First big snow of the season!

The weather folk were pretty sure it was going to snow but waffled on amounts - saying anything from 2 to 18 inches. It turns out the snow started a few hours earlier than expected, tapered off a bit around dawn, then picked up speed mid-day. So far, I'd say we have about a foot at our house and it's still snowing!

As luck would have it, I had a doctor's appointment scheduled today that was located about 5 miles by bike path from my house; luckier still, Boulder does a good job of plowing bike paths during snow storms. So! Off into the fluffy blowing flakes I went! Quite a lovely run actually. The return trip I decided to do as a combo run-bus-run affair which was not nearly as pleasant as the outbound trip. As is usually the case, those big roadside piles of snow turned into rivers of ice, many of which were just too wide to avoid as I made my way to and from the bus. Ah well, plenty of dry socks awaited me once I bounded through the snow banks and into our front door. Sspeaking of bounding, ol' Jester dog may have just celebrated his 12th birthday, but he is still does a fine job of bounding through snow. He's quite certain snow is a whole lot of fun falling from the sky!

The power of the dribble

Mom's doing very well; home from the hospital, thinking straight, moving around, organizing...pretty much back to her old self (except no longer driving). Me...I'm just now coming around.

Mid-week, calming down with mom's return home, I was fighting fatigue from stress, lack of sleep, and a cold. My powers of concentration were zilch. I had a whole bunch of reading to do for class and little ability to focus. I'd sit, open the book, stand, wander around the house, dabble in this and that, sit, stand, dabble. Then I noticed the sunshine streaming in through the window and decided to turn the dabbling into dribbling.

Basketball is a wonderful thing. Outside, bouncing the ball, trotting around the driveway, shooting towards the big blue sky, rebounding, dribbling, trotting, jumping, shooting, dribbling. Extraordinarily soothing. I'm certain it nudged my soul out of the doldrums and into the light of day. Thursday I rejoined my exercise class, reappeared at my CU class and Friday/today I started the day at my old-usual 5:22 a.m., running to my volunteer job, reading newspapers for AINC, and have continued the day with a bounce in my step. Thank you basketball!

A roller coaster I'd like never to ride again

Paula & Elena, July 2009

As is my nightly custom, I called my mom Thursday evening. No answer. Hmmm. Maybe tired from a busy day. We were heading out the door to catch a bus to Denver's Union Station where we were hopping a train to Galesburg, Illinois to visit Paul for his final family weekend at Knox College. I continued trying to call, tried calling neighbors...nobody answering. Hmmm. Maybe the phones are out in the neighborhood. Friday morning, I started calling again. No answer at mom's. Called the neighbors, they answered, went over to mom's house, and discovered no car in the garage and Thursday's mail still in the box. Oh oh. I called the hospital; no record of her there. I called her doctor; he hadn't heard from her in the last day or two. I called her dentist where she had an appointment Thursday morning. Yes, she had been there. But then heard from the friend who mom was supposed to have lunch with Thursday and mom had not shown up. Time to mount a full-out search. I called a high school buddy who started driving the streets of Petoskey and called the police who put out a 3-county bulletin and also started searching the streets, retracing possible routes mom might have taken. And me, my cell phone, and Kendall kept riding the rails to Galesburg.

Got to Galesburg. Happy family weekend Paul and, by the way, Grandma is missing. Checked into our B&B with the cell phone attached to my ear. Took Paul's buddies out for pizza and played with my salad while listening to the welcome distraction of a lively gang of college students. Looked up car rental agencies thinking we would head to Petoskey the next morning. Returned to the B&B, numb from disbelief at the turn of events. 10 p.m., the phone rings. It's the police and mom's been found. In her car, in good shape all things considered (no food or water for 36 hours and pretty darned cold), in a ditch off a two-track road off a country road south of town. The ambulance is taking her to the hospital to get checked out. I call the ER, they let me talk to her. She is talking, she is o.k., she's alive!

Today is Monday. We're back from Galesburg and mom's still in the hospital awaiting test results. The doctors would really like to solve the mystery of how mom got from the dentist's office to that little two-track road with no clue of where or how she was driving. In the meantime, she's got energy back in her voice, she's taking little walks around the hospital, she's cogent, she's got her sense of humor about her, and she's got one very thankful daughter. Whew. Oh, and she turned 89 during this adventure. Who'd've thunk an 89 year old could get into that much mischief.

Autumn musings

One of my routes home takes me by a field with a bunch of apple trees - and one of those trees has the tastiest little apples. I often swing by and grab one for an end-of-run snack. This past week as I came upon the field I discovered five deer with the same idea: apple munchathon time!

Along with apple-laden trees, it's the time of the harvest moon, which means I can run to my volunteer job at 6 in the morning wearing sunglasses even though the sun has yet to peek above the eastern horizon when I leave the house. However, when I get within a couple of miles of work the sunrise is underway - and they have been stellar lately. Perhaps it's the pre-winter low-lying clouds picking up the early rays or the golden-hued grasses reaching to the sky...whatever the reason, the sky above and earth are infused with an amber glow to begin the day.

Just such a sunrise graced my run this morning reminding me of the train ride to Knox College for Family Weekend three years ago. (We're headed there again, on the train, in just a few days.) Kendall and I were just waking up and I looked out the window to see miles and miles of fields nestled under a lifting fog, gently glowing in the rays of the rising sun. I turned to Kendall and said "This is why I want to run across the heartland." It is still those scenes - rustling grasslands, fog-filled river valleys, north woods canopies, sparkling waves - that fill my mind when I think back on the run.

And today? Amber autumn clouds at sunrise, golden aspen leaves drifting through the air, owls hooting from above, and sharing apples with the deer. It's all good.

Sunday sanctuary

The hills are alive with golden aspen and I was itching to get out of town to take a look - and to leave the hubbub of the city behind for at least a few peaceful moments. So I treated myself to my version of Sunday meditations by lacing up my running shoes and heading for the hills...on foot...3000 feet uphill in about 9 miles as I ran most of Sunshine Canyon from Boulder to Gold Hill. With most of the uphill running completed, Kendall and Devon drove up in the van and gave me a lift even further into the mountains where we gazed upon snow-covered peaks and glistening aspen. I must say it feels mighty fine to be fit enough again to simply cruise, breath, and lose myself to the sights and sounds of the world around me.

Shaping up!

The cleaning frenzy is almost complete:
floors mopped, walls scrubbed, windows washed, surfaces dusted, cobwebs vanquished, shelves built in the basement to house the books that started this whole thing, and the dog has even been bathed!
O.K. Paul! You can come home now! ;-)



Speaking of shaping up. It appears my running is also beginning to shape up! This was my 4th consecutive week of high 40s or low to mid-50 miles/week; 4th consecutive week of solid hill repeat workouts (this week was the most I've ever done: 6 each of 90-second hills alternating between a steep and a friggin' steep hill); and 4th consecutive week with a long run over two hours - with two of those runs over 2.5 hours. I'm starting to feel the hints of fitness again. Weeehawww! I've been asked (often) what I'm getting ready for. Bottom line is, I'd like to be able to run as long as I want, whenever I want, wherever I might find myself to be. I do love perambulating tourism. When I was doing my hill repeats this past week I ran into Mark Plaatjes' training group which was also repeating on the "friggin' steep" hill. He commented on my run to Michigan and I said it was the best way to sight-see ever. He allowed as how one could get a pretty darned good view from an airplane. But I must say, I do prefer an up close and personal view!

Summer catch up post - 3 of 3

TV room - with no more bookshelves

After the whirlwind of travel and festivities, it was time to buckle down to business. We've got this domino effect going on in our house that falls something like this:

• Kendall buys a high def TV for the family for Christmas.
• To make room for the new TV, all the bookshelves come down in the TV room; the books are boxed up; the boxes are piled into the guest room.
• We paint the TV room, put up the TV and it all looks so darned good with the newly painted walls that we decide not to put bookshelves back up. (Ah hah! says the astute reader, the guest room is now the boxed up book room.)
• Son Devon returns home to live while he goes for another round of college studies (this time in Communication/radio broadcast at Metro State College of Denver) and he needs that guest room. The books must find a new home.
  
• The only room in the house that can possibly house that many shelves is...the basement. The basement is so full of 34 years of accumulated Paula/Kendall/boys' stuff that it has been reduced down to winding paths through the piles...no floor space, no wall space...pretty much no space at all. The basement must be cleaned out! [Note: this was the first agenda item on my Retirement List...but it somehow got preempted by 1) preparing for that wee run to Michigan and 2) too much nice weather to spend days in the basement and 3) pretty much anything else that came along that wasn't cleaning out the basement.]
  

With the pressure on to get Devon into his own room (he and his stuff is crammed into Paul's room at the moment and Paul is due home for a visit in two weeks), the neighborhood offers up a great incentive: a neighborhood garage sale! So, for the last week, we've been industriously - nay, ruthlessly - going through our piles.

Two mongo garbage barrels of trash, two mongo recycle barrels plus a giant box of recyclables, and a back porch of yard sale stuff, we now have a pretty darned tidy basement ...at least on the scale of VaughanMiller tidiness - which comes nowhere near the Good Housekeeping Martha Stewart scale of tidiness - but we're rather proud of ourselves!

(Porch-full of yard sale stuff -on the left above- makes for rediscovered basement walls & floor -on the right!)

So, if anyone is in the vicinity of the Martin Acres neighborhood of the city of Boulder on August 15th or 16th, do check out the yard sales and make us an offer; we're willing to go very very low!

Summer catch up post - 2 of 3

Millers et al - brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles... the gang's all here!

Following the big dose of Vaughan festivities in early-mid July, we turned around for a Miller extravaganza in honor of Kendall's brother Steve's 60th birthday.
(In the picture to the right, Steve's daughter Amber presents the cake - which is decorated with "1949 Don't Ask" - while Steve's granddaughters Audrey and Kira look on.)




All the siblings were present, most of the kids of the siblings and many of the cousins. Middle brother, Andy, did most of the organizing in hopes that this celebration would take care of all the "60" parties for the brothers. Ha! He and two of his cousins celebrate birthdays within days of eachother (they were known as the triplets when they were little); I see another grand gathering in two years' time!

Brothers/cousins: Andy, Earl, Kendall, Steve, John
(Andy, Earl & John are the "triplets" - and all have the solar foreheads!)

The partying started in Fraser/Winter Park and continued on in the Denver area with a somewhat smaller - yet still boisterous crew. Those Millers sure do know how to have fun!

The next generation - yes, they do know how to have fun!
(Tony, Audrey, Cullen, Kira, Juniper & Sage)

Summer catch up post - 1 of 3

How time flies when summer is swinging! Here's catch-up post #1 (and that's "catch up", not "ketchup" ...I'm a mustard kindo' gal myself... which reminds me of one of my 'quotes of the week' on our family whiteboard: "You can't put a mayonnaise personality into a mustard suit" ...from Unwrapped on the Food Network).

So! Summer since my last post!

That would include our road trip to Michigan by way of Knox College where we visited our son, Paul, who is spending his summer doing one of his very most favorite things: mathematics....specifically, research in cryptography. The boy looks good - and happy. And mom here is going to be even happier when he arrives back in Boulder at the end of the month for a two-week visit before his fall term starts up!

me & frisky mom

After the visit with Paul, we headed up to Petoskey for some quality time with mom, family, friends, and the lake. 'Twas an unusual visit for us in that friends we typically spend lots of time with were way busy (work in the summer...what's that about?!) thus our visiting time was good but short, friends we often don't get to see were actually in town while we were there so we had bonus visits, we were able to catch up with relatives we hadn't seen for a couple of years, and the weather was really quite lovely - lots of sunshine yet not too hot or muggy - but the water, at 50 degrees, was way too cold to swim in. Best of all, my mom's health has significantly improved over the past year so we were able to take her out for quite a few excursions. Northern Michigan is a most excellent get-out-and-about kind of place and we did just that!

Murphey & Vaughan cousins

Yi Lu, me, mom, Aunt Helen,
Dan, Kathleen, Dave

too cold to swim -
but great for hunting Petoskey stones

Summer in full swing

Summer hasn't even been here a full two weeks, but there sure has been a flurry of summer activity!


What with our wet spring, hillsides are loaded with a rainbow of wildflowers making for some positively lovely trail running. Adding to the colorful trail running fun: a never-been-used pair of just-my-size montrails that I found at a yard sale for a mere $20. What a sweet pair of shoes - like running on feathers that glide over rocks and roots.



Adding to this year's summer fun, since we're going to be here in town more than we're going to be gone, we actually resurrected our garden! To top it off, the garden is even producing edibles. Lots of salads so far, with root vegetables on the way. Yummers. However, by my vote, even better than the vegies is this year's cherry crop. Earlier this week, my afternoon progressed as follows: pick a whole bunch of cherries, walk straight into the kitchen, pit the cherries, prepare the crisp, and become thoroughly intoxicated by the smell of hot bubbling fresh-picked cherries. Nothing better!

Alas, not every moment can be spent outdoors - not when one is preparing for their first fiddle recital. Yikes! Many many hours of fiddle practice - and, I'm sure, many many neighbors wishing they had never heard the far-too-often repeated pjv rendition of "Red Haired Boy". If y'all are interested in hearing just how that recital turned out (not perfect, but not a disaster), here's the video our son Devon shot of his fiddling mom, accompanied by our teacher, Mike Marsh. (The first 1:39 is tuning; I recommend you skip that part and head straight for the fiddling.)