January 2025

On Sundays Brett and I go walking or running or a little bit of both.

When we first moved here it was hard to get used to the hills. Columbus is mostly flat and the Poconos are mostly hilly. We moved here without visiting first so I had this idea that I’d bike everywhere. There’s a little grocery just outside our community and I pictured myself strolling there or biking for our weekly groceries only I didn’t realize that the grocery is at the bottom of a steep hill and that there are several hills on the way there, too. I mean, it’s not impossible — people do it — but your ice cream is definitely going to melt if you try to do it in the summer.

Anyway it was a lot to get used to running-wise and I’m still learning how to do it or more how to manage my expectations around it.

Back to Sundays. We used to do a long run together every Sunday (back in Columbus) and we’d walk to warm up and talk together then run then walk some more at the end. Lots of talking, too, and we plan our day and plan our future (and before we moved, we daydreamed about what come next) and we struggled with it here because Bret really hated those hills. I mean really a whole bunch of hatred.

Then we found Promised Land lake and it’s still hilly but there’s no traffic (or barely any) and a whole bunch of the route is very private. At the front and at the end there are vacation cabins but even in the middle of summer most of them are empty. They are interesting in themselves because they come in all sorts of styles but they are privately owned (just the buildings, not the land they’re on) and most have running water but they all have outhouses.

The whole route is about six miles and it’s marked so that you can keep track of the distance. There’s a 5k route, too, and it tells you where to turn around. And — big bonus — there are heated bathrooms where we park our car.

Today we went to Conservation Island, which is a car-free route off the main road. Brett went and stood out on the lake when he saw someone with a tent out in the middle ice fishing and knew it’d be safe.

It was a much shorter walk than usual (just three miles) and he wore the yaktracks and I wore my Icebug cleated boots.

Now I’m back at my desk using the Esuit chrome extension to delete everything on my Facebook.

I thought it was as good a time as any to start an online journal once again. I thought of starting a substack but then I’d want to find readers. It would be weird to write an email and send it to literally no one. Much weirder than writing into the empty space here.

At least that’s how I figure it.

I started writing my very first blog on January 1st, 2001. That entry doesn’t exist anymore but I think it was two lines and it had links because I was thinking of starting an actual web log; you know a curated collection of links with commentary. Instead I started a blog.

Back then I was 31. I had an almost 4-year old. I lived in Ohio. I wrote for a (meager) living. What else? I was living in my first house and we had one car.

Now I am 55 (as of today) and I have an almost 28-year old (who lives in DC) and an almost 21-year old (who lives in Ohio). I live in the Poconos (I counted 33 wild turkeys foraging their way across the ravine of our backyard on this snowy morning). I make a living as a therapist and am trying to add to that living by being a parent educator and we now live in our third house that is by far my favorite.

I don’t know what I will write about here but I just feel like I might want to write. Also it will be a Zuckerberg-free space to post my pictures because I do like taking pictures.

The one I took today when a client unexpectedly canceled so I had time for a quick 2-miles in the cold.