ThanksToday4Lots

A fixie masterpiece

Hubzo has been super busy lately. My nook is scattered with bike tools, grease and all sorts of weirdly named bike pieces I don't understand.

Yes, yet another bike has entered our life here in Denver.

This is hubzo's third bike since we left NYC and the best so far (IMO). It's sparkly blue and he built it himself. I'm pretty impressed that he can build a bike from other bike parts. I'm even more impressed that it's safe and gets him to-and-from work everyday.

The only really new parts are the frame and seat... he built from those and added the other pieces (wheels and things named things I don't remember) from his old bike. Since we now have a variety of handlebars stored in storage, he resurrected one previously retired and shuttered it with some new tape.

Downtown Denver (well, technically we're in Capitol Hill, which is downtownish) is very conducive to street biking. There's also the Cherry Creek bike path that runs a block or so from our apartment... Plus, there are dirt paths all over the place. www.bikedenver.org has tons of downloadable bike maps, if you're interested.

But hubzo's into fixed gear bikes, so dirt is a no-no.

Anyway, back to the bike. He's very happy with it, and although he still needs to buy protectant for his new white seat, he's been riding it for a few days.

Now we just need to attach that baby thingie to the back and he'll be set to ride the baby around. I think the Carrababy from England looks about right (kidding!).

P.S. Before hubzo, the only thing I knew about bikes was confined to Miss Gulch.

A sundae of snow topped with prego musings

We made it to NYC, but that was two weeks ago already! It was great fun, one of the best weekend trips we've ever taken. Halloween passed. We stayed in Hell's Kitchen, which is now Hellsea, per my beloved Jimmy. I saw lots of drunken gay men emerging from the clubs at 8 AM on Sunday morning in their Halloweenie outfits and heightened temperaments. I mistakenly took them for marathon runners running a bit late for that morning's NYC marathon. Wrong. I miss those moments.

All my amazing peeps came out for visits and we spent Saturday in the old hood of Brooklyn. It's changed a lot. New apartment buildings spreading like spilled milk all over Kent and Berry Streets north into Greenpoint. Krisp and I saw a truly terrifying 8-foot killer rabbit walking the streets on Halloween night. He waved at me. Even in daylight, I wanted to run away.

I walked probably 5 miles each day and my feet emerged swollen little lumps off the plane back in Denver on Sunday night. I hobbled around the airport waiting for them to regain shape and fit back into my ballet flats. My final diagnosis: a combo of deyhdration from flying, being in the air, having walked more than usual for 3 days straight and being knocked up. They still hurt on Monday, but they resumed a regular shape soon after.

I'm pretty lame if all I can talk about is swollen feet. It's only happened once!

Two weeks later, we await yet another snow storm and a less than enthused atmosphere of gray sky. I suppose if I wasn't preggers, I'd be entertaining the thought of a yearly ski pass and booting it up for the day. Instead, I'm adopting preggers-girl activities, like baking my first turkey and pondering baby room decor... Treehouse? Fairy forest?

Oh yeah -- the baby is a girl! Did I tell you?

I'm already projecting my idealism on the kid, not letting choice be a part of her very early life. I'm choosing the scary walls that will surround her when she wakes me up five times a night. I'm choosing her clothes and searching for hip stuff that easily allows diaper transition. I'm choosing the books she'll hear. I've chosen her daddy who talks to her in such a thick Boston accent that I'm sure she'll know him first out of everyone. I'm also choosing, with hubzo's help, how she will be referred to the rest of her life. I guess all parents do that though.

As you can see, I am, after some time of conversion, very much enjoying preggersness.

Psychologically, I'm less freaked. Physically, I'm good. I'm still running, albeit much less, but I'm supplementing with as much other activity as possible. Yoga is helping with the strains of running with extra poundage. My energy is fairly good and I'm not sleeping as much. My dreams are bridges to insanity and while I love to sleep and nap, I wake up terrified and often need hubzo to bring me back to reality.

Anyway, we're stoked that the baby appears to be healthy and developing in a normal manner. I'm not feeling her too much yet, although she was squirming all over the place during the ultrasound this week. She's also slated to arrive a bit earlier than we though, due on March 24 now.

At least she'll be an Aries. Mother and daughter should never be the same sign, especially the watery, dreamy, complicated Pisces.

We adapt well, but our minds are forever stuck in fantasy.

Williamsburg vs Capitol Hill

Who knew my old Brooklyn 'nabe, Williamsburg/Greenpoint, resembled my new Denver 'nabe, Capitol Hill? Of course, the people look very different, but structurally, it's similar. Check out these pics I took from morning of the Denver marathon.

I nearly weeped when I found Mile 12 a mere block from our apartment... For those that don't know, we used to live on the corner of Bedford and Lorimer streets, right on the cut-off street between Williamsburg and Greenpoint. It was also the Mile 12 marker of the NYC marathon and paved the path for years of tremendously fun marathon parties. Sniff.

October snowstormies

The snowstorming elves seriously went into overproduction this week in Denver. It's been snowing heavily for a full 24 hours at this point and mostly everything is closed down today. Hubzo and I are scheduled to fly out to NYC late this afternoon for the birthday celebration weekend, so I'm being as calm as possible about our chances of getting out. Because I'm so Type A, I want to control this situation, but I've already explored the possibilities and limits are in place.

My mantra is to stay cool (in the head), warm (in body) and safe (no weather-related accidents). I have to remember it's not all about me anymore. According to my weekly Baby Center email this morning, the little tyke is rapidly growing and the size of a bell pepper. Its genitals are formed, too, which totally freaks me out.

Here's a quick video I shot this morning:

It's that time

Do you feel it?

The air is crisp and chilly, sometimes snowy.

Leaves cover the ground and make it slippery when I run on sidewalks.

It's nearly dark when I get home and even darker when I wake up.

Safe inside the apartment, my bones are covered in layers and my eyeballs settle easier into books (because I don't feel guilty about frolicking in the sunshine versus reading in my nook).

We've had a BeAuTiFuL autumn in Denver this year. Our neighborhood is older than our last, covered in leaves and frozen mornings that take a bit longer to wake up. I drive home down Logan Street through red, gold and orange trees. I jog up into Governor's Park, a steep and odd little park just around the bend, and it's covered in leaves that don't cover dog poop. People usually pick it up here. I take late afternoon and Sunday morning walks down Poet's Row and up to Cheeseman Park where I view and long for an English cottage for sale and way too above my price range. Capitol Hill has a tremendous creepiness about it, with traditional London lighting near the parks and into the quiet, Tudor-style mushroomed streets. Last week, as hubzo and I crawled through the alleys to watch the Denver marathon, we were struck by how similar the area is to parts of Brooklyn, very like Park Slope and Cobble Hill. It's just so pleasant.

But this week I'm returning to my young adult roots, back to NYC for a birthday celebration and to re-energize my soul. I do so wonder how it will compare with the loveliness of Denver in the fall. But I suspect my curious thoughts will quickly be replaced with people watching and hurting feet.

Must remember to buy those cushiony jelly things for my shoes.

Around the world in mere weeks

When I first began my foray into journalism, it began with a simple column I wrote about being a closet bookworm for most of my life. That column was my "coming out" moment, and it well defined both my yearning for reading as a hobby and my disappointment in the public school system I grew up in. It wasn't cool to read in my school. We never even read Hamlet, the teacher opting instead to show us the Mel Gibson film. Book clubs didn't exist. I couldn't be caught dead in the school or community library, although I'd spent hordes of time there as a child and pre-adolescent.

But this post isn't about my sad, somewhat self-deserved curse of not allowing myself to be cool with reading. The gist of that tale is I broke through to the other side. I kick-started my journalism career and embraced myself for who I am and stopped aligning myself with the coolness of it all. Ha.

My first years in New York City were spent without TV, so reading became my outlet. To be accurate, we had a TV the first six months when I lived in the West Village, but once we hit Brooklyn, we went without. Books overflowed out of our apartment.

Anyway, I've been reading a lot these days. Since my happy hour days and nights are on hold, I have more time on my hands. Last night I considered the books I've read recently, and realized my yearning to travel must be subconsciously tugging at me. For, I've been to Limerick, Provence, Baghdad, the mountains of Afghanistan, Syria, Jordan, Kenya, New York City, and Kansas. You might enjoy a few of these yourselves:

A Year in Provence, by Peter MayleThis book literally documents one year of living in Provence and it’s mostly about food, but also delves into reconstruction of a country home and experiencing the locals. It will make you want to drink tons of wine and lie in a pool. It will make you want to eat foie gras and cheese with every meal. It will make you curious about the howling “mistral” that flies in from the Rhone Valley. It will make you wonder why the recession had to hit and destroy all hopes of retirement for my generation. This is non-fiction and it’s very entertaining. A quick read.

In the Woods, by Tana French
A debut novel, the book opens with three children mysteriously disappearing from their Dublin neighborhood. One returns home alive with no memory of the disappearance while sporting slash marks through his t-shirt and blood-filled shoes. The other two children remain missing. Flash forward 25 years or so and the little boy who returned home is now an adult detective investigating the murder of a 12-year old girl found near the same woods where the detective disappeared years earlier. This book is not like other mysteries I’ve read… it’s not flat or boring, and full of really interesting turns. The book kept me up several nights because I couldn’t stop reading. And, the best part: I couldn’t have predicted the end.

East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart, by Susan Butler
Few people know that Amelia Earhart had a love affair with Gore Vidal’s father. She also wasn’t terribly keen on doing things for anyone but herself, but thankfully her star power and apparent charisma fought through to make her an American darling. I’d always heard of Amelia, as a girl from Kansas… not unlike me. But Amelia actually lived all the over the country as a child and teenager. From what little bits of research I’ve done about Amelia, there are a hundred biographical books about her life. This book is supposed to be the best one, the most recent one, that presents a true accounting of Amelia. Parts of it get long-winded with details about her female flying rivals, about her foray into fashion, but the descriptions of her many flights, particularly the first trans-Atlantic crossing are fascinating.

A Hundred and One Days, by Asne Seierstad
Again… a non-fiction tale documenting 101 days prior to and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist who achieved not only continued permission to remain in Baghdad from January to April 2003 (we invaded on March 19), but also survived. This is seriously one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It documents meticulously her efforts to constantly get out and find a “real” story in the war-preparing Baghdad and surrounding cities. The travails of remaining in Iraq, by way of permission surreptitiously granted by the French-cheese loving Uday, are so bizarre and fragmented, I’m shocked anyone received news during this time at all. In some ways, her descriptions of the city and her Sadaam-loyal translator prior to the invasion are more riveting than after the bombs start dropping. I loved this book so much that I ran out and found Seierstad’s other war accountings, and I’m currently reading A Bookseller in Kabul, which she is most famous for. War turns me off in film and theory, but this book enlightened me. Big plus: it’s not written from an American perspective.

Wildflower, by Mark SealNarrative nonfiction at it’s best… I’d never heard of Joan Root, her famous documentarian ex-husband Alan Root and certainly not her tragic murder in Kenya in 2006. Joan and Alan are super ridiculously famous for pioneering safari-style film documentaries of animals all over Africa. They even flew a hot air balloon over Mount Everest and filmed it. Those Nature shows you see on PBS… well, these two are responsible for making that type of filmmaking trendy with public. Most of the book discusses their early relationship and ongoing marriage as partners and filmmakers. When Alan leaves Joan for a despicable, cancer-stricken husband stealer, the story picks up on solely on Joan’s life as an advocate for protecting Kenyan wildlife and Lake Naivasha. Her tragic and seriously creepy murder in 2006 is wildly theorized and discussed by the author, and he reveals strange relationships Joan had with local poachers that may have led to her death. I didn’t care for the post-marriage part of this book so much, but only because it’s very sad. The best parts are describing the filmmaking process, documenting African wildlife for the first time on film: king cobras and baby elephants. The book also delves into the history of Kenya itself, from the “Happy Valley” times of the 1920s when British ruled to today’s seemingly apparent fragile lifestyle.

‘Tis: A Memoir, by Frank McCourt
How I got away in life thus far and didn’t read this book is beyond me. Angela’s Ashes is searingly sad. ‘Tis is sad, too, but the documentation of McCourt’s move from Limerick to NYC in his very early 20s until his success as a high school English teacher is fascinating and compelling. My thoughts couldn’t help but go to that of my dear hubzo, who also moved to NYC alone and lived in less than wonderful surroundings in Spanish Harlem. Of course, McCourt was starving through much of his early time in NYC, living destitute with his terrible red eyes. The days of licking the grease from his uncle’s fish and chips paper are gone in this book because McCourt more often than not lucks out. I loved this book much more than Angela’s Ashes… perhaps because it’s a story of success. Nevertheless, McCourt’s easy writing style, basic descriptions and harrowing chapter tales are so easy to read you don’t even realize you’ve plowed through the book before it’s over and you want more.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

I'd heard about this book for years... finally picked it up. The story was tremendously thrilling, and totally not what I expected. A college-age boy relocates from a tepid California household to a small New England college in Vermont where he specializes in Greek and meets five bizarre, binge-drinking friends. The entire story of that year of school and wastedom is quite good. It's full of literary allusions, mostly through dialogue of the students who are supposedly brilliant. I constantly felt like Harry Potter-esque magic would surface at times, but it never does. It's just a good old-fashioned murder story/thriller told in the first person. I felt strangely sad when I finished the book, mostly because it was just over.