An Outdoor Project

We bought a house. This house is pretty fantastic, no thanks to us. It just came that way. However, it did not come with landscaping. No trees. No flowers. A few pieces of grass and lots of weeds were included.

Here we are, homeowners! Notice the blank slate the outdoors presents us with.

Our very first addition to our curb appeal came from Dan's mom, who dug up a few plants from her garden to bring us. We had no garden beds dug at that point in time, so we stuck them in a pot and watered them from time to time.

Next up, my mom volunteered to come out over Labor Day weekend with plants in tow. She has beautiful gardens that needed some thinning out, so she graciously offered her assistance. We hatched this plan very soon after we moved in, and every one knew that I'd be very pregnant by this point in time, so perhaps not a whole lot of help. Fortunately, Dan is the bomb-diggity when it comes to outdoor work. (Pun, get it? Bomb-DIGitty.) He also arranged for his friend to drop off 2+ cubic yards of mulch so our beds would look finished and for the overall health of our plants.

Here Dan is, starting to work on the very rocky soil by our deck. (All of the soil, in fact, was incredibly compacted and rocky.)

Now, to throw a wrench in our plans, my little sister had to go and get a job the Tuesday before Labor Day in a spot a few hours from my parents' house. The world was thrown into an uproar, and various family members helped her find an apartment, move her things, and set up her classroom in a few short days. Accordingly, our plans were rearranged. (No worries, Jo!) Instead of my parents visiting over Labor Day weekend, they came the next. It gave Dan a few extra days to get the garden beds dug to his (and my!) liking. I did helpful things like sort through the rocks he turned up. This was a multiple evening chore. He must have spent 10 hours working just to get the beds ready.

Mom and Dad arrived late Friday night, and Saturday morning we got to work! It was cool and rainy, which is very unusual for the summer we've been having, but perfect for planting. We laid out things, rearranged a bit, and stuck them in the ground, even taking the plants my mother-in-law brought from the pots and replanting them in the ground. We have a dogwood planted out front, which you can see below (far right), and I can't wait to see it bloom next spring!

The end results?

It is amazing how a few plants can change the house from being plopped on a lot to being loved. I've been instructed to water daily until the plants are well established, and I can proudly say that I've done it... for 2 days. I'll stick with it until the baby comes. Then it's Dan's job for a few weeks!

I'm positive that there will be some more changes to come in our landscaping over the next few years. We'd like to grow something on the trellises attached to the top of the fence (we needed some more privacy on our deck) -- maybe clematis or roses or trumpet vines. I hope to plant a couple of trees out back, too, to provide some shade. Oh, and a veggie garden next year. But for now, I am satisfied with the major changes these plants made to our curb appeal! Thanks Dad, Mom, and Dan for all of your hard work!

This IS my first rodeo...

Some of you may have been aware of my late evening hatched decision to participate (I hesitate to use race) in a triathlon via the facebook, but if you weren't aware, I participated in a triathlon last night. I will start from the beginning, which is actually around September 2009. My friend Ryan convinced me to go to Madison to watch the Ironman Wisconsin. He wanted to check it out and Madison is a good place to eat/visit, so we went. Ryan had in his head that he wanted to do an Ironman, he still may, I don't know. As we stood around the finish area we watched as folks came down the chute with big smiles on their faces, after swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112, and running 26.2. I saw some folks who didn't look like they should have been able to do it, but you know what? They did. They got to hear the announcer say, "Mr. or Mrs. So and so, you are an Ironman" As the announcer kept saying that to those folks after moving themselves 140.6 miles I got some goosebumps. I also realized that to them, that race was the easy part, the training is what was crazy hard. It was nearly 10pm and those people had been moving since 7:00am. It was then and there that a crazy idea hatched inside my head, "I want to finish an Ironman", maybe my heart said that, either way, something inside of me thought it was cool. After leaving Madison I still thought it really cool, and even thought it cool before I went, and I had done some informal training with a guy at work who has done Ironmans. He showed me the swim stroke, gave me some practice cards, and that was about it. I never did even a little triathlon. I didn't swim, but I did start running. I had already been road biking. Enough of that, onto yesterday.

The triathlon started Wednesday at 6:30pm, a small local race ran by Speedy-Feet, a local timing company. I decided to do this race around 9:00pm on Tuesday. A 1/2 mile swim, a 20.7 mile bike, and a 3.6 mile run. I messaged my friend who had done triathlons before and asked if he had tri shorts as I didn't want to swim in my bike shorts. He had them, and goggles. Oh ya, goggles, those would be useful. They will be on the porch he says, I plan on picked them up in the morning. I go to bed knowing that my lunch hour tomorrow will be spent getting my bike ready, figuring out what to wear, and learning where the heck this race even was as I had never even been in the area before.
In the morning I drive to said friends house to grab the shorts and goggles. He was leaving for a run and wished me luck. If he was more awake he probably would have laughed at me, as he thought I was going to drown/pass out. At lunch I get my things together. I come home from work at 5 and practice changing my shorts with a towel rapped around me as I decided to swim in one pair of shorts, bike in bike shorts, and run in running shorts. The tri shorts that were lent to me had a hole in them, and the elastic wasn't working so well. All is well. Hilary got home at 5:25, I load the car, and we leave. (we only have one car) The race is at 6:30 and we are about 45+ minutes away.

I race there in the car, find it, pay my fee, and line up. People had already left but this was a casual race with no mass start. I put on the chip for timing on my ankle and hope it doesn't fall off. I ask about the swim course and start, no worries, no butterflies or anything. I had no time to worry.

I swim, trying to practice my triathlon swim, minimal legs, jet into the water near your ear, and hold the long stroke. Someone passes me. I keep swimming, looking up to make sure I am going the correct way. I turn the buoy and head back. I pass someone, nice. I swim keeping the guy in the red swim cap to my right, making sure I can stay with him. Soon I exit the water, big gut and all.


I change into my biking shorts, put on my shoes, eat a fun sized snickers and drink some water. Onto the bike course. I think, "I sure hope it is marked well, I don't have a clue where I am going". My legs are tired, but turning. I focus on keeping my elbows bent and my head up. I pass a few people before I get out on the road. I refuse to look at the mileage on my bike computer, just the time. At the 5 mile marker painted on the road I am going slower than I thought I could go, but by mile 10 I've passes another 5-6 people and I'm feeling good, legs loose, high cadence. I pass more people. At mile 15 I'm going downhill and loving it, booyah racing! I shift as I'm feeling great and high tail it back to the transition area, passing another 5-6 folks, nice bikes included. Both of my bottles are empty.

I wanted to slow down because I knew I still had to run, but felt great and going fast is fun. The run is only 3.6 miles, I can suffer through it. I was a bit worried as it was super hot out.



I exit the transition area and start running, grabbing water to pour on myself and one to drink. Thank you Speedy Feet for having cold water in cups. I run for 6 minutes and pass the two mile marker, realizing that I have to do two laps. I drink water at about 1.5 miles at the other water cooler and keep running, passing people. I start lap two and realized I might finish in under 2 hours like I thought I could. I pass one other guy who is walking. I tell him he can do it and he runs with me for a bit. At mile 3 I hear footsteps behind me. "not know I think, all this way not getting passed and it is about to happen". I make the turn into the finish and realize the person on my tail had another lap to do, "Nice" I think to myself. I finish, soaking wet, not totally tired, thirsty for something other than water. Hilary comes over and congratulates me, "way to go Dan". Yeah, way to go Dan.

And for those of you that just wanted this information...

Swim...18:20
T1...3:22
Bike...1:06:20
T2...1:41
Run...29:00

Total...1:58:45
Finished 38th

And for those of you that don't get the title...fun people say, "This ain't my first rodeo" instead of "I know, I've done this before"

What the heck?

I wanted to take a brief moment and let everyone know that all of this rain stinks.
Mountain biking this Spring has been very difficult. A series of Wednesday night races have been postponed, rescheduled, pushed back, and officially cancelled for the Spring. No racing.

The two main areas around here are closed whenever the trails are too messy for riding, which is both good and bad, but they also have been closed. No mountain biking.

The 270 miles of paved off-street bikeways are located along the river corridors, so guess where they have been? That is correct, hiding their faces covered up by water. When the water levels do go back down the wonderful paved off-street bikeways are then covered with layers of mud. They dry up and eventually get cleaned off, but still...no bikeway biking.

Road riding you ask? You bet, but that too has been challenging this year. It has been raining a lot, and I am sick of it. The next few hours will sure to be wet. Check it out.

Lord, you said you wouldn't flood the whole earth again, which I am thankful, but could you save some of this rain for July, August when we need it and it is 1000 degrees outside? Thanks.

A Weekend Visit

One of the best parts of living in Ohio is that we live relatively close to our families. We live close enough that they were able to help us pack up our moving truck (and oh shucks, I had to go to a bridal shower while that was going on) and Dan's parents were gracious enough to drive out to help us unload all of our possessions. My dad and mom have visited once, and then my mom and sister came out for cookie weekend in early December. Last weekend we were graced with a visit from the Aiken family, who win the award for our closest relatives, at 3 hours away.

A few years ago, right after we were married, we lived in rural Western New York. The Aikens came and visited us there, too, and while I was organizing pictures for this blog, I stumbled upon a few pictures from that visit. The big activity from that trip was a visit to Houghton College's climbing wall. My, how they have grown since these pictures were taken!

Living in Dayton has afforded plenty of activities for us all to enjoy, and we took the Aikens ice skating on the outdoor rink in Riverscape MetroPark and to the US Air Force Museum. The boys loved the big airplanes at the Museum, and we all enjoyed ice skating. The boys were fairly new to ice skating, so there was, alternately, a lot of hand holding and falling, but we made it through without any tears and celebrated with lots of hot chocolate at home.

Thanks, Aikens, for coming to visit us! We loved having you!

Giving Thanks #8

Back in August, when the call came offering Dan a job in Dayton, Ohio, it gave us some pause. We were on the way back from picking up the textbooks at the school where I would be teaching. He had four job interviews lined up over the next two weeks, some in more exotic locations. He had done the interview over a month prior, so he was a bit fuzzy on what the job entailed. And last, since his interview was via Skype, he -- and we -- had never visited Dayton.

But after we weighed our options, we made the decision to move to Dayton. Dan arranged a visit to his job site in order to get some of the formalities out of the way, and we decided to kill two birds with one stone. I'd come along and we'd find an apartment together. We knew it was optimistic to hope that we'd find a place to live in one afternoon, so we decided to spend the night and continue searching the next day.

So we arrived in Dayton and had a whirlwind tour of the city, driving around the hip and trendy Oregon district, driving over the dam, and stopping for ice cream at Graeter's (the highlight of my trip). After our three-hour-tour was over, we drove to a grocery store to change, grabbed a free paper with only a few housing options listed, called one or two places from the car, and then realized we needed to drive around looking for the FOR RENT signs.

Keep in mind that Dan and I were at the end of a long period of limited employment, so we were attempting to be as frugal as possible. To that end, we had hardly any minutes left on our cell phone, but we were wary of bumping up our plan. We also had noticed the air conditioning in our car dying, but it's not exactly a necessity. And we decided to camp outside for free instead of stay in a hotel.

After we drove around Dayton and surrounding suburbs for several hours, making phone calls and being astonished by rent prices, we decided to drive up to the park where we were camping out for the night. There we also made dinner. Yes, so frugal that we brought our own food to cook. We were a bit discouraged, but we knew we had an entire day in front of us in which we would certainly find something, or at least have several decent options.

The next morning, full of optimism, we headed out after eating our cereal in lukewarm milk (yum). Today was the day! We drove down to the city of Dayton. And drove. And drove. And drove. The temperatures soared toward 95, and our car's a.c. would work for 5 minutes at a time and then putter out for 15.

The entire day is now somewhat of heat-soaked blur. I know that we looked at several sub-par apartments on the edge of a great neighborhood, one apartment in a bad neighborhood, and the upper apartment in a good neighborhood on a busy road. Somewhere in the middle we made ourselves pb & j, the makings of which were also brought from home.

After lunch, it was my turn to call the number on the sign, and boy, was Dan lucky! I spent 15 minutes on the phone with an elderly woman. I learned about her pets, her husband, and the things she expected from her tenants. I finally got off the phone with her, after extracting a promise that she'd show us the apartment later in the afternoon.

I'm not sure what Dan and I did between the phone call, but we were sitting on the steps of the apartment at the designated time. We waited. We waited some more. Dan called his mom. We watched cars go up and down the street. I eventually called the number again to see where the landlord was, and her husband assured me that she had left the apartment at least 20 minutes ago. Eventually, a Saab put on its right turning signal and ever so slowly pulled into the driveway. A slight, withered elderly woman ever so slowly got out of the car. (It probably took her 2 or 3 minutes to get out of the car. No joke.) She then pulled out a baggie of keys, which she handed to Dan, saying that she was not good with keys. So we made small talk as Dan attempted to open the front door. After every key was tried and some were retried, she declared that we could go through the back door and while we were at it, look at the downstairs apartment.

As Dan and I had been there for 45 minutes with nothing to do except look at the outside of this house/apartment, we knew someone was occupying the downstairs. We informed the lady of this, and she was shocked!

"Well, I told him he needed to be out of there three weeks ago," she said, as we stepped over filthy plates, clothes strewn all over the floor, and sidestepped between the couch and the door leading up to the second floor.

We admired the older apartment the best that we could, but both Dan and I knew that this probably wasn't going to be the best situation to become entangled in. So as politely as we could, we told her we'd call her if we decided to rent it and made our way out into the hot safe-haven known as our car.

Then, dejected and overheated, we decided to find a hotel, get some dinner, use the Internet, and resume our search in the morning. We cranked up the a.c. in our room, ate enough to go into a food coma, and attempted to search the internet for additional options. Eventually, we made a game plan, which included looking further outside the city and in big apartment buildings.

So the next morning, we set out again, still hoping that something would open up. This time, our game plan (differing from the previous day by having actual places to visit instead of just driving aimlessly around the city) showed a bit more promise. I had been watching the addictive channel HGTV, and especially the show House Hunters, far too much in the weeks and months preceding this move, so the options of the third day were narrated by Susanne Wong, with a script that went something like this.

Do they want the older town home outside the city in the need of some adjustments?

The trendy loft inside the city, but without parking?

Or the basement apartment with unique features in an old school building?

Find out when we return.

And our choice was... #3!

I am so grateful that we found something during our whirlwind trip, and I am even more thrilled that it is working out wonderfully for us. It's a great location for work and a really neat apartment.

(Becoming) Home

I love looking at people's homes in magazines. I love admiring how they've decided to arrange their rooms, the curtains they chose, the art displayed on their walls, what the color of their teapot is, and how their quirks are expressed. In my ideal world, my home would be of the caliber to be featured in a magazine -- with a housekeeper to keep it neat and tidy.

Our apartment building totally has potential to be in a magazine. It's an old school building near downtown Dayton, and some of the rooms have some of the original school-house architecture, like the stage for the auditorium or blackboards that used to be on the wall. Our apartment, however, used to be the bathrooms for the kiddos, so most of the original got ripped out (thank goodness!). To me, though, our apartment is perfect, but I hate to admit how much time I spent trying to ready our apartment for a few pictures. Besides the regular straightening up to make it picture worthy, I also needed to wash the windows. We're in the basement/ground level, and the windows were filthy with dirt and dust. The smudges wouldn't have been visible in the pictures, undoubtedly, but when you aspire to magazine greatness, you have to be pretty picky. While I washed the screens and the windows (both inside and outside), the light from the morning passed me by, so I was left to take pictures in the darker afternoon.

Here is the tour:

This is our entrance to the building, with beautiful potted plants lining the sidewalk. One of the residents loves to garden, and we get to enjoy her labor!

If you skip down six wide concrete steps, turn to your left, and then open the door on the right, you'll most likely be greeted with Lander, making sure you're acceptable.

Our door opens into the living room-kitchen-eating area, but because I don't have a wide-angle lens, you'll get it in stages. Here's the living room:

Notice the couch we bought before leaving Pittsburgh. It's pretty big, but it works really well in this space! Also, notice our t.v. sitting on a chair. I'm pretty sure I've never seen that in a magazine, but you know what? Works well for now.

Also notice the presence of an exercise ball. Where do people put their exercise balls when their house is being photographed for a magazine? I bet they throw it in their basements. Me, I leave it out. More real that way.

Another really neat feature of our apartment is the two foot deep windowsills. They are marble or slate (it varies), and so beautiful. They are also south facing, and I'm hoping to keep my herbs alive all winter. Our windows look into the backyard -- something that Lander particularly likes. It allows him to keep tabs on when the other dogs go out to play. I'm thinking that we could use some sheer curtains, especially as our dinner was interrupted yesterday when Lander and a yellow lab had a stare off.

Our kitchen is just dandy. It's pretty simple, without tons of cupboard space, but what we sacrificed cupboards for was a dishwasher! I love it. To supplement the kitchen area, Dan let me use a shelf that he built for his backpacking stuff (behind the table in the previous picture). We're going to add another couple of shelves and paint it white, and then it will look a bit more polished than it does now. We'll also try find a couple of stools or tall chairs for counter, but right now our shoes are happily living there.

Our hallway is lined with books -- we need to buy another bookshelf. If you peek in the door on the left you'll see the bathroom.

(Boring!)

On the right you have our storage room -- and theoretically a guest room. It's where Lander sleeps, our off season clothes reside, our chest freezer freezes, and our outdoor gear lives. Give us a few days before you decide to swing by. This room needs some work.

Our bedroom is at the end of the hallway. If I were a designer, I'd make some snooty comments about needing a headboard to give the bed some weight, some more art on the walls, etc. As is it's fine for sleeping in. And it has a nice big closet (no picture; I was tired of making things neat and tidy).

I'm still waiting for the magazine stylists to arrive, with accessories in hand, but until they do, I'm happy with our lovely apartment. I'm sure I'll make small changes -- rugs, curtains, pillows -- but you'll have to come see them for yourselves! We're excited to be settled in Dayton and even more excited for all of the adventures that lie ahead.