The Long and Winding Blog Post

I've had a couple unexpected workouts these past couple days. That's what I like to call activities that shouldn't exhaust me or make my muscles hurt, but do anyway. Ergo, I'm counting them as workouts.

Last night, I helped my friend Heather stick a headboard on her wall. Yes, really. She bought a giant headboard sticker of sorts from whatisblik.com, and it was too cumbersome for one person to adhere to the wall. I was intrigued by the whole idea of forgoing actually furniture for an illusion of furniture, so I went over to her apartment, armed with a level, and we got to work. I proved myself to be adept at rubbing the sticker backing with a special credit card sized tool to transfer the headboard outline to the sticky part. I realize I'm not doing a good job of explaining this, but the point is this: I hunched over Heather's dining room table with the tool and put all my strength into scraping the sticker backing. All the pent up energy I had from a day of sitting in an office chair was poured into scraping paper with a piece of plastic. And the pay-off was fantastic. The sticker on the wall looked so good -- like a real headboard! When I arrived home, though, my back and shoulders ached and I was already starting to feel embarrassed about how tired my body was.

I woke up this morning with a bit of a start from a deep sleep (kind of rare for me, as I usually start to open one eye before the alarm goes off). I hadn't decided if I was going to run today, but I made a quick decision to wait until tomorrow when the temps were a little warmer. I also have a bit of an exhausting day ahead of me, so I didn't want to kick it off when an exhausting run. I didn't mention this in my last post, but I'm not quite at the point where a morning jog energizes me for the day. It relaxes me, and it kind of makes me feel like I could fall asleep at my desk.

Okay, so running was out. I'll do that tomorrow, when it's not 19 degrees outside. Despite the frigid temps, I was feeling compelled to do something about the dying sod in our backyard. Neil and I just spent a boatload of money turning our backyard into a functional, beautiful retreat, and at the tail end of the project we decided to have sod put down to really make everything look polished.

You know how some people get a puppy to prepare them for parenthood? I think people should just install sod. That shit is needy.

Sod needs a boatload of water to take root in your backyard. We had it installed about three or four weeks ago, and we've been really good at keeping it watered and very grateful for the rainy November days in Nashville. But this past weekend winter set in. And my "this is my moment of zen" attitude toward standing in the backyard with the hose disappeared. And now, it's 19-freaking-degrees outside and I couldn't run the hose if I wanted to. And I do want to. It turns out that a dry freeze is the worst thing that can happen to your sod (dramatic, right?) so even it's freezing out, it's better for your grass to be iced over than just dry and really damn cold. Neil and I both reached a point of frustration yesterday with the prospect of watching our investment die right in front of us, so I made a plan to come home from work today at 3:00 p.m. to water the lawn. That was the forecasted time that the temperature was to rise above 32 degrees. But now I have a meeting scheduled at that time, so I needed a plan B.

Maybe it was because I was still wiping the sleep out of my eyes, or maybe I made it because I couldn't bear to have another frustrated conversation with my husband about it, but I after I decided to scrap a run, I resolved to get my lawn watered even if it meant filling buckets full of water in my kitchen sink and carrying them outside to pour on the sod.

So...that's what I've been doing for the past two hours.

Seriously, I've written this blog post over the last hour in 2 minute spurts as I waited for the big metal pail to fill up in the kitchen sink. Then, with my wellies and work gloves on (but still in my pajamas), I carried it out to the yard, straight up Laura Ingalls style.

And I thought my back hurt yesterday.

So that's my workout story for the day. I'm probably going to be more exhausted at work than if I had gone for a run, but at least I know I've taken some action to protect my little lawn.