The Life Aquatic

I've never been a strong swimmer. My dad taught me the basics when I was little, but I didn't take formal lessons. I knew just enough to get through the swim test in college. When I worked as a camp counselor one summer after graduating, I sat day after day by the pool and noticed this group of older women (some of them 80+) swimming laps as though it were nothing. I had this idea that if I could just get my form down, swimming was a skill that I could use for my whole life. But it's hard to figure out how to get better on your own; it's not like weight-lifting, where you can check your form in the mirror.

When I started physical therapy for knee pain last fall, the orthopedist told me to take a break from high-impact exercise for a while, so I decided to focus on swimming instead. I signed up for a six-week course at a pool in Harvard Square. The first few classes were very elementary, but I wanted to review the essentials before getting into more complex stuff. Also, I'd never done the crawl before, so the breathing pattern and arm movements were new territory for me.

When that course ended in November, I signed up for the Level II class, and then progressed to Level III this month. At this point, we spend most of the sessions swimming laps, alternating between the crawl and the backstroke. We're also working on treading water (which I still find exhausting) and learning flip turns to make the transition between laps smoother.

I think this will be the last class I take for now. I've learned everything I came to learn, and now I just need practice to build up endurance--especially mental endurance. I think the biggest impediment to progress right now is convincing myself that I'm not going to drown between breaths, that I have enough air to make it through three more strokes. It's weird how the animal brain can kick in when you're under water. Doing deep breathing exercises in yoga class has helped me learn to calm my brain a little when swimming, but it's still a struggle. I do love it, though. Especially at this time of year, when it's bitterly cold out, it's nice to go to a heated pool and splash around under the skylights for a while.

Zither!

Stephen and I made a deal back in August to get each other just one present for Christmas this year.  We don't really have much room to put new things in our 450 square foot apartment, and I thought that by limiting our shopping to just one gift each, we'd reduce our Christmas-shopping burden and be more thoughtful in our choices.  I got Stephen a Fit board to go with the Wii he got for his birthday in November.  And what did he get me?

An autoharp!  When we were visiting friends in Maryland last spring, we stopped in at a music store and tried out all kinds of obscure instruments: ukuleles, hammered dulcimers, accordians, etc.  The autoharp was my favorite.  I liked the way sounded and how easy it was to play.  Stephen must have made a mental note of my preference, because a suspiciously trapezoidal package showed up under the tree right before Christmas.  He told me later that he had to go to six different music stores to find one that carried autoharps.  Fun fact (if anything on Wikipedia can be called "fact"): The autoharp is not a harp at all, but a chorded zither.  

I love it.  It really is easy and fun to play--much easier than any other stringed instrument I've tried. There are no complicated fingerings to memorize or painful strings to press, thanks to the chord bars.  So far, I only know two songs, but I hope to grow my repertoire.  Get your request lists ready!

Christmas Review

We only had one Christmas tree this year, this little silver one.  I like the smell of a real tree, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy one in mid-December right before you leave town for two weeks, so we nixed the live greenery this time.  I tried to tone down the tinsel with folksy felt and wooden ornaments and a paper flag garland that we got on our trip to Portland last June.  I put up my collection of bird ornaments, too, but Iggy kept trying to eat them, so I had to take them down.

We invited some friends over before Christmas to help make a gingerbread village for the living room.  We had wine and funky pizza from Zing!, and things got pretty creative.  We ended up with a solar-powered house, an outhouse, and several structures that defied categorization.  Someone even made an aquarium stocked with Swedish fish.

When they were finished, we set them along the windowsill.  Now when the radiators come on, the smell of warm frosting fills the apartment.

I spent the holidays proper at my parents' house in New York state.  My family and I spent most of the week eating homemade lasagna, putting together puzzles and playing the highly-addictive Carcassonne.  Stephen took the train from Boston to Albany for my birthday on Monday and we went out to dinner with my brothers and their girlfriends.  It was lovely. 

And then...I got sick.  So how did I spend the last night of the year?  I took a shot of Nyquil and went to bed early. 

Here's to 2010!

Rare Bird

We took the train north to Salem a couple of weekends ago for another visit to the Peabody Essex museum.  The morning was grey and chilly; the afternoon, rainy; and by the time we left the museum at 5:00pm, it was snowing.  Inside the soaring PEM atrium, though, it was bright and warm. We saw Unzipped, a documentary about the making of Isaac Mizrahi's fall 1994 collection, and a panel discussion featuring Iris Apfel that coincided with the Rare Bird of Fashion exhibit.  Iris and Robin Givhan, fashion editor for the Washington Post, had a lot of interesting things to say about the politics of women's clothes (especially for politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton). 

The gift shop was full of crazy accessories inspired by the exhibit: necklaces as big as salad plates, huge bracelets, lots of feathers.  I got this fascinator and wore it until we had to go back out into the nasty weather.

After the museum closed, we had an hour and a half to kill before the train home.  We walked over to a little cafe, lured by signs promising Aztec hot chocolate and a chocolate fountain.  I was initially skeptical about the idea of a shared pool of chocolate, but the proprietor assured us that it was sanitary.  (Also, it was free and we were starving, so that tipped the balance in favor of the fountain.)  We ate a bunch of chocolate-covered things, drank hot chocolate, and then ran over to the train station, where we huddled on the open-air platform waiting for the train back to Boston.  It was a fun winter outing--though, someday, I would like to visit Salem when it's not freezing cold.

Fikapause

It's no secret that Stephen and I are big-time fans of all things Scandinavian. We've been saving up for a while to take a trip to Sweden, the land of (some of) my ancestors. And we're rabid consumers of anything Danish, Finnish, Swedish or Norwegian that can be found stateside: IKEA, Marimekko, H&M, and the little Scandinavian import store we visited in Portland. Stephen even carved me a Dala horse last Christmas.

It's a particularly work-heavy time of the semester right now; I'm spending a lot of weekend hours in the computer lab at school. By mid-afternoon, I'm pretty burnt out, so we've recently adopted fika, the traditional Swedish ritual of sitting down for coffee and pastries with colleagues and friends. Around 4:30, Stephen and I head to the picturesque Danish Pastry House in Medford for mocha and cookies.

Chocolate-dipped macaroons may not be the most nutritious afternoon snack, but it's nice to sit in a warm and cozy cafe when the sun is setting at a depressingly early hour. If anyone knows how to brighten these short winter days, it must be the northern Europeans, right?

Hallowe'en

What would it take for me to really like Halloween?  Kids, I think. I need to have some kids (my own or someone else's) to take trick-or-treating, or a house (or someone else's) where I can give out candy to kids.  It just seems like a great holiday for children.  It was so fun to dress up when I was little and walk around town with a million other kids, collecting candy from people.  Our town had a big Halloween parade on the evening of the 31st, and everyone (families, college students, dogs, whatever) would get dressed up and march down Main Street in the dark to the firehouse, then disburse into the surrounding streets. It was always cold that night, and our parents made us wear winter coats over our costumes even though cats/angels/princesses obviously don't wear puffy jackets.  The best part (besides the candy and the dressing-up) was that my mom let my sister and I wear makeup to go with our costumes.  (This is a big reason that I was a fortune-teller for so many years: they have to wear lots of makeup.) The smell of certain lipsticks still makes me think of Halloween.

I've never enjoyed the holiday as an adult, though.  I like the idea of a Day of the Dead, but the grown-up, American version of the holiday seems to center around (1) violence (blood and gore, dismemberment, brain-gobbling zombies) and (2) skimpy outfits for women (sexy nurse, sexy pirate, etc).  Ugh.  Where is the creativity?  The way I feel about Halloween is the way many people feel about Valentine's Day: it's too commercialized.  I mean, entire stores go up for Halloween.  Even V-day isn't that bad.

So how did I, the Halloween Grinch (or Halloweenie, as a friend dubbed me), celebrate this year? I went back to the holiday's historical roots.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Jack-o'-Lantern of legend was a wandering soul who carried a carved turnip lit by an ember.  So we carved dracula turnips and hung them in the window.  Between that and our real live black cat, I think we did the holiday justice.

Maybe next year I'll find a candy-dispensing house to borrow.

Eat Donuts, Sleep, Read

For our Columbus Day trip this year, we drove to New York to visit my parents and siblings. You know those IndieBound bookmarks that say “Eat Sleep Read”?  That pretty much sums up the weekend.  I was still knocked out from a cold I got in September, and I spent 25 hours sleeping it off between Saturday morning and Monday afternoon.  When I wasn’t sleeping, I visited the Village Tea Room with my sister, an Italian restaurant in Gardiner with my parents, got a bunch of take-out with Stephen, and had Sunday brunch at my parents’ favorite bagel place.  I finished up my September book and read through all of my mom’s back issues of Real Simple and O.

On Monday, Stephen and I went apple-picking (and zinnia-picking, and cider donut-eating) with my mom.  It was an overcast day, but the foliage was sparkling and the view was magnificent. 

We got Macouns, Cortlands, a couple of Empires, and one of the last few Macintoshes on the trees.  No Deliciouses, Red or Golden, because I dislike their texture and find them flavorless.  And their name seems like a marketing stunt, like naming Greenland “Greenland”.  I’ll be the judge of deliciousness.

Stephen thought the Goldens were pretty good, though.  Here he is eating one.

Afterward, we went to the farm stand and bought half a dozen cider donuts for the long drive back to Cambridge.  They were warm, fresh out of the donut-maker, so Stephen ate four of them in the first twenty minutes.  I can’t blame him.

When we did this around the same time last fall, I wore shorts and a t-shirt.  Hard to believe that now.  It was way too cold for that this time.  It feels like we transitioned very quickly from late summer to late fall this year, weather-wise.  I like it when October has warm days and chilly nights.  But this past month—in eastern Mass, anyway—it was just plain chilly.  We’ve already had snow twice!