If you haven’t noticed (and I’m sure all none of you have), I’ve been MIA for a month and a half or so. Part of this is because my alter ego writes novels and I was wrapping up one of those for publication. But partly, I’ve been considering something that I’ve wondered about off and on for years: is it better to pull back and reflect, to document and share and preserve? Or is life – and the type of experiences I write about here – better experienced all in?
In short, do I want to spend time blogging when I could be on the bike trainer or getting gear ready to go skiing or spending a bit of time snuggling with the cat on the couch? Do I want to step back and look at my life through a literary lens (or a camera lens, as the situation was when I first considered the question) when I could push farther into actually creating new experiences and stories to tell…. someday.
And oh yeah, we’re skiing now.
After about a week of thought, I realized that all of my posts here have a nice moral and I felt like they had to do so, or else why would I write them? Well, perhaps because that isn’t always fun, and it isn’t an accurate representation of my life. Perhaps I can capture the stories while on the go – and if they aren’t beautifully crafted, deep, 700 word essays, at least I can write them on my phone while sitting my a campfire or taking a break someone out in the woods/mountains/back country/middle of REI where I spend way too much money and time. Or, if nothing else, I can write something in fifteen minutes on the couch while still petting the very-cute-but-very-demanding cat.
Anyhow, that’s the idea, and I’m going to see if it works better than the previous model I was using. And to bring this up to speed since I wrote last, here’s a few of the bigger things that happened this fall:
- I got LASIK! This has been a dream of mine ever since I read Halfway to the Sky (not sponsored, just a great book even if it is for 9-12 year olds). It’s about a girl who runs away to hike the Appalachian Trail, which I immediately wanted to do. I’d just gotten contacts, though, and was struggling to put them in when standing in a well-lit, perfectly clean bathroom. The idea of spending 6 months on the AT with contacts? Impossible! I suppose this means I need to start planning a backpacking trip.
- The hubby completed a 150 mile gravel ultra (his first – read his guest post here). It screwed his knee up pretty badly, so between that and my instructions to keep all dust out of my newly 20/20 eyes, we cut back on the biking quite a bit.
- I ran two 5k’s and had fun even though I didn’t exactly train.
- We started biking again, slowly. Turns out that ski helmets are pretty awesome for biking in the cold!
- We started skiing (or rather, I skied and hubby snowboarded). Then the hubby hurt himself on 2/2 snowboarding trips (collarbone and ribs, luckily nothing broken! We’re pretty sure the ribs were only bruised, not cracked…) Thanks to another lovely REI garage sale, hubby picked up a pair of ski boots at a great price, we found him some skis online, and he’s made it down the black run at the closest ski hill already. *For those of you who ski in Iowa, a black run here is about the equivalent of a steep green run on an actual mountain. Maybe a blue.
- I think we may have corrupted hubby’s little brother and his girlfriend. We have skiing buddies now!
That’s all for now, folks. Hopefully I’ll have more to share soon!
