mud, mudder, modest

It’s crazy warm here in southern Vermont at the moment. Which is disconcerting, because – at least in our corner of this little corner of the state – there’s not actually a lot to report. Just a lot of dusty, dry leaf litter on the sides of the road. It’s mud season, folks.

The magnolia’s got nothing to say.

Wild ginger (Asarum canadense) has allowed as how a leaf here and there might be appropriate, but is otherwise silent.

The vinca, on the other hand, is confident that all is happening as it should. That’s hardly surprising, though. Vinca (also known as myrtle) is pretty gangbuster about just showing up. It was still throwing off flowers last November, for crying out loud.

 

There are a bunch of these skating around on the surface of the brook, in a calm spot free of ripples. They didn’t get the memo that they are, in fact, on water. Maybe I’ll call them Jesus bugs for the time being. 

 

Across the way, on the path that leads to the newt/tadpole pond, the trees have all been dipped in moss.

Awwww….

In other news, my apparent lack of modesty regarding my running routine has landed me in trouble. I’ve been recruited for not one, but two, kick-ass events. Up first, the Tough Mudder. This is a ten-mile slog up and back down a local mountain, with a bunch of spiritually annihilating obstacles thrown in, including walls to scale, mud pits to traverse, 15-foot leaps into water, greased jungle gym bars over a water pit, and various other hazards like, uh, getting an electric shock at the end. Doesn’t that sound like a peach? That’s mid-July. A friend of ours just turned 50, and since a sports car was apparently not in the budget, he figured this was the next best thing. So he’s putting together a team.

So I’m at the gym today, doing my eeensy-weensy girly girl weight lifting routine, and I learned that one of the guys at the gym has put together a Tough Mudder workout class. On Sundays. At seven a.m. Jeez, Louise, WHAT have I gotten myself into?

Another friend has lured me into joining a twelve-person team for some kind of ludicrous 48-hour thing where you run a relay from the mountains of New Hampshire, to the beach. As in, running 24/7, in shifts. Lucky you, if you pull the 2 a.m. slot. This isn’t happening for months and months, but still.

I’m at the point in my life where I’d rather have an epic fail at something like this, than never have tried at all, so I’m all in. My most recent long run was 11 miles, this past weekend, the highlight of which was nearly losing a shoe in some muddy ruts that were a little squelchier than I’d anticipated. So that’s what the “road closed” barrier was all about. Go figure. 

In other news – and this is, believe it or not, why I didn’t get outside with the camera much over the weekend – we are now the proud owners of a magical device that translates our cable capacity into a cell signal. Which means that we’ve gone from no bars, to four bars, of service. This all happened because our cell phone contract was up for renewal, and we went into the store, thinking we’d upgrade from our low-tech, but perfectly serviceable flip phones, with the bottom of the barrel no-frills plan, to perhaps ever-so-slightly newer flip phones, with the same bottom of the barrel no-frills plan.

Once we learned about the 'network extender’ gizmo, one thing led to another.

And now I have an iPhone. Not the one where Siri nags you in her dulcet tones about what you should be doing to train for your next event, but the next one down, the iPhone 4. I will now text. As a friend drily noted, ‘welcome to the 20th century, Sarah’.

Indeed.