tag: Mama's Ranting Now: May 2011

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Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Putting Down Roots


This past weekend, before the tornado that hit our area on Monday, during a few minutes without rain, we were finally able to plant the baby plants that were still in their pots, hanging out in our patio. The pepper plants had grown so large, that they were almost the same height as the support ladders.

The tomatoes were already tall enough to be threaded through the trellis netting.


Here's Bubba planting a marigold.

And here you see one of my containers.

The garden made it through the storm we had this Monday without any noticeable damage.  Tomorrow I'll see how the garden survived today's storm.  We are currently experiencing large hail and strong winds.
 
 

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

It Wasn't a Tornado

Photo courtesy of NSSL

Yesterday, hungry and exhausted after a long day of homeschooling, considering going out to dinner, we instead decided to head out to the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner.  The weather forecast was calling for severe thunder storms, but I figured that, one, the storm would not hit (it wouldn't have been the first time the forecast was wrong) or, two, that we could stay ahead of the weather, go to the store, and come back before the storm hit.

At the store it seemed like my plan was working.  It was looking like the storm was either not going to come or that we would be done shopping and back home before it struck.  Then, all of a sudden, as we were almost done at the checkout register, we saw the sky turn completely black on one side of the parking lot, while the sky was still blue in the other side, it started to rain heavily, and the wind started to blow very hard. And just as quickly as it had started, the storm stopped, the sky cleared, and the wind died down.  It was quite eerie.

We quickly loaded the groceries into the car and drove home while listening to the news reports on the car radio about a tornado warning right where we were.  We really didn't see anything strange until we were about a block from our house and found a tree that was partially blocking the road.  The neighbors were out moving the tree from the road, so I decided to turn in the other direction, and that's when we came across this tree.




Obviously, I wasn't going to get through that way, so I had to turn around and go the other way, where the neighbors were clearing the road.

Here are a few of the trees that were destroyed in our street.









And then, we have our beautiful linden tree, may it rest in peace.





 Here's another view showing how it was damaged beyond repair.

We couldn't save the tree, so we had it cut down.



This is all that's left of our tree.


We also lost some shingles off the roof, and limbs from some of the other trees in the yard.  Thankfully, that was all the damage we had.  One good thing that happened was that a toy the children had thrown on the roof and that had been stuck there for quite some time, was blown off the roof all in one piece.

Well, apparently, we had a few small tornadoes hit our area last night, and the weather service is calling for more severe weather tonight and tomorrow.


Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Forty Days & Forty Nights of Rain


Source: www.wunderground.com

Well, actually it's been more like forty-two days of rain. How do I know?  Well, since I haven't been able to go outside and work in my garden, I have used my time to check the rainfall we've gotten since March.  I even crosschecked our statistics against the most notoriously, rainy city in the United States: Seattle, WA; and what I found out wasn't pretty.  We actually have gotten more rainfall between March and today than Seattle, WA has gotten during the same time period.

As a gardener, I can appreciate the importance of getting enough rain to help the plants in the garden grow; however, as a gardener I also would like a few nice, non-rainy days in which to work the soil and do some planting.  The last frost date in our area is officially here; but where-o-where is the last drenching-rainfall date?

This past weekend, I spent a day shopping for my vegetable and herb plants in anticipation of the last frost date.  I brought home a nice little collection of baby plants that were excited to arrive at their new home, but they've been spending their time still in their little pots, waiting to put down roots.

Aren't they cute?

They want to be in the garden
Last week, on a rare, non-rainy day, I was able to check things out in the garden and found some growing activity.

Lettuce

Radishes

Carrots
I even found that some of the herbs from last year had made it through the winter.

Tarragon

Oregano


Chives


Additionally, the onions I planted last month seem to be doing well, and I'm sure that after all the rain we've gotten, the potatoes are probably doing well too, but I won't know for sure until I can get out there to check.

Onions
Hopefully the rain will stop soon.  On the bright side, I planted some grass seeds in a few bare muddy spots in our yard, and with all the rain we've gotten, the grass seedlings will be growing rather nicely, I'm sure.


Sunday, May 15, 2011

CSA Challenge


Normally, I like to plan about a week's worth of dinners ahead of time, go shopping for the ingredients, and cook nutritious dinners for my family all week long; however, we now belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program through a local farm, and my original way to plan our week's meals has been turned upside down.

So, instead of picking a recipe and then shopping for the ingredients like I've been doing, I now have the ingredients and must pick out a recipe.  This whole process makes my brain hurt!  Thankfully, Hubby is the type of person that sees an ingredient and immediately gets inspired; he's a walking, breathing, living cookbook, and that's a pretty handy thing to have around the house.  Soon, with all this experience, I should be able to do the same thing too.

Every week, we get a box of organic produce delivered directly to our house. Since it's too early in the season to get a bountiful supply of locally grown produce, the CSA supplier supplements the boxes with organic produce from outside the area until enough local produce is available to fill the boxes.

This week, in our CSA box, we received the following:

  • Green Garlic
  • Spinach
  • Mustard Greens
  • Dill
  • Bananas
  • Apples
  • Tomatoes
  • Celery
  • Carrots
  • Lettuce (Romaine)
  • Strawberries
  • Zucchini
  • Mangoes
  • Lemon
  • Lime

The challenge is to use all the produce from the box before it spoils. So far we've already made a spinach salad with strawberries, sautéed zucchini, Caesar salad with the romaine lettuce, sautéed mustard greens with green garlic, and some of the carrots.   Today, in order to use the dill, we will be having Greek spinach pies made with phyllo dough and feta cheese.  I also have plans to make a vegetable beef soup, which is a great way to use up miscellaneous vegetables.

Let's see if we're successful in using all the produce before it spoils, but, if not, I guess we'll just have really expensive compost for our garden.  Let's hope for the former rather than the later.
 
 

Saturday, May 14, 2011

No More Whine


Quit your whining and complaining.  And stop that temper tantrum right this minute.  Okay, so I couldn't resist this one, it was too good to pass up.  I was at the wine shop today for their Saturday afternoon wine tasting and came across this bottle of wine.  Pretty clever way to sell wine, and, seriously, with a label like this who cares if the wine actually tastes good, right? I didn't get to try this wine, but it might be fun to go back and get a bottle of this to save for a special occasion, that is, as long as I remember not to throw a Tempra Tantrum.  What a mess that would make!

Anyway, if for some reason I were to throw a Tempra Tantrum, I would end up needing a:




 


 
 

Eyes on the Prize



With spring finally here, the rains finally behind us (I think), and the beginning of summer not too far off, it’s been very hard to get the children focused on their homeschool.  Googie has been making great progress in his schoolwork all year long and only has about three or four weeks of lessons to complete.   Bubba has finally started to make some progress in his homeschool too.  But, all of a sudden, like Newton’s First Law of Motion, my children’s homeschooling motion is being acted upon by the external force of spring weather.
 
Just when they can actually see the prize: a summer filled with no school work, no cares, and endless fun; they start to dawdle, complain and waste time.  What would've taken one day to complete before the change in weather, is now taking almost a week to complete.  So, like Violet Beauregarde’s mother in the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I find myself saying, “Eyes on the Prize, Violet.  Eyes on the Prize.” And when they start to complain that the work toward the end of the school year is always the hardest, I just smile and, like Willie Wonka told Violet in the movie, I  say, “Confidence is key.”

What I need is another force to act upon my inert children.  A force greater than the wonderful spring weather that we’ve been having.  I’ve tried threatening them with summer homeschool, but to them it just sounds like an empty threat.  I either need to find a way to make the threat more convincing, or I need to find something else: a different force.  The question is: what could that possibly be?



Saturday, May 7, 2011

Completing My First 26.2 Miles




I did it, I actually did it, I finished a full marathon, all 26.2 miles of it. And after getting over forgetting about the pain, and after getting a great massage, and after a few margaritas, I can say (with confidence) that it was a great experience, a humbling experience, an experience that I will never forget—instead of the pain part, I obviously forgot that part.  I say this because, although, it hasn't yet been a week since the marathon, I'm already making plans for my next marathon.  I blame it on the endorphins, and on that massage.

So how did it go?  Well, the weather leading up to the marathon had been pretty awful: constant rain with no chance of dry weather. Being a nervous wreck during the ten days leading up to the marathon, I spent a lot of my time checking the weather on every imaginable weather web page I could find, looking for updates every thirty minutes, trying a different web page, hoping for a better forecast, but the forecast was always the same: scattered thunderstorms. Therefore, instead of hoping for fair weather, I started to pray for not-so-bad weather.  A steady, light rain would be fine or even just rain without thunder and lightning. Yes, as long as there was no thunder or lighting, I would be happy.

Convinced that I would not let the weather get the best of me, I packed for every possible weather scenario.  In addition to the regular running attire I had planned to wear, I packed a disposable rain poncho; a trash bag; a jacket which I planned to discard during the race; and a lightweight, water-resistant, running jacket that folded into its own little pouch, and which fit nicely into my running belt.

 
The morning of the race, our Team in Training (TNT) group assembled in the hotel lobby so we could take a group photo and walk over to the start line together.  Once the photographs were taken, and everyone was ready to go, we began to walk over to the start line. 



And, unfortunately, my weather readiness was not disappointed.  The moment we arrived at the start line, the temperature went down by about ten degrees and it began to rain, but, no problem, I had my poncho and jacket. The start line was jam-packed; it was hard to move into position.  Supposedly, they had set-up starting corrals, but I never really saw them.  I just saw a bunch of porta potties and spectators blocking the way and not letting the runners get through to the start line.  I’m not really sure how we did it, but somehow we pushed our way to the start line, and ended up in position one minute before the gun went off. (You'll have to excuse the blurriness of some of these pictures.  It's hard to take pictures while running)
 
And we were off—theoretically.  At this point, my heart was probably moving faster than my legs, since it took about ten minutes for us to actually cross the official start line, after which I started to run slowly jog, and strangely enough passed quite a lot of people.  In a way it was a bit of a morale boost, but, in a way, dodging walkers and discarded clothing items as if on an obstacle course got old pretty quickly.  After finally making it through that obstacle course, we started to run on a bridge, but I actually hadn’t registered the fact that we were on a bridge, and began to feel lightheaded  (no doubt because I hadn’t had any sleep the night before), and I started to worry that I might pass out, until I overhead someone talking to her friend saying, “Can you feel that?  The bridge is shaking!”  It sure was a relief to realize that I wasn’t going to pass out any time soon.  

 
Soon, I took off the poncho, even though it was still raining.  It just was too hard to run with that poncho on, and, anyways, it really wasn't doing much to keep me dry at this point. Next, I took off my throw-away jacket, and was considering actually throwing it by the side of the road, but could not let go of the jacket.  Some invisible force kept that jacket permanently attached to my hand.  I was going to drop it off at the next water stop, no, the next one, no, the next one.  I kept this up until I just told myself that I would hold on to the jacket until I got to about mile six where Hubby was going to be.  Mile three passed, mile four, mile five.  Then I heard two familiar voices shout out, “Nicole!”  I looked over and saw my friends Holly and Susy. I was screaming. I was jumping up and down. Then I looked farther down and saw Hubby standing there taking pictures.  To say that, that moment was the highlight of the race, would be an understatement.





 
Unless you count being serenaded by Elvis.


Or seeing Big Foot holding a sign which read, “Run, Human, Run.”

Or this guy, huh?

 
And then, just as I was starting to question my ability to finish the marathon, I see this guy:



It was around that time when my legs cramped up, and I stopped.  I think I hit the wall, well that’s what I thought it was.  I mean, my legs cramped up and wouldn’t move, doesn’t that sound like the wall?  My legs hurt really, really badly.  I gave birth to a baby without pain killers, and still didn’t remember that kind of pain.  It was so bad, I started to use my Lamaze breathing techniques, which freaked out some of the runners because everyone (yes, I actually do mean everyone) that was passing me at this point stopped for a moment to ask me if I was okay.  

Finally, one of the TNT coaches showed up around this point and asked me how I was doing.  I told him that I was just fine, but that my legs hurt really, really badly and that I thought I had just hit the wall because my legs wouldn't move and isn't this what hitting the wall meant? He just told me that I was crazy for thinking I could run a marathon needed to drink more water, and eat a few more energy gels.  Fortunately, they were handing out energy gels at this point of the race, and I started to stock up on them.  By the end of the race, I’m sure that I had consumed at least eight packages of energy gels, twice the number that I had packed for the race.

Pretty soon, I started to feel better, so the coach abandoned me ran back to check on the other team members.  Waddling along bowlegged, taking my time like it was a simple Sunday stroll, I mentally clawed my way to the finish line, when all of a sudden I looked behind me and saw Kim, another TNT member.  We greeted each other, she continued on, and not too long after that, I got my second wind and started to run. It was a miracle!  My legs started to work again.  Before I knew it, I was at mile 25.5 and Susy and Holly were standing there cheering me on again and giving me another boost, which helped me get to the finish line.

I earned this medal, and I also earned the sticker: the 26.2 sticker.  Now my 13.1 sticker doesn't have to hang out on my minivan all by its lonesome self.

The runner girl accomplishes her goal, runs her first marathon, crosses the finish line, sets a personal record of 5:25:11, THE END...

Coming soon, to a race nearby, an amnesiac runner girl decides to conquer what she had always thought she wanted to do: run her first marathon race.

Yes, I already signed up for my next race. I think that it's official, I have lost my mind.