Plantar fasciitis

I have not been able to run for a long time, not since the end of May, due to having a very small but very sore spot on my arch. I have foot “issues” – they are almost nearly flat (found out about that when I had pain from running track in high school), I over pronate, I have bunions. My shoes have been fantastic and really had prevented the ankle pain I always had when I’d run before, or even walked. I’ve had arch pain before but this time it was just not really getting better. It got to the point where I couldn’t walk on it in the morning and when I put shoes on, it felt like I was walking on a lump!

Off to the doctor I went. It turns out she is a runner too and had just been to this big conference. She gave me a bunch of exercises and stretches – plus motrin for 10 days and rolling my foot on a frozen water bottle. One of my exercises is an activity I enjoy anyway – picking up objects with my toes! I saw her less than a week ago so it’s hard to tell yet if it’s helping. I think that it’s pretty inflamed, and it will take a while to go away. I am not allowed to run at all right now, but I can power walk, which I did the other day. That went well with a lot of icing and stretching. She was also not at all alarmed about my weight gain, she said it was muscle and encouraged me to keep going!

I also had a bunch of blood tests. I have suspected that I never got rid of the mono I got two years ago, and now have chronic Epsteinn-Barr virus. I will find out early this week what, if anything, turned up. It could be still fibromyalgia and it could also be that I just need more time to recover from 5 years of never having enough sleep. Will update on that later!

Communicable disease of the month

This month, it’s Coxsackie virus – otherwise known as hand, foot, and mouth disease. Not to be confused with hoof and mouth disease, which is a disease of cattle. This one starts with a really high fever, then progresses to a child with sores in his/her mouth, and the whole thing is nicely decorated with extreme fussiness. Sophie went from fairly OK to suddenly screaming Thursday evening, and we didn’t know why. Then Saturday I saw the blisters in her mouth. She never did get a hand/foot rash but she did have 1-2 spots on one hand. Not much you can do except tylenol/motrin and benadryl. By the way benadryl does not make my kids sleepy. It does not wind them up, but it doesn’t make them sleep either. Lucky me right?

Yesterday Will had a fever and was puking but he went to bed, stayed there all night and was fine this morning. Appetite not the best but he’s nibbled a little here and there all day. Sophie seems herself for the most part but I can see spots in her mouth, including a big one under her tongue. No wonder the poor thing has hardly been able to nurse! And it is crazy contagious… so we’ve all been staying in.

I was feeling OK, tired, but today my throat is sore. However it could be mono again, which flares up whenever I don’t get enough rest. Before the kids got sick, I was up several nights coughing from a mild cold. It’s always something…

It’s going!!!

My beer seems to be doing well. After 48+ tense hours of wondering whether it would start fermenting, suddenly I had lots of foam! It’s still going strong and once it’s done I’ll get it bottled if the specific gravity looks good. I know I said I’d take a picture of the bubbling airlock but there really isn’t much to see, just a blurp now and then. I’m excited that things are going along like they should. What a fun biology/chemistry experiment!

As the wort turns!

This is my first of hopefully many adventures in beer making! I used a Brewer’s Best kit, English Brown Ale. Here are the contents of the kit:

And here is some of the equipment from my brewing set I used:

The first step was to make a “tea” out of crushed crystal malt. (The unfermented beer is called “wort” and this is the first step for this kind of beer.) First the crushed malt is put in a stockinette bag, while a pot of water gets its temperature taken. (Note my beautiful 1970 harvest gold cooktop. It’s an original!)

Then as the water heats, the bag of malt steeps.

It is a lovely color! And the smell! SO good.

You could get a good steam facial with this!

Once the crushed malt steeps for 20 minutes, the “tea” is brought to a boil and the malt (sugars) and bittering hops are added. Here are the hops, processed into pellets:

The hops are added to the boiling malt sugar solution and continue to boil for a total of 55 minutes. At that time, the flavoring hops are added (a different variety to give another layer of flavor). I had two types of malt in this kit – a can of syrup and a bag of powder. The powder malt made some crazy foam when I added it and it was a little bit scary! Eventually it all settled and happily boiled away. Made every room in the house smell good!

Once the wort was done cooking, into an ice bath to cool to 70 degrees.

After the wort came down to temperature, I poured it out of the pot and into the ale pail. The sediment left at the bottom of the pan actually has a name – it’s called trub!

Water goes in after that,then we check specific gravity. Just like chemistry class! The specific gravity will go down once the beer is done fermenting.

After that, yeast is added…

Temperature is checked again… (can’t see it well but it’s about 75)

Then the pail is lidded and fermentation lock applied.

Notice the order. That was my first mistake. I put on the lid and pushed in the fermentation lock, and the little rubber grommet went into the wort. This was followed by much swearing and fishing in the wort for the grommet. Once it was located, the fermentation lock went in the lid BEFORE applying the lid, then lid was applied and water was added to fermentation lock.

Now the beer is in its resting place for 3-7 days. Will take pictures of bubbling fermentation lock. Once bubbling has stopped, and specific gravity has decreased to stated number, then bottling process can begin.

Turning 40

It was my birthday last weekend and I turned 40. I don’t understand why people get all upset about turning 40 (or 30 or whatever) because I really don’t feel any different than I did at 39. Besides, I don’t give a crap what people think about me anymore and that’s very freeing! Here’s to turning 40! It’s good!

The birthday festivities stretched out over a week. Last Friday night I went to a friend’s house (My Big Blue Comfy Couch) for mojitos, then out to a bar for some dancing. Stayed up way too late and was very tired the next day! On Saturday, because it was Memorial Day weekend, we packed ourselves up and drove to my in law’s summer home about an hour away on Lake Huron. It was a nice overnight up there with the family, but for some reason I cannot sleep up there, so again a second night of not enough. By Sunday (my actual birthday) I was pretty tired! But we got home and I opened my gifts – the most interesting being a beer making kit. All the equipment I need to make beer except the ingredients! I’d asked for this because it’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while. I just picked up a kit for brown English ale and I’m excited to get started. Hopefully we have enough bottles, guess we need to finish up that 12 of Bass so I’ll have enough of them!

That evening we had dinner at a local Japanese steakhouse that has good sushi and they cook dinner right in front of you. The kids enjoyed that even though they fussed through dinner! We bribed them with ice cream which helped a little bit! We were too full for cake so the next day (Monday) we had cake. It would have been a lot of candles so I asked my husband to figure out how to do it in binary – which you can see here.

On this past Friday, the girls who couldn’t make it had a brunch for me. I got some wonderful gifts – a nice selection of Bath and Body Works goodies, a gift certificate, and another goody bag filled with incense, candles, candle holders, earrings… wonderful things! I have been wanting to burn more incense and candles and have been trying to create little pockets of things that make me feel good in this house of chaos! It’s time for me to dig out all those things I packed away when I started having babies and put them back out. Anything to create a little corner of serenity. My kitchen window is now a work in progress. I still need to stick some hooks in the soffit so I can hang a few things up. I love windows with glass things hanging in them to catch the light.

I had a very, very good birthday this year. 40 is good and all I can say is that life keeps getting better. It should be fantastic by the time I’m dead!

Just updated the building blog

An Adventure in Home Construction has been updated with planting news. Fun! It will be nice when we are actually living out there and we can actually maintain a garden.

Things have been going well here. My husband and son went off to help his parents with some house work this weekend so Sophie and I had some girlfriend time. Except for her couple of bouts of extreme crabbiness at inopportune times, we had a pretty good time. She has been sleeping well (all night long in her own bed – GASP!) and I’ve been feeling a little better. It is taking a really long time for me to actually feel good. But I finally feel like I am coming out of the baby fog and wanting to do little things like wear more jewelry and accessories (now that little hands aren’t always yanking on them) and do more things to make our house look better. It’s a huge undertaking, though, because I have a lot of cleaning to do and that always takes up way too much time!

On the running front, I ran a mile a couple of weekends ago for the first time and this past weekend, I ran our side street two full loops. I was pushing S in the jogging stroller and took a lot of walk breaks but we went about 1.25 miles. (It’s 1.5 miles round trip to do it twice.) I am at a point where the novelty has started to wear off and this is WORK!!! I know I will get stronger and get past this point, and get to a place where a little run down the road feels good and doesn’t feel so much like work. But, I am enjoying the results – I have a little more energy, I am sleeping a little better, I am looking a little better. It’s helping so I’m going to keep doing it. Sometimes I really have to kick my butt out the door but I know if I keep going, I won’t always feel like that.

I have been working on trying to get the flower beds cleaned up here. Boy are they a mess. They have suffered from 4+ years of pregnancy/infant/sleep induced neglect. There is a ton of work to be done but I keep picking away at it and hopefully by the end of the summer (if I don’t totally crap out from the heat) they will be looking OK.

Mark this day on your calender

At the age of 2 years and 3+ months, my daughter did the unthinkable. She didn’t take a nap so she fell asleep in my lap around 7:30 pm. I put her to bed just before 8 and shut the door. She slept in her own room, in her own bed, without waking up, without yelling, without fussing, until 7:30 this morning. What, you say? Why, most children are doing this by the time they turn 1. Not my kids!

The other thing that happened today was that I ran a mile. A whole mile, without stopping. My pace is painfully slow, probably a 20 minute mile, but I still ran it and I still did it without stopping, without walk breaks. I haven’t done that in over 20 years. So, while I have managed to maintain the 10 pound weight gain since I started about 6 weeks ago, I can now run a mile. And something else cool happened during that mile. I found my “groove”, just at a point of where my running was comfortable enough that I was relaxed and not dreading the next 10 feet. I felt a couple of small endorphin rushes too and I knew that once I was in my groove, I’d make it the whole mile. I think I could have gone farther but I wanted to take some time to cool down a bit as I had a short walk on a very busy main road to get home. There is a little group of houses down the road here in the woods and their road is dirt, there is almost no traffic and lots of wildlife and a lot of it is shady. I think I will plan to do most of my longer runs in there until it becomes too short. (I actually find that statement a bit funny but then again when I started out running only feet at a time, a mile sounded impossible!)

While I am a little discouraged by the weight gain, everyone who has been here before me is telling me to trust the process. If anything, I am not as hungry as I was before I started running and people keep reassuring me that it will come in time. I cannot imagine being this heavy and running several miles, several days a week and maintaining this weight. Some of it HAS to come off at some point! Geez. I am much better hydrated than I was before and I am still breastfeeding… so I am sure my body is confident there will be a famine any day, and it needs to be sure it can turn my butt into milk. I feel better and I am sleeping a little better so I will keep running, regardless of anything else. It’s a good thing for me right now.

Mixer on crack

Just a little funny story. I was making cookies yesterday and I love my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. I use it for cookie dough all the time because it can handle stiff doughs without a problem. I got my dry ingredients in the bowl and turned it on, LOW. BLAM!!!!!! Flour and cinnamon and baking powder clouds engulfed the kitchen. WHAT the H??? I say, as I shut it off. I gently start it again, and BLAM!!!! Another cloud of dust.

So I then add the oatmeal. I gingerly turn on the switch again, and BLAMO!!!!! Oatmeal bits EVERYWHERE!!!

This is not normal. My sweet Kitchen Aid mixer does NOT shoot oatmeal unless I crank ‘er up to 10 from the get-go. She does NOT do this on 1.

However, it’s been a long, long time since I made cookies. Maybe my memory is not good. So I add the wet ingredients, thinking the wetter, heavier dough would help my mixer to mix things more gently. I am wrong. I cannot get the mixer to slow down and I do not know why. So, I pulse it like one would pulse a food processor just to get the dough together, and I remove the bowl.

There is brownish water all over the counter. At first I thought my beloved coffee dispenser that we just got a few months ago was on the fritz. But, then I look around. It was the plant. I over-watered the plant that is on the shelf over the mixer and it went everywhere. As I turn the mixer around I can see brown water dripping out from the vents around the motor.

I said any number of bad words at this point because one time I fried a TV using the same plant-watering method.

I hesitated to tell my husband about it but then I did anyway. I did not get the razzing I’d expected… since he had given me heck in a handbasket for watering the TV (even though it meant he got to buy a bigger TV!). He said, he was sure kitchen equipment such as that could take a splash.

Thankfully this morning, my trusty Kitchen Aid is no longer on crack. Low speed means low again.

Note to self – do not place plants above any type of equipment that needs to be plugged in.

For those of you who want to run!

I have had quite a few people ask me about starting to run. I’ve been replying to everyone individually but thought it might help if I made a blog post. I am hoping Nancy at Running Chick will correct me or add any information I’m missing on as a comment because she runs half marathons and has been doing this a lot longer than I have!

First, it is crucial that you get yourself a good pair of shoes. Don’t just go to Dunham’s (and for Pete’s sake, avoid Wal Mart!) and try stuff on. Go to a running store where they do gait analysis. Have someone look at how you walk and determine the motion of your ankles and the shape of your feet. I have a lot of foot issues (overpronation, very low arches, bunions, ankle pain) and this is the best pair of athletic shoes I’ve ever owned. They are fantastic. I’ve had a lot of other pains since I started running but that nagging ankle pain I always would get is no longer there. Be prepared to pay good money for them. Your feet will thank you. Your ankles, knees, hips and back will thank you too. Good shoes will seriously help you avoid that “I hate this” feeling that people get when they first start out. Good shoes will help avoid injury as well.

Second, GO SLOW. If all you do is walk the first week, then walk. When you are feeling your endurance improving, add a little stretch of bouncing walk. When you get tired, walk some more. Walk a lot. Give yourself a day of rest the next day. When you head back out again, try to do a little bit more. A little bit! It doesn’t have to be a ton. If all you can do is 40 feet of a bouncy walk, then do 40 feet of a bouncy walk. It counts. IT WILL ALL HELP YOU BUILD ENDURANCE. This is how I started and within a few weeks I’d run my first quarter mile. I know everyone will vary depending on your current level of fitness, but especially for those of you who know me in person, you know that I did not go work out and am not athletic nor do I even enjoy watching sports on TV.

You will know by how you feel, how much more running to add to your walks as you go. Trust this process. I think that by going really slow I have managed to enjoy this and not wind up hating it. If I’d gone flying out of the driveway at a full tilt I’m sure I’d have quit long ago. Just take each day as it comes. Some days you will be tired and you will get out there and feel like you are lugging around concrete. That’s OK. It’s OK to take more walk breaks on those days, just go to your comfort. As long as you go! That’s the main thing.

And of course, if you have any medical issues, please take them up with your doctor. That includes severe pain that is more than “wow, I didn’t know I had that muscle” pain.

If your goal is to run events, like a 5K, 10K, or marathon, ask Nancy at Running Chick. That’s her department.

We got the trees in!

I updated my other blog “An Adventure in Home Construction” last night – we got our trees planted this weekend. On Saturday I went for a run/walk with my friend Annie. I ran a total of .44 miles, and if you count the walk break in between runs, it was .64. We went on a 2.1 mile loop and walked the rest of it. It was a nice day, it was windy though but in the mid 70’s. After the run we went to the dirt and met my husband and the kids. There is a big sandy ridge (well, I’d hardly call it anything since it looks flat to me, but ’round here, they are called ridges) in the middle of the field and the kids plopped down there with their lunches and sand toys. We managed to get over 100 put in before we needed a break – Annie (who is the best person EVER) offered to go back out there with my husband to finish up while I put Sophie down for a nap. They got all but about 7 of them planted on Saturday!! We filled Annie with beer and pizza. The next day, the temperature had really dropped, it was only about 48 and very overcast. I went out there myself and planted the last 7 trees and I also put in 10 asparagus plants and 15 strawberry plants. I don’t know how those will do, they are in a good spot, I am hoping they will not get too dry or overheated during our long stretches without rain that we seem to always have. I have 10 strawberry plants left to put in here, I figure once they start making berries, then I can go out and check the plants in the field. Otherwise I will be running out there constantly looking for berries!

Saturday afternoon while my husband and friend were out there, they spotted a huge fire. One of the “neighbors” (I say it loosely since they were probably a mile away) had a pole barn that caught fire and it was a total loss. They were able to see it clearly across the field and watched for about 1/2 hour they said. It was lucky it didn’t catch their house because that’s how the wind was blowing. The fire department went back many times to fill their tankers. Then later the same fire and rescue crew went flying by our house again… looks like the Midland Twp. fire department didn’t get much rest on Saturday.

It is cold and rainy today, I am hoping that is good for everything we planted. We have no way to water anything out there so whatever survives will be tough indeed. I will be excited to see little bits of green as the trees start growing leaves. We still have the 3 fruit trees to plant. They are a lot bigger than the saplings we put in so now there will be room for them in the truck. And we still need to plan on where to put them.

I am stiff and sore and walking around like a clunky old man! I am finally feeling it in my shoulders today. I was planning to run today but I think I will give myself one extra rest day and run tomorrow. I have plans to run with Jodie at Disasters with Yarn next Monday so I need to time my running days to get a rest day in before that.