I need a vacation.
Let’s all insert here for a minute the list of blessings I have.

• Nice house
• Good family
• Everything I need and want (food, clothing, shelter)
• Friends
• Education
• Human Rights
• Time to meditate and do yoga
• Lots of good books, and a library card too.
• Many more

OK, even in the face of all these blessings, I know there comes a time when the mind and body need to get away.

Out of the normal, out of the routine, outside of life-par-normale. For longer than a couple of hours or a day.

For a VACATION.

Colin and I love to travel. We both agree we are most happy with he in the driver’s seat, me in the passenger’s seat, the iPod filled with music lists and podcasts, the van filled to the brim with chattering — or snoozy — ones, and the destination programed in the GPS. It’s the kind of time that lets us simulatneously switch off and tune in.

I can feel the physical changes in my body and my mind when we set off for “vacation.” Even if there’s traffic, arguments, or bad diners, the entire experience feels different.

I mean, not to sound idiotically obvious, but it feels, well, separate. Switched off, and tuned in.

But, we can’t take vacations right now.

Airfares disagree with our budget and our schedules seem to continually argue with any meaningful drive time.

So how do we teleport ourselves to Vacationland — to that place where we can all just chill for awhile — without leaving home? It seems to be a mystery I cannot solve.

I’m open to suggestions.

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Penguin refrigerator, frog stove.
Fisher Price merry go round
With cranky plastic carnie–
How they afforded it
All cash then.
No plastic.

Day 2, July, A River of Stones.

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Fine, Matt. This is posted because you told me to.

I am about to tell you something really gross that’s going to make you puke, so get the bucket.

I don’t have to work at all if I don’t want to.

(Go ahead. Heave away. I’ll wait while you blow your nose.)

Back? Feeling better? Let me help.

Yes, it’s true. Colin makes a decent salary, and we have some help too around the house. So even though I am officially the “CEO” of our house (which is work to be sure), there are definitely days I could lay on my bed from 9 to 4 and that wouldn’t majorly impact the course of life in our home.

However, who wants a life like that?

Do you? OK, maybe you want a day or two like that, but all the time

No, trust me, you don’t.

Did you know that working makes you feel valuable? I do. I know that because ever since I got married (NOTE: this has NOTHING to do with Colin. Anyone who knows him knows this) and I haven’t been required to be the primary wage earner, my own sense of personal value has changed.

Before: I worked two jobs to support myself. If I wanted ANYTHING, I worked and then I earned enough money to pay for it.

After: I chose to focus on writing, to work for “life” and to see where that takes me. I make a bit of money, bring in “extra cash” for us. Enough to buy “little extras” and to pay the babysitter. By and large, we live within the means of our combined incomes: that is to say, within the means of what Colin earns.

This is like a brick to the head. Work makes people feel valuable, but not just work: it’s the paycheck, too. And it’s not just the paycheck, as those on unemployment benefits will tell you. It’s the combination of the two.

Also, with the kids (and even before them) I do LOTS of work around the house in my role as “CEO” of the family. But I don’t get a paycheck for it. I’m not complaining, by the way. Colin’s paycheck covers everything we need and want and that is something we share. However, our nanny helps with many of the same tasks around our house — organizing kids schedules. dishes, playdates, helping with homework, laundry, cleaning up, etc. — yet at the end of each two weeks, that work is affirmed, with a piece of paper that can be exchanged for money.

Some work done without compensation feels empty. At least if it is done over and over again. And this is true, even if people are grateful. I find it is nice to hear the thanks, but at the end it doesn’t matter so much if you are paid in kindness.

Show me the money.

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My husband is mowing the lawn right now…

Shhhh. Can you hear that?

No that isn’t (just) the sound of our gas-guzzling 42″ Ariens Super-Deluxe Tractor Mower/Cheese Slicer.

That’s the thundering palpitation of his heart.

Damn, some things a woman just CANNOT get in the way of, no matter how environmental-y she is. A man and the big tool he desires –shiny orange and growly — is definitely one of them.

So we had this grungy old lump of a lawn machine that was moping in our shed for three years. My husband was embarrased every time he sat on it and I don’t blame him.

That mower was an emphysemic old man who refused to give up his Camels. Colin rode Blue Smokey around the yard dejectedly.

Instead of getting a new wife, my husband was kind enough to just upgrade on his lawn machine. When it got delivered to our driveway, however, it didn’t WORK!

I tried to help. I tried to be supportive but nothing I did was working!

WHY? I now know. Because nothing in our relationship, our house, or our lives was ever going to work again until that mower worked.

Thank god my husband is persistent, sweet and handy with other tools. He bravely dove into the shiny new heart of the beast and fearlessly tinkered with its veins Until the Blades Turned.

The force is strong in this one.

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Ahhh. Today was one of those most perfect days.

I was so happy because my zen-wonderful brother-in-law/sister-in-law and their kids were visiting. They have such a nice way of arriving with their own unplanned, unhurried, not-worried manner. They are — or seem to be — just quite happy to hang out at our house and chill.

I mean, we do try to ensure their kids don’t get to over-stimulated by the small ones around here — but I find when this isthmus of my family visits, I have no active desire to plan anything too much in advance.

Yeah, we do end up doing things. Like once we all went to the beach. Another time, the big kids went to NYC for a day. Another time it was a big dinner out. But the majority of the time is just hang out, wander the house, do what you feel like doing, but don’t feel in any rush to get any of it done right at the moment.

I love this feeling. Mostly I attribute this zen-flow to my earth-mother-goddess sister-in-law Karen, who shimmies her way through life without even seeming to unsettle her core.

Or maybe it’s my brother-in-law, who travels through life at a slightly more revved up speed than Colin, but does so at a long-distance pace. He and Colin share that wonderful sort of vision of  life — swallowing the day in corn cob increments while being completely able to assess the impact of multiple linear factors on the final outcome.

All this is my way of saying — Ahhhh. What a great day. Less of plans and routine, more of family, and breathing and warm rain showers… makes my poet heart happy.

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Colin and I met when we both lived in Kansas City. This June we will have lived away from Kansas City for 7 years.

We left because we felt the call of life all its opportunities. We wanted to launch our life on a raft of experience we could build together.

On Understanding Risk

I am not sure if we knew this definitively when we got together, but this attitude towards life was essential to what holds Colin and I together. Even though our some of our interests and our careers are different, we have a parallel vision of life.

Life is risk. The human frame takes on Mother Nature at every turn. Everyday we wake up, we don’t have the answers to what is to come. We can’t save ourselves from certain death by any means!

If we want to delude ourselves into thinking “we know” or we are “safe,” well that is a choice to make.

As for Colin and me, we prefer to ride risk, love it, and find what is there for us.

Colin lived that way before he met me. It was the sort of life that made him quite happy to ride his bike from North Vancouver to UBC everyday. And back. It was the sort of mindset that makes him love skiing and rock climbing.

I lived that way before I met him. I quit my stable job as a TV news director to work freelance. I took internships at Disney World, and I was a live-in volunteer at a soup kitchen and halfway house when I was 19.

It was natural that we continued our lives in that way. So even though we both had dozens of friends and a happy life in Kansas City, we chose to move on.  We felt life and all its risky expectations calling again to test the boundaries of our joy. We sold it all and moved to London.

In the seven years since we got married and moved away, our life has been a domestic roller coaster. On the outside, it looks quite suburban and blase.  We even have white pickets and a minivan. But our life of risk rolls on in magnificent tumult as we say “yes” to the unexpected twists and turns of “normality.”

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I swam the full length, freestyle, for the first time last night.

I came up at the deep end to the cheers of Latoya, Paul, and Dan — my support team — at Flood Pool.

On the way home, I heard Faith Middleton interviewing one of my favorite environmentalist writers, Bill McKibben. Only he wasn’t discussing the enviroment.

Apparently he took a year off from that work when he was in his late 30s to train to become a long distance cross country skier. A PRO competitive one. Even though he was just a normal guy before that.

I sometimes wonder what I have in me. Even just as I was finishing that length — one I thought I could never do — I was thinking it. Then, on the radio, here was one of my most trusted voices saying he tried this sport because he wanted to see how far he could push himself, what were his limits.

When Colin said he wanted me to train for a triathalon with him, I laughed. HA! Who does he think I am?

Then I started asking myself that question hmm.

Who do I think I am?

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Our town has a big indoor pool, circa 1943, that offers the world’s cheapest swimming lessons, for all ages.

This is most excellent for us since we have 152 kids living at our house (Note: for those “interested parties,” who print out my blog for so-called legal reasons, please read the definition of hyperbole, as rhetorical device).

Anyway, as I was saying. We have this pool where the small ones are having swimming lessons. And now, so am I.

A few months ago, Colin thought it would be cool to start training for a mini-triathlon. For him, it was the training he saw as good motivation to get in shape and such. The triathlon was more of a means to an end.

So he says to me: Hey honey, why don’t you train with me?

Haha. He is SO funny. But then I noticed he was smiling but not joking. (He’s always so cute when he does that.)

Thinking About Moving Me

It takes a LOT of brain re-training to see yourself in a new way. When I was a kid, two of my three sisters were the “jocks”… my sister K. and I were the “smart” ones and my other two sisters, M. and A. were sporty girls, always getting picked to play the good positions in softball and such.

Why does all this stuff always come down to how you thought about yourself when you were a kid? I mean, when I look back, I was pretty sporty too. I played catcher up until 7th grade in softball. I always LOVED to play tag football with the neighbors and to this day I can throw a spiral like nobody’s business. In volleyball, I can bump and set no problem. Everyone always says my golf swing is a natural.

But when I try to imagine myself getting physical in many of the sports I played with my family as a kid, I immediately feel that “I’m not that good” feeling. M. is the sporty one. I’m the one who should be reading a book about some girl in flouncy hat on her horse who is singing an aria while baking bread on a sunset-y Tuesday.

It’s no surprise that as a grown-up, I stayed pretty physical, but the things I got interested in — yoga, biking, hiking, dancing, ice skating — were things we didn’t really do competitively in our family. I golf too, but I think my determination to golf was because my Dad made it look like the sort of thing he couldn’t live without. And I married a man who loves it too. Even so, when someone suggests I do something active, I have to work hard to imagine myself in that role.

Getting Wet

I am in no way blaming anyone else — least of all my family — for my lack of confidence about what I choose to do, physically. If I’m a couch potato, that’s my problem. But it is interesting to see how our patterns develop. I have always been a bit terrified of the water, even though I LOVE to swim, float and just be in a pool.

This is sort of normal I think. I grew up in Iowa, where the swimming season lasts about two weeks. That’s because it is either:

• too cold outside,
• hot enough outside but the water is still too cold,
• JUST RIGHT ALL AROUND (one week), or
• too blisteringly hot to go outside at all except at 6 a.m.
• and then back on down the scale.

The only time I was ever regularly in the water was when I was about 6 or 7. This was during the first two weeks in June, at 8 a.m. (YES 8 a.m. during summer break) for swimming lessons at Garfield Pool. It was an outdoor pool. This was during that time when it was Still Too Cold In Both the Air and the Water.

And it was scary being in the water when you didn’t spend much time there. I passed through the lower level, even jumped off the diving board into the deep end (that’s what you had to do to pass level 1… so terrifying!!) and eventually got to take more lessons at nice warm indoor pool. But I never got over the fear of death by water.

So, you know, in a triathlon (even a MINI one) you have to swim, right?

Last night I wriggled myself into a totally humiliating Speedo tube, and went out in the 10 degree weather at 8:30 p.m. to re-learn all the things I was too scared to really learn when I was 10 or so.

And, of course, it was totally wonderful. It was the first time in 30 years that I took time to practice BREATHING while swimming (I’ve been holding my face out of the water ever since my last lesson in 1980). It was a very meditative experience, once I stopped panicking (yoga is useful for many things in life!)

Moving Again

My friend Chris has got it right about pitching a prevent defense. In his blog he wrote about being bored with life and sort of relaxing into patterns of easiness. I knew exactly what he meant when he wrote “My motivation has shifted slowly—almost imperceptibly—away from winning the game and toward not losing the game.” (Note: this is another great rhetorical device called “metaphor” – where a good writer speaks figuratively and analogously.)

I suppose signing up for the lessons (and then actually showing up– I almost didn’t!) was like plunging into a reminder of who I CAN be. It reminds me the game isn’t over yet, I haven’t won yet, that there are many more rush yards, tackles, and Hail Marys to try.

As for my old way of thinking, this is just another chance to banish that old self-vista. See that I’m not just the fearful girl shivering on the side of the pool yearning to hide in another book.

Because I never much cared for that feeling. I preferred the feeling I had when I floated free and alone in the pool in the Dominican Republic, watching the afternoon moon watch me, and thinking nothing but “this is the life. This is the life I have. This is the life I have to live.”

This morning, I looked at my face in the mirror– no makeup, framed by bedhead — I thought:

What am I going to do today? (well, BESIDES buy a slightly bigger new swimsuit)?

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I’m on the train on the way to meet two old friends in New York. A part of me is terrified to put my foot on the platform at Grand Central.

I am a traveller. I don’t stay put. I go places.

Yet in the last 8 years I’ve mostly been with my travel companion, who has excellent sense of direction. He never once panics when he pops up out of the Tube in London, wondering which way to turn my face.

So I know I am not afraid of the city or getting lost.

I am suddenly aware that I love my husband a whole lot and depend on him. Even if I know I can get by for a day without him.

It’s a beautiful sunny day for meeting friends in the city…

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Or, The Booty is Asking for Help Here..

In the next few months, I am going to get RID of this seriously ridiculous JELLY ROLL on my gut and hopefully bring down my cholesterol number.

This is not some rinky dink New Year’s resolution. It takes time and resolve to plan the attack on bad habits. After all, what could be more fun then SNACK TIME? Or spooning in the morning until the last possible second?

But I need help! I am sending out my fitness assistance call to action in ALL directions. I already love to yoga, but I am not going to drop any weight in savasana once a week.

Colin suggested I train for a TRIATHALON with him. I feel skittish about this possibility but I haven’t said no. I have the seed planted and I am starting to look for adult swim lessons somewhere.

And I’ve asked him if we could maybe trade our usual date night out to dinner with some weekly rock climbing. Apparently this gym has a ladies night for $5 on Fridays. But I’ve got to learn to belay first.

What You Can Do to Help My Luscious Booty.

Besides getting myself motivated, I really would like some HELP!

I want you to send me fitness events, races, opportunities and CHALLENGE me to join you in them, or just tell me to do it on my own!

Give me link to a 5K and I will sign up.

Send me a bike race you know of and I will get cycling to get ready.

Hire Denise Austin to live at my house for awhile.

It’s karma, after all.

Once I had a friend, Kate Reilly, who said she ALWAYS wanted to run a marathon. She was SO ready for it and I could tell because she kept talking about it. She sat across at her desk and waxed poetic on the how SOMEDAY she was going  to run the Rock and Roll Marathon in San Diego.

This was back before marathons were cool, but after the internet was invented. So while she was gabbing on and on, I went online.

I signed her up.

“Kate, I just signed you up for the Rock and Roll Marathon,” I said.

There was a good deal of sputtering. And she was kinda pissed. After she reconnected her jaw to her face, she started training almost immediately. She trained for 6 months, running the streets in the late nights.

And she ran her dream first marathon.

Could you please help me? I should  note, however: Please don’t sign me up for a marathon. Currently can hardly walk currently. Give it a year or so.

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