dynamic elf

* The rain (reign) of little pink petals
* Extra snuggles
* Wind sprints, even lame ones
* My coffee buddy being back in the office
* A card from my kid that reads "maman je t'aime très tres tres fort"
* New bike horns with rhinestones onnem
* Still being a little high from the five-minute-photoshoots
* Not being broke
* Guy wearing one orange Converse Hi-Top and one turquoise one
* Lunch: avocado, red salt, delicious local hothouse tomatoes (!), fig yogurt, some cheese, and a plum. Hell yeah!
* Coming in to the office means I get to look out the office windows
* A perfecly dried bloom fell off the orchid this morning as I was waiting for the elevator. Now it is mine.

(things I wish I could change: I need more sleep, my left wrist hurts, my tire.)

fennel asks a question I also want to know the answer to: if I want an iPhone app that will track my workouts, whatever they are, what should I use? On any given day, I might be lifting, climbing, biking, running, stilting, hooping, doing pushups and crunches, whatever -- I just want to write it all down. Bonus points for allowing me to set a certain type of workout and somehow see them clustered -- like, tracking my weights/reps for lifting but tracking my minutes/speed/etc for biking.

Okay, I need to go out dancing more often. It's *fun*.

I guess I haven't talked much about this. A month or so ago, I started doing ( Crossfit. Cut for blah blah exercise. )

Despite my awful (and frankly kind of debilitating) sunburn, dilletante and I managed to get N on the trail-a-bike on Tuesday and out for our first family bike tour.

Let me say that again, because I've been waiting to for years: FAMILY BIKE TOUR.

It was a little more modest than we'd originally planned, of course. That's how these things go. We had thought it would be fun to take all day Tuesday to bike along the commuter rail down to Providence, get a hotel, and take the train back the next day. After all, on a tandem, D and I have extra power -- more than enough to tow a little girl -- which makes us limited only by her attention span. And that attention span has recently proven itself to be rather long for trips she's motivated to take. It turns out that the promise of spending the night in a hotel with a pool is a strong motivator, so I didn't have any trouble conceiving of her taking four or five two-hour chunks of bike trip.

There were two problems, though: (1) she'd never been on a tagalong bike before, and (2) I had to sleep all morning because of the goddamned sunburn. Also, as it turned out, (3) we were a little bit petrified to take her on the road, despite having thousands and thousands of bike miles under our wise parental belts. OK, and also (4) we had the inevitable mechanical failures and setbacks. Four problems. But! We conquered them, threw some clothes and bathing suits in a little backpack, and set out on our newly-minted 12-mile journey to the end of the Minuteman bike trail.

At first, Natalie was a little frightened. After all, even a slow ride on the back of a tandem is a lot faster than she ever goes on the tricycle in the backyard at preschool. This caused her to shift wildly from side to side which (as you can guess if you've ever captained a tandem) made the handling and steering go from "tricky" to extremely difficult. So we walked up the hill near our house, got back on, and coasted down the other side. By the time we had covered the two-ish miles to Davis Square, mostly by protected bike path, she had learned to relax, try to balance, and just enjoy herself.

Heartened, we kept our curious bike train moving on down the path, and N began to get up enough confidence to start pedaling rather than just riding. Unfortunately, she chose a bad moment to do this, and fell halfway off the bike as we went over two big bumps. Since she only fell halfway, she got her leg stuck against the moving wheel and thereby got a big abrasion on her thigh. Poor bean. We cleaned it off as best we could, patched it up, and cuddled her on the grass in the park behind Alewife. She vowed never to get on the bike again. I asked her to get up just so I could take one picture, which I would then show to dancingwolfgrrl so that she would say "OOH WOW!". N agreed. Here it is:



Once on the bike, she consented to keep going, so go we did. We made a game out of calling bumps: when my front wheel hit a bump, I'd say "Badump!", which would then chain back with D and N each calling "badump!" as their respective wheels went over it. This gave us a game to play and also gave N a bit of warning to hang on. It wasn't long before she was yelling about how happy she was and how wonderful it was to be biking. Too true!

We sailed over the 128 overpass on our bikes, waved at the cars, and turned off the path to check into our "POOL HOTEL". The pool was closed for the night, but she was not fazed; we ran around and ate delivery Thai food and D told her stories at bedtime since we hadn't brought any books. Later, after she was asleep, we lured zsquirrelboy to sit outside the hotel room door and play Chrononauts with us in the hallway until there were noise complaints and we were forced back inside the room. The next day, we had a lazy and wonderful ride back: we stopped in Lexington center for lunch, Arlington center for ice cream, and stopped at a little pond to run around for no reason:



Natalie, being tallish, articulate, and capable, was mistaken for a 5-year-old (she's 3). I could have made the same mistake myself a few times with the way she took to this crazy biking business. We called out bumps, yelped at our echoes under bridges and tunnels, sang songs together, listened to made-up stories, told jokes, collected comments from other bikers, and just generally had a marvelous time.

More, please.

[Poll #1325830]

Using a Captains of CRUSH grip-strength trainer to exhaustion and then immediately using the computer makes the physical act of typing feel totally fascinating.

[Poll #884730]

Don't worry, they both scare me a little. I don't know that I could swim 2.4 miles without more training than I've ever put into swimming before (i.e., any). The second race is more crazy, though, given the other bikier things I want to be training for.

Running this morning: we went further than last time, I had less of a stitch in my side, and I didn't have any closing-throat asthma-y feelings. Excellent. Maybe eventually I can actually do a 10k, in the far far future.

( blah blah blah health stuff )

Bad idea. Not the good kind.