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Wednesday Walks

Well, somehow October is already half over. So far, I’m enjoying October a heck of a lot more than I enjoyed September, though. Are we finally finding some sort of rhythm, perhaps? Or have the occasionally cooler temperatures simply mellowed me a bit? Hard to say. 

I continue to walk daily, as part of Elisabeth’s CBWC challenge. Near daily, I suppose is more accurate. Let’s take a look at the second week of walks. Several of my walks took place out of state. Here’s a teaser photo – can you guess where I was?

A truly riveting photo, for sure. “WHY are you taking a picture of THAT?” Carla demanded with disdain when I stopped to snap this shot. Why indeed, Carla.

October 8:

I started the day with a lovely three mile walk, accompanied by my friend and writing partner. After the previous day’s drenching rain, today was freshly scrubbed and shiny. I grabbed a photo of a wooly bear although it’s not the most flattering portrait; I find it slightly embarrassing to ask my friend to stop so I can paparazz a caterpillar. She rolled with it, though. 

Perhaps not his best side, but he was a cutie.

October 9: 

A quick one-miler today. This is where Elisabeth’s walking challenge really comes in clutch; I don’t know if I would have forced myself out of whatever stupor I’d been in to go for a walk if it wasn’t for her. As usual, though, I felt much better once I got my rear in gear and enjoyed some fresh air. I also ended up moving all of my vegetable pots – my tomatoes, basil, jalapenos, and zucchini are still producing – in anticipation of some landscaping work we’re having done. 

Now THIS is what fall should look like.

October 10: 

Today, my husband and I loaded Carla into the car, drove to the airport, and flew to Boston for a long weekend! My husband and I have each been to Boston several times, but this was a first for Carla. We checked into our lovely hotel in the Back Bay and took a duck boat tour. Then we spent the rest of the day wandering around Newbury Street. Even though we walked for hours, we only got in seven miles. It felt like more.

October 11:

If you guessed from my teaser photo that we were walking the Freedom Trail, you were right! We took a ferry to the USS Constitution, which was closed to visitors due to the government shutdown, and then did the Freedom Trail in reverse, reading about each stop online as we went. My biggest surprise takeaway was that neither the battle of Bunker Hill nor the Bunker Hill monument took place on Bunker Hill. They were named for where the battle was supposed to take place, but the real battle and monument were on Breed’s Hill. Our day included 9.6 miles of walking and ended in Cambridge. At dinner, my husband ordered a lobster roll, which he deemed delicious. (I prefer my lobster unadulterated by anything but gallons of melted butter.) (I had yummy, yummy halibut.) After dinner, we found ourselves at Carla’s favorite ice cream shop for dessert. She got the same combination (chocolate and raspberry) that she’d fallen in love with during our Paris vacation. We took the subway back to our hotel and I was out like a light.

October 12:

The Nor’easter that the weather people were warning about started spitting on us on Sunday, but we took a train to Salem anyway. I would not recommend visiting Salem in October, unless you love crowds and lines. Everything had a line: coffee shops, bathrooms, kitschy tourist shops. Any attraction available had endless lines and “sold out” signs on the doors. Luckily, my husband – trip planner extraordinaire – had reserved us a walking tour weeks ago. The tour was fun and appropriately spooky, and then our tour guide told us where to eat lunch. The tavern was slightly off the beaten path, and turned out to be a perfect suggestion because not only did we get in immediately, but the food was delicious. My biggest surprise takeaway from our tour was that the Salem Witch Trials lasted a mere thirteen months. Two hundred people were accused, but only (“only”) twenty people were tried and murdered as witches, nineteen by hanging and one by pressing. That minuscule moment in history sure gets a lot of hype! We walked around Salem for 7.8 miles, admiring the creepy sites and shuddering at the crowds, then hopped back on the train to Boston. After a brief stop at Levain Bakery – where we saw the inspiration for my favorite fall cookie in the wild! – we decided we were tired of the rain and weary of walking, so we ate dinner at the Irish pub in our hotel. 

October 13:

I did not do a dedicated walk on Monday, but I will count our pre-dawn hike to the bus stop in pouring rain. No, it was not more than a five-minute slosh from our hotel, but STILL. Despite the growing panic about the storm, our flight was unaffected and we got home around noon. The cat was extremely glad that we’d come home. Apparently the twice-daily visits from the cat sitter AND long daily visits with my parents weren’t enough to convince him he hadn’t been abandoned. 

In this photo from the cat sitter, Leo/Lenny looks like he is on the verge of giving up on life. He has been purring pretty much nonstop since we returned.

October 14: 

Back to normal, and I got in a mid-afternoon 1.6 mile walk around the neighborhood. The leaves are finally starting to don their October finery. I found a tree that matches my nail polish!

Blue skies, gorgeous leaves, and fun fall fingernails!

And that’s another week of fall and another week of walks in the books.  

Have you ever been to Salem? Did you, like me, go through A Witchy Phase (mine occurred in middle school, but I still enjoy witchy things)? What is the most crowded tourist attraction you’ve ever visited?

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Wednesday Walks

One week of October walks is in the books! Thanks to Elisabeth for hosting this session of the CBWC.

To keep myself accountable, I’ve been trying to take some photos while I walk. 

October 1:
This was the first walk of the month, and I got to walk with my friend and writing partner K. We walked 2.85 miles (4.6 km) in 53 minutes, then headed to K’s house for a writing session.

Friend not pictured. Temps still in the 80s. No rain.

October 2:
I very nearly missed my walk on Thursday. Carla was off from school, so we ran errands and then went to my parents’ house where I learned how to change the oil in my car. But I managed to get in a quick 1.1 mile (1.8 km) walk just as the sun was setting. 

Beginning of the walk…
…end of the walk.

October 3:
After a strength training workout in my basement, I figured I was already sweaty, why not take a walk? It wasn’t long – 1.9 miles (3.01 km) – but it counts! 

Everything’s a little dry and the heat and colors mostly still say “summer,” but the long shadows this early in the day portend shorter stretches of sunlight.

October 4:
Saturday’s effort was a walk-and-talk with my childhood bestie. I did 3.56 miles (5.7 km) as we chatted. 

The sunlight filtering through the leaves! There’s nothing better.

October 5:
Well, this was my first day of skipping a walk. I started the day with a very challenging full-body strength workout. We went to brunch with my family, then did a bunch of outdoor chores. And since I’d already showered and put on makeup and straightened my hair, I decided that I’d adhered to the spirit of Elisabeth’s collective (daily movement) even if I didn’t get a walk in. 

Cat joining me for some post-workout stretches. Please disregard the enormous amount of cat hair on my leggings. A hypoallergenic cat can still shed with the best of ’em.
One of the remaining hibiscus, in bloom.

October 6:
Sigh. Another day, another missed walk. I will not let this become a pattern. Did I do any other sort of movement today, aside from playing with the cat? No, I did not. But I did make pumpkin cream cheese muffins. 

These are *quite* delicious.

October 7:
Our fall weather has finally arrived! It rained, off and on, all day. I headed out for a walk around eleven, during a break in the rain. It was a good thing I took my raincoat, because the break did not last and I got completely drenched. No matter! It was warm and the rain was pleasant, so I walked for 3.7 miles (5.9 km) and dilly dallied for an hour and twenty minutes, taking pictures and writing haiku. 

Our leaves have been slow to color around here (the heat? the lack of rain?) so this lovely crimson maple leaf was noteworthy.

What was your favorite walk of the recent past? I’d probably choose the first walk of the month, because I got to walk and gab with a friend. But the rainy day walk was pretty great, too.

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Friday Photo Array

I’m plum out of ideas for blog posts lately. So let’s look through the photos on my phone and see if we can find anything remotely interesting.

(Why yes, I do realize it’s Saturday now. Shhhh. I’m in a very Late To Everything phase right now and it has apparently seeped over into blogging as well. As Carla kindly but firmly told me yesterday, as I was apologizing for dropping her off to an event more than 15 minutes late, I really need to “get it together.”)

This was Proof that I went for a walk on October 1. It has been so warm lately, and I’m so glad I loaded up on athletic shorts this summer. These are my favorite: they are so comfortable, and I like how they have the tight shorts with a pocket for my phone, but the floaty top layer so I don’t feel like I’m wearing a bathing suit. Strangely, though, I also really love these biker shorts. They are long enough that my thighs don’t chafe and they also have a pocket for my phone and they are very comfy. Anyway, I have been taking a page from Engie’s book and walking without listening to anything. I do still take my phone, though, and end up taking lots of pictures of the things I pass. I love these grasses; they are so fancy. Probably there’s some evolutionary/reproductive reason for their fanciness, but I enjoy them purely for the aesthetics.

I cannot resist photographing a pile of pumpkins. They are so pleasing! This particular pile was at the farmer’s market my family and I visited when my out-of-town friend was staying with us. Why don’t we ever go to the farmer’s market on our own? It was super charming and there were so many dogs. The only thing I bought was a bunch of icicle lettuce. It was so beautiful I couldn’t resist it.

Ah yes. I tried to take an artsy photo of the chicken soup I made as a post-surgery comfort offering. I do not like chicken noodle soup, and I did not enjoy making it as it involved dealing with bone-in, skin-on chicken. Ew. But the recipient seemed pleased, which is the important thing.

Cat in a box.

Carla loves to take random photographs with my phone. Someday I should do an entire post of the photos Carla takes. I’m guessing it will be an array of Leo shots, snaps of toys she wanted me to buy that I said “put that on your Christmas / birthday list,” and pictures of things she wants my mother to paint. This sky photo is one of the latter; she doesn’t 100% understand what makes a photograph paintable yet. But the cloud pattern was quite delicate and lovely, I’ll give her that.

This is one of the planters in my backyard. I quite like how it turned out and I took a picture of it so I can remember which plants to buy next year. I packed the planters so full of flowers and plants, and so many of them got swallowed up by the more showy plants. So next year I am sticking with Coleus, whatever this vine-y plant is, and the white and pink flowers. (Are they impatiens? I should probably figure out what they are.) The petunias just don’t do well. Those little blue flowers on the left weren’t a good fix next to the more voluminous foliage. I got some wonderful balloon flowers for some of the other planters, and they were too small to show up. Maybe I need to try to propagate some to keep inside my house; I think they are shade-loving flowers. I like this combo, and it seemed to thrive in both shade and sun.

Allison and I had a few exchanges about pork chops and how small the ones we can buy are compared to the ones the recipe wants us to cook. Like, no way is this pork chop an inch thick. (Confidential to Allison: I will never eat another pork chop without giggling like a twelve-year-old boy. Thank you for this gift.)

This cartoon showed up in my Instagram feed the day after I’d been awakened something like three times by the cat, and then a fourth time by my child who had similarly been awakened by the cat and was bringing him to me to complain that she couldn’t go back to sleep.

Leo’s main personality trait is that he is curious about everything. Obviously, he had to examine all the groceries as I unloaded them. (He is NOT ALLOWED on the counter.) (He does not recognize any of my arbitrary and stupid rules. He is The Cat and this is his house and there is no place he will not go.)

Another in-car Carla photograph. It took me a minute to understand why she took this picture. Ah yes. The temperature. She is very, very deep into Gen Alpha slang these days. At an appointment recently, her doctor said something about “16 or 17” and Carla looked at me and whispered “six seven” and of course her doctor overheard so I had to explain what “six seven” means and, since it doesn’t mean anything, and since neither the doctor nor I listen to Skrilla or do Tik Tok, the doctor only got more and more confused and I felt like an idiot.

I made sandwiches for Carla’s sports team and this was the photo I took when I ran out of bread and needed to text my friend to bring me another loaf. Am not so good with the maths.

Carla and my husband and I went for a walk and Carla wanted to pose on this bench near the pond.

Leo is working on his strength training.

My dad taught me how to change the oil in my car this week! It’s something he’s been trying to teach me for decades, but I’ve only recently understood how useful a skill it would be to have… and how nice of a bonding experience with my dad it would be. It was much simpler a process than I anticipated. I also made a HUGE mess the first time I released the drain plug, and dropped the drain plug in that tub of oil. Fortunately, my dad had a cool magnetic tool that I could use to fish the plug out. I feel very Let Me Change All the Oil now, while the information is fresh in my mind. Of course, since it’s not a weekly project, I will probably have forgotten everything by the time I need to do it again. (Need me to change your oil?)

One of the hiking trails I frequent with a friend is in full fall bloom. The profusion of flowers is spectacular and we stopped frequently to take pictures and look up the names of the blossoms.