys from Cool Ponds about 3 days to finish the installation. And with Doug's help, it's taken 3 very long weekend days and several weeknights after work to get the rest of the yard in order.

On the completed list:

• Flagstone path between house and garage
• Stone path to patio
• Stepping stones around strawberry bed by the garage
• Rebuilt poor, abused sod couch into Lawn Armchair (mostly done, still need to buy a roll of sod to finish)
• Cleaned gutters
• Built & installed 2nd rain barrel
• Got koi & goldfish for the pond
• Lots of mulching done
• Finished planting redesigned front prairie bed
• Finished redesigning & turning the veggie beds
• Bought a new fire dish (to replace the ponded-over fire pit)
  

On the still to be finished list:

• Find a contractor to finish fencing the yard
• Plant the rest of the veggie garden
• Buy sod to finish up the lawn furniture remodel
  
• Prettify the compost bins
• Finish moving the rest of the dirt from the pond excavation
• Plant grass seed around the flagstone path and the nook behind the pond
• Finish planting marginals in the pond
  
• Create & plant the 2 bog beds around the pond
• Get the cannas & elephant ear tubers out of the basement & plant
  
• Buy & install a bit more lighting for the pond
  
• Dig back the mulch & re-edge the pebble patio with bricks
• When the first rain barrel gets empty, raise it up on another level of cinder blocks & paint it (no more bright blue barrel!)
• Get some flower seeds planted around the yard
• Finish more landscaping around the pond
• Continue redesigning the front prairie planting to be more acceptable to the lawn police
• Get the chipper back to the shop to see why it's STILL not running (Sigh)
• Convince the City of Indianapolis that the prairie planting in the front yard is not weeds
  

Whew. The "to do" list seems entirely too long. I'm tired already!

Giant Hole in the Mud (aka the new pond)

On this wet and icky morning, digging started on the new pond, which quickly turned the back yard into a giant mud pit.



Sadly, the crew had to throw in the towel after a few hours, due to the treacherous muddy conditions. They should be back on Thursday to finish up digging, install the liner, and schlepp around the boulders! Woohoo!

I would bike 1000 miles, and I would bike 1000 more

I bought a recumbent bike (Rans Rocket), and have had no end of joy biking around town. I've had it since 9/2007, and yesterday, I passed 1000 miles. So, I'm the equivalent of 1/3 of the way across the United States! Wahoo!

Heart Racing Dips

Doug and I took our first class for the "Dips and Tricks" lessons last night with Naptown Stomp. Since I'm a little obsessed with calories & exercise these days, I've been trying to wear my heart rate monitor to all of our dance events, to see what kind of value they have as exercise. I'm still compiling a pool of data on these, but the early results show that real contra & swing dances, even with a few breaks keep my heart rate elevated enough to count as a pretty decent cardio workout. Classes, not so much for the real cardio work out, but they also burn more calories than just lolling about on the couch.

The results from last night's class were hysterically funny. Instructors talk, leaders figure out footwork...70-80 heart rate. Thirty seconds of twirling and dipping...heart rate rockets up to 130-160. It was awesome.

I love dips!

Wonderful Winter Weekend Update

Doug's fancy GPS watch told him that the fastest toboggan run was really 41 mph! Woohoo!

Here's our list of races for this spring:
3/21 Holliday Park 5 mile Trail Run - Indianapolis, IN
4/18 Hellbender Hustle 5k - O'Bannon Woods State Park, IN
4/25 Road Ends 5 mile Trail Run - Pinckney Recreational Area, MI
5/30 Brown County 5k Trail Run - Brown County State Park, IN

Wonderful Winter Weekend!

I started off this year reinspired to focus on improving my health. Hence restarting my running program. Blech. :)

I have figured out that if I want to run, I can find some extra motivation by training for races. Nope, not the Indy Mini--I still have NO desire to run 13 miles. But I have registered for a few 5Ks and 5 mile trail runs. In the past few years I've walk/run a few 5Ks (for a good giggle, read about how I started running at my first 5k) and one 5 mile trail run, but I haven't ever managed to keep a running pace through the whole of any of them. So I set myself a new goal for this first 5k of the year--I wanted to actually run the whole thing. In training on the treadmill or on the nice flat crushed limestone Indy Towpath, I have done okay running a full 3.1 or 5 miles. But during the races, I haven't been able to continue running where there's been significant uphills. So, the first 2 races of this year are in Indianapolis, a great wonderfully flat place where I can finally finish running a race. And Doug is being a wonderful guy in joining me for these races!

So, we started the weekend by running our first race of the year, the PolarBear 5k through downtown Indianapolis, starting at the Indiana World War Memorial. I was a bit worried about this race, since I had been having some trouble in my training running a full 5k at a pace to match or beat my previous 5k best, 37.56. But despite my worries, we started the race on Saturday morning, at the balmy temperature of 37 degrees, with the forecasted snow/rain mix still holding off. Depite stopping (TWICE!) to retie my shoelaces, we passed the first mile marker at 11:40ish. Woohoo! More or less keeping the same pace for the rest of the race, with a little bit of a sprint at very end of the race, I finished my first all-running 5k race!

"Your overall finish place was 216 and your age group finish place was 12. Your time of 36:26.0 gave you a 11:43 pace per mile."

Immediately after the race, we celebrated by picking up coffee and a tasty chocolate croissant from the Indy Winter Farmer's Market. Yum.

Then we started a three hour drive up to Pokagon State Park to meet our friends, Juliet and Frank, for some toboganning! Yep, there's a toboggan run up in northeast Indiana, about an hour north of Fort Wayne. And we had a fabulous time. It was just about perfect winter weather, a few inches of snow. We ran the toboggan runs a half dozen times, and the winners of the top speed of the day (for us) were Juliet, Frank and Doug at 37 mph. Woohoo!



We finished off Saturday evening by heading back towards Fort Wayne, to a little town called Roanoke, to have dinner a wonderful restaurant called Joseph Decuis. Doug & I had gotten some gift certificates for this place when we bought some amazing soup at the Farmers Market. And the soup from the Market was a great indicator of the fabulous meal that we had. Yum, again!

This morning, we rounded off our wonderful winter weekend by cross country skiing before we left the state park. It's the first time I've skied since high school, and I was pleasantly surprised by finding it way easier than I remembered. Not that there wasn't shrieking and falling, but it was way fun.

Yoga at the office

For a few years, I've been going to a studio about a half mile from my office that offers vinyasa (flow) yoga. It was one of the first fitness routines that I actually enjoyed--when I wasn't in the midst of cursing it or my aching body--and looked forward to on a regular basis. Since then I've been trying to entice some of my co-workers to join me at the noon sessions that they offer. With one person, who already knew some yoga, she loved the classes and joins me regularly. With a completely new to yoga person, it failed miserably. Recently another yoga novice showed some interest in joining us, and I didn't want her to hate yoga too...so....

I sent around an email at work, trying to gauge the interest in having a few beginners group yoga classes during lunch. Fantastically, about 10 folks were interested, so I was able to book a few classes with my favorite yoga instructor, Eric, at a fairly reasonably per person price.

Yesterday was our first class, and it went pretty well. I think a lot of people were pretty shocked at how hard we worked--especially when I reported the calories burned from my heart rate monitor at 400 cal/hour. Which is pretty fun, since what we did in an hour for this class compares with the first 15 minutes of Eric's regular class. (Sadly, the calories burned won't multiply by 4...but even so I usually burn about 500 in an hour in the advanced class, and most of it is in the aerobic range. Not bad for yoga. Vinyasa rocks!)

Taking a yoga basics class was also great encouragement for me. In addition to reminding me of the proper way to do poses, it also really reminded me of how far I've gotten in my own practice over the last few years. I vividly remember my first classes and how crazy hard it was to hold those deceptively easy looking strength poses. Maybe it will also remind me not to be so despondent when I have a hard time holding the crazy poses that I'm trying now. I must remind myself to remember this lesson during the intense 2 hour hot yoga class I'll be taking on Saturday. :)

CSA + Bike

Earlier this year, my wonderful friend Tara gave me a copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I loved this great book about a family eating only local food for a year. It reminded me of things I wanted to do myself, like finally joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and growing & canning more of my own food.

After driving Doug a little crazy talking about it for weeks, I found a CSA called Homestead Growers that delivers produce to our Wednesday Farmer's Market outside the City Market in downtown Indianapolis. We signed up for a full share that we are splitting with our friends Debra & Harry. So far we've been pretty pleased with all the fresh veggies, and I've had some fun finding ways to prepare some vegetables I've never really cooked with before. And getting to the Farmer's Market on a weekly basis is a lot of fun as well, since I never seem to escape before I buy quite a bit more after picking up the CSA box. In fact, I found out that the City Market also has a butcher shop called Moody Meats that provides very tasty meat from a local farm (free-range chickens, pesticide-free, sustainable farming methods, all sorts of good stuff going on there.) So, barring a few items from the regular grocery store (and from my well-stocked pantry), Doug & I have mostly been buying and eating local foods for the past few weeks. Yay! It makes me very happy!

And shamed by Doug's recent bike mileage goals, I've been trying to do more bike commuting myself. My office is only a bit more than 3 miles from my house, so I can't really compete with his mileage. But I have been pretty good at biking to & from work, including some errands around town just about every day for the past two weeks. In fact, I even managed to attach the CSA box onto my bike rack yesterday! I got a real kick out of all the weird looks, giggles and cheers I got from the farmer's market folks as I tried to stash a week's groceries onto my bike. And I managed to make it home with only one minor mishap. Bumping over a particularly nasty pothole, the little bag with my chocolate croissant (from Rene's at the market "You deserve a cookie today!") escaped from my saddle bag. When I stopped to rescue it, I realized that the bump had also popped the clip of the saddle bag off the rack and with it, the bungee cord on the CSA box! Luckily, they slid off the rack slowly & I reattached everything without bruising the precious cargo. And the croissant was only slightly mushed. :)

I'm hoping to continue this local food habit (and infect all my friends too!) There are some great books & blogs out there if you're interested in finding out more about eating local foods or being mindful about the food you choose to consume. Here's a just a few, including some sites for local Indy food: Going Local, Plenty & the 100 mile diet, Slow Food USA, Market on Morris, Goose the Market, Ominvore's Dilemma, and Indiana Market Maker.

It was also in the plans to expand the veggie garden this year. The expansion didn't happen, but I did plant the exisitng beds. Which the weeds are trying to take over. :) Hopefully I'll take control back soon, at least in time to get the tomatoes staked up. The plan is to do a little more canning this year and to make some crabapple jelly!

Petting Catfish

Over the July 4th weekend, we joined our friends Valerie & Darren for some camping in southern Illinois. They were getting some scuba dive certifications at a spring-fed former quarry called Mermet Springs. Doug & I mostly just tagged along to try out our new tent, hike, play games and eat good food!

It turns out the Mermet Springs is also home to some huge, hungry catfish! And they like hotdogs! And while you are distracting them with the hotdog (before they steal the whole thing) you can pet their very soft noses. :)



The quarry is just a few miles from Metropolis, IL, home of the giant Superman Statue. After visiting with him for a bit, Doug and I also wandered down for a hike at Fort Massac State Park. Fort Massac is a restored wooden fort on the Ohio River originally built by the French in the mid 18th century.

Feeling inspired, we also decided to take a run on the trails at the Mermet Lake Conservation Area. Vaguely spooked by this sign, we ended up running on the very sunny (and hot) bluebird trail in a prairie field.