Exploring At The Gym

I'm at a total loss for what happened to today. Between six staff evaluations, countless meetings and preparing to head out of town, I'm just depleted. So, I'll go back to yesterday.

Ryan and I decided to get some gym time in after work. We headed over to our local rec facility, housed in a tall, skinny building that used to be the old downtown YMCA. We climbed the stairs up to the running track that's suspended a level above the basketball course. It's a strange open ring hanging in the air around the court with only a glass partition and railing keeping us from falling down below. We can see and hear the basketball players. They can see and hear us. When you walk, but especially when you run, you can feel a bit of bobbing resistance below your feet. I'm not quite sure how they make it work. We walked at a brisk pace for about forty-five minutes and toward the end Ryan lapped me with some jogging.

Ten minutes before closing time we walked down to the next level and started exploring some of the other spaces that are tucked away in this old gym. We walked around the racquet ball gallery, but no one was playing. We checked out the squash court, but couldn't figure out how to turn on the lights. Next we found the boxing gym, which looked to be in sorry shape. But given our most recent obsession with Season Four of the HBO series The Wire , we couldn't fight our excited urge to bang around on the punching bags for a while pretending we were in Dennis' gym. So we tried out all of the bags, except the speed ball, which you had to check out from the front desk. Punching, kickboxing style. Whatever. They are heavier than you might think. We discovered two old rowing machines (with instructions on the wall circa 1986, literally). We each climbed on one and started to do a little rowing race next to each other. Ryan tried to get in synch with my rowing and I tried to get out of synch. We laughed and kept going for a while. It was nice to find what felt like a secret old forgotten corner tucked away in the gym where we could just play and explore.

The gym closed and when we walked outside I could see that it had just started snowing. I hadn't watched my usual morning news in a while, so I had no idea it was coming. The flakes looked lovely and we stopped for a bit on the steps of the Big Red Calvary Church. I looked on toward the Marquette campus and Ryan looked back toward downtown. Through the small windows on the arched doorway of the church I saw a small framed icon hanging on the wall.

We walked over to the library so I could grab a book I'm interested in reading by someone I worked with a few years back. It's called From The Pews In The Back, a collection of essays written by young women about their experience with Catholocism and Catholic identity. I've been meaning to check it out to pay homage to Jen, one of the book's editors, but also because I think it may be of some use to me in my work.

When we got home Ryan assembled and frosted his "wacky" cake for a school party:



Our dinner of Potato Vegetable Curry (made by Megan):

Cutting potatoes:



In the pot:



Final product with rooster sauce: