Hmmm.

I woke up today, as I so often do on cold mornings, with sore hips.

I’ve been drifting back toward Christian Science lately, because it is the only brand of Christianity that offers anything even vaguely resembling a valid explanation for the state of the world at the moment, and I’m not quite ready to fire God and start taking applications from new deities just yet.

With that in mind, and having just read part of this week’s Lesson before bed last night, I opened the medicine cabinet, reached for the Tylenol, and felt the best part of me — the part that ran 14 painless miles on a twisted ankle in 2006, healed my instep after I dropped a 12-foot pressure-treated 4×4 on it in 2007, and dragged me kicking and screaming back into the classroom in 2008 — recoil, not with the deliberate naivete that characterized my last foray into faith, but with the fierce rage of a woman who is FED UP.

“F*ck off, error,” I said.

Pain jolted through my hips.

“I said, ‘F*ck OFF!'” I growled.

Another twinge.

I was half-asleep and couldn’t think of any appropriate quotes from Science and Health or the Bible. Instead, Peter Capaldi’s unmistakable Weegie accent drifted through my thought: “I’ve told you to f*ck off twice, and yet, you’re still here.”

Laughing, I repeated the quote out loud. It didn’t occur to me until several hours later that I hadn’t heard from my hips all day.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had the sense that the sustaining Infinite was intentionally speaking blue French to me, but the last time it happened, someone I’d adopted as a mentor suggested that it wasn’t really God, but just error manipulating me.

My 30-year-old self — earnestly performative, and desperate to get all the right answers — tried to agree, despite the fact that the message I’d received was exactly what I needed to hear at the moment, in exactly the way I needed to hear it.

My 50-year-old self has better sense. I’m still trying to unpack the last vestiges of the nonsense unmitigated bullshit I picked up during my Hermione Granger era and cast it out of my theology, but I’m done accepting fanon as literal Gospel.

I’m not sure where this will lead, but if nothing else, it should be an interesting ride.

Emily

Dreaming again

This April will mark 20 years since my last full marathon. I was thinking about that today as I was reading a book called Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger, Longer by Margaret Webb, a Canadian author who whipped herself into the best shape of her life at age 50.

This book was not an impulse purchase; I’ve been thinking about running again for years, and I’ve made some halfhearted attempts to get back into it here and there, but the older I get, the harder it seems, so a few weeks ago, I ordered two books specifically aimed at postmenopausal women who want to run but don’t have time for training injuries.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Webb’s book, and so far, I have three big takeaways:

1. I am too damn old to get away with fueling an entire marathon training season on MaggieMoo’s and Krispy Kremes.
2. I am too damn old to get away with basing my entire program on running alone. Like it or not, I’m going to need to shore up my core if I want to do this without injuries.
3. I am NOT too damn old to pull this off, but I have to want it. That was true when I was 30, and it’s true now.

I seem to remember being better organized in the mid-’00s, but I think that’s just because I was running with a group, which provided enough accountability to help keep the ADHD Fairy at bay. Running can be very good for ADHDers, because it generates a LOT of dopamine, but it’s a hard-earned hit: To get it, I have to get out of bed, get dressed, put on my shoes, and hit the trail or treadmill, all of which is unreasonably difficult for me because I suck at task transitions.

I’m still brainstorming strategies to get past that obstacle but haven’t settled on anything in particular just yet. I’m thinking maybe “fundraiser for the prison dog program” would do the trick. If the guys know I’m running for their dogs, I’ll have automatic accountability and weekly pep talks to get me up and moving on days when I’d rather be bed rotting.

I dunno. Maybe I’ll take Ramona out to Five Mile Park tomorrow and see how we feel after a lap around the Yellow Trail.

Emily

Winning.

I haven’t been quite as productive this break as I’d imagined I might be, but I rarely am, because 3 a.m.-on-a-schoolnight me — the version of myself who makes the long, elaborate to-do lists — is considerably more energetic and imagines herself to have considerably more executive functioning than 8 a.m.-on-a-day-off me, who is actually responsible for completing tasks and marking them off those overly ambitious lists.

That said, I’m pretty happy with what I have accomplished in the past few days. Fifteen of the little boxes I drew under the tree in my bullet journal are now colored in, and the ones I took care of today were the ones I’d been dreading the most: I decluttered, dusted, swept, deck-scrubbed, and mopped the back room.

I’d had those tasks on the page since Christmas, but they took on a new urgency yesterday, when a colleague announced on Facebook that she was selling her treadmill for $100. I’d been half-thinking of buying one for years but couldn’t really justify the expense of a brand-new one, especially when I’m not sure whether my arthritic hips will cooperate well enough to let me get back into distance running. Gambling $1,000 on my own willpower? Risky. Gambling $100? Yeah, I’m comfortable with that. I messaged my friend, asked a couple of questions, and told her I’d clear out a space for it and get back to her when we were ready to pick it up.

The mudroom still isn’t pretty, and it probably never will be, but at least it’s a lot cleaner than it was, and I’m looking forward to finding out whether I’ve got another marathon in these old legs.

Emily

Chilly morning.

The weather forecast was calling for temperatures to be in the 50s this morning, then cool down after 11 a.m., so we decided it would be a good day to take Honey and the Pest over to San Jon Park to climb on the playground equipment.

The girls didn’t get to play as long as we were hoping, because the wind shifted earlier than the meteorologists expected and started blowing out of the north right after we got to San Jon, quickly rendering it too cold for humans to enjoy. We were out there long enough for Ramona and Honey to do some problem-solving, practice some commands, and make a few trips down the slide before the wind got obnoxious enough to cut the adventure short.

The girls also found interesting things to sniff, including this desiccated toad carcass, which I spotted at about the same time Ramona did. Fortunately, she has a solid “leave it” command, which I was able to give quickly enough to keep her from attempting to eat the unfortunate amphibian.

I’m really enjoying our playground excursions, because they force the girls to exercise their brains along with their bodies. It’s fun to watch them solve problems, and they always fall asleep in the car on the way home.

Hope you had a good Sunday with your family, wherever you are.

Emily

Orange is the new black

Today was my weekly trip to Clayton with Kathi McClelland of Paws and Claws Animal Rescue to visit with the participants in the Northeast New Mexico Correctional Facility’s dog-training program.

The program started in August 2024, after the warden reached out to Kathi to see whether she’d be game to bring the guys some rescue dogs to foster and train. There was just one catch: They needed a trainer to lead the program. Kathi asked me whether I’d be willing to travel to Clayton on a near-weekly basis to work with the guys and the dogs.

Of COURSE I was willing. I’d daydreamed about doing something like that for more than 20 years, and I was thrilled to be invited.

The drive up is kind of a pain — we have to be on the road by 6:45 a.m. to get to Clayton in time to meet with the guys at 9 — but it’s invariably the highlight of my week, because it combines so many things I enjoy: teaching, handling dogs, doing volunteer work, solving problems on the fly, and working with at-risk populations.

Helping with this program is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, because it does so much good for so many people and animals at once: The dogs get much-needed training and socialization, the guys get to give and receive unconditional love, the adopters get great dogs who already know how to behave appropriately around humans, and I get a lot of practice working with a lot of different dogs and a lot of different handlers, some of whom have learned different techniques for behavior modification, all of which is making me a better trainer.

Bonus: I get the pick of the litter when I’m considering adopting a new dog. This summer, I met Honey through the program, saw her potential for therapy work, and called dibs on her. She’s turned out to be an amazing teaching assistant and a fantastic addition to our pack.

If you’re in the market for a dog, I’d strongly encourage you to click here to visit the Paws and Claws website and find out more about our awesome prison dogs.

Emily

Christmas present to myself.

Yesterday, I decided that whipping my cluttered, dusty house into shape this week would be my Christmas present to myself.

As part of that effort, I wanted to reclaim some counter space in the kitchen so it wouldn’t look so cluttered all the time. My plan was to buy an elevated dish-drying rack I could install above the sink, but nobody had anything that would work with the configuration of my cabinets, so I wound up DIYing my own out of a beat-up wire shelf I got at a discount from the lumberyard and some scrap lumber I had lying around from another project.

While I was rummaging through the shed in search of screws to attach the 2×4 supports to the cabinets, I found some nail-in furniture gliders that worked well for anchoring the shelf to the supports.

At some point, I’ll either sand and stain the supports or give them a faux-woodgrain paint job to match the varnish on the cabinets, but I’m not expending that level of effort until we’ve used the rack for a while and confirmed that it’s actually going to work as well as I’m hoping. I also need to take down that awkwardly placed mirror, which is ALWAYS covered in water spots, and replace it with a midmod-style painting or a Merry Mushroom clock or something. Maybe I’ll add that to my list of projects for spring break.

Emily

Warm and fuzzy.

I know several people who were hoping for a white Christmas, but I am ALWAYS here for a warm day in December, and if that warm day coincides with a day when Ron and I are both off work, so much the better. We celebrated Christmas — and our 75-degree afternoon — with a trip to the Park Lake playground in Santa Rosa so Ramona and Honey could climb and slide and blow off steam. Honey is the newest permanent member of our pack. She joined us in late July and is as close to perfect as any dog I’ve ever had. I met her through the dog-training program I lead up at the prison in Clayton and adopted her this summer for the express purpose of using her as a therapy dog in my classroom one day a week.

Honey is as smart as Scout and as good-natured as Songdog, which is a pretty dazzling combination. My sixth-graders adore her. She listens to them read, does tricks for them, occasionally helps with lessons (last week, we taught them that a preposition is “anywhere Honey can go”), and comforts them when they’re sad. Honey has her own school picture, her own faculty ID, and her own wardrobe, which at this point is probably better than mine. She is far and away the most popular girl in school, and she’s been an excellent addition to our pack, giving Ramona somebody her size to play with and keeping Marley humble. (Marley doesn’t particularly like climbing, and it’s hard to manage three dogs with only two handlers, so she stayed home and took a nap while Ramona and Honey went to the park.) Emily

Twenty years.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of my first post on this blog.

On Dec. 22, 2005, I wrote:

A few years ago, while living in Southern Illinois, I ran across a little publication called The Waterman and Hill-Traveler’s Companion. Created by Jim Jung — owner of the late, great Hillside Nursery in Carbondale — the almanac contained all sorts of fascinating information, including a wonderful day-by-day account of all the interesting events occurring in the forests and fields of Southern Illinois.

Twenty years ago, while living in the Red Fork neighborhood of Tulsa, I found that I missed Jim’s almanac and went searching for a similar publication covering northeastern Oklahoma. No such publication existed, so I decided to set up a blog to record my own observations, calling it “my own personal little Red Fork almanac.”

I got up at 1:30 a.m. yesterday to watch the livestream of the winter solstice celebration at Newgrange, where an opening above the door of a 5,200-year-old passage tomb allows the rising sun to illuminate the interior of the structure on the morning of the solstice, marking the return of the light after the longest night of the year. As I sat down to write this entry nearly 24 hours later, it struck me that I am, perhaps, not so different from my Celtic ancestors.

From here, the days grow longer, and like the ancient Celts, I am celebrating the return of the light. When I sat down on the night of the solstice in 2005 to create a blog with the intent of documenting natural events as a means of warding off seasonal depression, I had never heard of Newgrange, knew nothing about Celtic mythology, and had only the vaguest sense of what the solstice represented, yet I do not believe the timing was a coincidence; rather, it was an impulse encoded in my DNA, passed down for thousands of years and hundreds of generations, manifesting itself in a 21st-century form to see me through the winter.

It’s 1:30 a.m. MST, and Tucumcari is dark and quiet. It’s a mild, clear night, and if I stand in the driveway and look up, I can see a star twinkling frantically in the sky above me — perhaps the same one I almost mistook for an airplane on this night in 2005.

As I wrote two decades ago: “It’s a grand night for sleeping. Rest well.”

Emily