My husband and I have been married twenty years and we celebrated our anniversary by visiting the Meijer Gardens near Grand Rapids Michigan.  The gardens have a huge conservatory with tropical plants, and acres and acres of gardens outside that are beautifully planted and showcase giant sculpture.

The gardens are wonderful, the sculpture interesting, sometimes even funny…and right now there is a special installation of giant art glass interspersed among the waterfalls, flowers, grasses, hills, woods and sculptures.

There were so many wonderful, colorful, playful and striking things to see; I have so many pictures to show you, but I guess I’ll try to limit myself here.

It’s going to be difficult to choose…

…because there were just so many amazing things to see.

I wish you could all have been there…

…to see the glass balls bobbing in the water and nestled among the rocks in the waterfalls…

…and the tall rushes in the woods…

…and tucked in among the real rushes near the wetlands.

So much to share with you.  Maybe I’ll put a few more pictures up tomorrow.

Meanwhile, did you see the big hawk sitting on top of the huge horse sculpture?

Meanwhile this morning the knee feels almost 100%.  I even took Katie out for a bit of a walk around the neighborhood to see if I could get it to hurt again.  Nada.  So I went back online to see what I could figure out.  Perhaps I have tendinitis, an overuse injury that just takes time and care to heal.  That makes sense as I can’t pin my knee pain to a specific event, as people with tears in their MCL or meniscus usually can.  If it really is just tendinitis I’m already doing everything there is to do to make it better.  And it is getting better.

So, though I haven’t reached my doctor yet I’m feeling a bit better about the prospects of being able to walk around a grocery store without ending up with ice on the knee.  Maybe someday I’ll even be able to take a walk that is longer than six blocks.  If I’m careful.

I’m registered to do a half marathon in October.  I guess that isn’t going to happen as I’m unable to train, and should already be up to running 10 miles or so.  I can’t even walk one at the moment.

Maybe I’ll just go and cheer everyone else on.

Sigh.

Katie was an extra specially wound up Sheltie-girl yesterday.  And if you’ve ever lived with a Sheltie — well — you know that they’re pretty much wound up enough on a normal day.  So even though I knew that I couldn’t walk around on the uneven ground of the park she had me at my wits end by late in the afternoon when I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride.

OF COURSE MOM!  A RIDE?  RIGHT NOW?  REALLY!?!?!?  YES!!!!!  LET’S GO!!!  WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?  COME ON MOM!

So we went into the neighboring village, a small quaint town with expensive homes and a tiny downtown.  Also a very busy town, lots of cars and motorcycles and people and other dogs and stuff.

We parked at the main intersection and sat there awhile getting used to all the weekend traffic.

She did pretty well, but the flat ears belay the fear.

So we moved a bit away from the corner to sit on a park wall.

That was a lot better.  For a moment.

Then we walked through the two blocks of town.  Katie got to check out the old bank and see if she had any money deposited there.  She did not.

Getting away from town was more enjoyable, we walked by old houses…

…and smelled lots of food being grilled in the back yards.

At one point she stopped on the sidewalk as if to say…”carry me Mom!”  Sorry baby, you’re going to have to walk yourself.  Mom’s knees are done!

We had a lot of fun, met some resident pups, smelled some good stuff and got a little less scared of new places.  All good things.   Except for the knee which is now elevated and being iced.  Again.

Hey Mom! Wanna PLAY?

Since I’ve been sitting most of the week with my leg elevated and iced Katie and I haven’t done much work on anything.  You can tell.  She wants to GO TO THE PARK RIGHT NOW MOM!!!  But I can’t walk that much, and certainly not on the uneven ground at the park.

So we went to a pet supply store and worked on keeping her attention on me rather than all the good sniffing spots.  She’s a bit of a vacuum cleaner and I’m worried about our next Rally trial, which is a week from today!  (OH NOOOO!)

I did a bit of Rally stuff; heeling, sitting, turning, lying down.  It went OK.  Pretty good I guess given all the distractions.  It all seems to depend on what the treats are.  If they’re tasty and special enough a typhoon could go by and she’d continue to stare at me.  If it’s just her regular kibble….well….lots of stuff is more important and more interesting than her regular kibble or her Mom.

Next Sunday is our Rally trial.  I guess that will be our Training Challenge #6!

You go to interviews smiling and hopeful, certain that the interviewers can see the value you’d bring to their libraries.  Your years of experience.  Your motivation and enthusiasm for the work.  Your fresh ideas framed in another life, adapted to fit the world of public libraries.

But after months and months of looking and writing and applying and meeting I still have no library work, and that world has become distant and even somewhat foreign to me.  Unemployment benefits are ending soon, husband is still adjusting to his forced retirement.  Tensions mount.

On a whim I applied for an underwriting job on Monster.com, never thinking that anyone would be interested in me, a person who has been out of the business for over four years.  Turns out that though that particular job didn’t work for me it did lead me to call my previous employer who has offered me a full time job and the opportunity to get my head back into the mortgage underwriting world.

It was a difficult decision to give up the dream of working in a place I feel I’m meant to be.
And to give up the freedom these last few months have afforded me.  But it’s an opportunity I can’t ignore, so the week after next I’ll be putting on grownup clothes again and heading into work with the other rush hour commuters.

I know I’m lucky.  I’ve seen what it’s like out there for the unemployed and it is not pretty.  I also know I am lucky that someone is willing to take a chance on me and let me relearn the industry.  And I’m grateful for all of that, and will give back to them more than their money’s worth.  I always did.

But I’m going to miss the way the light falls on the trees in early afternoon.  I’m going to miss long walks with Katie.  I’m going to miss staying up late reading all night if I want to.  I’m just going to miss the possibilities that hover around each morning when I get up.  The possibilities to do anything or nothing at all.

I’m gonna miss this.

The past couple of weeks I’ve noticed a mystery bird in my back yard.  In fact it’s out there now.  It sits on Katie’s kennel (but not when she’s in it!) then flies off catches a bug and returns to it’s perch.  It’s an elegant but small brown bird with cream markings on the wings and a gray underside.  I have never seen it before these past couple of weeks and it is intriguing.

I emailed a friend of mine who is pretty good identifying birds, but she couldn’t tell me what it was from my description.   I’ve spent a good amount of time googling “small brown bird MI” and finally narrowed it down to the Eastern Phoebe.

Here’s a link to a great photo of the bird.  I think, given that I’ve noticed it here at least three different times this week, that it’s likely been around all summer and I just didn’t see it.   The first time I noticed it I thought it was a junco and the voice inside my head said “NOOOOO!”  because juncos are only here during the winter and it was way too early for me to believe winter was around the corner.  When I noticed it flying up and catching bugs I was relieved because juncos don’t do that.

I’m really excited to see a new bird around…even if it isn’t really “new.”

Katie, on the other hand, doesn’t care.

I was out weeding last week and noticed all the bee action on a couple of sunflowers.  It never ceases to amaze me that this giant plant can come up out of a single little seed.  I planted quite a line of these, but only a few grew this year. Still, those that did are beautiful.

See all the yellow on the leaves below the flower head on the photo above?  That’s pollen knocked off by the bees who are themselves covered in the yellow stuff.  Fascinating to watch.

Way more fun to watch then weeding.

Eventually I did get to the finish line of my 8K run/walk Saturday at the Crim Festival of Races.  What a relief!  But still, I felt pretty good other than my knee.  It takes a LOT of people and a lot of work to put these races on for us.  Just at the finish line alone there was an orchestrated effort to keep us comfortable.

There was the woman with the towels that had been soaking in ice water…

…and the volunteers handing out medals for the ten mile finishers.

The tables loaded down with fruit…

…and water….

….and sports drinks.

Volunteers were handing out popsicles which were just the ticket.  I got the orange one, my favorite!

People were all around talking about their race, and these little girls were being interviewed about their Teddy Bear Trot for the local TV station.

But eventually most of us ended up like this:

And probably most of us, at least those of us that are not elite runners have spent today sitting around with our feet up.

I certainly have!