O Canada!

We're here! Our long-awaited north-of-the-border vacation has finally materialized, and we are in Banff. It was a pretty optimal day of travel on Friday, with really nice people on the United staff, a really comfortable flight from SFO to Calgary (I really like the CLJ-700), a smooth trip through customs and baggage claim, and an early enough arrival to get on an earlier Banff Airporter shuttle (motor coach?).

Here's what I thought from the plane might be Mt. Shasta.

I would have consulted with my local Mt. Shasta expert, but he was asleep.

Forgot to take a photo of the battery of Canadian flags in customs,

so I had to settle for this roadside maple leaf.

The drive from Calgary to Banff took about an hour and a half, but with so much to see, it was a pretty easy trip. Hello, Canadian Rockies! Hello Banff!

We finally got to the Fairmont Banff Springs around 5pm local time. The hotel is gorgeous, and all the staff were super nice. And how's this for a nice surprise—they put us on the club level: a lovely room in one of the 5th floor turrets with near-panoramic views of the surrounding mountains, plus lots of fancy amenities and services to busy ourselves with. We partook of the evening hors d'oeuvre reception in the Gold Club lounge, and after Cliff left for the Conference Center Centre, I was able to putter around in the hotel room and knit all I wanted. And to finally relax!

Oldtimer's Disease

I've never been entirely good at writing. I have been a voracious reader, and I am happy to pick apart others' writing and give them helpful (hopefully) critiques. But putting down my own thoughts and ideas has always been painful. I really don't like for anyone else to read what I have to say. Plus, most of what careens through my brain is fleeting at best, making it difficult to capture anything useful

So why write here? I am old and forgetful and I am feeling the need to document my life for myself. I don't know if it's early-onset Alzheimer's, but it sure feels like it. Maybe it's just that I'm trying to do too many things at once or juggle too many thoughts and tasks. But I'm losing track of events, and I feel like time is flying by before I get the chance to absorb the significance of anything.

Of course, it's been almost 4 (!) years since I first decided to try and slow this memory freefall...and in that time I've recorded almost none of what I wanted to. So the theory is that I'm now going to try to go back and play catch-up with a weekly summary of some of the days gone by, in chronological order, with alot of help from the photos on my computer.

Wish me luck.

Starting Over

Six years ago (give or take a month or two), we bought 5 bare-root fruit trees (apricot, nectarine, asian pear, & 2 plums) and 2 bare-root grapevines (red & green seedless). We dug through the impacted Sacramento clay, did our best to amend the soil, rigged a drip irrigation system, and plopped the little buggers down in their new homes. I periodically fussed at them, worried over them, read (minimally) about how to nurture them, but mostly I ignored them. Despite my inattention, they started to bear some great fruit about 3 years ago. At that point, I realized that I should make some effort to prune them every year...and learned that pruning would have best been started early on, before there were crazy branches everywhere. Each winter since, I have tried to do band-aid pruning, and every spring the tree branches still go nuts. Last year, the nectarine tree even lost several big branches under the weight of its own fruit. So today I decided to hack everything down to the bare minimum so that I can try to regain control of these trees.

Hopefully I haven't killed them.

So I am thinking that maybe I will use this as a starting over point for me too. It's 2011, and at New Year's I didn't even try to pretend to make any promises to break. Which saves me from the disappointment of flaking on yet another new year's resolution, but I think that if I don't try to inject at least a little bit of structure into my chaotic life at this point, 2011 will fly by with as much speed and with as little notice as 2010 did.

If only I knew where to start.

Civil Service

In a departure from the daily grind, I got to spend today participating in the judicial system and helping to carry out a small portion of the Founding Fathers' vision. Is that overbilling jury duty? I mean, it's just a 2-3 day trial at the Yolo County courthouse, but still. The Constitution. I think it's pretty cool. Plus it's so different from anything that I do at work that I get really excited about seeing the processes. And who doesn't get all quivery about all that Latin?

So the whole thing probably was a little tedious, with all the waiting and the instructions and the more waiting and the more instructions, but they had wi-fi in the jury assembly room, and I had my knitting, AND I was excited about this, remember? Plus, it made for pretty good people-watching. Well, mostly just watching people unable to follow directions or possess any sort of listening skills.

We had to wait for almost an hour and a half in the jury assembly room before we got ushered into Judge Katherine White's courtroom. As an aside, every time I've had jury duty in Yolo County before, I've gotten assigned to Judge Timothy Fell's courtroom, so I was kind of bummed to get someone else. Judge Fell is amazingly articulate and logical, and he can be either thoroughly compassionate or piercingly callous (when he thinks you're being rude or trying to game the system). It's pretty fun to watch. I have to say that Judge White was pretty cool too though. She definitely has a sense of humor and was very down-to-earth. She actually was much less focused on trying to determine whether or not people were trying to evade jury duty, so that was kind of nice.

Anyway, I filed in at about the middle of the pack, but there weren't many chairs in the gallery, so they were almost all taken already. I managed to find a seat in the middle of a row, and, in lovely fashion, was ignored by the lady I had to get by to get to the seat. I pretty much stuck my butt in her magazine that she refused to move. I hope the close view of my butt creeped her out. Anyway, they called up 18 people to be the first pool, and I was number 12. (Got to stick my butt in Magazine Lady's face again. Ha.) After about an hour of questions, we hadn't even gotten to eliminating anyone yet, so we broke for lunch. I wandered over to Woodland's Main Street and had a tasty portabello caprese sandwich at The Savory Cafe. I always feel a little awkward eating at a restaurant alone, but I got to text, knit, and listen to a podcast, so I felt fairly accomplished by the time lunch was over. I didn't manage to photodocument the cafe or my lunch (too hungry), but I did remember to take some pictures of the courthouse and the lovely blue September skies:

After lunch, it was back to more questions--pretty much the same ones as before but put in 20 different ways, by the judge, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and posed to different people whose initial answers were apparently of interest. I think it pretty much turned into a mini-therapy session for each person as soon as they got their chance to talk about themselves. People seriously enjoyed publicly psychoanalyzing themselves. Unfortunately, that made the whole process take twice as long. Anyway, to make this long story short, the Judge crammed a whole lot of juror selection into the next 3 hours and we managed to select one by a little after 4pm. I stayed Juror #12 and have to report to the jury room at 9:15 tomorrow morning. And yes, even though the day was kind of exhausting, I still think it will be kind of fun.

Well, this has gotten more than a little rambly, so I'd better go to bed. As a final note though, we did a 3.5 mile course today, and I ran a mile of it straight! It took me 16 minutes to run that mile, but I ran the whole way. Well, in my world, run = jog = slower-than-some-people-walk. BUT, it was a big step for me, so I am pretty pleased with myself. Also, I'm pretty sore already, so it may be a bit difficult to walk tomorrow.

Annual update?

Well, hopefully updates will be more frequent than that and I will use this as a launching point to actually write regularly, but clearly I can't be held to any sort of promise. Somehow, though, I am once again taken with the idea of documenting the passing days, so I might as well run with it while I have the inclination. I'm definitely not going to try to catch up on the past 2.5 years since I started sporadically posting, or even the past 16 months (!) since my last post--that seems like a recipe for failure...and I'm obviously already a little predisposed to failure anyway.

So for now, I'll stick to present-day life as I know it, so far as my aging brain/memory can recall.

As always, everything is a mixture of chaos and unmotivation and disorganization, but one thing that has been marking my days and keeping me grounded is my No Boundaries running group that I'm doing through Fleet Feet. It's this beginners' running program that introduces you to the basics of running and trains you for a 5K. I actually did the program last spring also, but had to miss a bunch of sessions (thereby not qualifying to get the awesome training jacket that you get if you go to 15 of the 20 sessions), so I decided to do it again. And I'm really not usually so much of a group training sort of girl, but I have to say that this program has been really great for me. I'm actually enjoying running, or at least the achievement of increasing my distance and my speed, and I've actually met some people that are really fun to hang out with. Today, one of the coaches (who is convinced--falsely--that I could run the whole 2.8 miles) made me skip my walk interval and run further than I've ever run before. I shot her many dirty looks, but to no avail--she pep-talked me and paced me the whole segment and showed me that I could readily do what my mind has been telling me that I can't. So even though I cursed her name the whole way, I am actually somewhat impressed with myself because of her. Thanks, Nancy! Good thing I have that to motivate me to go back out on Thursday for an even longer distance in the 99-degree heat.

As for knitting, I have been trying to plow my way through a few seemingly interminable projects. It's all these babies being born, combined with my short attention span. Makes for some long-term relationships with pastel blankets. But I did finally finish the Basil Blanket for Julia Loraine Tsai (born June 27, 2009):And the other blanket that I am in the middle of is a second, backup blanket for Parker. I never did post the photo of his completed blanket, so here it is:

The great thing is that apparently he really loves it and has to have it to sleep with every night. The less great thing is that I have to knit him another one. I mean, it's not really a bad thing--I can't think of anything more flattering and heart-warming than people not only appreciating what I knit them in the first place but then also wanting a second one of it! It's just an awful lot of garter stitch in a boucle yarn that I'm a bit weary of. But I do love having made something that crazy-cute Parker can't do without.

In the meanwhile, I did manage to knit Parker a birthday present, although I didn't manage to finish it until he was about 1 year + 3.5 months. Oops. Got caught in a bout of procrastination brought on by logistical difficulty in the assembly phase. But I am quite pleased with it now that it's done, and Ryan was duly impressed, giving much thanks and boosting my knitterly ego. Now that I think about it, I love knitting for the Davises--they are the most appreciative recipients ever. It helps that Ryan is a big bio-geek. Did I mention that the base-pairs on this knitted oligo are in the form of the codons that would transcribe into the RNA codons that would translate into the amino acids proline and aspartate, which can be abbreviated P-D (Parker's initials)? Total geekdom, I know, but if you're gonna knit a DNA toy for someone, are you gonna knit just random sequence? I don't think so.

No time to lose (oh, and congratulations!)

Welcome to the world, Parker Riley (?) Davis! You don't know it yet, in all your 8lbs, 0.08oz of glory, all your 21 squirming inches, but you are one lucky kid. You have one of the greatest guys in the world for your daddy, so I bet you are going to grow up to be a pretty great guy too. Anyway, welcome welcome welcome. And congratulations to Mama Katie and Papa Ryan.

On the other hand...couldn't you have put it off just a few more days??? I am so almost done with your blanket (it's much more finished than in this photo, but I don't have time to take another picture because I need to finish knitting, don't I?).

I mean, I know I had a full 6 months to get it done, but you know, I really appreciate it when other people take it upon themselves to share in my lateness. I was hoping for that with you, but I guess you are your father's son. Anyway, happy 0th birthday, and I'll be seeing you soon (as soon as I cram in these last few rows, weave in the ends, and throw the thing in the washer and dryer)!

Theraflu is disgusting

Okay, I am going to take the torrential rain, gale-force winds, power outage, and my severe sore throat as signs that the powers-that-be want me to take the time to start posting regularly. Well, not really (why would the powers-that-be knock out the power if they wanted me to use a computer), but feeling like crap and not being able to do anything else but lay on the couch and wait for NFL wild card weekend to start has guilted me into making attempt #2 at keeping a blog.

There is much that has happened since last April, but for the sake of sustainability, I'll take it easy this first post. I'll just summariz1e the holiday season by saying that I got all sorts of things I wanted for Christmas, including lots of goodies under the tree as well as a mellow family-stress-free holiday. The other thing I got was a ski outing on Christmas day...during which CGT broke his thumb. Oops. He was very pissed and ready to throw out his skis, but I think he's getting over it...and maybe might someday consider possibly skiing again. New Year's was also mellow--recuperation time for our work-weary souls.

More later...hopefully.