30-day photo challenge

I needed something to inspire me to take more photos, and something to post on this-here blog-thing, so when I ran across this 30-day photo challenge, I thought it sounded like something I could do.

This is day 1: self-portrait.

I am going to try to do this each day this month and post here. Let's see how I do!

counting my blessings

If my biggest problem is that I can't think of anything to write about on my blog, or that my husband wants to take my daughter to Paris while my other daughter and I are on a mother-daughter girl scout cruise, then I don't really have any problems.

The photo above is of balloons we released at a gathering last weekend to honor the life and birthday of a boy that my daughter went to school with from kindergarten through sixth grade. He was born with a heart defect and had received a heart transplant as a tiny baby. He was always struggling with health issues but was a lively, funny, quirky kid and I always enjoyed him. He was the only child of a single mom, who adored him.

He died before he ever made it to middle school.

My family is healthy. I don't really have any problems.

am I going to do something with this?

I am always looking for a way to be inspired to be more creative. The THING that's going to get me to stretch creatively and do something new.

Before Christmas, my in-laws asked me to add more items to my Amazon wishlist to give faraway family members some ideas for gifts to get for me. On a whim, I added a package of 8x10 canvas panels, some acrylic paints, and paintbrushes. Thinking I might like to paint something colorful and textury like this.

My in-laws thought, hmm, art supplies? Didn't know she painted . . . okay.

I opened up a couple of packages when we visited at Christmastime and ended up receiving the canvases and the brushes. No paints.

Oh well, it's not like I was going to paint anything while I was up in Wisconsin anyway.

But when I got home I decided that if I actually had the paints on hand, maybe I would paint something. So I ordered them from Amazon. And here they sit.

I don't really know what to do with them. My creative impulse has kind of blown over at the moment. I don't have a good place to set up to paint. How do you even work with acrylic paints? I can't even WRITE about painting. It's taken me a good three days to even put together this disjointed little blog post.

BUT . . . I am inspired by my talented friend Lisa. She used some time that fell into her lap to sit down and create something cool and beautiful. I need to learn to use my time like that. 

what sparkles

My dear friend Lisa challenged me to post something today, since I haven't done anything here in a while. She gave me a prompt of "what is sparkling in your life this week?"

Well, there's been a lot of sparkling going on, since it IS the holiday season, but I decided on this: the giant wedge of cheese that they "drop" on New Year's Eve in my husband's little Wisconsin hometown.

Our family tradition, when we are in Wisconsin for the holidays every other year, is to go downtown at quarter to midnight on New Year's Eve and watch the cheese get lowered from the tall ladder of the town firetruck. Families gather beneath the lit-up "cheese" wedge with their mittens and hot chocolate and count down from 10 as the cheese, dangling on a cable, gets brought down. Lights flash and sirens blare as the crowd cheers when the cheese reaches the ground.

It's a short drop, but it's a lot of fun and everyone loves sending up "that ball drop they do in New York." Each year we've gone (and we were there for the first one), it's drawn more of a crowd and they've gotten more efficient with the hoisting and lowering.

While the cheese itself was festooned with lights, what really sparkled for me last night was the glow of the happy crowd, the smiles of my girls (giggling even though they are teenagers and so over it), and the warmth of a family tradition renewed.

grateful

I am feeling thankful today. Grateful for my nice, newly single neighbor who let us park one of our cars in her newly half-empty garage for the snowstorm. Thankful that today was a snow day that let us sleep in but turned into a beautiful sunny afternoon and evening. And happy that my ordeal from yesterday (thyroid biopsy) is over and I am feeling okay.

iron

Well. It turns out that there was something else holding me back too, and I don't know why I didn't suspect: I found out I was severely anemic. Now I know why I sometimes felt too weak to finish a run, or why whenever I would crouch down and stand back up, I would almost black out. How did I ignore that for so long?

I stopped my running program before I got to the end (couldn't really ever get to the point where I could run longer than 10 minutes at a stretch), and haven't run since probably June. It's now the first of November (haha, the one day I can count on myself to try to post an entry - NaBloPoMo, you know)  and I think I would have to start all over. I think I might, though.

I have now been taking iron supplements for a few months, plus I had some uterine fibroids removed, which were causing excessive monthly bleeding (the probable cause of the anemia). I'm feeling stronger and tire less easily, so I think I'm ready to give it another try. I think this iron thing was holding me back way more than that measly "4" on the treadmill incline!

uphill battle

I really struggled with week 7 of Couch to 5K. Couldn't figure out why I was huffing and puffing so much doing my slow jog through the 25 minutes. About halfway through the second run of the week, I noticed that the incline on the treadmill had been set to 4. I usually run at about a 1.5 incline; apparently someone in my family who had used the treadmill had cranked it up and I had run uphill several miles without noticing, even though that "4" was just staring me in the face as I leaned over the handrails, gasping and sweating.

It made me think: what else am I making more difficult for myself because I just plow on ahead without paying attention?