Running Chick

Back in May, I bought a little cherry tomato plant from Wally(mart).  It lived on my deck, getting plenty of sun and water all summer long.  It grew slowly and didn't flower until August, but nothing ever happened.  I figured it was a dud.

When the weather started getting cooler, I brought it inside.  It had a few flowers left on it, but not that many.  Those flowers did eventually turn into fruit, but not as much as I was expecting.  But whatever.  I got to have a few salads with "real" tomatoes at least.  After the fruit was gone, I figured it would croak and that would be the end of that.

Well, it didn't.  After all the fruit was gone, it started growing like a weed.  It's outgrown it's cage to the point where I've had to carefully wind the branches around the cage just to keep them from breaking off.  So, I figured I'd keep on watering it and see what happened.

The other week I noticed three tiny little flowers had appeared.  Then more showed up.  Now, this week a couple of those flowers have turned into tiny tomatoes!

Look!

Our cold spell finally passed on Sunday and it was a beautiful, sunny, blue-skied, 23 degree day.  The perfect day for another tromp through the woods on my snowshoes.

My tracks from last week are barely noticeable after all the snow we received in the past few days.  There were lots of other tracks around from furry critters and critters on skis.  No snowmobile tracks though, so I ended up breaking trail all the way.

I bought some gaiters, but they were too small to even fit around my calves.  I guess I must have man-calves.  Gotta get me some gaiters.  I also got a new camera, so I was messing around with the macro function, thanks to the tiny pine cones I found.

 I tried to find the cemetery and ended up taking two wrong trails before finally giving up and heading back.  The good news is that I think I did end up finding the trail to the cemetery, so next weekend I'll take another stab at getting there.  In all, I tromped around for 3.25 miles and got to spend two hours outside on a really nice day.

Have I mentioned that I hate running on the treadmill?  That's what I've been doing this week while Mother Nature tries to remember that we're not Antarctica.  Since Tuesday, high temperatures have been anywhere between 0 and 5, while the lows have been, well, low.

 Here's what thermometer on my car said last night around 7pm

It did say -11 at one point, but I didn't think to take a picture.

So, Tuesday and Wednesday I logged my boring and dull miles on the dreadmill at the local fitness center.  My runs were uneventful, except when I accidentally snagged the cord for my headphones with my hand, which sent my iPhone flying through the air to come down with a very loud bang on the mental front of the treadmill and caused everybody in the gym to stop what they were doing and look at me. Whoopsie!

Thursday morning I rolled out bed, took my first steps and immediately felt like I stepped on a sharp stone with my left heel.  Throughout the day, the pain got progressively worse until I could barely put weight on my left foot.  I was really concerned that it was plantar fasciitis, and I guess I'm unconvinced that it's not, but it seems to be getting a lot better as time goes on.  Yesterday it was about 50% better.  Today it's about 80% better and I'm walking without a limp.  There's still some pain there, but it's not the piercing pain that it was on Thursday.  I was supposed to run 3 miles today, but I decided to skip that.  I'm hoping to do some snowshoeing in Eagle Harbor tomorrow and test out the new gaiters I bought.  As long as my heel is agreeable.

I'm contemplating buying a new digital camera.  The one I have now is about 7 years old and it's pretty beat up.  I dropped it in my driveway a couple of years ago and the display got all distorted and fuzzy and sometimes that trickles into the photos.  It's also big and bulky when compared with today's cameras.  I'd really like to get something that's small enough to easily slip into my pocket or purse so I can take it with me all the time.  I've got my eye on the Olympus FE-330.  It's very light and compact and has all sorts of neat functions like digital image stabalization which is cool because I can't seem to take a picture that's not blurry.  It also gets Josh's stamp of approval in the resolution and optical zoom department.  I don't really know beans about that stuff, so it's always good when Josh approves.