Don't ever call me Dreary Deary in real life

Last night, revenge was mine!

I should also note that I'll stop posting my puzzles after tonight. In terms of ranking how much you care about my day, Reader, I have no doubt that my Cryptoquip success rate rightly falls very low on your list. 

I only wanted to include it because it aptly captured last night's mood. Nothing actually bad is happening, which I should keep in mind and perspective.  It's just that this week is gray and weird and super-blustery and mucky. Last night was the kind of night that makes you want to hunker down and get into your best, softest, ugliest winter pajamas.

Around 3 p.m., I identified that lasagna would be the best weapon with which to battle the chilly night, so after work, Dreary Deary here finished her run, retrieved her car from the shop (yay!) and hightailed it to the grocery store for ingredients.  Did you know there is a recipe on the back of the pasta box that includes microwave directions for a 9x13 pan of lasagna? Gross. While the dish baked (in the oven), I conquered Cryptoquip and watched the Twins game.  Josh came home, we ate lasagna, and then we went for a drive and got ice cream.  Presto!  The hapless drear could not stand up to this ferocious defense.  

Write that down: lasagna, Cryptoquip, baseball, ice cream.

Last Saturday in August?!

I was late to running club this morning.  I didn't miss the run's start, which would have been an extreme bummer, given that the day's schedule called for 20 miles. But I was That Girl, the one who rolls up with her hair down and shoes untied, just as the coach is wrapping up his instructions.  Oops.

But why was I late, you ask?  It's probably understandable for any event that begins each Saturday morning at 7:00.  Today, though, it wasn't courtesy of an alarm clock failure.  As usual, I stumbled into the kitchen bleary-eyed and started making coffee and my English muffin with PB.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something orange coming from outside my kitchen window.  I had to learn more, so I put in my contacts. 

Ha!  It was just a beautiful sunrise.  I grabbed my camera, opened the door to our patio, and tottered down the alley wearing my large, fleecy yellow robe to get a better view. Thank heavens no other humans had to start their day with this sight.  But the sight of the sunrise--that was something to behold:

I finished getting ready, and when I jumped in the car 20 minutes later, the sky was back to run-of-the-mill (but still beautiful) blue with puffy white morning clouds.  It was perfect weather to start the run: The temperature was around 60, and more importantly, it wasn't sticky and humid.  (I nearly just typed a smiley emoticon--that's how satisfying I found the weather.) 

Our club had a good showing today--I'd guess 30-40 runners showed up--and there were a ton of runners out on the trails getting ready for fall races.  The route covered Lake of the Isles, a big stretch of the Midtown Greenway, West River Parkway, Minnehaha Parkway, Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun before winding back around Lake of the Isles to the start.  I felt really good today, too, which was reassuring given that I had a trainwreck of a 20-miler a few weeks ago.  I told my running buddy that another six miles wouldn't have been joyful, but they probably would have been okay. 

But of course 20 was quite enough.  Now I'm home and hydrating, and I have a few important priorities for the day. Notably:

• Assemble a turkey-mozzarella-pesto sandwich from the contents of my fridge.
• Spend some quality time with my couch and my Us Weekly.  ("Jen's Baby Countdown"!)
• Haul myself over to Target Field in time for this afternoon's Twins game via the 21-94C Metro Transit special.
• Eat ice cream.

Speaking of ice cream--and can you imagine a better way to start a sentence?--I haven't been a major consumer of State Fair food, ever since an unfortunate incident that involved Josh and I eating everything in sight at the fair over the course of, like, 45 minutes.  But ever since the reviews starting coming in, I haven't been able to get sweet corn ice cream out of my mind.  This week, I might have to wrangle some.

Shake it up

This week in St. Paul has been my kind of August.  The high temperatures have been in the upper 70s, the humidity and dew points have retreated sheepishly, and the breeze has been wonderful and laced with almost-fall.  I had to snap a photo as I was walking around St. Paul yesterday because at this time of year, the sky really is that blue and the clouds really are so puffy that they look cartoonish.  The only sky that comes close to Minnesota's in August is Colorado, where the color is always a rich, rich blue every time I visit--and the sky seems bigger on the plains there, too.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm no night owl.  In fact, I'm just lousy at staying up late.  I'm also lousy at sleeping late in the morning but need copious blocks of sleep, so that drives my bedtime earlier.  Before I go on and make myself sound like even more of a wet blanket, I'll get to the point.  If I can fight my internal clock tonight, I'm going to stay up late and watch the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks today and is one of the best meteor showers all year.  Astronomy is another long-time hidden love of mine, and I have a strange hodge-podge of constellation and planetary fun facts stored up thanks to Dayton Elementary's library.  I've only actually seen the meteor shower once, when we were on a family vacation way up north a long time ago, and it was amazing.  Tonight, I would like to drive out to the country far suburbs and check it out.

Yesterday, dangerously toeing the boundary of my non-night-owlness, I ventured out of my comfort zone and went to a play on a weeknight.  The Minnesota Fringe Festival runs just through this weekend, so I was running out of time to see my friend Isabel's play, Red Resurrected.  I grabbed a ticket to the 8:30 p.m. show and headed over to The Lab Theater in Minneapolis's Warehouse District.  I got there early, in time to wander around a neighborhood that I rarely explore and then in time to get way, way at the back of the line of theatergoers after my walk.

Here are the views from my walk--the Minneapolis skyline and the Mississippi River:

The Fringe Festival is something I've had on my should-attend list for at least three years, but this was my first show, and I had no idea what to expect.  I've heard people describe the festival as a wide spectrum of real hits and, well, real misses, and Isabel's play was a real hit.  I'm no theater critic, but Isabel is super-talented, I got completely drawn into the hour-long play, and the music and stage and acting was beautiful.  There you have it: go see it this weekend!

Next: I have been bouncing off the walls this week because I'm flying to California tomorrow morning for a weekend with my wonderful friend Nat.  Nat is getting married in three weeks!  I've seen her regularly enough since graduation because I've taken annual work trips to her part of the world, but my work schedule during those trips limited our face time to a short lunch every year. That's not enough!  I am so excited to spend a whole weekend with her (and her fiancé too!).

Last but not least, I had a Cherry Dilly Bar yesterday, and I think it changed my life.

Burgers and maple creamees

Last night's Church Street view

This shall be known as the food post, with barely a dash of Lake Champlain mixed in.  Tomorrow, my fellow conference-goers and I are going on a boat cruise around the lake, so if you were a betting reader, I would not bet against never seeing another photo of Lake Champlain on Miles and Laurel.

Last night, a new friend and I walked downtown and shopped the sweetest group of boutiques.  I might have purchased jeggings (pipe down, Blogger spellcheck!) but will probably never fully admit it, even when I wear them.  Sonja and I found a restaurant called The Farmhouse but the wait was an hour, so we ate at a pub on Church Street.  It was just fine, especially the outdoor seating on a 75-degree evening with people-watching galore all around us.  But today, it seemed that everyone at the conference had dined at The Farmhouse to rave reviews...so we had to try again.

Tonight we went earlier, and we snagged an outdoor table.  I ordered tomato-fennel soup and a bacon cheeseburger with Vermont cheddar (and local beef and bacon too, but that doesn't have a ring quite like "Vermont cheddar").  Our meals came with a condiment tray that included root beer barbecue sauce, which was amazing--and I'm not even a major barbecue sauce consumer.  All in all: I'm ready to pronounce that meal the best burger I've ever had.  Please do yourself a service and go here if you are ever in Burlington.

But the Vermont food tour was not complete.  Last stop: the ice cream stand by the lake, for maple creamees.  "Creamees" is the Vermont equivalent to soft-serve ice cream, and this stand boasted maple creamees. The ice cream was perfect, with a gentle but not overpowering touch of maple--as I said so articulately when I tasted it, "like syrup but way better!"

And then, on the shuttle back to the dorms, we were chatting with the driver about Burlington, and I saw my chance and grabbed it: I got to ask a local if he ever forgets to notice the lake.  "Oh, no," he said emphatically, and his face changed in a way that showed how much he loved it. He told us that he lives a stone's throw from the lake, outside town in a house that has seen his family through five generations. "Morning, evening, it's the same water, but it always looks something different."

It'll be hard to top his view, wherever I'll be in 30 or 40 years, but I hope I get a monster-sized kick out of my neighborhood the way he does.

Roar!

Spring, spring, spring

In Minnesota, the weather this spring left much to be desired--especially on the weekends.  As soon as Friday afternoon came around, it felt like clouds rolled in every week, leaving Saturday and Sunday damp and cool and even rainy for what felt like every single weekend.  That's good long run weather, so it didn't get me down too much, since I was logging miles on most Saturday mornings and spending a lot of Saturday afternoons planted on the couch in various stages of slumber.  But it definitely wreaked havoc on the spring sports schedules for the colleges around here and also for the general public's recreation and traditional emergence from a long, long winter inside. 

All of this context is necessary to convey how gorgeous today was.  The stats: 82 and not humid with partly cloudy skies and a light breeze.  My great friend Ellie and her boyfriend Andrew were in town for Reunion, and Ellie wanted to head over to Lake Calhoun, part of the Twin Cities gem known as the Chain of Lakes.  There's a massive trail system around all of the lakes and the Mississippi River, so you can make a 30-mile loop around the Twin Cities on bike trails, and each of the lakes (Harriet, Calhoun, and Isles) have a distinct little personality. 



Josh loved the dogs in particular and
snuck a photo with my camera.



One thing's for sure: Calhoun draws the crowds.  Today, with the perfect weather, there were hundreds and hundreds of people laying out on the grass and beach, dozens of dogs chasing tennis balls and splashing around by the lake's shore, and tons of beach volleyball games going back and forth. 



We walked over to Lake Harriet to get ice cream at the bandshell's concession area, which is named Bread and Pickle and is so much nicer than the concession stands of my youth.  It also featured an enticing list of some of my favorite treats:

Ellie and I both got vanilla ice cream--the wonderful kind with vanilla bean flecks--and the four of us sat on a picnic table in the sun.  Here's a peek at what Harriet looked like today:

We finished the walk, jumped in the car, and waited in a long line of cars crawling along Calhoun Parkway--no surprise, given the number of people actually hanging out in and near the lake.  There's one hill on the parkway, and as we crept up it, I saw a view of Calhoun glittering in the sun framed by the leafy trees.  I never thought I'd actually see that again, I thought dramatically, remembering all of the miles around the lake in the fall and winter and cold spring.  Josh obliged my request to open the driver's side window to try to get it on camera, for memory's sake.