Mile 88

Old Gato Cigar Factory on Simonton St.

I don't remember if I mentioned this or not, but one of my goals for the year was to run every mile of every street in old town Key West; for those of you familiar with the island, everything south of 1st street. Today I accomplished that goal:

(The big white spot in the middle are the cemetary lanes; I did not run them because that seemed weird.) Anyway, it took way less time than I anticipated, so I'm now expanding my goal to running every mile of every street in Key West. Period. I was talking to my friend at work about this and she was like "You should take a picture every time you go out and run" and I was all "I don't really want to carry my camera around though." But then, when I was out running this morning I had this epiphany, which is that I carry my phone around while running for safety and also because I have a cool app that tracks where I'm running and how far I went and fun things like that, and ALSO, my phone has a camera. So, I'm sorry that you missed getting a picture a run from old town (maybe if I still have time left in Key West after I finish the rest of the island, I'll try and re-do it for you), but from here on out, I'm going to snap a shot during every run.

So if you are interested, all of those photos will be in this album on SmugMug. I also resurrected, repurposed, and rechristened my old "Jules Q View" blog as "A Running View" and will be posting those pictures there. (You can find it at: julesqview.blogspot.com.)

But mostly this post is to say Hooray for me! because I accomplished my goal. And also in awesomeness: next week I will hit 100 miles for the year.Which I'm kind of excited about.

Today's Top 5

One of the things that I've done to try and keep my house cleaner, my life a little more organized, and myself a little more productive was go out and get a white board from the dollar store. Every night before I go to bed (or sometimes in the morning before I got to work) I spend like a minute coming up with the five things that most need to get done that day. On Saturday I add a couple of extra tasks for my Saturday Seven, since I usually have more time at home. They usually aren't terribly difficult, and even then, I honestly only average about three of them every day, but it has definitely helped.

p.s. guess what my most pressing thing to do today is.

Playing House

Ed and her husband went out of town last weekend to do some area scoping up in DC (where we will hopefully all be moving sometime this year), and to make their lives a little bit easier I stayed here with their two oldest kids, Shi-bud and Little Man. We had lots of fun. On Friday we rented a movie:

And then the boys helped me make chocolate chip cookies. Shi-bud did all the measuring and Little Man was responsible for turning the mixer on and off, and of course, we had big spoonfuls of cookie dough.

Saturday morning I had to take Lilo to go get her rabies shot at the clinic. While we were there we decided to go visit the cats. Shi-bud liked petting them, but Little Man was very nervous about it and pretty much hid behind my leg the whole time:

So, Lilo always gets cheap chicken nuggets from Wendy's whenever she rides in the car because she hates riding in the car and I'm trying to get her to think it's maybe not that bad after all (otherwise the move from here to Virginia is going to be fun...). While we were in the drive through Little Man announced that he had to go potty RIGHT! NOW! So as soon as we'd gotten and paid for our food we zoomed around, parked, and ran back into Wendy's with no shoes and made it just in time.

After lunch and naps we decided to up the fun factor and went minigolfing!

The boys had a blast -- they spent most of the time hitting their balls through the fun obstacles multiple times, and when they were done would work at getting them in the holes. In the picture above, Little Man is deliberately hitting the ball into a water trap.

The mini-golfing place is attached to a restaurant so when we were done we headed over for hogfish (me), mac and cheese (Shi-bud) and chicken nuggets (Little Man). I made sure to take the boys to the bathroom before we sat down in the hopes that we could have an uninterrupted meal. No such luck, about half an hour later both boys needed to go back to the bathroom. I told the waitress, but family trip to the bathroom took no less than 25 minutes. Not even kidding. When we came back she was like "you have no idea how many people tried to clear your table for you." Hahaha.

On a kind of random note, the boys kept slipping up all weekend and calling me Daddy. This is not the first time that's happened to me either; a couple weeks ago I was babysitting some other kids and they also kept accidentally calling me Daddy. Not sure how I feel about that...

After soooo much fun on Saturday, we kept Sunday pretty quiet. We went to church:

and then both boys fell asleep in the afternoon. I used the quiet time to try and clean up after ourselves a bit, and relax. I happily returned to the boys to their mother on Monday; we had tons of fun, but who know fun would be so much work!?

Some lessons learned:

• When/If I have kids I should anticipate spending most of my day in the bathroom
• The hour or so between the kids going to sleep and me crashing out from exhaustion is the most important part of the day
• Plan for things to take about 12 times longer than you think they will
• Learn everything so you can answer questions 13 hours a day
• MAKE SURE I HAVE A HUSBAND TO DO THIS WITH ME!

Today's Projects

Along with running, grocery shopping, sweeping and mopping, doing the laundry, and organizing the office, here are two fun projects from today:

Starting some homemade vanilla. (The whole time that I was in the liquor store buying the vodka I was nervous that one of my young women or someone from church would see me coming out of there with a bottle in a brown paper bag, but that I wouldn't see them and be able to explain: it's for making vanilla! I swear!)

And homemade conversation hearts! What! I'm totally crafty and awesome. Just waiting for them to dry and for my food pens to show up so I can write cute stuff on them. Any suggestions for what I should write?

Vegetarian

So, yesterday I decided that I wanted to eat like a vegetarian this month. A bit of a whim, but also part of this year's "cleanse and sanctify" mantra -- I wanted to eat like the Word of Wisdom which is all fruits and vegetables and grain, and meat only sparingly in times of winter or famine. Technically February is Winter, yes, but not really here in Key West, plus it's only 29 days instead of 30 or 31, so vegetarian month it was!.

Today, I ate three-quarters of a ham and cheese croissant that a coworker brought in before I went "Oh crap! I'm a vegetarian this month!"

Moral of the story: you have to pay more attention to what you're eating to be a vegetarian.

Also, that I am SO awesome.

My Ami

I love it when work facilitates vacations. In this case, a mini vacation to Miami for the weekend and a much-needed break from real life. There was a work-related lecture at the University of Miami on Friday night, so I decided to make a weekend of it.

The original plan actually called for me to be out of the office all day on Friday, so I would have traveled up Friday, gotten all my mainland erranding done, and then had Saturday to hang out. Unfortunately, there were things that needed to be done in the office on Friday, and being all dedicated and diligent like I am, I went in to do them, so I didn't leave until Friday afternoon. Still, the lecture was fantastic and preceded by fancy little Cuban sandwiches and coconut chicken and fancy cheeses and the like. Yummo!

Since I didn't get any of my errands done on Friday, I had to do them on Saturday -- after a nice little run in a nearby park, and a free breakfast of eggs benedict at the hotel. Then it was Target and Kohls and the cell phone repair guys, and etc. I bought some awesome shoes on sale for 70% off. YES! And other fun things like a new blender THAT IS ALSO A FOOD PROCESSOR!!! And some jewelry. All in all a successful shopping day.

But by far, the highlight was Saturday night, which is when I went to see my first ever opera (unless you count the "opera" that I saw at BYU about Joseph Smith. Which I obviously don't.)

It was opening night of Rigoletto produced by the Florida Grand Opera, and I LOVED it. It was super fun to be there with everyone all dressed up and fancy. There were even some guys in tuxedos. Hot! My coworkers contributed to my own fancy outfit (I apologize for how lame this picture is; it's really hard to take pictures of yourself with my giant camera when you're alone, so a hotel room timed shot was the best that I could do for you):

 
My coworker Judi makes these fabulous little fascinator hats and my fancy Cuban coworker insisted that I borrow one. He, himself, loaned me the pearl broach. The bracelet is actually a necklace that I bought for like $2 at Macy's or somewhere, but that turned out to be a really awkward length on me. I was also wearing my sweet on-sale shoes. I felt pretty glam, actually.

And the opera itself was just gorgeous. The lead singers all had these beautifully rich voices, although, I may have to say it, the men's choral parts were probably my favorite -- especially during a scene in which there was supposed to be a storm and they were doing this eerily, wind-like "ooo-OOO-ooo" thing. Shivers, seriously. The orchestra also was just wonderful, and there was some fantastically sinister cello-ing happening at one point. Basically, I loved it, although the narrative junkie in me was bothered by an insufficiently developed plot and at a couple of points the orchestra was so loud it actually drowned out the singers. When I went to the ballet a couple years ago I decided that after Nutcracker and Don Quixote I didn't really need to see any more ballets. I TOTALLY need to see another opera, however.

It was stake conference the next morning, and so after a leisurely breakfast I headed out. We had one of those regional stake conference broadcasts from Salt Lake, which had two great talks by Bishop Edgely and Elder Ballard, and a good talk by Cheryl Esplin (I think) who is in the Primary General Presidency. A lovely way to make an exit from Miami. The drive home was pleasant and uneventful.

And then yesterday I had to get back to real life. Boo!

Jules in the Kitchen

So, I like to cook on Sundays. Saturdays are for cleaning, and such, but I find the process of cooking -- the cleaning, and the chopping, and the sauteeing and the simmering -- to be very relaxing when I have a whole afternoon open and no real deadlines to meet. I like to turn on General Conference, or my MoTab Pandora station, and its very uplifting and spiritually (and physically!) enriching. I'll usually do two or three dishes in a row, and that way I actually eat good food during the week.

Here's what came out of my kitchen today.


Cranberry Orange Jam with crystallized ginger, from this recipe at Serious Eats:

Not just gorgeous, also delicious.

This bread:

The texture is wonderful, but I forgot the salt. Ooops. I had some carrot ginger soup in the freezer that I made a while ago, but never ate because it was disastrous as a soup. Seriously awful. But then I had the genius idea of subbing in the soup for some of the water in the bread, which made up for SOME of the salt lack, but otherwise, you can't really taste that it's there beyond a kind of earthy flavor to the bread.

And finally, Cilantro, Chicken, and Black Bean soup, adapted from this recipe at Kalyn's Kitchen:

This is a winner. And paired with the crusty homemade bread above? Yum-mo!

I realize that my blog has been super boring lately, but that's mostly just because *I've* been super boring lately. Basically, I've been working, and reading, and going on run/walks, doing the Young Women president thing, and cooking. And that's pretty much it. Whee! I'm not complaining, though. Last year was pretty hectic, so I'm enjoying the slower pace. For now anyway...