travels, races, and other musings

During the last week of my mom's life, as I sat with her, I needed something to occupy my time. I had been meaning to get my journal entries off of my old LiveJournal for a long time but I kept putting it off. I just didn't have the time to sit with my computer and do it. I had decided to do it manually, copying and pasting each entry. As I sat and went through it, I read most of those old entries. I was so grateful to that past self for documenting that time of my life. Roger and I were newlyweds and were knee deep in a pretty creative period of our musical careers but on the other hand, I had just recently finished grad school and was feeling like a failure (I know that sounds backwards, but that's a different story). As I began my journal, I had just started working at Apple and was trying to figure out what to do with my life. It was like reading the life of another person. I barely recognized that twenty-something young woman.  It's now twenty-something years later

Election day is upon us once again and I usually post this story online each year. It began on my LiveJournal and migrated to Facebook and each year I repost it. This year I've decided to give it a permanent home here. In November 1917 my great-great-grandmother Kate Stafford went to Washington during the movement to adopt the 19th amendment. After picketing and demonstrations at the White House on November 10 she was arrested with 41 other women. She refused to pay a twenty-five dollar fine for allegedly obstructing traffic and on November 12 she was sentenced to thirty days in Occoquan Prison, a Virginia workhouse. She survived the “Night of Terror” and began a four-day hunger strike. On November 27, government authorities released the suffragists; they had served fourteen days. A month later, Kate was one of 97 guests of honor at a dinner in Washington, D.C. during the NWP (National Women’s Party) National Convention where suffrage leader Alice Paul (see note below) gifted each

Have you ever taken a trip for a destination race? Ever driven a long distance to see a band you like? That’s the best way to describe Les Mills Live. It’s like a crazy rock concert where people lift weights, punch stuff, ride stationary bikes, and strike yoga poses. I’ve never seen anything like it.  When I heard that Les Mills would be having a “Les Mills Live” I literally had no clue what it was but people online seemed really excited about it and it sounded neat. Then they announced it would be in New Orleans. Cool, that’s actually not too far. An 8 hour drive from Austin. So I pitched the idea to Roger, who was fine with me leaving for the weekend to do this crazy thing. I asked some of my instructor friends here and not one of them was interested. Pretty sure the word “NOPE” was uttered by a couple. The pandemic will be waaaaay better by then (HA) plus LM was requiring that everyone be vaccinated. All will be well. (Spoiler alert: all was well. I didn’t get sick and unlike our la

It’s the end of 2019 and I’ve got a shiny new BODYPUMP cert so my boss offered me a 5:30 AM class. It was brutal. I was setting multiple alarms, waking up repeatedly worried I was missing my alarm, coming home and taking naps. I don’t know how people work out at 5:30 AM. I trained that time slot a lot with CG as well and for a short time with an early AM cycle class when I first started with FC and hated it every time.  It was short-lived anyway, the time slot didn’t do well at FC and the class was dropped and I was back to no BP class. I continued teaching my other classes, subbing in for BP where I could, and hoping a slot would open up.  Then we all know what happened in spring 2020. I vividly remember my last cycle class. Hardly anyone was there and we were all super nervous and we knew shutting down was inevitable. We just didn’t know for how long. It was almost a relief when the gym shut down. I needed the time off. I was teaching 5 Cycle classes and 3 HIIT classes, plus filling

Rejection and rejection, the road to Fitness Connection and BODYPUMP This past weekend was Les Mills Live and it got me thinking about my journey to this point and why I drove eight hours each way to do five workouts on a Saturday. In a way, I thought about it like a race, but I didn’t actually train for it. I mean, nothing other than my usual workouts. I did think about my nutrition and hydration and paced myself so that was similar. And it was definitely a destination “race” so it had that aspect. I thought it might be nice to step back and reflect. How did I get here? Well, no, not New Orleans on a Saturday morning, but how did I wind up on this instructor journey in the first place? I actually started teaching classes in the early 2000s when I was working for Apple. I want to say it was maybe around 2005 or 2006. It sort of happened accidentally and organically. I was just taking some indoor cycling at the Apple gym and the instructor was going on vacation and asked me to fill in.

Final Thoughts A friend warned me that longer cruises can turn out to be addictive and asked me if we felt like that was the case. I have to say, honestly, I’m not sure that’s going to be the case for us. We really were ready to get back to our home, cats, normal eating, and our own beds by the end. It was a great trip and we had a great time, but I didn’t find I liked it way way more than a 7-night. I actually feel like a 7-night is just about perfect.  Now, we do have a 10-night booked for next year and we had a discussion about that. I think it will be fine, but I’m not sure I could do something like a transatlantic or longer Panama Canal cruise. I miss stuff like tacos and my cats. I think the other thing that played into this feeling was the fact that we had four port days in a row which was pretty intense. I think next year it will help that our schedule is a little more broken up. The max we have in a row is three port days.  Things I did like about the longer cruise were gettin

Saturday July 30 - Disembarkation and Orlando The theme for the morning ended up being “hurry up and wait.” The Fantasy pulled into Port Canaveral around 6:30 AM and the ship was cleared at around 7:30. We got ourselves up and dressed and finished packing the last of our things before one last meal with our wonderful servers.  We said goodbye and made a final bathroom break before heading for the gangway. We tapped our cards one last time, moved into the gangway and stopped. And waited. And waited. Then we saw someone being taken off in a stretcher from the medical center on deck 1 into a waiting ambulance. I hope they are okay. It seems that they had halted everyone until that was sorted out. They were probably trying to avoid any type of congestion outside the port until the ambulance was away. It was about a 20 minute wait (there was a surprising lack of urgency so that makes me hopeful that it wasn’t too terribly serious). Finally we were moving again and retrieved our luggage and

Friday July 29 - Castaway Cay We were originally scheduled for 9:30-4:45 at Castaway Cay, but then the night before they said we would arrive at 10 AM (with no explanation) but then we didn’t actually end up being cleared to get off the ship until 10:30 so they said we could stay ashore until 5:30. All the early excursions before 10:30 were canceled and that was that. (We didn’t have one of those excursions.) It didn’t matter to us, this was our 5th time to CC ( 2014 , 2015 , 2017 , 2022 ) and we aren’t as crazy about it as many are. (Blasphemy, I know.) So we woke up later than usual and had a leisurely breakfast. At 10:15 Emmaline and I went to Animation Class in D Lounge (drawing) and Roger watched some TV (he watched a lot of cricket). This was actually the first time we went to one of the animation classes on this sailing, which is funny because we did a ton of them back in November on the Wonder. We drew the Genie with a fair amount of success considering we were told he’s a more

 Thursday July 28 - Sea Day The last of our three sea days dawned sunny and beautiful. We really had fantastic weather the whole cruise. Roger and I were both up early at 7:00 which was unusual. Emmaline slept on and we slipped out to deck 4. It was busy, but didn’t seem quite as busy as the first two sea days. I did the same workout as before with my easy/sprint laps with some bodyweight strength in between. We finished up and went back to the room to retrieve Emmaline. While she took her sweet time getting up, Roger got showered and we all went to breakfast at Cabana’s. I showered after breakfast. Sorry to the people of Cabana’s.  On our way back from breakfast we stopped by the open house at the Oceaneer Club where Dr. Strange was meeting and then we checked out some of the new stuff that had been installed since Emmaline had been there. She was never a huge fan of the younger kid clubs. I think the age ranges were just too vast and it’s often really chaotic. She much prefers the tw

Wednesday July 27 St. Thomas I was excited for our first time in St. Thomas. We had a slightly later start this morning as our excursion was later in the morning. We took our time getting up and ate breakfast outside at Cabana’s. We got off the ship around 9:15 and easily found a taxi. The taxis in St. Thomas are huge open sided buses with benches across. We felt sort of silly just the three of us on this crazy taxi bus. It was about a 15 minute ride from the port to where we needed to meet for our excursion and we found our guide easily once we got there.  Our guide, Patrick, loaded us up into the back of his jeep and we set off, which was sort of sketch and scary, but we all lived. We arrived at our first stop, a beautiful little beach that wasn’t very busy at all. I looked it up on Google Maps when we got home and it’s called Brewer’s Bay Beach. First we walked around and he showed us some of the plant life around the area, both native and non-native. Next, we went fishing. For tara