apple juice

I’ve been gone a little while. After a wonderful vacation for a week and a half, it’s back to work. The daily grind.

This was the first vacation I’ve had where one day into it I had a sinking feeling of having forgotten to do something at work before leaving. Two days in I had emailed back to a co-worker to update a few passwords.

But after getting that out of the way, the vacation was wonderful. My ankle held up as well as I could expect, and I skied without pain for most of it.

After the great week, I thought I might be able to go for a run! The ankle is still a little sore, but I thought it was possible. Three houses away, I was feeling the pain, and by the end of the block I stopped, went back, and grabbed my bike to follow the Juice-ette and Yeti around the lake. The pedaling motion is a far lower impact activity.

Luckily, your local sporting goods store will sell you any number of different ankle braces with different levels of protection, little slip-on neoprene booties all the way up to plastic casts (real comfortable looking).

After trying a few on, and running around Sportmart in my socks, I settled on one of the lace-up boots. It worked well enough to make it over to the lake, down the near side and then almost back to the house. As it breaks-in, I think it will support even better.

The point of this story is that I was feeling like a tremendous slug sitting around, not doing any exercising or anything. If there was some sort of work-out program that involved vacuuming, I would be all over that, but alas, you don’t work up quite the same sweat as you do while running.

So the weather is beautfiul here in minnesota. The air smells wonderful, all the plants are sprouting and budding. Birds, chirping. Kids, playing. If only we had some outdoor baseball!

Things you can look forward to in the next couple weeks as I get back into a routine here…

• I made an epic ski video from the trip. I will post it here. Ski team buddies will get a kick out of it I’m sure.
• I’ll be going to the Living Green Expo at the end of April, to find out how I can live green. (Britt, are you going to be there?)
• Hopefully seeing a concert or two (M.Doughty is coming to town with a new CD out in May)
• I’ll probably babble on about BioDiesel again soon, much to the chagrin of my shrinking readership.
• and whatever I feel like, gosh!

I had a little sports-related injury a week ago. I just started playing indoor soccer, and I managed to catch my foot in some strange and un-natural way as I was running after the ball.

I’m compelled to share a picture:

A co-worker wanted to see the ankle the other day, so I pulled up my pants a few inches, and she said.. “Is the ace bandage keeping it stable?”

“Ummm, it’s not wrapped,” I replied.

But that was a week ago, now I’m hobbling around without the crutches, but i don’t think I’ll be back on the artificial pitch again this season!

Ah well, more time for vids.

Doug just showed me how to use my espresso maker. Its buzz-a-licious!

I was at my polling place at 6:40am this morning, it opened at 7am. This was the line behind me when I got there.

By the time I voted, that line was 3 times as long, and the little voting machine said 94 people had voted.

I’m off to knock on doors and get people to the polls. Go vote!

We carved our pumpkins tonight. The plan was to be non-partisan until my lady stole my message with her design.

So I ditched the plan and carved something else!

Beautiful Vista
Originally uploaded by ajc3.

Here’s a photo from some road in Vermont. It’s on the way to Mad River Glen. I have no idea how to decipher the roads out there that seemingly head of in random directions.

It was beautiful out there in all directions though. It seems as though there were ten times as many trees that were changing colors out there than there is back here in Minnesota.

John also told me that that 100 years ago, 85% of vermont had been logged, and that he has seen extremely surreal pictures of the mountains with absolutely no trees on them.

Amazing to think what has re-grown, and also that people couldn’t see the beauty they were destroying at the time.

I was just sent this article by a friend, and I was compelled to share…. Politics in the ‘New Normal’ America

During the spring and summer of 2004 some Americans, most but not all of them nominal Democrats, spoke of the November 2 presidential election as the most important, or “crucial,” of their lifetimes. They told not only acquaintances but reporters and political opinion researchers that they had never been more “concerned,” more “uneasy,” more “discouraged,” even more “frightened” about the future of the United States. They expressed apprehension that the fragile threads that bound the republic had reached a breaking point; that the nation’s very constitution had been diverted for political advantage; that the mechanisms its citizens had created over two centuries to protect themselves from one another and from others had been in the first instance systematically dismantled and in the second sacrificed to an enthusiasm for bellicose fantasy. They downloaded news reports that seemed to make these points. They e-mailed newsletters and Web logs and speeches and Doonesbury strips to multiple recipients.

I started Swedish class last night, and in conversations with a couple students, it came out that ‘thinking about moving after November’ was on their minds, and I admitted to them that we had jokingly said that as well. When I was in Canada this summer for a friend’s wedding, we jokingly told a few Canadians that we were up there “scoping out places to live if things didn’t go well in November”. Which we thought was pretty funny, although I’m not sure if they want any more Americans coming up there.

But it has always been a joke, partially because just up and moving is difficult when you have jobs and houses and familes, but mostly because I still believe in the promise of this country, and that things work like a pendulum given that our system was set up so well. It swings right, it swings left, but in the end it returns to center.

Sometimes I wonder though if that will continue to hold… what if there is a new center?