Bike legs

All together, this was a very relaxing weekend. I could do another few of those. I love starting the week with a bunch of lunches prepared, clean sheets, laundry and dishes done, while feeling well rested. OK, maybe a bit tired. My legs are aching, and they'll hurt even more tomorrow. This morning, I went for my first power pacing class at the gym. Yikes.

Power pacing, also called spinning, is 60 minutes of different exercises on a stationary bike. Up-hill, sprints, racing, you do all these various bikes exercises while listening to loud music. It's tough, but great cardio and since I haven't gone back to running, it's also a good way for me to get back into shape. The knee hasn't complained much throughout the entire class, it's a good sign. But I felt so out of shape, some of the girls in the class are pretty hardcore!

I paid a visit to the worms this afternoon and gave them fresh scraps. They still have stuff to eat, but I figured they would like a little variety. I also cooked a bit this weekend, so I had lots of organics to throw away. Most of it ended up distributed between the two bins. I prepare some bedding for bin #2, since the worms are finding their home a bit inhospitable. How can you tell? There's a bunch of them stuck to the cover. Next week, I'm emptying some of the content if it's nice. I need a bit of sunshine and warm weather to dry the compost on my balcony.

I can't believe May starts this week. What happened to April? May is when I ditch public transit and walk (or maybe even bike) to work every day. My UPass (special pass for students, comes out to approximately $24 / month) expires at the end of April and I decided I wasn't going to buy a pass for May. I'll buy a few tickets, in case the weather turns nasty, but not having a pass will be great motivation to walk. It doesn't take me much longer and sometimes, when traffic is bad on the Cambie bridge, it's actually faster to walk.

OK, off to do some reading before going to bed. Good night.

In heaven

Organic chicken breast in a pesto sauce, steamed organic asparagus, and a medley of grape and cherry tomatoes from a local hothouse. Fifteen minutes to prepare, less than $10, and there are leftovers.

Who said eating well had to be complicated or expensive?

Time

The great thing about ambitious goals is that they have a way to drive you, get you out of bed in the morning and set you up to accomplish more than you would ever think possible. Once you reach that goal, it's a time for celebration. And rest.

But then what?

I'm going through a phase of random and unguided reflection. It helps that I started walking to and from work every day. That time is my time, it is a bowl of energy in the morning and a great way to relax after spending eight hours in front of the computer. It's also a time when I think of everything and nothing. I think about weekend plans, career plans, what I want to eat for dinner, that bill I should pay when I get home, the good things that happened to me during the day, and the bad. The big difference between now and before is that I HAVE time.

I'm not really planning for anything at the moment. I don't think it is wise to jump from one goal to the other without a pause, a break. And my thinking time is not focused on anything in particular, so whatever I decided to do next would probably change at every walk. That's OK. My brain has been under a very disciplined regimen for the past few years, I need to limit the boundaries for the next little while.

I also had to write about a few things I'm pretty pleased with right now: I stopped getting junk mail the very moment I placed a little sticker from the Red Dot Campaign on my mailslot, and last weekend, I joined a political party for the first time in my life. I'm guessing I should get a membership card shortly and soon, I'll be a card-carrying member of the Green Party of Canada. Adriane Carr is a lovely lady who made a convincing pitch at EPIC last weekend. She's also running in my riding.

Are you kidding me?

On my way back from work last night, I was caught in a hail storm. Fortunately, I had my umbrella, gloves, scarf, boots and winter jacket, pretty much dressed for whatever bizarre weather would be thrown at Vancouver. I did start the day with sunglasses on.

Heading to the bus stop, I walked by a guy with his little designer miniature dog on leash. The guy was wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. The dog was wearing a jacket. Only in Vancouver.

This morning, I woke up to this:

April 19 in Vancouver, people. Be scared, be very scared.

I guess it'll be a while until I plant my seedlings outside. Right now, even the hardy plants that spent the winter outdoors look fed up.

Eeewww, I mean... cool!

Wow. It feels like someone finally found the spring switch and turned it on this weekend. We were fortunate to get two days of sun and warm weather. I expect to see a few burnt faces tomorrow at work... people never learn.

I got myself a set of wheels yesterday (a Nissan Versa, cute little car, not much juice but at least it was barely sipping away at the gas) to visit my former boss (former from a long time ago) Lindsay. Obviously, having a car means running all the heavy-duty errands, like grocery shopping (cans) and picking up two worm composting bins from a friend in Kits.

I kinda scored on the composting. I few months back, I wrote about having to wait until April to take a course with the Vancouver Composting centre to get a bin, which meant no compost until the end of the summer. My friend's bins were already started, so I was hoping for a harvest within the next few weeks. I placed the bins downstairs in the garage, where it's dark and the temperature will stay fairly constant.

I didn't play much with the bins yesterday, as I was getting ready for dinner. It was a really nice drive to Anmore and an even nicer dinner with Lindsay, Geoff and Lucas (and Raven and Rosie, the dogs). I always love coming back to their house, this is where I stayed when I first moved to BC in 2002. They hosted me for a few weeks while my apartment was getting set up, offered a car to pick up miscellaneous items at IKEA, and invited me over at Christmas so I wouldn't be by myself. Fond memories indeed.

Today, I was on a mission: poke through the bins to see how much compost was ready to harvest. I can't bring the bins up to my balcony, they're too heavy to carry around. If it was harvest time, I intended to transfer most of the content to a bucket and then bring the bucket to the balcony, leaving it outside. The worms would crawl to the bottom, I could harvest the top soil in layers, until all was left was a bunch of worms ready to go back to a new bedding. It was a great plan.

Except that it didn't really work that way. I pulled the cover away from the first bin, mostly in the dark, and could hear the rustling of little critters. I used a flashlight to get a better idea of what was crawling around and boy, I wish I hadn't. The worms are fine, no problem, but the bugs? I read some literature online about worm composting and it's normal for other critters to set shop in there, but that many? Most were pill bugs, little grey bugs with a hard shell. I read that they chew through the hard stuff, very useful, but creepy.

It smelled a bit ripe in the bin, so I started poking around with a plastic garden fork to move the content around and discovered that a lot of food hadn't been eaten yet. Worms don't eat food immediately after you leave it in there, it takes a few days before the scraps get really gross and worm enticing. I guess my friend had a bag of apples that went bad, 'cause I saw several almost full apples in the bin. It really looked like there was enough food in there for another week. But the soil was really wet (the bins were left outside and we've had pretty rainy weather), and there was no bedding left, so I shredded a few sheets of newspaper and mixed it in, along with egg shells (to rebalance the acidity). I left the other bin untouched, the worms had enough food.

So, it will be another week (at least) until I can start keeping kitchen scraps in a container on the counter instead of throwing them in the trash. The bins are full of compost, but there was too much uneaten food to harvest. At least that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

Scatter-brain

I knew this was going to happen. No more school, no more forced reading and homework = no more mental discipline. I'm all over the place, looking at too many options, reading too many books at once (I have eight, EIGHT books in progress next to my bed), I think I need to calm down and have somewhat of more structured approach for all this free time.

Or maybe this is just exactly how life really is, disorganized and spontaneous. Live a little, right?

It feels strange.

Notice how the number of posts has dramatically fallen since I finished school (fallen to 0 I might add). It's not that I don't have anything to blog about, I've been busy for the past few weeks, but somehow, I just felt that I needed to disconnect and let go. I'm back now, thinking about new projects (oh yeah, not one to sit back and relax) and very excited about the months ahead.

Which is good because we've had a tough time at work last week, several employees were let go from our office and it was possibly the worst timing ever. I understand layoffs, it's a quick way to adjust to changes in the market and the economy, but we are only a short time away from releasing our software, after two years of grueling work. The teams needed to stay focused on the end goal, and layoffs just have a way to kill motivation. I felt pretty bummed after the news came out, we hadn't really anticipated this either. We'll all recover, as humans have an amazing ability to adapt to changing situations, but not without some hardship.

Now, I'm just worried about my throat that is getting icky, pretty much all my colleagues have come down with the flu over the past two months and I'm wondering if the adrenaline was keeping the bugs away. I should go to bed early tonight.