In between the 1,001 non-exciting things going on around here (took a break from the kitchen and ended up painting furniture. Yeehaw! The fumes!) I am spending some time enjoying the season. It’s incredibly warm (88 F today) but at the same time, there is that change in the air.  And, I lie, because I’m also spending plenty of time contemplating life and life changes and what this last year has been like.  In about three weeks or so it will have been about one year since I decided to change everything around, quit my job, and “figure out” my life.

Well, I did those first two things, and let me just say that last thing is pretty much impossible. So, if you ever decide to do something drastic, and “figure out” your life, set your expectations very, very low.  I mean, LOW. Like, survival = success low.  Then, you won’t be surprised when it is almost a year later and although you’ve discovered so much about yourself and the life you’ve created vs. the life you want and how those two things both relate to each other, you will also feel some comfort in going to  bed every night just about as clueless as you were before. Only happier. Which I guess was half the point to begin with. Slight disappointment is worth happiness, even if those don’t really go hand-in-hand.

And where was I?  Oh, yes, fall.  Let me just say, it is just incredible around here this year.  While leaves are only just beginning to change in the lower country (read: 6,000 feet or so), just a couple thousand feet higher is simply amazing.  Better than I remember in any recent year, in fact.

So, take a break from either being just as lost as ever (like me) or knowing just where you’re going (many other people, apparently) and look at these photos. You will not be disappointed.

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]]> http://justrunjustlivejustbe.com/2010/09/28/fall-not-disappointing-at-all/feed/ 7 http://justrunjustlivejustbe.com/2010/07/22/please-pass-the-doritos/ http://justrunjustlivejustbe.com/2010/07/22/please-pass-the-doritos/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:31:48 +0000 LesleyG http://justrunjustlivejustbe.com/?p=1737

This was a post I originally began writing last night about how I felt run over by life yesterday and everything was just so angsty and inexplicably strange. But then the electricity went out just as I was ready to publish and I heard voices outside my house. It was only my neighbors, because apparently a power outage somehow signals them to all walk the streets shirtless, beer in hand. I would make a crack about how money can’t buy class or something, but I was honestly torn between joining them and screaming out the window to shut up, some of us are trying to go to bed! Perhaps it was a sign from above because today I am not feeling so much like my seventeen-year-old self, thankfully.

If you’d have told me at seventeen that at thirty I’d still have days when nothing but whining and eating Doritos made sense, I don’t think I would have believed you. But isn’t it exciting that we never really have to completely give up whining Doritos?!

Nevertheless, I did have these photos included in that post as I felt each of them illustrated something about how I was feeling yesterday, floating, not real, sort of loopy, sort of angry, sort of grounded, and fine.  It makes even less sense now, I think.  But I’ll still leave in the photos because although my seventeen-year-old self had a lot of things figured out, she also would have never believed she’d see all this.

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I realize that by just concentrating on the [expletive!] water bugs in my last post that it may seem to some that I didn’t really have anything else to say about the trip, and that I didn’t really appreciate being able to go. Neither of those is true. In fact, I can hardly explain here or anywhere just how fortunate I feel—both this time and every time— when I get to return from a trip to my favorite place and tell stories about it.  I know every day that I’m lucky.

With each trip, it does become a little to easy for me to just expect to love it, to expect it to feel the way it does. I expect to spend time with friends, to meet new friends, to have a great time and remember, with each and every visit, just what it is I value in my life.

And this:

Since the weekend, I’ve been pretty vocal on Twitter about the flooding in Nashville.  I’m going to assume you’ve heard about it by now, although I talked to a friend just yesterday who hadn’t, so I know it’s possible.  For me, though, this hits close to home. Along with having friends in Nashville—friends who are safe, thankfully—I simply love that town.

Today I’ve reposted below a post from about a year ago when I was in Nashville to run the Country Music Marathon. I took a lot of photos that trip, and although the post is long, it conveys my genuine thrill and appreciation for the city.  A good part of the post focuses on my visit to the Grand Ole Opry, which looked like this when I was there:

And yesterday morning, looked like this:

It just makes my heart sink.

And yes, I know there are other things going on in the world, in our country. I know this.  And I know if any city can come together and recover, it’s Nashville.

In the coming days and weeks, there will be a lot of ways to help. I hope if you can help, you will.  It’s a special place, people.  And you can see a little of why I think so, below.

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Nashville: The other parts not about the running

Lest anyone believe that my trip to Tennessee was all about running and emotions and accomplishment, I’d like to point out that I came away with about 40 race day photos, and about 240 from the rest of the trip. Or there’s the fact that nearly two weeks later I’m still talking about food, like okra.  Man, okra is good stuff.

Anyway, I did some walking around Nashville, and some touristy stuff.  Oh, and let’s just face it, I love the touristy stuff.  My last trip to Nashville was all business (and by that I mean I immediately got high on sweet tea and didn’t take a lot of pictures) so it was nice to do some lookin’ this time around.

There was food, like the Pancake Pantry:

And mark my words right now, I think my grandmother’s twin was our waitress.  I don’t know where she came from, but she was the sweetest woman and I felt like maybe if I dripped something on my chin while eating she would have come over, spit on a napkin, and wiped my face for me.

Or maybe I just love her because she brought me sweet potato pancakes:

I restrained myself from eating all five the day before a marathon, but my lands, I could have.

We also drove the race course, as I mentioned in my race report, and my favorite thing about that had to have been how bright GREEN the entire city was. I was so happy to be in the midst of springtime at a moment when it was actually snowing here in the Rockies.

And then of course I had to hang out the car window and get all kinds of other photos, only some of which actually came out.

The day after the marathon was a bit of a different story.  I wanted to keep moving, but I was slow. Very, very slow.  While my friends went museum-ing, I did my own walking tour. Slowly.

But that’s probably also what allowed me to notice things I otherwise may not have noticed, like this:

I love Dolly. LOVE her.  As in I dressed as her for Halloween twice as a kid. There are three people on this Earth wherein my knees would go weak upon seeing, and she’s one of them.  She’s a genius, and hilarious.

And then of course I had to do some window shoppin’:

And some bar hoppin’:

And some star gazin’:

And some… okay, never mind, that’s getting old.

But I’m not gonna lie, I loved it.  I really do love country music. I love other music, too, of course but country music is good stuff. Let me know if you want to argue with me about that. Pack a lunch.

Maybe it’s just because I was moving so slowly, but there just seemed to be a little bit of charm around every corner.

And then we went to lunch.  At the Loveless Cafe. Can you say fried food?

Which is where the okra came in.  And the sweet tea.

…of which I had gallons.   Normally, I’d have limited myself a bit, but that’s the beauty of the day after a marathon: all the fried food you want. Sorry, that’s just how I see things.

Just a couple more stops.  Hold on, we can make it.  We can do it together! Someone sing Kum Ba Yah already.

Last month marked my fourth anniversary for this site, and I would have celebrated somehow but I was busy traveling between some of the most extreme conditions imagineable throughout the month of January.

For instance, Iowa:

In Iowa I helped on the farm. You know, with the hay and the animals:

It was so cold and snowy. Also? It was so cold.

And by “helped on the farm” I mean was driven around in a warm car and looked at pretty farm scenes with animals. And then we went to lunch.

Later in the month, I got to warm up a little, as I’m sure you might remember. There was no farm, and no animals.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are some animals.

And they, if possible, moved slower than me.

So what I’m really saying is that January went really fast, and, well, February is, too and if I don’t hurry up and find something to do to celebrate that four years we’ll be at five years.

Which is where I must ask you, Internet, what should I do to celebrate? Write a revealing post?  Give something away? Redesign the blog a little? (This may just be already in progress.) Maybe go for a midnight run and take pictures? I don’t know, help me!

I’m being simple-minded here, I’m sure. I know. It’s just that I’ve had this cold and you would not believe the amount of…. nevermind,  it wasn’t okay to share more than that four years ago and it’s still not okay now. But my head is clouded, and I need help.

Now here’s a pretty beach:

Thank you, and The End.

It was my full intention, laptop in hand (read: carry-on) as I boarded the plane, to keep up with blog posting while I was away last week. And I did do that. For one day. Thank you. That was Friday the 22nd, and oh, look here we are over a week later and I am finally finding it in me to catch up. And if this were Twitter, I would end that statement with a hashtag something like #geewherehaveweheardthisbefore, because we most definitely have heard this before.

It’s just that I have such an easy tiiimmme unplugging, you know?  Yeah, I know, your heart breaks for me. Moving right along.  Because this trip, though somewhat planned, turned out to be even so much more than I knew. And I want to retell it. In parts.  You’re welcome.

The Point of the Trip

Now then, the point of the trip itself: Operation Sneak Onto An Island. I actually didn’t call it that, but I should have, because that’s what I had to do. And the whole point of that was that two friends of mine, I’d call them island friends, although they live stateside most of the time like me, you, and the rest of us that freeze several months out of the year. But I met my friends on the island, and therefore they are island friends. And they were having an anniversary celebration, complete with a vow renewal ceremony. Because they were married there, and they wanted to celebrate there, ten years later. (And those last several sentences, and likely those that follow, would give my college English professors a heart attack.)

My friends, the ones having an anniversary, were celebrating on Friday the 22nd, and they invited me months and months ago, when I was still employed and restricted from vacation time (ah, those were the days!), and basically had zero hope of being able to attend. It was a sad thing when I had to turn down that invite. But! Then I quit my job, and became a full-time, temporary loafer, so no longer was I tied down.  Combine that with an unheard of low fare alert I received just a few weeks before the actual date of the event and a couple of other veerrrryy generous friends who allow me to bunk with them more often than I deserve, and the surprise covert operation was a done deal.

Keeping this secret was so difficult for me. It meant not saying anything on my blog, and therefore Twitter, or Facebook or to any mutual friends (minus a few in on the covert operation). A little reaffirmed fact about me: I can keep a “bad” secret with me until death, but ask me to keep a fun secret and I am impossible. But when I got to show up and surprise my friends, and then be a part of their celebration, it was worth it.

It was the home of these same friends I brought my friends down to stay in back in October for my 30th birthday, you might remember, and well, just like the island itself, it can be a magical place.

It was a beautiful celebration in a beautiful place, and I’m certainly better for having been part of it, not to mention friends with all these wonderful people whom I met completely by timing and chance.

Speaking of Timing and Chance

Here’s where the story gets even more interesting.

I arrived on the island the night before my friends’ celebration, which meant that all of the 21st I was either in an airport or on a plane. Somewhere between 10 and a billion hours of voluntary torture is what it takes to get down to the Caribbean from the Western U.S., and my lands as worth it as it is, it kicks your ass. There is no other way to put that, it just plain kicks your ass. And because of my secret, I couldn’t complain about any of it on the Internet. I know, right?!

On the last leg of my trip, in the Miami airport (which, in my opinion, has not moved out of the category of AWFUL in over a decade) I collapsed on a vinyl chair and drank what was probably my fiftieth caffeinated beverage of the day. A couple sat down next to me along with another man, and before long I saw that they were smart, because they were drinking beer. We started chatting, and I’d noticed the girl had a long garment bag with her, which could only mean one thing: Island Wedding.

Soon we found out we were not only on the same flight but sitting in the same row on the plane, where I did join in the beer drinking after all. We talked about the islands, about weddings, about love, about life. It was great. And I only had one beer, so I know it really must have all been real.

I also know it was real because at this point, I know that’s just how things happen in the islands. It just is. Whether you’re there, on your way, or somewhere in between, when that place is involved I’m telling you, good things and good people just come into the picture. I can’t explain it, I don’t necessarily want to, but I know it’s true. So when the happy couple, who I’d learned were actually eloping, asked me to take photos of their wedding, I was not entirely surprised. Shocked? Yes. Intimidated? Yes. Questioning their sobriety? Yes.

Long story short, though, they were sober, I was sober, and I went out two days later and photographed their very beautiful, very quiet, very perfect island wedding ceremony. We sailed to a small island, just the couple, the captain and his first mate, and me.  It was a beautiful day, and I was grateful for the invite.  And that day, I also got to put “Photographer” in the field for occupation on a customs form, which was a highlight I won’t soon forget.

Serendipitous, I tell you.

Stranded in the Islands

Three days later, after beaching and hiking and generally finding absolutely nothing to complain about all day every day, it was time for my quick trip to end.  I woke up at five in the morning, my friend (bless her!) drove me across the island, I caught a ferry, caught a taxi, went through customs, and ended up in the airport. Kids, it is a long day just getting to the airport, and you’re not even on the plane yet.

I’ve tried various ways of explaining this next part, but I can’t seem to do it better than I did in the emails I sent to a couple friends when they asked, paraphrased, HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET STUCK IN THE TROPICS? My response, below:

The plane I was supposed to leave on broke, something about a cooling fan, so they couldn’t go anywhere (fine by me, the pilot says no and I’m totally cool with that, right?) but the thing is, to even get to the airport I have to take a car ride across the island, then a ferry, then a taxi from the dock to the airport, and then deal with customs, which is fake as compared to most customs, but nonetheless, customs, and then sit in an airport with, literally, no PA system (at least one that can be heard). IF YOU CAN IMAGINE.

So, when someone says the flight’s not leaving and they’ll either book you on a later one (maybe) or one the following day it’s like, um, NO, because what you went through just to get there (not to mention packing up the flip-flops and breaking out the parka) is just not worth going all the way back for 12 hours. So, since I was going to be coming back anyway, I demanded it be at least a 48-hour extension.  And by “demanded” I mean spoke very kindly, smiled, and observed all cultural and customary manners. Ha.

And that’s how I got to spend a couple more days “stranded” in the Caribbean. I was staying with friends, so they gladly took me back in. Which is something I will never figure out as long as I live, how I got friends such as these. Crazy. Serendipitous. All of it.

The End.

Until next month.

One of my goals for 2010 is to learn more about photography, and this includes learning more about the cameras and lenses I own.  Even several years after taking up this extremely cheap (heh) habit in a pretty serious way, the ways I have still to grow outnumber what I know by about a billion to one.

One of the ways I’m tackling this already is by taking photos every day.  This is not a unique thing, of course, there are 365 photo streams and projects all over the Internet. But what I’m hopeful it’ll  help me do is think about taking photos a lot more. Reinforcement is what my brain needs to learn something, and I’m hoping to do better.  The first month or so I’m probably just going to concentrate on taking the actual photos, and paying attention to my day, but after that I may actually start experimenting with aperture, shutter speed, f-stop, and many other things that I either don’t know the definition of or just stated redundantly without realizing it.  Sounds fun, right?

It’s only been a couple weeks, and I already find myself paying attention more. I love that. I usually consider myself a pretty observant person, but to see something and then record it as part of your life? That’s pretty cool.

If you’d like, you can follow along with my Daily Photos at: http://justrunjustlivejustbe.com/365/ and there’s a link right to it on the sidebar.  One of my other goals with this is to try to be honest with my day, but at the same time I will try not to be too boring.

Sometimes I might even succeed in that. Sometimes I might not.

I would love to say more but I have to run out to my exciting morning of courtroom observations now, and I don’t think you’re allowed to wear fuzzy slippers and a hoodie to court.  Well, at least most people shouldn’t.

Thanks for following along!

I know Christmas and holiday times bring out a lot of optimism and wonderment in people (except when you’re at the mall. So help you if you are at the mall), but I tend to be like that a lot of the time. It is kind of how I’ve lived so far, thinking “what if?” and then, more often than not, actually seeing things fall into place. I’m doing a lot of that today, because I just cannot see any other way. If the whole world doesn’t know by now, not to say that the whole world cares, I’ve been out of a regular gig (JOB) for over six weeks now.

Although this was all my choice, it’s not without it’s moments of panic. Planning and reassurance aside, sometimes it’s all I can do to keep myself from FREAKING OUT. I mean the kind of freaking out only reserved for emergencies, but in my mind, there’s a really thin line between EMERGENCY and CALM DOWN, STUPID, it’s all going to work out. I live on that line a lot.

But I think I also picked the best time of year to live on that line, because everyone around me is a little more optimistic and reassured, too. Even if I am in a panic and flailing around in the streets come January 2nd, right now I’m okay.

In my world, it’s Christmas! No need to panic, for there are cookies and snowmen and lights!

(The above three photos taken at the Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas earlier this month. The majority of the display is created from flowers and live plants. It is phenomenal, if you ask me.)

And there are also baked goods galore around here, as I’m sure there are where ever you are, too. My plan: eat them all. Yes, I know. But in all practicality there is a chance I will have to live outdoors soon and I’m thinking I’m going to need the extra layers of warmth. And, man, Key Lime Cookies can provide that layer, let me assure you!

Alright, truth be told, I really don’t think I’m going to be living on the street. That is the optimistic part of me, the part of me that knows it’s going to work out. And by “it” I mean a lot of things. Number one being my immediate future. In spite of how crazy it sounds.

In the mean time, I cannot help but party a little.

There’s nothing like a pile of dirty dishes and a tub full of empty wine bottles to make you feel like it’s all going to work out, right?

So that’s why I can easily think of a What If list. In spite of it sounding stupid and crazy and being within moments of a freak out, I still feel so close to that What If that I can almost touch it.

I hope your holiday, whatever it may be, is full of optimism and dirty dishes. And maybe some cookies and wine.