Not a Manic Sunday

Sundays are such fun days. Not like manic Mondays. Although it was a run day. Huh. Day.

The sleep wasn’t great. The getting up at 6:15 again wasn’t great, but letting my wife sleep in was. Light-roasted Mexican. (Butch: “Now, if anyone should ask you about who your fare was tonight, what’re you gonna tell them?” Esmarelda: “The truth: three, well-dressed, slightly toasted Mexicans.”)

Out to the garden. Rounds. Some watering. (I don’t water everything every day; hence, my apparently frequent watering. Although the corn is a real pain in my ass and since I planted it so late, I guess, I’m having to water it pretty much every day. That, or I watch it curl up and beg for water. I’m not good with this corn thing.) Coffee drinking. Fetching. Liam running. Dogs.

Back in the house at 7:20. I’d already given Liam some milk, and was about to give him food when an urge struck, and he was going to have to endure that urge, but then lucky for him, Angie got out of bed.

What did I do this morning? I’m struggling to remember for no good reason. Oh yeah, I typed. I wasn’t real hungry. I’d had…orange juice, I think. OJ and coffee. But my wife came to the rescue and made some spelt pancakes. The spelt has been getting rocked around here. It’s her. I didn’t really know anything about it. Still don’t know much. But it makes fine pancakes and waffles.

We walked the Nosta dog down to the farmers’ market. I think the apostrophe after the “s” must surely be the appropriate usage. I may have done that wrong in the past. I’ll probably do it wrong in the future, and maybe I’m wrong now. I’m tired now. I’m drinking a real cheap (on sale) carmenere from Chile, “Honoring 120 patriots who helped lead Chile to independence.” My knee hurts. We loaded up the bottom of Liam’s stroller with fresh goods, which included some succulent white nectarines. That’s the guy who grows the nectar plums, but they have a short season and go fast, and he’s certified organic, and those white nectarines are good. I never knew until today. Advancements in good eating on-going. I make myself proud.

I trimmed my dogs’ nails, which is always a bit of a pain. It’s my least favorite thing about dog maintenance (granting I rarely brush them and even more rarely bathe them), but it’s necessary and I got it done. Then I ran with Elba. We ran the Berry Loop, which is further than I’ve ran in a while, about 5.4 miles total. But that makes it sound like I just went out and busted out 5.4 miles, and maybe you’d assume a 7:30/mile pace or something, but that wasn’t the case. I never hit the stop button on my Forerunner so I could illustrate that. It was a pretty leisurely run. I know we ran the first mile in 7:34, but beyond that, the actual running pace is a mystery to me.

We ran…probably about 2 miles, which took us from pavement to trail, then hit the first patch of blackberries. I stopped and searched. I found a few, but not as many as I would have liked. They’re late this year, and more people seem to have realized they can actually eat them. (Seriously: as though it’s completely new information.) We strolled along a bit. Picked a few more berries. Ran a bit further to the next patch. Strolled. A lot of people were out, but a lot of berries were not. Darn those people, taking my berries; my running fuel. Still I found a few, and I snarfed ‘em down, and we continued on.

It was a longer run, and the Elbster: she has some long fur. (She scares people, which can be fun, but that’s beside the point, although I’m pretty sure she made a guy dribble in his drawers a bit when he spotted us coming around a trail bend.) I promised her we’d stop at the river so she could cool off, and I kept my word. We ran a bit more, then went to our usual spot on the river, and she enjoyed a good 10 minutes of fetching sticks in the water. It cooled her down, and she was rejuvenated, and we walked a little bit more so she could have some free time off leash, then we started our run home. We stopped off for more berries on the way out of the park, and I was talking to her, lamenting the lack of ripe berries. I still found a few, though, and let out an “Mmmmmm…” and some girl I didn’t know was walking up from behind said, “They’re good, aren’t they?”

-Yes they are. I’d swear, though, that two years ago no one knew you could just pick berries off the bushes and eat them.

“I know! They’re going faster these days. But they’re also coming in a bit late this year.”

-Yeah, that’s definitely a part of it.

We ran on maybe 50 feet, stopped for another look, saw nothing ripe, and ran home. Garmin makes our run/berry/fun time look like this:

Garmin makes it look like we ran really slow, but while we were actually running, it probably wasn’t THAT slow. I think I can walk a 10-minute mile. You can see our long pauses in there. I could put arrows where we stopped for berries and played fetch, but if you care that much and can’t figure it out, wellllll….

I got home and drank some water. Ate an apple: gala. Maybe I had more, but I know I was hungry and not quite filling that vacuous stomach of mine. I realized my left knee had gotten messed up somehow, which sucks. (It’s fine mostly, it seems, unless I squat down or, even worse, use my left leg to lift myself up. This isn’t great. I may have to take a day or two off. Tomorrow is supposed to be my gym day, which would mean squats and running intervals—this knee won’t let that happen.) At some point I ate corn chips. I really don’t know why my memory is failing me so much right now. I had errands to run, and I ran them: Home Depot, Ace, BelAire. I bought things.

When I got home, Liam was napping and we adults of the household had some time to ourselves. Angie had some errands to run, so she ran them. I ate a white nectarine. (That was the first ever for me, other than the sample I’d tasted that morning.) Mmmmmm…. I was still hungry. Angie got home and I started prepping dinner.

It was a grilling night. If we were on Iron Chef, the theme ingredient tonight was gypsy peppers from our garden. I cubed some red potatoes and tossed ‘em with olive oil, garden-garlic, gypsy peppers, salt, and pepper. I wrapped ‘em in foil and grilled ‘em. I did essentially the same thing for our chicken breasts, minus the foil. I grilled corn on the cob, some poor excuses for said vegetable from our garden, and two good ears from the farmers’ market. I picked some French green beans from the garden (long and thin and tender and good) and tossed those with all the aforementioned ingredients except garlic. I used the last of our homegrown garlic. That’s not why there was none in the beans, though—I just chose to leave it out.

We opened a rosė (when I started prepping dinner), which is not a type of wine I typically like, but we found this one a few weeks ago at a place called Andis up in the foothills and it’s damn good so we bought it and tonight we drank it. Dinner, it looked exactly like this:

I ate mine, then I ate what was left of Liam’s, which was mostly some of the ‘taters and a couple bites of chicken with a bit of the garden-corn, which was okay. After dinner, I had some garden work to do: temporary, portable fencing to keep dogs from eating fertilizer and destroying tomatoes and beans and peppers in the process. Oh, those dogs. But I didn’t buy enough fencing, and it was getting dark, and I did what I could, and I came inside. I came inside to brownies, which my wife whipped up while I was out working. See how great my wife is?

I had to shower off a bunch of things that were making me itch, mostly having been all up in some of the sub-par corn to get to some pole beans we’ll eat later this week. Liam had a bath. I sat here, typing this. The rosė was finished with dinner and we’d moved on to that carmenere. I’m drinking that now. I’m a bit tired and hoping for some good sleep. I always do. But maybe first….

So goodnight, good Sunday. Until next week.