Happy Easter!
“So did you guys do anything?” my mother asked.
I knew that someone was bound to, and so I had my answer ready: We took Jolie for an Easter run, gave her an Easter bath, and were currently eating some Easter popcorn and waiting for our Easter chicken to be ready.
This was, for those of you keeping count (everyone, I know), our second Easter together. It was also, even more random-trivia-for-when-I’m-famous-ally, our first second holiday together, since I moved in last March. And if you really want to stretch the bounds of your interest in the details, it was someone’s odd interpretation of Jolie’s first anniversary as a member of our family, since we got her the day before last Easter. As a result, the egg dye that my mother sent sat forgotten in a cupboard while we watched every tiny move our new dog made, occasionally wondering aloud, “Is that normal?” and marveling over the fact that, inept was we were, she just kept on breathing like the trooper that she is.
This year we’re mostly over the staring thing, but I couldn’t find white eggs anywhere within the city limits, and that’s how that goes.
In the meantime, I think that my husband is trying to kill me.
A little over a week ago we were running through the woods when we stumbled upon what looked to be a set of pull-up bars of varying heights. Off to the side, a stick figure on a sign illustrated the concept. “Okay,” said Nick, “so do as many pull-ups as you can, and then we’ll keep running!”
Seriously.
So I twisted futilely on the bar for a few seconds, and then convinced him that we should really be moving on. On, I mean, to a set of low benches and stumps, where the stick figure cheerfully demonstrated a push-up variation that I believe should technically be outlawed under the Geneva Convention, but I still can’t seem to get anyone to look at my research on the subject.
Nick’s eyes just got bigger and bigger as he realized that we had inadvertently stumbled across a public circuit-training path. And while I tried whispering subliminal messages in his ear every night that week, he still remembered that it was there when Easter Sunday rolled around. And again on Easter Monday.
A few things:
- I can’t do even a single pull-up. Remember the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge, or whatever it was, where we had to touch our toes and run a mile and do pull-ups and stuff? What the hell has happened to me since then?
- The circuit includes climbing walls in three heights. Two women were already looking doubtfully at them when we got there, and tried to get us to go first. I declined, and one of them trotted nervously up to the middle one, and surprised us all by making it over quite handily. When they were gone, I took a good running start, jumped, reached…and smacked flat into it. I felt a tad like a certain cartoon coyote, if you get my drift.
- Fitness is bad for marriages. As evidence, I offer the fact that when Nick tripped on a tire-run-type activity and ended up rolling helplessly through the black mud, I laughed. You would have, too.
- Today I lack the ability to do anything at all requiring abdominal muscles. I had to push with my hands in order to sit up in bed, and lying back down again was an excruciating process that I will not describe.
- Jolie is disgustingly fit. And perky. Why does she have to be so perky?
In other news, I’ve taken to baking again. I mean, I don’t want to get into it much right now, but cheese, leek, and bacon scones were involved, and there will be more, and I’ll go into why another time. For now, I’ll just say this:
- Cheese, leek, and bacon scones are not your friends on a morning when you intend to do a lot of jumping and climbing. They are not, in fact, even on a morning when you mostly just intend to try to avoid doing those things as much as possible.
And did I mention Happy Easter?