Run Blog Wrap Up and My Half-Marathon Playlist, 2012 Edition

I haven’t formally pulled the plug yet, but it is very unlikely I will be running the half marathon at the end of this month in Ottawa. Stoooopid injuries.

I trained well, and two months ago I was on track to beat my time from last year, but then things started to hurt. I went to physio and tried to work through it, but my pace suffered and the pain kept coming back. I kept trying, and I even ran the entire 21.1K three weekends ago, but after that I could hardly walk or climb stairs for a week.

So I took a break from running for two weeks to try to recover, and then I went for a slow 15K run last weekend – that ended up being only 10K in the end. Wednesday morning I woke up early to see if I could do a slow 5K, and I only finished 2K before stopping to walk.

I had decided already that this would be my last half-marathon, and that I would drop back down to 10K races in the future. The training time needed and the wear and tear on my body was making race preparation not fun anymore; if it wasn’t fun, then why do it? I really wish I could have finished this one last race, but it’s not worth injuring myself.

So I’m wrapping up the run blog for this year – unless I change my mind, rest and stretch between now and race day, and then just go for it and see what I can do. Yes, I know, stoooopid runners.

Now, who wants a great running playlist?

 Finola’s Half-Marathon Playlist - 2012 Edition

Ammaeli – Sugarcubes
A New Day – Mary Margaret O’Hara
Pumped Up Kicks – Foster the People
Little Lion Man – Mumford & Sons
Save it for Later – The English Beat
The Cave – Mumford & Sons
Someone Like You – Adele
Supernatural Superserious – R.E.M
Just a Girl – No Doubt
London Calling – The Clash
Reconstruction Site - The Weakerthans
In a Big Coumtry – Big Country
A-Punk – Vampire Weekend
Save Tonight – Eagle-Eye Cherry
Rolling in the Deep – Adele
I Wanna Be Sedated – The Ramones
Lovefool – The Cardigans
Blitzkrieg Bop – The Ramones
A Girl Like You – Edwin Collins
Pretty in Pink – The Psychedelic Furs
Beggar in the Morning – The Barr Brothers
Add It Up – Violent Femmes
End of the World – R.E.M
End of the World – Great Big Sea
Closer to Fine – Indigo Girls
Time of Your Life – Green Day
Bigmouth Strikes Again – The Smiths
Dashboard – Modest Mouse
MoneyGrabber – Fitz & the Tantrums
Blister in the Sun – Violent Femmes
Bridge to Nowhere – Sam Roberts
Closer to Fine – Indigo Girls
Boys Don’t Cry – The Cure
Bleed It Out  – Linkin Park
Your English is Good – Tokyo Police Club
In Between Days – The Cure
Punk Rock Girl – The Dead Milkmen
Feeling This – Blink-182
All I Want Is You – Barry Louis Polisar (Juno soundtrack)
Black Velvet Band – Dropkick Murphys
Turn the Page – Matt Hires
Home – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Closing Time – Semisonic
Janglin – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Flathead – The Fratellis
Gone Daddy Gone – Gnarls Barkley
Juliette – Hollerado
Say Hey (I Love You) – Michael Franti & Spearhead
The Cave – Mumford and Sons
Living Well is the Best Revenge – REM
Ruby Soho – Rancid
We Dance to Yesterday – Hawksley Workman
The Naked and Famous – Young Blood
New Life – Depeche Mode
Sweetest Thing – U2
Awake My Soul – Mumford & Sons

Sod!

Last summer our road was torn up for water and sewer main replacement. It was a messy, messy summer.

Look now -

We will probably become those people always out with the whipper snipper and leaf blower, look out.

Happy summer!

Don’t Ever Compose a Blog Post That Starts With: ‘I’m having the best day…’

I was working on a blog post on Monday that started with:

I’m having the best day.

Silly, silly me.

Fast forward a few hours and I was at CHEO with ten-year-old Niamh who was having an asthma attack. We were there for four hours and left sometime after 11pm, with her breathing in control, but with her still feeling very miserable.

Exhausted, it threw off the cheerful mood that I had been feeling since the previous Friday. Karma, huh.

But I still want to tell you about the few days previous because they really were fantastic.

On Sunday evening I was on a major high from my weekend away with my writing group. We had organized a writing retreat for ourselves where we stayed at a spiritual retreat near Calibogie for two nights – away from our husbands and children – where we had the peace and quiet needed to write.

I worked on a short story that I had been inspired to start writing on Thursday, and by the time we left for home on Sunday afternoon, I had a complete draft of this story totalling 5,500 words. It is still rough and needs a lot of editing, but I have the entire story written.

Sometimes when I have a little time to myself in which to write, the words won’t flow, but on the weekend I was fortunate that they did and so I came home feeling refreshed, rested, competent, buoyed, enthusiastic, and content.

Sunday evening I reassimilated with my family, and one of my daughters drew this:

Check out the writing down the left side of the heart.

Of course I had a tear or two, and I patted myself on the back for the second time that weekend, not only for being an awesome writer, but also because I figured that I must be doing this parenting gig right too.

Monday morning I was up early, and before I left for work I read the draft of my short story through in its entirety for the first time, and I didn’t hate it, and didn’t cringe while reading nearly as much as I thought I was going to.

This in itself is huge because the more I read about the writing process, the more I realize that the first drafts of stories written by even really great writers usually need an awful lot of revision. On the CBC’s Canada Writes website, I found this exerpt of a piece written  by Stuart McLean, who in my mind has completely mastered the art of writing the short story:

You should know that my first drafts are probably not much better than your first drafts, and my ideas are certainly no better than your ideas. The difference is I don’t expect my first drafts to be any good. In fact, mostly I expect them to be lame. What I do expect is, that if I keep at it and write draft two and three and then show draft four to my editor Meg and incorporate her suggestions into draft five, that maybe by draft six or seven, when Vinyl Café producer Jess Milton starts fiddling with it, that we might come up with something… well, that will be good enough. The idea we started with is not nearly as important as the fact that we started – and most importantly, kept going. The most important thing, then, if you want to be a writer, is to find something to get you going. What usually works for me is a deadline. Sign up for a writer’s class, join a writer’s group, look into the Young Writer’s Group online, volunteer for a local paper… do whatever you have to do so that someone somewhere is expecting you to hand them something. That will get you going. Make it as good as you can make it, and then show it to someone and listen to what they have to say and then go at it again.

It was a  bit difficult to face the work week on Monday morning because my mind was still on my writing and all I wanted to do was spend the day editing my story. I was even hoping that the cold that I was coming down with would be enough to keep me home for the day, but too bad for me, my immune system is razor sharp after the bombardments of the past few years of having children enter the school system. Alas, I was well enough to go to work.

It was however a perfect spring day and my bike ride to the office helped to keep my mood high.

And then – the icing on the cake – my French oral language results arrived in my inbox. I had gotten the result that I have been working towards for the last two years. Fluently bilingual public servant here, folks.

And so, all in all, it was a pretty spectacular few days.

Which was much needed for this usually tired, and let’s face it, cranky, full-time working mother. It is weekends like the one that I just had that make me better able to handle when my daughter suddenly has difficulty breathing and I have to pack her up to CHEO in an instant. We all need these breaks from the everyday so that we can deal with the normal events that make up life of a busy mother, wife, writer, government peon, person. Let’s take the time that we need, without guilt, because it is a really healthy and good thing to do.

Disposable

I am tired of disposing of things that should not be disposable.

Last weekend I threw out our two-year-old blender. The turn-y thing at the bottom started slipping which resulted in smoke coming out of it as we tried to make daiquiris. It was almost a daiquiri disaster, I tell you. Thank goodness we had the hand-held blender to make our strawberry deliciousness. Phew, close call that one.

Then, I had to call an appliance repair company to look at my six-year-old dishwasher because the heating element was staying on after the cycle was finished – even though we never use the heated dry option. This could have caused a true disaster. Donnie from Robotec (highly recommend!) told me that since we don’t use the heated dry option, the most economical way to repair the problem would be to simply disconnect the heating element. Doing so would mean we would have to run the kitchen hot water tap before starting the dishwasher so that the pre-wash water would be warm enough for the detergent to work, but it would save us over $200 by not having to buy a new controller and have it installed. It bothers me that I need to use a work-around to use my dishwasher, but we are going to see how it goes.

A few months ago THIS happened on our stove top:

A minor bump and a chunk of glass pops off. Dang.

For the second time.

The first time it cost us $600 to replace the glass top. That time the crack was all around the heating element, and so if liquid spilled over from a pot and got under the glass, it could be dangerous, we were told. This time we will hold off until the crack gets bigger or until one of us needs to get stitches from the sharp edge. When the time comes, I suspect we will opt for a new stove because there are only so many $600 repairs to be made before it stops being worthwhile.

The most frustrating part of this is that there is clearly a design flaw in this stove. The heavy metal grate needed for the gas elements should not have to be placed directly on a glass top. Most gas stoves have metal tops; unfortunately we just never noticed this when we were shopping.

The kicker is that these were not inexpensive appliances. We thought if we bought good ones we would be able to keep them longer. Silly us.

I talked to Donnie for a while about appliances, and he told me that all of his are around 40 years old. Today, the typical life span of an appliance is around 10 years.  As Donnie said, this means that we will be throwing out four times as many appliances to landfill than we used to, and added to that, the control boards in modern appliances have toxic chemicals in them that can’t easily be separated from the units anymore, and so the whole thing ends up in landfill.

For me, I’m just hoping that my dishwasher and stove make it as far as ten, because I’m not sure they will.

If only my stove could go in my green bin.

My Baby is Eight!

Happy Birthday to my beautiful Beatrice. She is the smartest, sweetest, funniest, and most empathetic eight-year-old I have ever known and I love her so very much.

She was sooooo sleepy on her first day.

It must have been a grandparent who bought her THAT.

Wasn't she a pretty baby? And those teeth came in at four months!

Getting her blood pressure checked by her big sister. She is always ready to play.

Now she prefers spaghetti.

We must have missed a vaccination.

She has improved a lot since then.

Now she is one! We survived our first year together. And look how cute we were!

 

She is still always on the go.

Beatrice and Niamh. Best friends forever.

I am so proud of you my beautiful girl. Happy Birthday Sweetie!!

Run Blog Week Something Or Other and a Weekend Running Tune

I ran 18K today. On the treadmill. Oh yes I did.

Training for the half marathon in May has been going really well in that my long runs have been at a faster pace than in other years and I was on track to improve my time for the third year in a row, but I have also had more than the usual number of injuries and have had to take a few weeks off here and there. I’m not sure where that leaves me now for my time, but I’m just hoping to get through the last few weeks uninjured.

So today I was scheduled to run 18K and for all sorts of different reasons I didn’t trust my body to be able to complete even 5K today, and so I set myself up on the treadmill with Netflix and a huge container of water, and I blocked out the basement setting and lost myself in The Lucky Ones. It’s not a bad way to pass the time during a long run, truly.

The good news is that I felt really well and finished 18K with no trouble, and I still think there is hope to beat last year’s time. We shall see.

It’s been a while since I have shared a weekend running tune, so here is one that I love. I definitely recommend adding Save it for Later by the English Beat to your running play list. It gets the feet moving just a little faster and lighter – guaranteed.

Happy Trails!

A Difficult Day

Today was a difficult day, but I am OK.

Today was the day my department told individuals whether their jobs were affected in the current downsizing in the federal government. There has been a lot of tension in the office leading up to today and it has been really hard. This morning was awful, but by noon we pretty much knew if we were safe or not. I feel for everyone who has been going through this, affected or not. It really really sucks.

I am OK and I hope that you are too.