Weekly Mileage #146 and First Snow of the Year!

catching snowflakes

This week we started getting back to our routine after the holidays.

Monday I wasn't able to go for a trail run and hike because I had a chiropractor appointment and groceries to buy. I'm moving my future chiro appts to another day of the week so that I can still squeeze in a trail run before doing the grocery shopping every other week.

I'm still working on moving content from one site to another. Technically it's all moved, but I had to re-brand the printable worksheets with my travel site's blog name, and as I started doing that I realized I could improve the printables with some editing and re-writing. So I've been working on that all week and am almost done. Unfortunately, the edits to the printables mean that the lessons that go with those printables also need to be edited and re-written. So, I'm not done yet with this project.

I also worked on two notebook orders. One was a second order from someone who ordered a music notebook and wanted a notebook (non-music) with more pages than I usually include. I did it, but I won't do it again. Trying to sew a thicker chunk of paper into the cover was a time-consuming challenge. It's not worth the time I put into it. A good learning experience though.

Tuesday we had snow in the forecast for around midday, so all the local schools closed. This has happened in the past, but inevitably there's no snow when they cancel school preemptively. Tuesday was the exception to the rule!

It started snowing big fat snowflakes just as we arrived at music lessons. By the time we left 45 minutes later, there was already decent accumulation.

leaving lessons- this is a gravel road, so snow stuck to it easier than it would a paved road

It snowed for the next four hours, with about 3 or 4" of accumulation. It started to melt a bit in the late afternoon, but temps dropped overnight, so it was still around Wednesday morning.

the custom order notebook I shipped out this week

I took the notebooks to the PO after it stopped snowing and then worked on my printables some more.

Looking down our driveway. I love this view when it's covered in snow!

I spent all day Wednesday working on my printables and making good progress.

beautiful sunrise

Thursday we finally got the date for our appraisal (we're refinancing the house and have been working on the process since October). Naturally it was for the next day. At least it wasn't till later in the afternoon. So I spent the rest of the day Thursday and most of Friday cleaning and tidying and telling the boys not to make messes (harder than it sounds). It's not strictly necessary to do these things for a refinance appraisal, but we do want the house to look as good as possible (it's got some definite weak points right now).

Thankfully the painting in the kitchen was all done and we'd already tidied up the yard. We've been working on things here and there so that we wouldn't have to do it all at once at the last moment.

Friday I rearranged the furniture in the living room and the library. The big desk that's been in the living room was causing serious traffic flow problems since it sat right in front of the door to the deck. I moved it to the library, where it just fits along one wall and makes it look more like an office. I left one arm chair in there and moved the other into the living room.

I feel like the furniture finally fits in the library after trying many different configurations over the years. It's a small space with two doors and two windows, which makes it hard to fill properly. The living room feels better with the desk gone. I don't love the current configuration, but it's better than it was and is probably about as good as it'll get. It's even more awkward than the library: it's long and narrow and has a fireplace and three doorways.

Saturday morning I went for a short trail run and hike. I've been so busy all week that I haven't logged any outdoor miles. My step counts were good Thursday and Friday with all the cleaning, but I didn't count them towards mileage. It was good to get out finally after spending so much time in front of my computer this week. It was a wet, drizzly, muddy run and hike, but I'm not complaining: I got to spend time outside.

A little later Jeremy and I went bowling with the other team leads and their wives. Bowling isn't my favorite thing to do and I dislike having to socialize with complete strangers,  but it went pretty well and we had fun. I even scored a double strike my last frame!

Then in the evening Sunshine and I went to a SCUBA experience hosted by our Scout district. We went to a local pool and a local dive shop brought equipment and we got to try it on and spend some time in the pool. It was disconcerting at first. It actually reminded me a lot of breathing through a CPAP, which I also found disconcerting (I tried Jeremy's one night awhile ago). The mask over the face and being forced to breathe through your mouth and not your nose just feels unnatural. Despite that, we had a good time. The water was so murky though!

I had issues equalizing my ears, finally got it to work and was able to descend lower. Sunshine couldn't equalize her ears, so had to stay in shallower water, but still had a lot of fun and wants to do more. We have a class Tuesday night where we'll learn more about SCUBA, and that will leave us with a SCUBA experience patch we can put on our Scout uniforms. We'd like to become SCUBA certified, but it would be about $1500 for the two of us and that's not in the budget right now. Hopefully in the not-to-distant future, though.

When we finished that, we came home and I worked on my YW lesson. We had a combined group so we could teach all the girls how to be a fully functioning, contributing presidency member, something that we haven't had in a long time. I also worked on a short talk for the Temple and Priesthood Prep class Sunday evening. It was a busy, busy day, but I somehow managed to get to bed almost on time.

mud on the trail shoes is a sign of a good run

I mentioned last week that I've been working on getting up earlier. The insomnia has improved, thankfully. I'm still not getting to bed as early as I'd like, but I'm getting there. I had good success getting up and getting some work done first thing in the am. I'm not getting up as early as I'd like to eventually, but I am getting up earlier than I was. So I didn't get up early enough to get a lot of work done, but definite progress was made and I didn't feel awful. Giving myself half an hour to get fully functional before attempting to work seems to be a key part of being functional and productive.

Another update: Ocean has adapted very well to life without bobby or thumb sucking. On occasion he'll carry a stuffed animal around with him, but he's not super attached to them. I'm not sure if there's a correlation, but he's also having more mornings where he wakes up dry. River still sucks his thumb at night, but has never had an accident, so there's not a strict correlation between the two. I suspect Ocean is just maturing out of it, and it happens to coincide with us taking away his thumb and bobby.

Definitely weird weather this week. We had snow on Tuesday and on Sunday it got up to 66*!

Weekly Mileage
Saturday- 1.21 mile trail run
Friday- 1.30 mile hike
total- 2.51 miles

2020 totals

1 hike towards #52hikechallenge
0 kayak miles towards #365milechallenge

9.62 outdoor foot miles towards #365milechallenge
0.0 indoor foot miles towards #365milechallenge
0.0 bike miles towards #365milechallenge
9.62 miles total