I really enjoy reading Hollie’s daily blog posts and I often mean to establish a daily blog posting habit, but many of my weekdays are so samey that it doesn’t feel worth it. “Dear Blog, Today I went to work and was too tired to limit my kid’s screen time” would get repetitive after a while and makes me think of that time in Firefly when Jayne finds Simon’s diary. “Dear Diary, Today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.” (Actually, that could be my diary too. If you drop the pompous part, it could be either of my siblings’ diary.)
So, Tuesday through Friday never feels like blogging about it would be very interesting, but sometimes I do get up to stuff on the weekends, especially now that we’re 6 weeks into the school year and the weather is gorgeous. So! Case in point! M. and I are very sedentary creatures, which is not great for either of our cardiovascular fitness or general physical stamina, and we have recently watched the Lord of the Rings movies (he’s not interested in reading the books which is fine except it means he doesn’t know about Tom Bombadil who, in case you haven’t heard, is a merry fellow - bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow!), so I decided we would (figuratively) walk to Mordor. Different people have calculated the distance and made various apps and challenges. I ended up going with mordorwalk.app, which is an adorable little web app for tracking your walk. I love not having to install anything.
This is a project that will take us years, many many years, because we do not keep up a hobbit’s pace of 18 miles a day.
Nay, we began with a trail that’s only a third of a mile long because, as I mentioned, Very Sedentary.
If you’re going to walk to Mordor, you obviously need nourishment, so we made lembas bread with a recipe from Insanely Good Recipes. It was, indeed, insanely good, and M. said he wants to bake from scratch more. This is great because homemade baked goods are pretty much guaranteed to be more nourishing than processed baked goods, and also, I love how baking isn’t watching dudes yell at their friends on YouTube.
So we made the lembas bread, waited for W. to get home from visiting his dad, and then the three of us packed the lembas bread in a bag and headed to a park with a lovely little 1/3 mile loop. While we were walking, we saw a toad! I didn’t get a picture but it was a very cool toad, green and yellow and great at hopping.
We hung out on the park playground after our walk and vaguely crashed some 2-year-old’s birthday party, by which I mean we shared the rad accessible see-saw with some older kids who were attending. I realized that I operate on the assumption that at any gathering of families with young children, I will know at least one family there other than my own. I did not at this, and as my kid gets older, that will probably continue.
Thoroughly exhausted from interacting with strangers, we went home and retreated into our respective introvert screen holes.
That was Saturday! Then on Sunday, we went to see Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom in a theater with only 24 seats. It felt like a really big screening room in somebody’s house. Very cozy! We strolled over to the Jeni’s on the other end of the mall from the movie theater and I had a scoop of Opaque, the gothest ice cream, in a black buttercrisp waffle bowl. We took W’s mom and M’s bestie with us for the movie and ice cream, and that was very pleasant.
See! Sometimes I do things!