Workin in Pittsburgh!

Some of you may wonder "Just what does Aaron do on all of those trips"? Well, if you ask Jill she may bring up the ski trips, climbing Mt. Hood, our some of the Golf. Yes, i am getting into playing Golf. Next thing you know I may start watching football. Anyway, this trip to Pittsburgh is a little different. I have been out here for almost two weeks. The first week was an official sales meeting. We are trying to get together all of the information and plan out for the next couple of months. The second week, as you can see from the photos, is all about building some decks! Eric and Marcia, my boss and his wife, bought their house about 4 years ago and everytime we have a sales meeting Eric and I build something new. The last couple of trips we have been working on the back decks. Many of them where very unsafe and needed to be replaced. With this trip we will be very close to being done with this project. Don't worry Eric, I am sure that we will come up with another one soon! It is nice to be building again. It reminds me how glad I am that I do not have to do this everyday! It is always hard to be away from home and Jill and the boys, but getting up in 20 deg. weather to swing a hammer makes it alot worse! I will be done at the end of the week and it sounds like I am driving to KY to meet Jill and the boys to visit her parents for the weekend. i think I have to work on her mom's bathroom when we get there. O well, have hammer will travel!

Jill's sweet feet

This morning I got up to work out, grabbed my coffee and water bottle and went downstairs. I turned on the ipod and started running, and didn't stop for over 50 minutes! I ran for more than 4 miles and probably could have kept going, except I ran out of time, and had to get the boys up for school. Now, for some who actually run for fun or are training for triathlons (like my friend Jennifer B.), this may not sound impressive, especially since my average speed was only about 5 miles an hour. What's impressive is the fact that I have never before even come close to running 4 miles, nor have I ever run for more than a half an hour, and that was only last week. A typical treadmill workout for me is 2 miles of run/walking, and by then I am done physically and also totally bored. I attribute this newfound athleticism to several things:

1: New running shoes. Aaron recently scored me a new pair, to replace my 4-year-old Asics which I bought when I was pregnant.

2: New ipod. Aaron just ordered me a new Nano to replace the one of mine that was "stolen" while he was on a trip.

3. My friends Jay Z, Ludacris, Michael Jackson, Chemical Brothers, The Killers, and a variety of techno tracks from my days of music piracy on Limewire.

4. My really slow pace. I used to think that if you weren't running at least 6 miles an hour, you weren't really running. Well that's great, except I can only run a mile or 2 at 6 miles an hour, before my heart is going to beat out of my chest and I feel the need for a vomitorium (See previous post on the word of the day).

5. P90X.

If this last one sounds to you like some cheesy workout program you would buy off of an infomercial, you would be correct, sort of. Aaron bought this last year after seeing said infomercial, but the program isn't cheesy. It's hard. 6 days a week, at least an hour a day, of cardio, strength training, yoga, and something called ab ripper X, which at the beginning was as painful
as it sounds. For 90 days. Apparently it works though, because even though I didn't do any running during that 90 days, I can somehow run 4 miles now. Cool.

So what's next for someone who has always said she hated running, but now finds herself kind of enjoying it? Hmmmm. A 5K? The Race for the Cure is coming up in May, and I told Aaron I was signing us up. It should be fun, as long as all the snow has melted by then.

Aaron's entry into the blogoshpere

I just want to say how proud I am of Aaron for making his first blog posting on here. He is really NOT kidding when he says he and computers just don't get along. There have been several times I have had to talk him down from tossing the thing out the window. But hey, that's what you get for buy a PC with Vista! (By the way, if anyone wants to purchase said laptop for a good price, drop us a line. Less than six months old, Sony Vaio. Make us an offer!)
This weekend we here in Southwestern Michigan witnessed Winter's last gasp (I hope). After a week of temps in the 40s and even some sun, Mother nature decided to drop 14" of snow on us in less than 24 hours. The Friday afternoon/evening timing of the storm meant that I left for work with a few inches of snow on the ground, and came home at 1 a.m. to a foot of snow in the driveway. I had made it all the way to the house, started to pull into the driveway, then I started to slide. Not wanting to bash our relatively new van into our dreaded rock wall, I stopped, but then realized I couldn't get going again. I sat there, feeling like an idiot, with the van half hanging out into the street, knowing that Aaron is gone, the boys were at Grandma's and any neighbors who might help push were fast asleep. Somehow though, I managed to get the tail end just inside the driveway, so it didn't get hit by a plow in the middle of the night.
Of course, I needn't have worried about that, because the next morning, the plow still hadn't come down our street. After Grandma Candis brought the boys home, thanks to their 4-Wheel drive Jeep, we suited up and trudged down to the park for the neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt, which for the past two years has gone on despite having several inches of snow on the ground. Only in Michigan, I guess! The challenge at a snowy egg hunt is not so much to spot the hidden eggs, but to actually be able to pick them up out of a snowbank while wearing thick, clumsy mittens. The boys still managed to come away with a bunch of eggs apiece, filled with candy I had to quietly throw away while they weren't looking. I'm not that bad, I let them have some, but then they forget about the rest of it, and guess who ends up eating it instead.
After the egg hunt, we came back to the house, and put together a snowman in no time. This snow was the snow I remember from childhood in NJ, sticky stuff that packs well and actually rolls into snowballs, but soft enough to dig a cave out of a snowpile (which Connor did). All this winter, it has been so cold that the snow just falls apart--not much fun for a 3 year old. Unfortunately, you will not see a picture of the best snowman ever on this blog, because as I was running back into the house to get the camera, Riley decided it would be funny to knock it over. By the time I got back outside, the snowman was headless, and pretty soon he was just a couple of snowballs. After all that excitemement, what else could we do? Why, decorate Star Wars Easter eggs, of course! I was especially proud of myself because I discovered that if you pop the egg inside of a wisk, the boys could dunk it and pull it out without dropping it off those little wire egg-dunkers that come with every egg-dyeing kit.
As you can see, the eggs turned out pretty cool.

Coming soon: The Easter Bunny brought light sabers to our house for Easter. I think a re-enactment of the Obi-Wan-Darth Vader duel is in the works.

Aaron's First Blog!!!!

Okay, so I am not nearly as cool as my wife when it comes to this blog thing. Not that it is an excuse, but computers and I do not seem to get along. This is my second one in 6 months! But that is another story. Things are going along at about warp speed here. Jill and I were outside with the boys the other day and Connor looked like a little man. I know I went through this with the girls, but they get so big so fast. I have been on the road a lot lately, but it is going really well. Jill and I do the best we can with the travel. I really don't have to remind my self how great she is.... I have been on a health kick lately ( because of Jill!) and I have lost 18 pounds! I called her today about how I am down to my last notch on my belt. I actually have been running. Don't worry. It won't be a regular thing. Anyway, I will try to get some more post in as time goes on. I can't let Jill be the best at everything!

Word of the Day: Vomitory

Okay, so I have to admit I had a Beavis and Butthead moment when I saw this on my way off the court at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. ("Huh-huh, it says vomit, huh-huh") It struck me as funny enough to take a picture of, at least, so i decided to look it up an see if it really had anything to do with vomit. So here is the definition, according to the American Heritage Dictionary:

vom·i·to·ry (vŏm'ĭ-tôr'ē, -tōr'ē)
adj. Inducing vomiting; vomitive.

n. pl. vom·i·to·ries
1. Something that induces vomiting.
2. An aperture through which matter is discharged.
3. One of the tunnellike passages of an amphitheater or stadium between the seats and the outside wall or passageway.

Okay, so number three is what it actually was, but notice that number one actually has to do with vomit. Which brought to mind a tidbit from ancient history class about a vomitorium being a place for people to vomit, more specifically, the passageways of the Colosseum being a place for people to puke after watching some poor Christian be mauled to death by a lion. I won't really blame my Roman history teacher, because I can't really remember where I heard it, but I can put that misconception to rest.
Here is the entry from Wikipedia:

A vomitorium (plural: vomitoria) is a passage situated below or behind a tier of seats in an amphitheatre, through which crowds can "spew out" at the end of a performance.
Despite their association with Ancient Rome, vomitoria are still found in some theatres. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for instance, has vomitoria in two of its theatres, the outdoor Elizabethan Stage and the Angus Bowmer Theatre. The voms, as they are called, allow actors to mount the stage from passageways cut into the amphitheatre. The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota has two permanent voms, one at stage left and one at stage right, of its thrust stage. The Circle in the Square Theatre, designed to reflect the theatres of ancient Greece and Rome, is the only Broadway theatre that has a vomitorium. The Vomitorium is still used in many of their productions as an entrance and exit for the actors.
A commonly held, but false, belief is that Ancient Romans designated spaces called vomitoria for the purpose of actual vomiting, as part of a binge and purge cycle.

I also found another article debunking this at straightdope.com. You can read it at the link, but basically it says Romans were no strangers to blowing chunks, but didn't have special rooms for this purpose. The rich, however, had servants to clean it up. I have to say that would have been really nice when the boys were babies!

MAC mania in Cleveland

So this will be short becasue I have spent WAY too much time in front of the computer today. I am at the MAC (Mid-American Conference, for those of you who don't live in the Midwest) Tournament in Cleveland, covering Western Michigan University for the paper. The reporter and I left Kalamazoo at 7 a.m., drove to Cleveland, (4 hours) then covered the women's game. This has become much more involved since last year, when all I did was shoot and send pictures on my laptop. This year, I am shooting still and also doing video. Today I sent 12 pictures to the paper and put together 2 different videos, and Graham, the reporter , has updated the WMU Broncos blog about 4 or 5 different times, in addition to writing stories for the paper. We went into Quicken Loans arena around 11:30 a.m., and didn't leave until almost 10 p.m. That's a whole day of my life, gone, whiled away in the basement of a sports arena. I am totally looking forward to tomorrow, because I get to sleep in on my fancy sleep number bed. Knowing me, though, I will probably wake up at 7.

Environmental conundrum

So if you are driving to the grocery store, and halfway there you realize you forgot your reusable shopping bags at home, is it better for the environment to: a) Turn around and drive back to the house to get them, burning extra fossil fuels in the process, or b) Continue on to the store and get plastic bags, which will not biodegrade in our lifetime?

Cool as ice

Sometimes my job is really cool. There are times when I am on an assignment, and I marvel at the fact that I actually get paid to do this stuff. Friday night I was at work at the paper and a guy called to say he and the rest of the Gull Lake Ice Yacht Club would be having races Saturday and Sunday out on the lake for the first time in 8 years. I vaguely knew what ice yachting was, and it sounded like it could be cool, so I called the guy back for more info. When he promised to give me a ride in his boat, I was sold, even though I wasn't supposed to be working Saturday. So the next morning I layered up, put on my warmest socks, and ventured out onto the ice. Now, as you know from my previous post, I am totally done with winter, but apparently winter isn't done with me. It was about 12 degrees, and the wind was blowing somewhere around 15 miles an hour, which put the wind chill at about -5. These boat guys didn't seem to care, they were bundled up from head to toe, then they hunkered down in these tiny sailboats with runners on the bottom and zipped along the ice at about 60 miles an hour. Click here for a photo gallery of pics from the races. Randy, the very nice guy who called the paper, had just finished telling me and the reporter all about all these injuries he'd had and how people have drowned doing this, when he said, "Okay, who's going first?" To his credit, he did not push the boat to 60, and we didn't even come close to leaning over onto one runner like some of the racers, which was probably good, since I was holding a brand-new, corporately purchased HD video camera. But it was REALLY cool. And when would I ever have gotten the chance to do something like that? That's why I like my job. It opens doors, gives me a glimpse into the lives of people I would otherwise never know, and a chance to do things like go speeding across the ice on a cold (but sunny!) March morning in Michigan. Here's a little clip of my ride:




And if you want more, here is the video I put together for Mlive.com, the Kalamazoo Gazette's website.

Ice Yachting on Gull Lake

Sun-ny day, sweepin' the clouds a-way...

Okay, so the weather Gods heard my plea, sort of. Monday I walked outside and it was a balmy 48 degrees. Of course it was overcast and drizzling, but it was downright tropical compared to what we have been having, and it eventually got up to 51. Break out the shorts! Fast forward to Wednesday. It wasn't quite so warm, but it was in the 40s, and guess what I got to see—the sun! It is amazing what a little sunlight can do for my mood. I had more energy, felt like I got more stuff done at work, I actually felt like cooking dinner, and had a great time playing with the boys. I don't know what it is about the sun, maybe it just signals that warmer days are on the way, but I'll take it!

What to write?

Argh, there is a reason I don't post here more often. I want to let people know what is going on in our lives, but sometimes it seems so mundane that to take the time to write about it wouldn't even be worth the trouble. This weekend I went to a Michigan Press Photographers Association conference to see the judging for the yearly contest. I didn't win anything, but it is still fun to be around other photogs from other papers and see what they are doing. The conference was in Lansing, a little more than an hour from here. I left the conference Friday night a little after 8 p.m. It was overcast and cold, but that was it. About ten minutes into my drive, I drove into a snowstorm. Not just some flurries, big fat flakes that were drifting over the road so I couldn't see ANYTHING! It was dark and all you could see was the snow in your headlights. The effect of the snow flying towards the windshield gave the impression that I wasn't actually moving. After slowing to a crawl for about 15 minutes and periodically hitting the rumble strips on the side of the road because i couldn't see the lanes, the snow finally let up a little. I thought, whew, I must have just gone through a little squall, but its over now. Nope. About five minutes later a semi and a few cars in front of me started slowing down really fast. I tapped the brakes, only to have the antilock brakes come on (which still freaks me out, we have only had our new van for a few months) and I realized the road was a sheet of ice. I passed 4 or 5 slide-offs in about a mile and a half, then it started snowing again. After I drove back into the snow. the road wasn't so slick, but I couldn't see anything again. Ugh. It took me almost 2 hours to get home, and by the time I reached Kalamazoo, it wasn't even snowing. Go figure. I am SO ready for winter to be over. I want to see green stuff and not have to start the car to warm it up or wear socks all the time. I want to see the sun! I t doesn't come out very often in Michigan in the winter. Anybody reading this from a warmer clime, please send some sunshine my way!