8 lbs of Pure Athlete

This is Pierre the Papillon. He is small but mighty. We take him on a 3 mile walk every day. 3 miles over the hills, through the woods and often to grandma's house. He also floats the Deshutes River on an inflatable raft, and watches birds from a boat in the middle of high desert mountain lakes. Soon, he will start Agility training, since it turns out Papillons live for obstacle courses.

Pierre doesn't really look like an athlete, but then neither do I. In order to get my heart rate up to my fat burning zone, when I'm walking with Pierre instead of jogging on my own, I now have to carry 25 pounds of weights up the hills and through the woods. That's like carrying three Pierres.

I'd like to get a nifty hi-tech weighted vest, like the over-achiever athletes tend to use. You know, those people who train for Ironman and Ultra Marathons? For now, I just put my hand weights in a backpack.

I'm built for comfort, Pierre is built for speed. Together we navigate the winding roads to good health and fitness.

Portrait of the Artist as a Middle Aged Woman

"Okay," said the famous painter and color theorist during one of her famous artist's workshops. "Now, based on what you've just learned with your color wheel, create a self portrait."

Easy, I thought. I've been doodling the same big-lipped, big-eyed face for 36 years.

I took a deep breath and tried to put my color wheel failure behind me. Color wheels are harder than they look. It doesn't work to just copy the good artists, sitting beside you. You can't really cheat on a color wheel. If you don't pay attention, you put the violet in the wrong place, then you have to cut and paste, and then of course the gradients are all wrong, and you bite you lip and try not to cry when the stress of failing at an art project starts seeping into the corners of your eyes.

Exhale. Art is harder than it looks.

Self portraits, on the other hand, are easy. I did one for my Painting 101 final in college, but I got a B instead of an A because I skipped the last day to play the end-of-the-year Faculty/Student intramural softball game. So I quickly pasted silver-foil ribbon in the middle of the canvas where my face should have been, thinking I could get away with something symbolic.

Dumb idea, of course, since faces are easy (right?) and the professor could see I wasn't really trying. Plus he threw me out at first base in the softball game, so he knew I wasn't at the Art House finishing my self portrait.

"You have 20 minutes," she said. "Don't worry too much, just have fun."

Ah, I sighed happily. Now this is more like it. I felt a bit of my creative joy starting to flow again, as I snipped and ripped through piles of magazines to find the shapes and colors that would make up me. This was the easy part of art. This was why I was here.

"Oh," she said, as she walked by to check on me. "You're making a face. I didn't mean a literal self-portrait," I glanced at my friend's work next to me, which was quickly turning into a sophisticated page of exceptional color theory miraculously cut from the pages of Bend Living Magazine.

But then the famous painter, who is also a fantastic teacher, saw my smile and my easy laugh for what it was, a cover-up for the disappointment of failing again. "Of course, it's fine! No problem, it will be great!" she gushed diplomatically. She has a 10-year old child at home, she knows when to pass out gratuitous praise at the right time.

Curses, I thought. Foiled again.

Action Jeans!

Chuck Norris is a show off.

Running Hills with Kate Bush

Sometimes you have to give your own self a gold star for trying, not crying.

I made it up Pilot Butte, and was rewarded with this lovely view.

Sometimes, when I'm lucky, I run up a hill at the exact same time Kate Bush's "Running Up The Hill" song arrives on my iPod Shuffle.


Here's is a condensed version:

"If I only could, I'd be running up that hill.
It doesn't hurt me.
Do you want to feel how it feels?
Do you want to know that it doesn't hurt me?
Do you want to hear about the deal that I'm making?
And if I only could, I'd make a deal with god, and I'd get him to swap our places.
Be running up that road, be running up that hill,
be running up that building...
be running up that hill, with no problems..."

You can watch the YouTube video of this song here. Very modern dancy, not so Chubby Mommy sweaty. I'd like to think I look like the lady with the flow-y skirt in the video.

I wonder if God runs. If so, I'm sure he looks very flow-y. I'll give him a gold star, just in case.

TweetUp Tonight!

Hey Bendites,

We're having a TweetUp to welcome Julio Fernandez to town! A TweetUp is a term that all the wacky people from Twitter throw out when they want to get together for a party. Sort of like a Rave for geeks. Minus the Ecstasy, of course. Or maybe like the "progressive dinners" we enjoyed in high school youth group. Or the PubCrawls we joined in college.

So basically, it's a party, and everyone is welcome.

Please join us at the Blacksmith restaurant, for a no-host Happy Hour from 5:00-7:00. We may wander over to a pub afterwards for a burger, so follow us @juliejulie, @fiveforefun, @SocialJulio) on Twitter, or check the Twitter stream here, on my blog (look to your right!)

Tweet Tweet,

Miss juliejulie

Lisa Simpson Navigates her Social Network

I'm not sure what this means. My friend Patricia Freeman Martin sent it to me. Perhaps it is social commentary. Perhaps it is poetry. Perhaps it is a picture of her kid's toys all lined up near the window. Maybe it is all those things snapped into one picture.

Bewitched and Bedazzled by my Mop

This has nothing to do with running (oops, forgot to go again, my goodness, look at the time!) or technology, or art, or dogs, or my brilliant career, or anything else that I usually write about, in my random way.

But then, you're used to that, right?

This is a HOUSE WIFE post! My little boy was home sick, so I decided to actually step away from my computer, make him tea with honey, cook a few things from scratch, mop the floor and some laundry today. This is newsworthy, I swear, for me.

Here's my Samantha Stevens moment #173: today I re-discovered Mop and Glow for my hard wood floors, and the nifty Swiffer-type flat mop that comes with it. The mop pad sticks on the bottom in a Velcro-like way, and you can just wash it when you're all done.

This little system does provide effective cleaning, I must admit, and I feel better about my "Green Cleaning" attempt, since I'm not throwing away all those disposable Swiffer pads, which always makes me feel al bit guilty. Which I so do not need, since I already have guilt about NOT cleaning enough.

Double negative guilt about housework is bad, bad, bad. Don't get me started on not starting...

If only I could twitch my nose like Samantha and clean by magic, I could skip all the hard work of actually mopping. Too bad I can't get in shape with a nose twitch too, and skip the actual running part.

Now that would be a trick.