The Dawning Of A New Era

On Thanksgiving, we ran a 5K turkey Trot, and by we, I mean ALL of us. It was the boys' first 5K, and they did great. I was so proud of them both.

We started all together and then D and I took off while The Dude stayed with G. I let D lead the pace though I pulled us back just a bit - he's very fast but doesn't yet have the experience of running longer distances at speed. (He's covered this distance before but only on slow runs with the Dude.) But even though I could tell he was working hard he stayed at it, only taking a few short walk breaks now and then. As we came up to the finish line I gave him permission to go ahead (along with a couple of notes on race finish etiquette) and he took off!

I'd been a bit worried about G as he'd never done anywhere near this distance before, not running, so we looked for them once we turned at the halfway mark. We saw them, G was sprinting ahead and then walking and The Dude was trying to keep up with him on the sprints... G is getting to be quite fast as well. They were both beaming.

And here they are crossing the finish line as well.

It was a beautiful day for it, cold but bright, and a great first family race. I'm hoping we have a new tradition.

And then there's the Ravenswood Run in the spring!

Proud mama,
Annie

Albany Park Love

I wasn't going to write about the election. The campaign has made me so tired, so upset. I'm glad it will be over soon (or will it?) and yet I'm also anxious about what will come next.

But I got up and was at my polling place* before they officially opened - there was already a line - and voted. And I thought today might be a good day to share some reflections on our neighborhood, on why I love this place and this city.

We were taking the bus home from D's soccer game earlier this month, and I thought about how both his team and that bus were a mix of language, race, and class. This wasn't a surprise to me, every place I go in my particular corner of the city is like that. And I love it. It's what feels like home. It's what I imagine a city should feel like.

Not that Chicago always does, we keep hearing about how it's one of the most segregated cities in America. Demographically, Chicago is almost equally black, white, and Latinx, but you wouldn't know it from mainstream papers or the TV, and I suspect that many of us who call ourselves white have a hard time really believing it.

But a city should be like the world, yes? In these days of travel and migration, a city should be a jambalaya of cultures, each with its own taste, texture, and bite, but all part of a glorious whole. Not a melting pot - that was an idea only ever meant for European immigrants anyway - but a dim sum of abundance, joyously overflowing. Nature is rich - over 6 billion organisms in a teaspoon of dirt, an acre of land teems with life (yes, even in the city) - so why shouldn't our streets be too?

A few days' stay in a man-made corner of a northern state this summer - comprised of hotels, shopping centers, and chain restaurants, barely a person of color in sight - left me gasping and dizzy until I was back on my streets again, awash in flags, veils, music, and color, breathing it all in, steady in the flow.

This is what makes America great. This is the future I vote for. And this is the future I will work for, whatever the results of this election.

With uncertainty and sadness,
Annie

* This is the pool hall where we vote. Not the best place for voting - it's awkward getting around inside and The Dude was already reporting problems at 6:30 a.m. - but how can you not love it.

Maybe Now I Can Sleep

THE CUBS WON THE WORLD SERIES!!!!!

Okay, now I need a week's worth of naps.

Still stunned,
Annie

Takes My Breath Away

Such an amazing sky this morning. The clouds were moving rapidly as the sun was rising so every time I looked things had changed, layers of layers of different kinds of clouds sliding over each other in every color, no matter where I looked. I was afraid I might trip, all I wanted was to look up and watch the grand show.

At this time in the year all my runs start off in the dark and soon they will return in the dark as well. So I am grateful every day I get to go out and watch the skies change as sunrise approaches. And I am grateful as well, again and again, that I get to go out and run in the mornings. Every day I do I get to go on a journey, exploring the world and seeing what's new. And then I come home to a house slightly stirring, and I look forward to the day and to the next run.

I live a good life,
Annie

I Love Chicago

Favorite shirt seen today, on a woman we passed on the way to school:

More Chicago Wildlife

Last Saturday, on my  run, I saw this animal:

at this park:

and was so floored by seeing a coyote so close, in the middle of a busy neighborhood (and very close to a major intersection), that I had to tell the first person I encountered. Except it was 5:30 in the morning and no one was on the sidewalk but me so I waved at a work crew stopped at the nearest stop sign like a crazy lady, saying "Did you see the coyote?"

It had been stalking one of the black squirrels that live in that park but when I shouted it shook itself and moved away about five feet (so still only 20 feet away from me) and then trotted parallel to me most of the rest of the park. I saw another person in the park cross its path, look at it, do a double-take, then a triple-take, and nearly trip on some broken concrete. After a while the coyote spotted another squirrel and started to stalk it and I continued on and lost sight. For another quarter-mile I kept looking for anyone who might be going that way so I could share the news but everyone I passed had headphones on and was looking very serious so I didn't bother.

Apparently there are LOTS of coyotes living in Chicago (you can Google this) and we just don't see them because unlike suburban or rural coyotes, urban ones have learned to be solely nocturnal, and curl up and hide when people are out. So I just happened to be up early enough that day to get lucky. Also, unlike the stories you hear about coyotes out West preying on pets, Chicago coyotes mostly eat songbirds, squirrels, and rabbits (of which we have a lot this year).

A very cool start to the day.

Breathlessly,
Annie

Another Year at Pitchfork

Pitchfork (an outdoor music festival in Chicago) started out this year as a somewhat frustrating experience for me. We didn't arrange for a sitter soon enough so ended up bringing the kids with us. We'd brought them before and it had been okay, but never for acts we were especially eager to hear. The Dude had already been to two days of Pitchfork so was fine with heading home with them after a couple of hours, leaving me to enjoy the rest of the day by myself, but it still meant that my attention was fragmented for both the Sun Ra Arkestra and Kemasi Washington, the two bands I had most wanted to see.

There's always a moment at these festivals where I am overwhelmed. Not necessarily tired, hungry, or hot, although sometimes these can be contributing factors. Just, overwhelmed. A colleague of mine who is very Myers-Briggs oriented suggested it might be that as an Introvert on the M-B scale I might be getting drained from being around all the people and activity - and it's certainly true that once I have a chance to sit and be with myself (and maybe weep a little if I need to) and assess things, I'm usually good to go again. But I also think it's the need to deal with the difference between my expectations and the reality, and at these festivals there's always a gap. Bands you were excited to see turn out to be meh, or in the wrong setting, or you hate the audience, or you don't even get to see them - while at the same time if you're open to it you can discover/experience something new, different, exciting, expansive that you couldn't have dreamt of finding on your own.

It's always worth it though, these festivals. (I do love Pitchfork the best.) I firmly believe in the power of live performance - theater, dance, and especially for me, music - to act on us in some way. Whether through the sound waves, vibrations, intent of the performers, or the concentrated energy of the audience - I think we are moved in ways both obvious and subtle. I love that. And I think this effect is magnified under the open sky.

The summer before college my family went to the south of France for two weeks. While there, we went to two nighttime open air concerts: Oscar Peterson and the Merce Cunningham dance company. Both in spaces that had once been Roman ruins, both under the moon, both magical. And watching FKA twigs in the final Pitchfork performance of the night, with her mesmerizing dance and vocals, I had the sense of being suspended in a web of time, that moment connecting with those evenings and casting forward to other performances and other evenings I haven't known myself to experience yet. And I write this listening to another performer of the weekend - that I hadn't seen - cover Laurie Anderson's "O Superman", a song I haven't listened to since just after college. And thinking on all these connections makes me think of even more...

Just some of the reverberations continuing on from the show.

Swimming in sound -
Annie

Deer, Oh Deer

I was running in the park the other day, early in the morning, when I looked over and saw a deer watching me.

Excuse me?

The parks that I run through are bordered by the Chicago River on one or the other side. The park district is restoring the river bank in that particular stretch, so for two years now the parkland leading up to the river has been fenced off.  I'm sure all manner of wildlife have gotten used to people being safely on the other side of a fence.

Since they can roam freely through the entire city, following the river (and the deer up by the nature center northwest of us are quite tame), while we're bordered in by streets and traffic and bridges and buildings, I imagine to them it might look as if we were the ones in a cage.

Just a bit surprising for that early in the morning.

Deep in the wilds of Chicago,
Annie

The Day After

We've had rain four days in a row (and will get more later this week) - with torrential rain yesterday, unbelievable amounts of rain, just sheets of water coming from the sky. I got soaked not once but twice and the boys too - the house smells like wet shoe.

But today the air is clear and the sun is out - this morning on my run the whole world felt fresh, with everything green and shimmering. And open: after days of heavy gray everything felt as if it were reaching out. The peach of the sunrise reflecting on a seagull's wings, as it soared above the trees that kept me from the seeing the sunrise itself. Sunlight sparkling on the puddles as I walked G to school. Our pumpkin plants, grown two inches in a night.

And oh yes, the red and black worn by our neighbors on the sidewalks, the bus, the train as people made their way to work without umbrellas or raincoats to cover them. Did I mention that the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup yesterday too? It's been fun seeing people wear their Blackhawks shirts all across the city.

Delightedly,
Annie

A Yummy Snack

I've been trying to figure out what's in our garden as the plants take off (and in some cases, take over). We moved into a fully planted perennial garden so there's no shortage of growing things, but we weren't paying a lot of attention when we moved in and some things aren't recognizable yet. (A weed? Not a weed? I don't know sometimes.)

This last weekend it was finally dry enough to spend some serious time out there, and at the end of day, when I was too tired to do any more work, I started looking up some of my unidentifiables in a perennial book I have. And realized that we have a lot of different kinds of hostas. On further reading I saw that most people with hostas fret about slugs getting to them. I'd already seen that we have slugs in our garden - little ones, not the monster ones my Opa used to scare me with - but aside from some damage to our tulips (which survived just fine), I really hadn't seen any damage to the many (many) hostas planted here. Why wouldn't they be suffering from the slugs?

I had a guess...

This is not our possum, we haven't managed to take any photos of it.
This lovely photo comes to us courtesy of National Geographic.

And a little internet research confirmed it - opossums eat slugs.

Yes!

I can live with a little possum poop if it means fewer slugs.

Investigatingly,
Annie

National Museum of Mexican Art

On Sunday, to celebrate my birthday with the kids, we went someplace new to us, the National Museum of Mexican Art. I can barely tell you anything about it because we walked through so fast (G was not happy being there and was very loud and agitated about it), but D and I are new fans.

So much so, that I had to promise to take him back soon - without G, that was his stipulation. Also, he wants us to bring our sketchbooks and pencils with so that we can "draw our favorite things".

(Plus, they have an awesome gift shop that I would have liked to spend more time in as well. The Dude did buy me a very cool mug that I can now use for my Mexican hot chocolate.)

The gift shop, not the museum.

And then we came home and ate chocolate zucchini cake. A yummy day, all around.

A year older,
Annie

Mission Accomplished!

And I feel grand.

Looking forward to writing about it later this weekend.

But just a quickie...

After mile 20 I started worrying if I was going to hit the wall, as I have in my previous two marathons. I had to really step in with some serious self-talk about how I am so much better prepared for this, I am tougher than I've ever been, I am smarter about these things now, etc. At some point the thought popped into my head,

"Wall? What wall? I piss on the wall!"

And you know what?

I never did hit it.

In fact, my last three miles were my most enjoyable (not fast, I was both battling headwinds and going uphill, but fun), AND I felt like I could have done more.

I am now eating a sandwich from my favorite bagel shop called the "Xena, Warrior Princess" and about to take a hot shower.

Damn, it's a good day.

I Can Run for Miles and Miles and Miles

Despite my concern about the sidewalks, today had some of the best conditions for running in a while. The temperature dropped enough overnight to freeze a lot of the water (the crazy big puddles turned into slush but it was easier to see and avoid them), and then it was snowing lightly which provided traction! I was worried about the wind when I set out, but still determined to at least try the lakefront path, and it ended up being less windy along there than I thought. There was only a mile of really blustery conditions where I nearly tripped up twice just from the wind blowing me sideways - I felt like those ice skaters who trip on their own feet from not getting the timing right on their jumps. But that was close to the end so I just got off the lakefront at the next opportunity and ran the rest of the way on the inner drive. It was interesting to see just where the wind was worst: on the lakefront it was whenever the trail got close to Lake Shore Drive, and on the inner drive it was when crossing the street, I had to make sure I didn't get blown onto the drive itself.

One unexpected treat was that the path was clear enough that I didn't have to look directly in front of me the whole time, as I've been doing all winter to make sure of my footing. I could look up and around and enjoy the sky (rapidly moving clouds) and the parks (huge frozen ponds), the shoreline (crazy ice formations) and the trees near to me (fat squirrels and red berries!). What a joy.

This week I've run into work twice, once long and once mostly direct (it's about a mile and a half more to run into work along the lakefront vs. taking a street that runs diagonally across the city). I love it, I love it, I love it. I think I'm going to try running in to work every other day.

And in other good news, Goo slept through the night after going down pretty easily! He came out in the morning to tell me "bunny awake mama" (we got a new nightlight that can change pictures from a sleeping bunny to an awake bunny if you set it)... time to now slo-o-owly move that wake-up time a little later in the morning. And as I've been getting more sleep I have again been waking up before him anyway, and can reclaim at least a little of my quiet morning time.

Got a bunch of baking to do for our church's annual South Sudan bake sale/auction - carrot cake and chocolate chip cookies. I imagine some of the cookies will end up staying home with us...

Happily,
Annie

Very Far and Very Cold

I ran to work this morning. Well, it's more accurate to say that I went for a run this morning, and then I ran to work. I'm not going to say how far I ran because

1. It is kind of a ridiculous distance, that makes sense only in the context of marathon or ultra training;
2. At some point, if you make a habit of running long, the distance becomes kind of meaningless. I don't think about "how many miles do I have left", I think about what part of the run am I on and what will I be doing next;
3. A certain person I live with doesn't tremendously like that I run so long or that I run in the cold, and really doesn't like it when I combine the two. No need to provoke him with an actual number.

As for the cold... it was -1F when I left and 5F when I reached my destination. Not as windy as I'd feared, thank goodness. I was snug as a bug in my layers and had greased up my face to prevent windburn. The only issue I had with the cold was that my water bottles froze and towards the end I was reduced to just sucking on the ice. So I need to figure something out there. Oh, and frozen gels are gross. But I've pretty much moved away from gels anyway and have been sticking with "real" food - in my case dried fruit, pretzels, and jellybeans. The dried fruit and jellybeans get hard when it's that cold but a moment or so of chewing takes care of that.

And my reward (aside from the whole running bit) was in seeing, once I hit the lakefront, a quiet, snowy, icy world with almost no one else around. Listening to one of my favorite jazz pianists and just floating in white. Ahhh.

Blissfully,
Annie

Baby, It's COLD Outside

On Monday I went to the gym based on a forecast of ice drizzle that never materialized. I had a pretty hard dreadmill experience (I'll just say that it was an exercise in mental fortitude), and it would have been a perfect day to run outside. Nice fresh snow, sunny, quite cold but not horribly so. I was determined not to make that mistake again. My new winter mantra: when in doubt, run out!

So today I bundled up. Today, it was 1 degree when I left the house. Yes, 1 degree above zero. Fahrenheit. And not sunny. Oh, and windy.

One kid dropoff, 8 miles, and two hours later, it was a balmy 6 degrees. Still pretty windy. A little sun.

Here's what I wore:

Regular trouser socks underneath my regular, year-round ankle-height running socks. I have some thin wool running socks on order but they haven't arrived yet, and my old winter running socks bit the dust last year. At least the trouser socks were acrylic, not cotton.

Long underwear under my lightweight running pants.

A short-sleeve thin running shirt, long enough to cover my butt. This is an ugly shirt from a race I'm not wild about, but it's a perfect underlayer, so I've kept it.

A thin long-sleeve overshirt. Again, another shirt I'm not wild about, but it's good as an overlayer, especially since the sleeves are long (this became important).

My Hot Chocolate 15K tech hoodie from last year. This is a great cold weather top.

The baby has claimed my neck gaiter and my replacement one hasn't come in yet, so a wide acrylic scarf, wrapped around my face and neck several times.

A tech running beanie hat.

Chapstick smeared liberally all over my face as a wind break. You laugh, but it works!

The hood of my hoodie kept all my head and neck gear in place.

Running gloves. These on their own were definitely not enough. All the way to daycare my hands were freezing and I was thinking that this would be the weak link in my outfit, the one that had the potential to spoil my long-run plans. Luckily, just before I was about to raid the kids' clothing boxes for extra socks I remembered my shirt has really long sleeves, and I was able to pull them out and cover up my hands in the gloves. Perfect!

Once my feet warmed up I was pretty good for the whole run. The wind was an issue and impacted my choice of route - I had wanted to run along the lakefront but that just wasn't an option for me today. When I started I really didn't know if I would be able to complete my intended eight miles, but figured that at the very least this would be an information-gathering exercise in what kind of gear I might need to keep running outside this winter. I will say that it is unusually cold for Chicago, we get testy when it dips into the teens, let alone the single digits. And most winters I've been sidelined by injury and haven't tried to do regular long runs outside. So I really don't have a "winter running gear" selection, just some odds and ends that I throw together for the few times I have gone out. But apparently that works! I will be happy to get those wool socks, though.

I could use some hot chocolate right now...

Not yet warmed up -
Annie