Today I'm ripping off both words and ideas - the idea is Angela's, but at least the words are mine.
I'm in the middle of a bunch of work that threatens to (heck, I already know it will, I just haven't reached the acceptance stage of mourning yet) swallow up my weekend plan to frolic in that 10 feet of snow they're getting in Tahoe this weekend. Sigh.
I have a few extra holiday goodies saved up, I forget what. I think a picture of me and a moose or something. But as cop-outy as those recent photo album posts seem, I find them time intensive. First you have to find your camera, then you have to find your camera cord...
I was also embarrassingly flattered to get tagged for a couple of memes back at the end of November - randomly, but whatever, I feel a duty to hold up my end. (And yet I never forward chain mail, is that a contradiction?) It's just that answering deep questions like "Fabric softener or dryer sheets?" can take some real introspection and consideration that I don't have the leftover brain power to accomplish just now.
So here is TasterSpoon's 2007 year in review, at least, as far as you can make it out from snipping the first sentence of the first post of each month!
January. "Is this it? Is winter over?" Although this post starts out talking about the mild weather (which foreshadowed a very hot and dry year), January was all about our ridiculous search for the new home into which Ace and I would move...together. (Ladies, avert your eyes! Gentlemen, step right up to see the harlot and her live in man!) We had started to talk about moving in together in September of 2006. I planned to move in to his house with an awesome view and big open floor plan in November. Then his landlord decided to give the place to his (long distance) girlfriend at some unnamed point, so we started looking, unsuccessfully, for a place. Then, while Ace was home for Christmas, the landlord informed him that the girlfriend "needed" him to be out by the January 3 new moon. Big New Years plans devolved in to a small cleaning-out-the-fridge party with close friends that has a soft spot in my holiday memories, thanks to the Champagne-in-a-can. Ace crammed all of his stuff into a Public Storage Locker (I imagined as kind of a Silence of the Lambs scene) that he would visit every couple of nights and stoicly moved into my TV-free place that bored him to tears. Anyway, it was then just a month of spending every spare minute to finally, joyously land on a place where he could get cable and walk around the block without fear of being sexually molested.
February. "I'm way too busy to be posting anything this week, but this doesn't stop me from running around bestowing my little pearls in everybody else's Comments sections." February was indeed a busy month. There was a lot going on at work, Boots and KK and I were trying to train all hard core for the Baja 70.3 triathlon, and then my grandmother died, which took me to Chicago for a week. It was generally a grumpy month, and my posts all seem way more interested in what other people have going on in their lives - their blogs, their housing prices, their workout regimens - than in mine.
March. "So Ace comes home from his night with the boys to find me watching TV, wearing my work skirt and a warm, woolly sweater (because it was cold and we are frugal), a pair of tights and his cuddly sheepskin slippers." We also started going to the Farmer's Market. I was trying homemade remedies for springtime allergies, carrying my own bag to the market and buying organic broccoli. I took the time to pay attention to fuzzy caterpillars. Maybe this was the beginning of my hippie awakening. We had a St. Patrick's Day party which included a showing of The Departed, using up our free TiVo/Amazon-on-demand trial - it worked pretty well, but took about a day to download. Ace turned 30.
April. "Saturday I did the Cinderella Ride." I started out the month by riding 100 miles on my bicycle, did some weekend-killing training runs, ran the Boston Marathon and went to a wedding in Kansas. Started a compost heap. It was a month without a lot of downtime.
May. "Yaaay, we're going to Wildflower this weekend!" The triathlon season started with a vengeance. I cheered on Boots, KK, Ace and his brother Scooter at Wildflower. I'd been training since January, and was delighted to get into the athletic spirit. I tried to become a health nut. I biked to work. I won my first ever duathlon at Auburn, qualifying for Worlds and Nationals. Coming off of my Boston success, I felt like I'd arrived at my crowning year. Ace was on a new tritahlon team, competed at Wildflower, did his Xterra-type TV show, and won at Auburn.
June. "This morning, as I was driving to work, minding my own business, about to merge onto 101 ("the" 101, for you Southern Californians), a green minivan wearing a stovepipe hat pulled into my lane in front of me. " Yeah, yeah, the streetview van. June was all about going to work and having a good time with Boots at the doomed Baja race. For just a weekend away, that trip sure packed in a lot of great memories.
July. "I'm working. I suggest you do the same." Ha! We did Nationals in Oregon and the Vineman race in Sonoma. Had a 4th of July party, saw the fireworks at Shoreline (aka Google Park). I think I at least managed to put a picture album from the Oregon trip up.
August. "'Next, Handel's Royal Fireworks Music, to commemmorate the end of the War of Austrian Secession. Glad that's over.'" Surprisingly, this is an apt summary to the month. Also over was my triathlon season and I was glad about it. Training can become such an obsession that it's a real time suck, and is no fun when insecurity replaces love as the motivation. Why spend all that time doing something that's not fun anymore?? So we did all kinds of OTHER things - the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a local block party and an SF street fair, renting a tandem for the day. Ace had a few more races, and I was completely content to stand aside and cheer. We also went to the symphony. See? Full circle.
September. "We're having weird skies this week." It was a hot, dry summer. And thus the wildfires started. Ace and I spent a neat weekend in Pacific Grove so he could do his triathlon and we could celebrate my birthday. We had dinner and a lovely evening with Rad and Victor, a couple of my favorite people in the world, whom I've only known for about a year. We had a memorial tree planting for my grandmother in Chicago, because my brother was in Afghanistan in February. Learned that he was headed for Iraq in January. Great. I tried to get into the Eat Local Challenge, and despite not doing such a good job at it, really came into my hippie own, irritating people to the right and left of me.
October. "While you're waiting for pictures from this weekend...and last week...and last weekend...and the week before that...chew on this." We were thinking about getting a dog, then promptly had the kind of month that makes getting a dog a terrible idea. Spent a weekend in Tahoe for Ace's Xterra race in the snow; spent nearly a week in Richmond, VA, visiting Ace's family, visiting a good friend from California in her and her husband's new digs and deeply envying her life (hi Belle!), oh yeah and doing that Long Course Duathlon World Championship; and of course spent all those long nights at work that make the days away possible. Halloween parties!
November. "A friend of ours had a cocktail party Saturday." The holiday season hit the ground running and never quit. Halloween bled into Thanksgiving with my brother, bled into mulling over New Years resolutions. NaBloPoMo. I did it. Oh, I also squeezed in the Ironman 70.3 World Championship. Jeez, I did a lot of cool races this year. A good place to end my triathlon career, don't you think?
December. "Ace had a great marathon yesterday. " Starting off with a weekend of munchkins in bathrobes and Santa hats up in Sacramento where Ace qualified for Boston 2008, this was a very Christmassy December (some years I don't notice the holiday till it's upon me).
Now, to get with my theme for this year (16 different dimensions of life or 43 things, or 5 angles or whatever my goals were - whatever, I've ended up going with the theme approach) - I need to quit the reminiscing and get on with 2008!
Goodbye from Tasterspoon 2007, and hello from Tasterspoon 2008. Let's all have a totally blogworthy year!
Comments