Photo op fail

For someone who is, as my husband lovingly likes to say, glued to her smartphone, I found myself unglued late yesterday morning, leaving the blog much poorer in photos today.

I set out to take a long walk early, phone in hand, and decided – on a whim – to do Day 1, Week 1 of a Couch to 5K app I'd downloaded a while ago. (Because I'm whimsical like that. Also, thanks for the inspiration, Gingerzingi!) Due to operator error, I ended up doing 20-ish minutes instead of the full 30, so I started over when I got to the turnaround of my out-and-back loop.

I'm going to find a new app and start over AGAIN, though, because the one I picked (because it was highly rated and free) doesn't give me all the cool stats Gingerzingi's does. (Or at least I can't figure out how to find them. I tried.) I am so inspired by her progress and would love to watch my speeds improve as the training advances.

Naturally I had a GPS application going, too, to track my total miles/speed, which ended up being 6.87 miles in 1:48:03, for an average pace of less than 16 minutes/mile.

By Nicubunu (Own work)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/3.0)
or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/
copyleft/fdl.html)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Running two GPS apps simultaneously seriously drained the battery, however, and I had to put it on the charger as soon as I got home. Thus, I couldn't take it with me when I hopped in the car to go pick cherries at a neighbor's who invited me to clean out his trees. If I wanted to.

Free cherries? When organic cherries are selling for $8 a pound at Tiny Kroger? I'm on it, doggone it!

There were many photo ops during this adventure. I could have gotten an up-close-and-personal view of the upper branches of a cherry tree from my 20-foot-high perch in a front loader. I could have shown you the carpet of cherries on the ground below the trees, after all the wind we had yesterday. I might have gotten an artsy-fartsy close-up shot of a single perfect specimen.

After a good 45 minutes balancing myself in that front loader, I was so stiff I could barely move, and my bucket was more than half full. My neighbor then said I wasn't leaving until he'd pitted them! Um, sure, I'll let someone else pit two gallons of cherries, thankyouverymuch. Turns out he had one of these:

It had belonged to his mother, but since he's the only family member with cherry trees (his mom, aunt, two cousins and a brother all live within a mile of each other – this is West Virginia, after all!), he confiscated it from her kitchen and put it to good – and speedy! – use before sending me on my way.

My two gallons yielded three quarts sans seeds and stems, and I am one happy cavewoman. They're in the freezer, ready for some kind of paleo-friendly crisp or cobbler this winter.

Vickie asked yesterday in a comment how many bananas I eat. According to LoseIt, bananas are my number-two favorite food (eggs are first), and I've eaten 75 of them in the past six months, 53 since beginning the paleo plan three months ago.

I don't know if cavewomen ate bananas or not, but this one does and will continue to do so. Portable and easy to eat, bananas are perfect for those of us beginning Year Two of the Denture Adventure. Heh.

A side note: A year ago right now, I was drinking campfire coffee brewed on the grill, we'd been without electricity for more than 12 hours, four of our pine trees had fallen over in front of our eyes and it would be another eight days (during a brutal heat wave) before the Mon Power crews made it out to the Middle of Nowhere. May we never have another derecho. And may you never experience one, either.