Scenes from Saturday + Sweat & Swim

When I was in sixth grade, I decided R.E.M. were my favorite band. I had recently burned out on UB40.

Forty years ago, they released their first album. Guitarist Peter Buck commented on the occasion: “If, on the way to the first day of recording Murmur, we had chanced upon a radio rebroadcast from exactly forty years previous, we would have heard speeches from Franklin Roosevelt, news about World War II, and the swinging sounds of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.”

Time is elastic and weird.

For instance, this past week, I became the parent of a fourteen-year-old.

She cannot fathom how R.E.M. could ever be popular. Taste is wasted on the youth.

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From Couch to 10K: A Step-by-Step Training Plan for Beginners

From couch to 10k running plan

As an experienced runner, I know that starting (or re-starting) a training plan if you’ve lost some fitness can be daunting, but with small steps and perseverance, anyone can go from the couch to a successful 10k road race.

The key is to start slowly, build gradually, and listen to your body. By following a step-by-step plan that incorporates walking, running, strength training, cross-training, and stretching, you can increase your endurance, improve your fitness, and achieve your goal of completing a 10k race.

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Scenes from Saturday + Rolls & Holes

As we try to be the best parents for two kids navigating the ups and downs of two distinctly different ages, it’s a good time to remind myself that while I will, of course, always love my kids, but I will not love them all the time in exactly the same way. It’s impossible and unfair. It will only set everyone up for disappointment.

I think as a parent that you need to strive to make love a constant in the relationship but both kids and parents grow and change and if a strong relationship is going to survive, love has to be fluid and flexible.

Like a dance.

And dance is something I’ve becoming very familiar with as a parent.

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Scenes from Saturday + Dancing Taxes

Stumbled on this unusual description of happiness this week and it’s stuck with me. It almost feels like a riddle. So simple as to be almost contradictory.

There are a lot of ideas about cultivating happiness through appreciation of the present and what you have but the the idea of gratitude for things we don’t have and don’t want sort of knocked me sideways.

Maybe I’m happier than I realized. Maybe we all are. Or could be.

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Scenes from Saturday + Haste & Waste

I am (in)famous in the family for listening to podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5x or greater. It drives the girls crazy. Add in my love of flashcards and a to-do list and you wouldn’t think I’d be the primary audience for the slow learning movement, but I’m not always in a rush. There is nothing fast about writing a book. So, I read about about the Slow Learning Project with interest, especially their Bill of Rights.

Immerse yourself completely and make haste slowly. Indeed.

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