by Kathy Brasby | Feb 11, 2014 | Hope
I wasn’t this nervous during the birth of my first child or when I gave my first presentation in sophomore speech class.
The day I started my running program was not a day for public consumption.
I downloaded an app on my iPhone ( C25K Free) which promised to get me from a couch potato to a 5K run in 8 weeks. I selected my running playlist. I signed up for Strava, a GPS service that could track my runs by distance, trail, and time.
In short, I stalled.
But the day came. I had already decided on a secluded trail where nothing but hawks and crop dusters could watch me run.
Yeah, there was a crop duster that day. A small yellow airplane made at least three passes over me while I staggered through the training.
Fortunately, I had thought to wear a baseball cap and I just kept it tugged low.
Nobody could see my face.
The training app featured a sweet voice calmly cuing me: “Start walking now.”
I was good on the walking part. I strode out confidently for five minutes and then my sweet trainer said, “Start running now.”
I knew I only had to run for one minute on this day and so I stepped right out.
When waiting out a labor contraction or that last minute before the Friday bell releases you for the weekend, sixty seconds is an eternity.
And it’s even longer than that when you’re running and you’re out of shape.
I have never been so glad to hear my trainer speak again: “Start walking.”
I thanked her. Out loud. The hawk didn’t care.
App or no app, those were welcome words.
Ninety seconds go by fast when you’re trying to catch your breath and the trainer, with that voice that now sounded more like she didn’t care much, said, “Start running now.”
I survived. But then, just for the record, I survived labor and the sophomore speech, too. Amazing.
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by Kathy Brasby | Feb 4, 2014 | Hope
Our youngest daughter was a quiet baby until she gained mobility. Crawling opened up her world. It wasn’t long before neither trees or walls were an obstacle. Energy oozed from this child.
So it made sense to me, when she was 4, to enroll her in ski school for the day while the rest of the family hit the slopes.
Ski school for pre-schoolers included lunch, games, and a lesson on the beginner slope. I knew she’d love the action.
When I picked her up at the end of the day, I discovered that she hadn’t gotten a lesson.
After lunch, the staff helped the kids get ready for the teaching session but our daughter announced that she’d rather not go out. So they let her stay inside with the movies and cookies.
We spent $150 on this experience.
On day two, I decided to take her to the beginner’s slope myself. As I zipped her snowsuit and buckled her boots, she calmly told me that she’d rather not go out. She had to words down exactly.
While visions of Bambi and Cinderella probably danced in her head, they didn’t in mine.
“You’re going,” I said. “You’ll like this.”
With a sigh, having lost the chance at chocolate chip cookies too, she tromped beside me to the slope.
The slope was nearly flat. I also had a gadget that wrapped around her middle while I skied behind her. I could keep her from zooming away and even from falling.
So away we went.
Within an hour, she could stop on command. Within two hours, she was begging me to take off the gadget because I was slowing her.
When the lifts began to close, she crossed her arms. “I don’t want to go in yet.”
“Really?”
“Yeah! This is fun!”
I knew the ski school staff couldn’t push my daughter out in the cold. But I could.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jan 28, 2014 | Hope
I knew I had an issue when I looked out the back door of my new office to see my trailer house rolling down the highway.
I had been commuting 30 miles a day to the new job, waiting for a moving company to relocate my little trailer house closer to my work.
The nice thing about moving a trailer house is that you really don’t have to pack much. In fact, I hadn’t even bothered to drain my water bed.
I had instructed the moving company to give me some advance notice before they hauled the house to the new place. I’d drain it then.
They’d promised they would.
And they didn’t.
I jumped in my car and raced after the trailer house, which was being backed into its new home by the time I arrived.
The crew hooked up all the lines and the foreman wandered over.
“I thought you were going to call me,” I said.
He shrugged. “I guess nobody did.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a full waterbed in the back of that trailer that I intended to drain.”
He studied the house for a long time. Then he shrugged again. “I guess that explains why it was so goosey in the back end while we were on the highway.”
Good news: the bed didn’t come out the back wall of the trailer. Bad news: it was pressed against the wall after sliding off the pedestal.
There is a moral to this story. When you’re 20-something and think you don’t have to drain your waterbed till the last minute, sleep on the couch a few nights instead.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jan 14, 2014 | Hope
Our younger son looked up from his computer to land yet another fun fact in the midst of the living room.
“You know about that idea that putting a potato in an exhaust pipe of a car keeps the car from running?”
Well, it hadn’t been the first thing that popped in my mind when I got up in the morning. In fact, I hadn’t thought about that in years.
My mind flashed to the stories from junior high school about the boys who had shoved a potato in a school bus exhaust, or was it the math teacher’s car? Maybe it was the opposing team’s school bus. Maybe it was the home ec teacher’s pickup .
In any case, I was sure it was successful.
Somebody had said so.
So I told our son, “Sure. That works.”
He laughed. That’s never a good sign when you’re the mom and he’s the one with the computer in front of him. “Nope. When you put a potato in an exhaust pipe, what you get is a great potato launcher.”
Oh.
This is the son that I bought the book Backyard Ballistics for many years ago. The idea in the book was to let boys be boys as they were growing up.
This boy built catapults, tennis ball mortars, a paper match rocket, and a potato cannon that didn’t even involve an exhaust pipe.
Still, he was going in the face of junior high legend and I wasn’t sure if I could let that go down without a defense.
“Are you sure?” I asked. It was a feeble defense but I had to try.
“Oh, yeah. They’ve done studies on it.”
I decided to let it go. I really didn’t want to follow him outside to stuff a potato in our car’s exhaust.
“There’s a box of fruit by the fridge,” I told him. Changing the subject was better than admitting defeat. “Oranges, apples, grapefruit. Help yourself.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I could make a fruit cannon.”
“What?”
“The neighbors deserve fruit, too.”
It would have better to concede defeat.
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by Kathy Brasby | Dec 31, 2013 | Hope
We had heard the best time to ski was on New Year’s Day because there were no crowds. That was true, for all the wrong reasons.
Our group of 20-somethings arrived early at Winter Park, hauled equipment to the lodge, and began preparing.
I discovered that the temperatures that day were colder than I had expected and I decided to spend the day with hot chocolate beside the fireplace.
But that decision hadn’t gotten to one of the guys in our group who had scurried to purchase lift tickets for all of us.
I couldn’t leave him hanging for my ticket and I couldn’t spend that kind of money just to sit in the lodge. So I buckled up the boots, popped into the bindings and skied to the lift.
Surprise! There was no line at all. Up I went, getting a quick glance at a blackboard that read -38 degrees.
I was outside at 38 degrees below zero? I pulled my cap a little lower.
“Follow me.” This was the same guy who had bought the lift tickets but we followed anyway. The group arrived at another lift.
“Where are we going?”
“To the top of the mountain. The skiing is great up there.”
So we went further in. It doesn’t get warmer as you go up the mountain. The snow squealed with each turn of the ski.
We got to the top, made a fast run to the midway lodge and ducked inside for hot chocolate and a fireplace. The guys with mustaches sported icicles from their upper lips.
Any exposed skin was either bright red or white.
This was fun, right?
An employee wandered by. “We’re watching for frostbite. If we see anything suspicious, we’ll send you back to the lodge.”
Out we went for round 2 and one of the gals who had sat in the lodge the longest flunked. Her cheeks were white and she went back in to thaw out.
The rest of us made another fast run back to the midway lodge.
“Are we going to ski all day?” I asked.
“Why not?” Yep, it was that guy again. “The snow is fantastic.”
We’d already made two runs from the top. Maybe I was getting my money’s worth on that ticket.
Another employee came up to the table. “You all OK?”
“Yeah, but minus 38 degrees is pretty challenging,” I said.
“Well, it’s minus 50 on top with wind chill.”
So I’ve survived a ski trip at 50 below zero. And they were right: no lift lines. Not everyone had frozen brains.
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by Kathy Brasby | Dec 24, 2013 | Hope
Long before Pinterest could puncture my wanna-be creative bubble, there was the nativity Christmas cookie cutter set.
I sometimes call Pinterest the dream site: I can only do those projects in my dreams.
The cookie cutter set was like that. The box seduced me with photos of beautiful cookies in the shape of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in a manger. A little piping of frosting, a few sparkles in the right place and we would have a unique nativity set.
And the best part was that we could do this project as a family with everyone helping.
I bought the set.
Yes, I knew we wouldn’t get the cookies quite as perfect as the photos. We had a two-year-old at the time. He’d produce a cute but goofy little cookie.
It was OK.
I forgot to factor in his mother.
I knew we were in trouble when I pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven. Baby Jesus in the manger more resembled a toasted marshmallow.
The sheep – and I’d made lots of them – all were blimps. Some had short fat legs but, since you couldn’t tell where the head was, the legs could have been porcupine prickles, too.
The camels’ longer legs had grown together while baking. “Is this an elm tree?” asked the six-year-old.
The shepherds had morphed into tall planks of wood and kneeling Joseph was now a giant S.
The kids were game, anyway. They slathered on frosting that was too thin so that the blues and oranges dribbled into each other making a muddy brown on the kings.
Well, I thought those were the kings because of the lumps at the top which I identified as crowns. Maybe they were cows, in which case the muddy brown might make more sense.
I had planned to assemble the stable printed on the back of the box but tossed that after our older son frosted a angel as though it were a donkey. I was not displaying these.
When we were done, with sticky frosting on our fingers and sparkles drifting to the floor, I studied the blobs of cookies. “Well, this didn’t work out quite like I had hoped.”
My husband surveyed the table, surrounded by sets of eager young eyes, and picked up a cookie. “Then we’d better destroy the evidence.”
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