I spent this weekend in Hays.
Normally that sentence would be the entirety of a conversation about one’s weekend. Saying “I just went to Hays” is recognizable by anyone who’s been there as meaning, effectively, “I was just bored out of my mind and did absolutely nothing for however long I’ve been gone.”
This was a pretty good trip though. It was the Kansas Special Olympics state basketball tournament, and quite frankly it was the best KSO trip I’ve ever been on. Everyone had a great time, nobody was injured, the dance came and went without one tear shed or any drama staged, and there weren’t even any fights.
These tournaments are pretty exhausting, so I haven’t searched the pictures I shot yet, but I know from the previews on-screen when I was shooting them that many are not good. The camera and I had some disagreements regarding settings. Stupid point-and-shoot. If any of them are good, though, I’ll toss them up on Flickr later and post a link here.
So, Walm*rt is having a $1/yard fabric sale, beginning today and running until Saturday. I leave tomorrow morning for a work trip, so I don’t have the luxury of waiting until Saturday - I need to go stock up tonight! This is complicated, though, since I don’t have a car. Seth left this morning - he’s helping out with a Special Olympics trip this weekend, and took the car. So, I have to catch a ride to work today. I’m supposed to meet with a friend tonight to show her how to cast off some knitting (she’s making a felted purse! I am so proud!), and I’m hoping she might want to go get some fabric, too. I suspect the sale is due to Walm*rt’s decision to phase out fabrics in their stores, which pretty much sucks. With no fabric available, I’ll have to either go to the quilt shop here in town (they’ve probably got nice stuff, but it’s probably out of my price range), or drive the 45 minutes to Joplin to hit Hobby Lobby or Jo-Ann Fabrics.
I really shouldn’t complain too much, though. We’re getting a yarn store! Right here in Pittsburg! It’s tentatively slated to open the first week of April. I’ve already warned Seth that I’ll be putting a pretty significant dent in our checkbook as soon as I visit, which I hope to do right away. I know I can probably get yarn cheaper online, but I also know that having a yarn shop (right here! where I live!) is worth a lot, and I’m going to do my part to ensure they stick around.
I started cleaning the garage the other night. I’ve always been a bit of a pack rat, and though I have a theory or two on the reasons for that, they don’t really merit mention here. What does bear attention is that I have so much crap that if actual rats were to literally nest in it, serendipity alone would lead to their discovery.
On the plus side, I’ve finally started to think of this crap as such, and have begun throwing out trash. Tonight I spent a while rummaging through a rather large box populated mostly by old telephone bills. This would have been useful at tax time, except that they were all for a cell phone I haven’t had for four or five years, not for a land line. Those I threw away years ago, naturally.
But I’m making progress, even if it doesn’t show. I’m still in the stage of cleaning in which every thing I does looks worse, but is necessary. I’m really looking forward to being finished.
On a lighter note, I’ve rediscovered Sgt. Keroro/Keroro Gunsou. I found a few episodes on my hard drive, and a few more online. While I was looking for the ones online though, I discovered it had been licensed in November. The bad news is that the DVD release dates aren’t announced yet, but the good news is that the licensing company was ADV. I’m in the minority of anime fans in that I prefer a well-done dub to a sub whenever possible. I’ll take subs if the dub is bad or non-existent, and if TokyoPop, 4Kids, or any number of other outfits had picked up Keroro Gunsou I would be supremely disappointed, but I think ADV is one of the best two chances the good sergeant has at a respectful translation, the other being Geneon. Of course, I think ADV did Super Milk Chan, now that I think of it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Woo! I managed to get two full miles inside of 30 minutes! Previously, I’d been getting about 2.9, and was walking a good portion of the time. This morning, though, I made myself run about half the time (maybe just a little more). For the first mile, I walked laps 1 & 3, and ran laps 2 & 4, and for the second mile, I walked the first half of each lap and ran the back half of it.
I’m not running at the pace I’m going to need to get a 10 minute mile, but I’m pushing myself to run longer (whole laps at a time) rather than faster (quarter or half laps at a time) and keeping my minimum/walking pace higher throughout the session. Is it any wonder, then, that I’m craving eggs and the protein they provide?
Since early January, I’ve been working out pretty consistently at the YMCA. At lunch, I go with a group of coworkers to take whatever class is offered, usually an aerobic one (Zumba, step, possibly Kickboxing soon) on MWF and Abs, Back, and Buns on TTh. In the mornings, I go and just put in some time on one of the machines. For a while there, I was changing things up, using the elliptical machine one day, a bike the next, then a treadmill, etc. But lately, I’ve been pretty stuck on the treadmill.
I really love the feedback I can get on a treadmill. I’m not talking about the calories burned readout - I don’t trust that much at all. But I like seeing how far I can run in my specified time (usually 30 minutes). I haven’t had a real goal, though. Just walk & run for 30 minutes.
This morning, I realized I did have a goal. I want to be able to run two miles in 20 minutes. Right now I can very easily walk two miles in about 40 minutes. I can run one or two laps at a 10-minute-mile pace during my 30 minutes, but I can’t keep it up for more that that. I know I can do this - when I was on the rowing team in college I did two miles in 22 minutes during our fitness tests at the beginning of the spring season. And I’m pretty sure a 10 minute mile isn’t outside the realm of feasibility for the average person. So, I’m going to do my damndest to make it happen.
Wish me luck (and send some endurance this way)!
Last night I made macaroni & cheese for supper. Lately, since I discovered that making a bechamel to create the cheese part of the dish is a) not too hard and b) really, really, tasty, I’ve enjoyed making it more. Also, it’s maybe even (dare I say it?) better than the one Grandma used to make. I usually use shredded Cheddar, torn up slices of American, and some generic canned Parmesan to flavor the cheese sauce. Last night was different.
Yesterday, after work, at the store, I decided to look at the fancier cheese Wal-Mart has to offer. Admittedly, this being Wal-Mart in Pittsburg, KS, the cheeses weren’t that high-end, but still - I got Farmer’s cheese, restaurant-style white dipping cheese (think white queso at Mexican restaurants), and Havarti. Using these in conjuction with my standard three, I made some really, really good mac & cheese. I made too much of the sauce though, compared to the amount of pasta I made (note to self - a single recipe of the bechamel is more than enough for 4 oz. of dry pasta). That’s okay though - it’s always better to have too much cheese than not enough.
So, if things go as planned, we’ll be going to Taiwan in August. We’re applying to teach English there, and we’re bucking our trademark spontaneity (”Hey Mom, we’re getting married…next month”) and actually planning and preparing.
We’ve been going through our stuff, deciding which books we really want to keep, considering whether there’ll be storage space for our favorite-enough-to-keep but not favorite-enough-to-schlep-on-a-trans-oceanic-flight things, and figuring out what to do with the stuff we don’t want to keep, which we figure should be most of our worldly goods. What good is a (hopefully) life- and consciousness-changing experience if it doesn’t make one at least a little less attached to material possessions?
We’re also dealing with the fact that we will be going there with nothing more than the language school’s crash course in Mandarin, with jobs that consume as much as 32 hours of each week. There’ll be a bit of free time, it would seem. So although we’ll certainly want to spend a lot of time immersing ourselves in the culture, learning the language, (there’s one-on-one peer tutoring and classes in addition to the default immersion by way of just being there,) there’ll be days when we’re just homesick, too, and need some brainless sitcoms or zombie-killing action. So I’m (slowly) ripping our DVD collection to the computer, with the intention of tossing it all on a portable hard drive, and watching it there on a laptop. It’s a slightly wonky process under Linux, in some ways more straightforward than under Windows, but with slightly less predictable results, particularly with regards to file size. I won’t bore you with that right now, though. I’ll do it some other time in another post. A looooong one.