Ajuga in bloom

DSCN6498.JPG
Originally uploaded by matthewsunessa

This picture from May shows the vibrant purple flowers ajuga kicks up when it gets good light and ample water. (The pipe in the background is a downspout, which the flowers are happy to live near.)

All of this ajuga came from an original group of plants that Katy sent from St. Louis. Less than two years later, we're moving offshoots to other spots in the yard. We didn't expect the excellent flowering, a very pleasant side effect of copious spring rain.

Garden progress!

This year saw leap-and-bounding changes to the garden "space" (not much) that surrounds our house. Although the house reaches almost the boundary of the property, the trained eye can detect patches on non-house that I believe gardeners call "dirt." Naturally, the largest amount of this growth-enabling substance is right where the sun doesn't shine, along our house's eastern side and in shade of the neighbors and two trees. Here's how that area looked in April of 2006.

To improve the space in general, we added a gravel path to the side yard in 2007. This meant pulling up the bony bricks, lining the path with something practical, and adding an initial line of plants to the front sidewalk, which runs along the top edge of this photo. In went a pair of rhododendrons, some pachysandras, and a couple of other flowering plants. That helped, but looks even better this year after the new terracing and a half-dozen flora species.

Of all the flowers, I look forward to the lilies the most. They come in a beautiful orange-red, as seen below. If only they stuck around more than a couple of weeks! Maybe a complement of long-bloomers will add some balance to their burn-out-young mentality. 

Our best shot of this year's lilies, which bloom a gorgeous deep red.

April came and went so fast

We barely had time to blog...Birthday his (Apirl 3), Mom visit (both of ours in St. Louis April 9-14), Tax day (April 15, and predictably we mailed our taxes on April 13), Boston Marathon (April 21, and Sunny didn't run, but instead worked the LUNA bar booth for the Marathon Expo), and Birthday hers (April 28).

Oh, and our virtual garage band on RockBand has earned the adoration of over 700,000 "fans". We rock the songs on drum and guitar on the Hard level now. How's that for quality time spent, eh? Busy month!

But here are some of our favorite memory photos, in no particular order.

Everyone at Lewis & Clark's restaurant for the "Meeting of the Moms" (and Bill, and Barbara, and Steve, more of our extended family).

I spent a little time at Bradley's (Bill's son's place) while Matthew returned from a brief visit to his Grandma Thomas in Kentucky. While I waited with Brad, I noticed that he had some video games, which I knew Matthew would hone in on like a bee to honey when he finally arrived. So here's Mom grooving out to Matthew's skills on Guitar Hero, highly transferable from RockBand!

Matthew finding that safety triggers actually are a laughing matter while at the Gun Club with Bill. Everyone got in on the skeet shooting that day, including Mom and me who took turns firing shots and launching skeet from various points on the range.




click on the flickr animator on the left to see more!

They prefer the term "little filmstrips"

We caught a great series of short films tonight at the Museum of Fine Arts. The Asbury Shorts of New York group tours films every so often and this was the first gig in Boston.

http://www.mfa.org/calendar/event.asp?eventkey=32394&date=3/22/2008

The time ranged from ninety seconds to 18 minutes and included three by Jason Reitman, recently Oscar-nominated for Juno (though I liked Thank You for Smoking better, perhaps thanks to its contrarian style). Mr. Reitman became known through his short films, a common "resume" for filmmakers. If the program comes to your town (or you head to NYC), they're definitely worth a look.

The next 48-hour film project looms and though the team situation is unsettled, the producers and I have hatched a few story and shooting ideas. I hope we don't steal anything too obviously from the ones shown tonight!

Lately we've been...

Too busy to post notes to this blog, or so it seems. You may notice some recent photo updates in the flickr sidebar, but we haven't written anything about them. I won't make excuses; we have been busy and yet not too busy to post. In recent weeks we have been to:

1. One BU women's hockey game (they won!)
2. Church gatherings for brunch with our young adult friends, executive council meetings, various committee meetings, an all day leadership retreat (Sunessa took photos which will probably go on the First Church Cambridge UCC website fairly soon), and our own game night which ended up with guests in our loft space
   
3. And then of course there's work...and more work

But really, our number one diversions of late are Facebook.com and RockBand on Xbox. It seems that Facebook is no longer simply the crazy domain of 20-somethings that MySpace became. Now it's a popular networking website among our peers, and we have some pretty interesting peers! We play scrabulous (scrabble+fabulousness) with friends from near and far. We exchange comments on what our friends from high school have said about their recent trip to the grocery store. It's just so, you know, addictive...to reconnect easily and quickly with people you are (or at least once were) very fond of is a real treat in this rather disconnected world. For example,

Name:

Sunessa Schettler

Network:

Boston, MA

Here are some of Sunessa's friends on Facebook...

Liza Ryan Wozniak

Jessica Grass

Christine Claypoole

Elizabeth Wagner

Eric DeWitt

But enough about Facebook, our real, dirty little secret is that we are both pretty obsessed with RockBand. What is RockBand? Well, living room karaoke + drums + clicking plastic guitars + excellent animated characters that are "you" on your band's own "world tour" = RockBand, the game. It's a riot, seriously. I can't stop drumming to old Bon Jovi and new Freezepop tunes without wanting to perfect my score and get new gigs. Ever since Matthew bought it, we've spent at least an hour each night (three or more or weekends!) rockin' out together. He's mastering song on the Hard guitar level while I'm most comfortable on the Medium level drums. Seriously, it's teaching me valuable life skills...like how to drum drum drum until I want to run off and open that nightclub in Stockholm. Matthew really wants us to break through to that level, and with his mad guitar skillz, we just might get there

Should we keep our day jobs? Wait and see...

Sunny's Mid-week Training

Mid-week means a fair amount of training for me (Sunessa). While Matthew takes mid-day breaks for soccer several times each week (Tu, Th, Fr?), I usually workout in the mornings or evenings. It gets predictable after a while, so I've changed up my routine lately. For example, instead of just cycling/spinning at 6am on Wednesday mornings, I've started going swimming for 45 min and then doing the 7am spin instead, so I get a swim-bike combo. Three other days I'm in the gym between 6:30-8am lifting or running or taking a personal training client. One evening I go for my own workout, usually following an Intro to PT session for a client.

Yesterday, however, was different. I slept in and skipped my Wednesday morning routine because I knew that I had a mid-day instruction session on how to instruct special cardio/strength combo classes called BURN. What I didn't know is that this would be a participatory class and I would get sweaty, big-time. The instructor was Tina DeMarco, a master trainer, and she almost let me "just watch" but then I saw that two other trainers, Tom and Lesley, would be taking the class AND participating. I couldn't just sit on the sidelines in my office clothes! So I got changed into workout duds and laced up my shoes...

• First running interval: 10 mins total - 2 min warmup jogging, 1 min incline running followed by 1 min recovery for 4 repeats. The catch...a 3% incline raise on each run segment. Start with 3%, 6%, 9%, and finally 12% incline. "Slow your run speed if you need to" Tina said, but us trainers were too competitive for that.
  
• Strength interval #1: Lunges, Bicep curls, Shoulder presses, and more Lunges. After the hill running, those Lunges got the quads tired quickly. Now I see why they call this BURN...
• Second running interval: 10 mins total - speed over hills with a sprint at the end. This time Tina pushed the hills up to "only" 6% and told us about shin splints. Lots of her new clients in the BURN sessions had really sore shins from the hills. More stretching was needed, but she admitted that stretching is the first thing to get cut from these short, jam-packed 55 minute workouts. Go figure!
  
• Strength interval #2: Wide squats with more curls and presses, plus Pushups. Using the back of the treadmill for our hands, we did these on a slight incline. But still, pushups are hard, really hard when the instructor says "Down and hold for 10 seconds hovering 2" from the ground". More BURNing going on, this time in the chest.
• Third running interval: 10 mins total - speed, Speed and more SPEED. We cranked it up with each 30 second that passed, taking only one break to a jog in the middle of the set. This was not easy, but it was fun, and again we (the trainers) got a little competitive. I could see double digits on Lesley's 10+ mph pace, but I held back at 9mph while Tom probably hit 11 mph. I just did not want to get thrown off the back! Oh, and I'd have to go back to the office in less than 15 mins so I wanted to not sweat too much more. Ha.
• Strength interval #3: Abs on the BoSu - I love ab/core work, so this was no problem. I got to ask questions about success and challenges with offering these BURN courses. Tina told me that she gets lots of "regular" clients for these, and that she has a reputation for being tough (I can see why!). She pushes her clients a lot, and it made me realize that I should push mine harder, too. I'm too nice sometimes. I should really toughen up. BURN will help.
  

So that was how I spent my mid-afternoon break yesterday. Although it made me work later in the evening, it was worth the chance to try something different and learn about another training technique. I really enjoy this kind of athletic challenge, and being able to share it with others (and get paid for it!) is really great. I guess that's why I keep up with my Personal Training certifications and keep working (and working out) at Healthworks. It's good fun.

Wintertime geocaches

Sunny and I headed for natural surroundings today after a week of rain and varying temperatures played havoc with our attempts to get out and around. The blue skies meant easy times for geocaching and we picked out a likely suspect in the nearby Middlesex Fells, a large natural area north of Boston.

Friday's chilly weather preserved a snow cover and iced over most of the ponds. Much of the path featured frozen patches, some thin enough to see the water slowly circulating underneath.

It took an hour or so to reach the geocache site and poke around. It featured great views of the adjacent towns, as does about any hill in Boston. We watched the moon move across the afternoon sky and eventually found the cache, a Rubbermaid container secured under the edge of a boulder. (As with most places called "fells," rocks are plentiful.) After failing to find one in our neighborhood this morning, it was nice to succeed on a larger scale.

Sunny attended a social event hosted by the magazine Science tonight, while Matthew organized the new closet setup and watched Saturday Night at the Fights between our kitties. (They scrap a lot, with no actual harm to report.) Weather.com foretells similar weather tomorrow, so perhaps another geocache will turn up...