Back on Track

First week of 2012 is officially gone!

I spent a little bit of time before the holidays and then on New Year’s Day figuring out my race schedule for this year.

Big goal: Free Press FULL Marathon.

Goals along the way:

• Super 5k: February 5th, Novi, MI
• Shamrocks & Shenanigans 5k: March 11th, Ann Arbor, MI
• Martian Marathon 10k: April 14th, Dearborn, MI
• Roads’ End 5 Miler: April 29th, Pinckney Rec Area, MI
• Capitol City Half Marathon: May 5th, Columbus, OH
• Back to the Beach 10k: May 20th, Shelby Twp., MI
• Flirt with Dirt 10k: June 9th, Novi, MI
• The Legend Half Marathon: August 4th, Lansing, MI
• Free Press Full Marathon: October 21st, Detroit, MI/Windsor, Ontario

I’ve got my 2012 calendar all kitted out with my running plan for the year and the white board below it for each week + our meals and other appointments.

Week 1 Planned

Week 1 Actual
Sunday 1/1: Drove home from skiing up north
Monday 1/2: 3 mile run (treadmill, 10:56 pace)
Tuesday 1/3: 6am-7am workout with personal trainer, 6pm-7pm beginning yoga with Amanda
Wednesday 1/4: nothing, glorious nothing.
Thursday 1/5: 6pm-7pm beginning yoga with Amanda
Friday 1/6: 3.86 mile run to Amanda’s house (10:05 pace)
Saturday 1/7: 3.25 mile walk at Gallup Park
Sunday 1/8: 2 mile run to the Rec Center (9:54 pace); 20 minutes of abs, 2.85 mile run back home (11:04 pace)

This week is a short week since we’re leaving for Vermont on Wednesday after work. I’ve only got a run for tonight, personal training session and yoga tomorrow planned, but I’ll be taking my running stuff out east with me too

A Return

It really does seem like I can’t keep up with this for more than a few months.

Last time I was here, we were just buying a house. That was SIX MONTHS ago. We’ve settled in, still have a few areas with not-so-much furniture, got a new hot water heater, and built some sweet raised bed gardens.

Work has changed too. For a little over three years I did, for lack of a better explanation, an inside sales job. It dealt with our customers that were smaller, however there were many of them and I had between 100-200 customers at any time.

Due to some turnover at work, I was promoted to Account Manager, which is an outside sales position. I travel (almost) weekly or twice a week to Ohio and have a company car, which is awesome since I wouldn’t want to drive the Satillac around that much and that far away.

I’ve been pretty busy with that, but I’ve still been working out with my trainer twice a week and also did a lot of running. In October I finished the Free Press Half Marathon in 2 hours 30 minutes and was super excited that I ran the whole time.

This New Year I’ve got new running goals that I’ll post about soon and some other exercise goals too. More soon

Introducing…

A new blog!

We closed on our house this Monday (!!!) so I decided to start another, little less personal, blog.

Rosewood Homestead

The new blog will focus on our house, being new homeowners, projects, and my goals of being able to be as self-sufficient as possible on the new land that we own.

I Dream of Garden

I’ve had a lot of time to (day)dream in the beginning of the week. You say, I spend about 15 hours in a car going back and forth from Normal, IL. In case you don’t know, it is FOREVER away from here. 15 hours to go to a Mitsubishi supplier conference. Best part, I get to take another long drive next week to Lafayette, IN for a Subaru supplier conference. Bleh.

I got to check out a great deal of farms. Lots of them. Unfortunately, not much difference. Soy beans, wheat, corn. Wheat, corn, soy beans, and so on and so forth. Each little town had a silo where I’m sure they brought their harvest to and I’m sure they made pennies on the dollar and needed subsidies to afford to keep their land.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single crop farm, aside from a U-Pick fruit farm, that grows something other than corn, soy beans, or wheat. Welcome to the Midwest.

Anyways, getting on with it, I had a lot of time to think about my garden. It’s hard to describe how giddy I feel when I see little plants popping out of the soil that just weeks ago I sweated over to till by hand.

So, without any more to do, here are a couple more garden pictures.

A Long Time Coming, Update Part #3

The last thing that has been keeping me busy lately has been my Project Grow community garden plot.

We couldn’t get into the garden until after the middle of May since it was so rainy… and then the man who usually tills the gardens for everyone was unable to till since it was still so rainy.

It has taken many, many hours of tilling by hand with a pitchfork but I finally have almost all of my plants in.

Tomatoes
Brad’s Black Heart (link)
Aunt Ruby’s German Green (link)
Pixie Red Rock (link)
Livingstone Stone (x2) (link)
Amish Paste (x4) (link)
Honor Bright (x2) (link)

Peppers
Fish (link)
Thai (x2) (link)
Sheepnose Pimento (x4) (link)
Mini Yellow Bell (x4) (link)

All Others
Broccoli
Detroit Cabbage (seed) (link)
Sunset Lettuce (seed) (link)
Henderson Bush Lima Beans
Snow Crown Cauliflower (x6)
Cabbage (x3)
Red Russian Kale (x3)
Kale (x3)
Thai Basil (x3)
Genovese Basil (x3)
Flat Leaf Parsley (x4)

I still have carrots, two different types of beans I got from my garden neighbor, and some Hearts of Gold Melons from the heirloom seed trail.

I added the red lines to easily point out the outline of the plot. This isn’t the most recent picture, I’ve finished those two half rows and added some at the very ends of the walking rows.

I’m heading down to Illinois for work today so no more working on the garden until Tuesday evening

A Long Time Coming, Update Part #2

One Step Closer to Homesteading

otherwise known as…

WE’RE BUYING A HOUSE. OMG.

Honestly, I thought this process would take a lot longer than it actually did.
We found our Realtor through one of our friends, set up an informational meeting in the beginning of April since no one ever explains to you exactly how one proceeds to buy a house, and we were looking at houses not long after.

We put an offer in on the house we choose on the evening of May 4th and it got accepted less than 24 hours later! Within a week we had the inspections done, radon test done, loan paperwork in… everything has been chugging along smoothly.

Two days ago we finally heard back from the underwriter about our loan and had to complete a couple Prior to Closing Conditions. They were actually really simple things to explain (we don’t own any part of Tim’s parent’s house and we had to re-scan his license).

We are set to close on June 24th and I think it is just a waiting game until then.
I’ve got grand plans for things like clotheslines and rain barrels and building raised bed gardens. Tim has grand plans for wiring Cat-6 data lines and re-staining the deck.

Of course, house details. It’s 1000 sq. ft. on the ground floor with about 90% of that finished in the basement. Three bedrooms and full bath upstairs and a sort of finished half bath downstairs. Kitchen is super tiny. Yard is what I would consider big for Ann Arbor. Trex front porch and wooden deck in the back.

A Long Time Coming, Update Part #1

Well, it certainly has been a long time since I have done one of these “update” things.

It has been a busy spring so far, so I’m going to do a little rundown (in a few posts) of what has happened in the past three months or so.

Races and Exercise
In the beginning of April, I ran the Martian Marathon 5k in Dearborn, MI. Sad that I still had to wear my long underwear because of the cold but GREAT because I met my goal of under thirty minutes! It was 29:51 overall. Also, the shirt was awesome.

The rest of April and May were filled with not much running and a lot more mountain biking and road biking, that is, when we weren’t getting constantly rained on.

my valiant steed

The weekend of May 21st brought our first ride in the Zoo-de-Mack, a 51 mile bicycle ride from Boyne Highlands Resort near Petoskey, MI to Mackinaw City, MI. It took us 3 hours and 15 minutes of ride time, with an hour in the middle for lunch.

spandex ftw

still lots of energy

Crazy enough, the next day I ran the Back to the Beaches 5k at Stoney Creek Metropark in Shelby Twp, MI. I was also under 30 minutes this time, at 29:53 overall. I was really surprised that I was able to run that quickly after such a long ride the night before… and once I saw that I was only two seconds slower than my record, I wished I could’ve just pushed a little bit more to beat it. Oh well. Next 5k isn’t until the Warrior Dash in July and I have no time goals for that one.

A week from tomorrow is the Tour de Cure Century Ride and you should donate to me, it’d be lovely of you

After that, I’m trying to figure out which running races I want to sign up for next. I’m thinking about the Romeo to Richmond 5k and the CRIM 8k. I need to start amping up a little bit after the Century in preparation for the half marathon.

Saturday Planning – 3/19/2011 to 3/25/2011

Planning my menus on Saturday before my grocery shopping trip is my go-to method for keeping organized and saving money by only buying what I need.

With that, here is my meal plan for 3/19/2011 to 3/25/2011, in no particular order. It’s pretty boring, since there is a lot of leftovers and I have no help in the brainstorming.

• Spaghetti
• Bean burgers, couscous, zucchini
• Finishing up leftover Indian, Thai (in freezer), etc
• Leftover Beef Stew

I’m really not feeling like cooking anything new, or anything at all right now. It’s so nice outside and I have so much training to do. Tim will be leaving, I think on Thursday, for skiing Utah… so I’m trying to just finish up as much food as we have in the kitchen. Feels good sometimes to finish up all the leftovers and start again.

I’ll probably be posting less too, or at least, not sticking to any schedule. Life is getting busy, even though I’m making it that way. It seems that between working, working out/training, and finding time to eat food I don’t have too much time for anything else.

Opposites, Old & New

This week has been mostly leftovers… which is AWESOME because the weather has decided to be amazing

These two recipes are, just as the title says, opposites of each and one is a new-to-me recipe and one is a usual one. An old dish, a new one. A vegan dish and a very, very non-vegan dish.

I found this recipe on The Food Network’s website, not on purpose though. We recently bought one of those really heavy dutch oven type pots and since we’ve only used it once so far I figured it was high time that we took it for another drive.

I found this by Googling “dutch oven recipes” and this looked like the best one. I was actually surprised at the number of recipes for breads!

It took a while to prepare this and the beef actually had to marinate over night. I was wary of the marinade since it was AN ENTIRE BOTTLE OF RED WINE with just some crushed garlic. The beef was purple! Actually very yummy and you could only taste a tiny tiny bit of the wine after it was cooked.

I consider this to be a staple dish on my menu planning since I don’t need to look at any directions (or it could just be simple… that too!). BBQ Tofu (original recipe from the Veganomicon), steamed broccoli, and Israeli couscous flavored with curry powder.

I’ve finished up a whole bottle of this barbecue sauce just from making this! We can’t grill at our apartment complex because we have a charcoal grill (boo) so this is the closest I get to “barbecue.” I bet someone in the South is dying when I say that.

So there you have it! An old dish, a new one. A vegan dish and a very, very non-vegan dish.

Quinoa Chili & the Kitty

This past Saturday night I stole another recipe from (never home) maker and made her In-a-pinch Chili… with quinoa! I’d never even thought of adding quinoa to chili before as a way to pack in some protein.

It was super easy but my only worry as I was cooking it was that the taste of the vegetable broth was very, well, un-chili-like at first. I added a lot more spices than in the recipe (chili powder, paprika, cayenne pepper, and red pepper flakes) and in the end you couldn’t tell the taste of the vegetable broth. It was just yummy chili goodness. Also, I used diced garlic tomatoes that I had in the cupboard already instead of whole tomatoes. They cooked down really nicely.

I’ve got a bunch of leftovers so I’m taking some to work for today’s lunch

Also on the agenda for today’s post, kitty pictures!
In case you didn’t know it, we have a kitty. She doesn’t really have a name… we call her Kitty or Cat. Yup, we’re creative. Her ‘professional’ name is Leeloo Dallas Multipass (or something like that) in tribute to her being orange and Milla Jovovich rocking sweet orange hair in The Fifth Element.