Tennessee: Part 2

Some highlights from Gatlinburg and the cabin:

All 25 of us took a lovely drive around Cade's Cove.  E and Little Guy and I also got to explore Arrowmont and have a quick visit with Barbara, a very talented woodworker and close friend of my family. 

I Should Be 83

When I got back to work after our trip, there was an email waiting for me that said I was eligible for a free upgrade on my work cell phone.  I didn't really care too much, since my work cell gets only sporadic use, and it is, after all, for work, not for fun.  So I picked a new phone at random from the list of options available (I'm pretty sure I passed up an iPhone 4 in there, so you can tell how invested I was in this decision), and the next Monday a box arrived at my office.  I didn't even bother to open the box until Thursday morning (again, you can see how underwhelmed I was by this opportunity), which turned out to be a bit of a problem, since a coworker's new phone had been shipped along with mine, and he had been thinking for the previous three days that his phone was stolen in the mail.

Oops.

Anyway, when I finally got the new phone unwrapped and charged, this is what I was looking at:

Great, it adds a little flair to my desk.  But then I had to actually use it.

I should note here that I love technology.  If it does fancy stuff with data, images, etc. I'm all for it.  But with telecommunications, I prefer an unplugged approach.  I don't need to have constant access to my email, and if I need to call someone, I'm only looking for a phone, not a carnival of apps.  (This might be related to why I am not exactly speedy with responding to emails and why this blog is not particularly current most of the time)

So.  I have a 100% Old Woman relationship with this phone.  I do not like sorting through numerous icons that may or may not have obvious uses.  I am cranky that there isn't always a keypad visible and that, when I am using the keypad, I can't feel that I've pressed a button.  I can't seem to 'slide' the screen right to unlock it, so I occasionally miss calls and have to call people back (feel free to laugh at me here).  And the last straw for an Old Woman: I am totally confident that it is extra, EXTRA unsafe to use a smartphone while driving.

Tennessee: Part 1

It's been crazy hot here this summer, and we aren't fans of using the AC in the car for extended periods of time, so we took advantage of the fact that Little Guy wakes us up a couple of times a night and hit the road by about 5:15 AM.  We had planned to drive only halfway - about 5 1/2 hours - so we could be out of the car by the hottest part of the day.  To that end, we went online to bid on a hotel and managed to get something that was not only really cheap but also turned out to be a mostly legit establishment, with a couple of notable exceptions:

1) It appeared that a family of ducks had taken up permanent residence in the swimming pool.

2) When I asked the woman at the front desk if the hotel had a gym (as we'd been led to believe by their website), she said, "There's a fitness room on the second floor.  It's not the greatest; it's just cardio, but there's a treadmill that works.  You'll need this key for it."  And she handed me the magnetic tag to activate the treadmill.  So I took the key upstairs and found the fitness room, which had 5 cardio machines in it, 3 of which were obviously not working (e.g. control panels ripped off).  There were 2 treadmills; I was fooled into thinking that the one with the screen lit up would work.  It did not.  The second treadmill did, in fact, work when I attached the key, but it was really noisy and thumpy, and the key wouldn't really stay attached by itself, so I had to try to hold it in place while running, which made things really awkward.  I didn't last long.

The next day, we drove the rest of the way to Knoxville to stay with E's brother's family for a couple of days.  Little Guy met the first of many aunts, uncles, and cousins who continued to arrive for the reunion in bunches over the next couple of days. 

My dad also drove down from Richmond to meet Little Guy.  During his visit, we did a little hike up Clingman's Dome (we forgot our camera) and had brunch at The French Market in Knoxville, which was delicious.

Then we were off to the cabin in Gatlinburg for the reunion.

So very, very glad to be home after 12 days of comings and goings in eastern Tennessee.  Bonus: a slightly rainy afternoon in what was an extremely hot and dry neighborhood when we left it nearly 2 weeks ago.  Double bonus: beer.

Little Guy was a really good traveler but still seemed ecstatic to be lying on our bed under the fan instead of sitting in the carseat.  Now he is totally conked out in his bouncy chair, which he appears to have nearly outgrown while we've been gone.

Now to sort through all the pictures...

Photos That Say "I'm done with this"

Little Guy is one month old.  And a couple of days ago, I made my first concerted effort at actual exercise since his birth.  There is a small fitness room at our apartment complex, which means both that I don't have to try to rush to the campus gym while Little Guy is sleeping and that I don't have to brave the heat/humidity for outdoor exercise.  I had only intended to walk on the treadmill for a while, but it was broken, so I went straight to the elliptical.  It was neither a very long nor a very rigorous workout, but it felt really good to get started again. 

I kept up some low-grade exercise through most of my pregnancy, but I've really been looking forward to working back up to some of my previous exercise habits.  In particular, I've really missed running.  Not that I am, by any stretch of the imagination, a serious runner.  But in the 6 or 7 months before I got pregnant, I started running, made it a normal part of my week, did a couple of short races, and discovered that, while I don't always love the act and experience of running, I really love the satisfaction of having done it.  During the first trimester of pregnancy, I barely had the energy to get out for a walk a few times a week, so I got out of the habit of running and was afraid to try to reinstate the habit once I had more energy but was also more pregnant. 

Sometimes I think perhaps it wasn't objectively such a big deal but was just what my pregnant brain decided to seize on, but I would often get really sad or jealous during pregnancy when I'd see other people running.  There's an annual marathon here in April; the route uses the bike path that we live right next to, so I heard/saw runners going by all morning.  And I felt really left out.  Which is a bit ridiculous, since I've never had any intention of participating in that particular race.  For one thing, I've never been in marathon shape (yet!), and for another, I do not envy those runners the race conditions that they had that day - 20+ mph winds and, eventually, a tornado warning.  But I still wanted to be out there. 

I expect it will still be a while before I'm really exercising consistently/normally, but all the same, I'm very happy to have the prospect of running back.

A sample of the first of many less-than-perfect family photo collections to come: