"I want you to move to California for yourself"

Well that was a nice little break wasn't it? :) Things have been weird, but I want to start writing again so, here I am.

They all look so happy pre-squirrel attacks

So on a lighter note, we've been quite the outdoorsy set lately! Really sprucing up our back patio and this past weekend we had our Wilderness Survival Class. I wanted this to be a picture heavy post but as I'm coming to realize more and more, iPhones are the WORST. They seem really cool and awesome. Until they cost a million dollars and you can't do something as simple as rotate a picture on your computer because Apple and PC's refuse to get alone. Of course. So I'll just post the handful of pictures my iPhone has deemed acceptable. Son of a.... (EDIT - Using Ed's Mac, I'm attempting to post what seem to be rightly oriented pictures... Success! So I'll also update my post on my 10k with a couple other pictures if you are interested!)

My happy place

Anyways. The patio (and upstairs study) gardening has been more amazing than we could've imagined. The potato box is exploding in general. We had to pull up one plant that wasn't performing very well and up came the CUTEST baby potato you have ever seen. It was about the size of my thumb nail. I have picture but I couldn't rotate it... grrr... The rosemary and basil are fighting to hang on, and I'm not sure why they are struggling so much. The other herbs are going gangbusters. Ed also finished making me a beautiful new table so I can sit and have coffee or read during the day by all the lovely plants. We moved our indoor tomato plants out next to it as well and I looooove the smell of tomatos. With my lovely colored lights it reminds me of Mom's, which is a very good feeling indeed.

Our adorable baby potato!

We've been waging a war against the squirrels here. I'm partly to blame because I refuse to give up my wonderful bird feeders, thereby disposing of the cats day-long entertainment. But that means that all the little seeds that drop down from the feeders scatter everywhere and attract everything onto the patio and also into all the plants on the patio. Several of the herbs have met a grisly end, uprooted by these chubby grey squirrels who are truly very UN-afraid of us. If I had any reservations about getting a BB gun before, those reservations were gone with the last murdered parsley plant. We're trying a less violent option of chicken wire first so think happy thoughts for it or these squirrels are going to have a lot more than poor defenseless plants to contend with... In fact, we have been training Rosie pretty intensely lately... Hmmmm.....

Awesome path up to the training area... left everyone pretty winded

Now about the Wilderness Training! We had to drive up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, always terrifying for me in any car because the roads are so tiny and the drops are straight down and extremely far. I highly recommend anyone who wants to visit California that they must make a trip into the woods. It's stunning. The trees go on for ages. Everything is just so much bigger than on the East coast. Too bad I'm too terrified to drive the truck up those tiny roads or I'd visit more often! The training took place on a boy scout reservation high up this windy, woodsy trail following Boulder Creek. Our teacher Jack, who was the real deal, was my sister's age and had spent many a night out in the wild. He said he lived outdoors for a year, and was very familiar with spending the night in a debris hut. What is a debris hut you might ask? It's exactly what you think it is. And we got to make them during our shelter training. (You can see Ed enjoying our group's shelter at the bottom of this post)

We also learned how to make spoons and bowls out of pieces of wood, and then how to boil water using rocks. One of the sillier, but still fun and useful parts of class was learning how to stalk prey in the woods (they do offer a traps class but they had to separate it from their usual stuff because people kept trapping and injuring house pets - yikes) But my favorite part was making fire with the Bow Drill technique! Muahahaha! Let's be up front and honest here. Ed did all the hard work.We tandem whittled a spindle and a fireboard and a handhold, and notched a bow. Ed did the manual labor after that in terms of burning holes and creating the dust coal and I made a beautiful tinder ball (blame iphone for the lack of pictures) that nurtured that coal until it burst into flames! I learned two things from this experience. One, Ed and I will not die during the Zombie Apocalypse or Hunger Games situations of the future. Two, people do not know nearly enough about survival or basic respect for nature. It was really good to get out there and learn things that as Jack and his co-teacher Mark put it, are skills that our ancestors have used and passed on for thousands upon thousands of years. 

This was the insanely hard part, using the bow to make the spindle rotate until wood dust collected and then smoked itself into a tiny coal

My beautiful tinder bundle :)

Finally! After a lot of sweat and a little blood, no tears, we got a coal!

Nurturing the coal in the tinder like a crazy person

FIRE!

And Ed decided he could live here happily ever after :)

"I'm an extraordinary machine"

Ok I'm gonna brag. And I'll admit I give people grief (silently and in my own head of course) when they brag. I don't care how much weight you've lost (I actually do and I'm jealous) or how far you can run (once again, jealous) or how much you enjoy your work out (super envious on that point). So it's been really odd for me to be on the other side of that for once. I'll be damned if I turn into one of those people who only talks about their exercises but I just HAD to come on here and tell the world that I am OFFICIALLY a runner! Like I mentioned last entry, my family and I have signed up for Bay to Breakers (this is so NSFW for the love of God, but you should absolutely do a google image search for Bay to Breakers if you're at home). So I've been training and following a plan Ed made up for me. You must understand, when I've 'run' in the past, it went something like this: walk for five minutes, and then run one minute and then walk one minute for about 30-40 minutes. This is not an ideal way to run a race. I don't know what got into me, but when Ed gave me my assignment, I said okay. And proceeded to run for 20+ minutes a day straight. No break. No slowing down. I've dreamed about running like this for so long...

The sheer freedom of lacing up your sneakers and just going somewhere from your own strength and determination... it's exhilarating! (Anyone else think of that ad they pitched in What Women Want? Mel Gibson will forever be associated with peaceful women's running) It's also appealing in that it's just one long meditation. An extended assignment in focus and clarity of thought. In her new book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Mindy Kaling (from The Office) talks about using elaborate revenge fantasies to get her through exercises. Turns out I like envisioning scenes from musicals, tv shows and books in great detail. If I start thinking about the fact that I'm working out or traveling or any thought at all about my actions I immediately start to feel exhausted and weak. So I just keep on trucking. I'm also kind of a baby in terms of working out without music... It's just so alien and barbaric that one would workout without any kind of distraction... But I've been doing that too. As much as I enjoy my scenes in my head, I've started testing out just being quiet and running. And that's not been awful either!

Ok that's enough exercise talk. I just wanted to tell the world how ecstatic I am to run finally. It's like learning how to do a cartwheel or something! (I have no idea how to do a cartwheel but since I've always wanted to do one and they look like so much fun, I imagine it's the best feeling in the world)

In other news, I'm plugging away at my reading challenge. The whole Game of Thrones series really slows me down, but I love it. I'll probably love it more when the show comes on again. I also picked up another book that really got me, Discovery of Witches, which is a trilogy, and has all that lovely romance and vampire-witch relations that I can never get enough of. I'm truly a sucker for vampires at the end of the day.

And! I've officially tried my hand at canning. It wasn't as hard or complicated as I thought. It WAS as messy as I was worried it would be. I have yet to taste my strawberry jam, but fingers crossed it's delicious. It's hard not to be delicious with bright berries and a metric ton of sugar added. 

Strawberry Jam! Hopefully edible...

Enjoying the day in Mountain View

I feel as if maybe in the first few months out here, I really kind of stalled. I just was dragging my feet and refusing to tackle all these dreams I had... maybe for fear of failure or because I was still bummed about moving? I still very dearly miss MD, my friends and family. But... I believe I'm finally seeing this as home? At least as in, this is Ed and I's space here. Our little corner of the world where we can and play with crazy cats and make potato bins (yeah, I'll post about that craziness next time), and I can address things I've always wanted to do, or just do better. It's a nice feeling :)

Cabernet flight at Savvy Cellars

Also one last little programming note - today is my stepmom's bday, and she and Dad are in Hawaii. I would like to express my happy birthday wishes to her along with a heaping dose of jealousy that we are not in Hawaii as well, snorkeling with dolphins, turtles and who knows what else :) Happy Birthday Debbie!

Brunch at Louis'