wrigley's big day. from wrigley's point of view.

So you've had two versions of yesterday's big fun. Here's how Wrigley saw things:

Guys! Guys! Get up. I'm hungry. Scratch. Scratch.

Gotta go outside!

Yay! Breakfast! It's my favorite! Yay!

Hm. Something's up. The guys are talking to me. They're taking out my leash. What's this bandanna thing she's tying around my neck? Feels itchy. Oh, well, I'm lookin' sharp. Yes, indeedy.

Oh, we're going in the car. We're going somewhere I know. I'm going to start singing in the back seat. Loud. Yes, more singing.

Hey, we're stopping. I'm getting out of the car. Ooh ... gotta pee on this tree! And this one! And this one!

I know where we are: the square. Hooray!

Wow. There's a lot of people around. Lots of them. They're all crowding in on me. I should bark. Loud. Yes, more barking.

Where did Scratch Boy go? He's way up ahead. OK, so I'll just trot alongside Snack Girl. Yes. We're in the groove now.

We're cruising along. Wait! I gotta stop! Snack Girl picks up after me, just like she always does.

We're walking, we're walking. Hey, we're going toward Carl's. Let's go. LET'S GO!!!!

Cool. There are lots of people around. We're walking. Hey, there's Scratch Boy. Hi, Scratch Boy!

Hey, Scratch Boy has something to eat. Something for ME. Pretzel! I love pretzel!

Wow, I could use a big slurp of water. Oooh, crunchy ice. I love ice! I love pretzel!

Yay!

It's a big day for ME! It's all about ME! People are asking about ME! They love ME!

A Day of Speed and a Matter of Trust

As Bryn mentioned in her post below, Saturday was the annual Hyde Park Blast 4-miler. Heading into this race, I was feeling pretty good about the training I'd been doing, the weather was OK, and I had no nagging injuries to deal with.

But, in the minutes leading up to the race, I was feeling pretty sluggy and needed some inspiration and focus. I joked with my buddy Jay at the starting line how we needed a motivational talk from Tom Browning. (Browning miraculously hauls his butt out of bed to emcee the annual Reds 5K, and bumbles through a send-off including such classics as "All you hot chicks be sure to line up on my side of the pack" and "OK, guys, you guys are the best, guys, uuuuh, good luck guys, I'll save a beer for you at the finish... guys.") Since Browning was not an option, I just told myself, "trust your legs." I settled into a comfortable pace, pushed the pace in the uphill parts of the race (of which there were many!), and finished strong for 12th, 1st in my age group.

But the big fun of the day was a trip to the Kentucky Speedway, and a slot in the Mario Andretti Racing School. The premise of this school was that you could drive 6 laps around the 1.5 mile Speedway in a real Indy car. No advance training, no specific experience - just a medical waiver and a valid driver's license gets you in. And 400 bucks. Would you be a little worried about this deal? My friends Jason, Mark, and I sure were. How the hell could they let schmucks like us take control of a car with a jet engine inside and turn laps on a pro track? How many people have perished doing this? Would we all drive like old ladies and get laughed off the track? All these questions were in our heads.

The school consisted of about an hour of verbal instruction and a couple trips around the track in a van to talk you through it. But the best advice we got was to "trust your car." That reminded me of what I'd told myself that morning at the race, and kind of put me at ease.

The idea is that you turn 6 laps trailing a professional instructor. If you stay within the prescribed 4-6 car lengths, your instructor will keep pushing the pace throughout. If you fall behind, your instructor eases up. Pretty simple. I told myself to follow the line and push it as hard as I could.

When you punch the gas on an Indy car, it's like nothing you've ever experienced. The acceleration is totally cool when you let out the clutch and hit the gas. I started out a little tentative, since the steering is just a little different from my Maxima, and you're going 90 mph just about as soon as you pull out of the access road onto the track.

Like everyone else in our class, I got a green flag the first time I went past the starting line, which means to "speed up." As I got more comfortable with the idea, I just told myself to "trust the car" and get into the groove of the track with my instructor. He kept pushing the speed, and I stayed on his tail. One thing I learned is that, when you go around an oval race track, you NEVER let off the throttle. Can you imagine what this feels like? NO, you can't! You've got these crazy G-forces pulling at you, the little steering wheel is vibrating, the engine is howling, and you are (almost literally) flying around the track. All I can say is, WOW!

I got the car up to 167 mph, which was the fastest in our group. But we all did really well. Definitely better than a bunch of old ladies! If you ever have the opportunity to try this, I highly recommend it. I'm working on Bryn for next year's session... Wanna join us? Trust me.

wrigley's big day.

Yesterday, the whole Mooth family participated in the annual Hyde Park Blast. It's full-day neighborhood festival that takes place around July 4: The day starts with a four-mile run/walk that we all did. Wrigley donned his official Hyde Park (make that Bark) Blast bandanna and looked quite snappy as he and I did the walk. With his red bandanna and lead, and my red shirt, we were such the team.

Wrigley had a pedicure on Friday; his nails had been too long and I could tell it was affecting how he walked -- with shorter nails on Saturday, he was very happy walking at a quick pace. Our first mile was the slowest (thanks to a business stop early on) and picked up speed each mile, including a super-speedy pace down Observatory toward Carl's, the neighborhood deli. Our pace always quickens as we approach Carl's. Always.

Rob was waiting for us at the finish line: He cruised to a 12th place spot out of more than 1,600 runners! He's awesome.

The post-race goings-on at the Blast are a high point of the whole experience, most especially the kegs & eggs. Nothing like a Bud Light and plate of eggs to refuel after a race. Wrigley scarfed some eggs and a few bites of soft pretzel, gulped down a lot of water and crunched some ice. A great morning for the Boy.

(In the afternoon, Rob and some friends headed down to the Kentucky Speedway, where they took part in the Mario Andretti Driving School and drove Indy Cars around the track. Perhaps I'll get him to post about that.)

Later in the day, we returned to Hyde Park Square, where they closed the streets down for a block party and series of bicycle races. We watched the cycling, enjoyed some good wine and had a bite to eat. The Wrigley Effect was in full force: Everyone wanted to know what kind of dog he is, and he was eternally patient when a little kid came up and played with his ears or his tail. He barked whenever the crowd was cheering on the riders (and sometimes just because). I find it funny that everyone assumes he's still a puppy. Perhaps it's his goofy look or his happy demeanor, but folks are always surprised when I tell how old he is. He's a good boy.

I love my little family.

(edit: Today, Wrigley wants to go EVERYWHERE with us. He's been following us around and was most disappointed when we left to go to Target and then to play golf without him.)

more on the neighborhood.

So we've run down the list of families from our house on down Coventry Way. I neglected to mention one other house on the street: Next to the Stevenses lived the Toombs. They had kids who were grown and out of the house by the time they moved in, so we collectively had very little to do with them.

They had an enormous dog, a doberman, we figured, named Duke. As they walked Duke, the Toombs allowed him to leave behind enormous piles of doo-doo. Apparently, it wasn't considered polite in the 1970s to pick up after your dog. Duke was, as I mention, enormous, and his leavings were commensurately huge. Every once in awhile, Dad would bump into a pile while cutting the front yard like he ran the mower into a boulder the size of a compact car.

All us kids talked repeatedly about collecting a paper sack of Duke's doo, dropping it on Toombs' front porch and lighting it ablaze. The closest we ever got was ding-dong-ditching them.

growing up. or not.

I suppose I've been moony about the bullet-train passage of these wonderful summer days in part because of my current reading material.

Recently, Mom gave me a copy of Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" -- his memoir about growing up in Des Moines in the late 1950s. Bryson's laugh-out-loud reminiscences about kidhood really resonate with me; it strikes me that the difference between my growing-up in the 1970s and his in the '50s is much narrower than the difference between my childhood and today's kids'.

The book, plus these late-spring days (today is picture-perfect) have got me thinking a ton about growing up on Coventry Way, and about all the experiences that made up my childhood. Especially, all of our outdoor summer activities in the neighborhood. Which, frankly, I'd just as soon be doing still.

So let me paint a picture:

When we moved into our house at 3754 Coventry Way in, I think it was 1972, the street was still under construction. Most of the houses on our west side of the street were finished or nearly so; across the street there were several vacant lots and half-built houses that offered tempting play options, provided we could sneak over there without our moms knowing we were messing around on a potentially hazardous construction site. Most likely, someone stepped on a nail, and that was the end of our navigating shaky stairways and exploring open basements.

Our house had the first flat backyard at the crest of a hill. To our north lived the Hugheys (my classmate Debbie and her younger twin brothers). Beyond them on the cul-de-sac were the Webers, Todd, who was a year younger than me, and Tammy, who was Bill's age. I thought the Webers were a bit odd. Todd and Tammy were allowed to watch cartoons after school, which wasn't an option in our house. And Mrs. Weber made the WORST PB&J sandwiches: Jif peanut butter (we were a Peter Pan family) and Welch's grape jelly on Wonder bread. They were mushy and I thought they tasted sort of low-budget.

From our house going south down the street, you'd run next into the Chris Crowder's yard. Then on downhill to the McEneany's house, clad in blue siding. Tricia McEneany was a year or two older than me, and she was the first kid I knew to have her own record player in her bedroom, upon which we spun the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" until the needle broke. "S-A-TUR-DAY NIGHT!" The McEneany's lived there when we moved in, but the dad was transferred and the family moved away a year or two later. Then in moved the Joneses, with daughter Erin who was Bill's age.

Chris Crowder and Erin Jones were the only only children on the street; we thought either their parents couldn't have any more kids or, after Chris and Erin, didn't want to.

Next down the hill were the Grimms. Kirsten Grimm remains my oldest friend, and we're in fairly regular touch both in person and via email. Her brother, Adam, was the youngest kid on the block, and we hazed him for it. In addition to having a finished basement (including a very exotic-seeming wet bar and a square of linoleum tile that became the defacto dance floor), Grimms' house had a root cellar, which was accessible by a huge door on the back of the house. It was a sort of appealing and yet scary place, and it smelled damp and earthy and dark. I don't recall what was stored there; we'd open the door and go in for a few minutes before getting a bit creeped out and running back out into the yard.

Then came Eric Stevens's house. The Stevenses were by far the richest family on the street, as evidenced by a) the deep-pile white shag carpet in their sunken living room; b) the fact that they gave out full-size Hershey bars at Halloween; and c) the fact that they were probably the first family in the neighborhood to have cable, and most definitely the first to have HBO. I caught more than an eyeful of some R-rated movies (most memorably a bizarre scene from "Last Tango in Paris" that I still can't quite get past) late-night when I was babysitting Eric.

From our house down to the Stevenses', our backyards all connected in this sloping stripe of green playspace, edged all along the west side by a deep and wonderful woods.

About which I'll post more soon.

hmph.

(a clandestine at-work post, because I just have to get this out of my head)

To my dismay, I'm finding that I'm spending a lot of time when I'm not at work stewing about work. So it feels like I'm almost always working. Which in turn feels like time is just flying by.

One of my biggest causes of stress in life -- and you can ask Rob what I'm like when I feel rushed -- is not having enough time to do all the things that I want or need to do. That, plus the fact that my to-do list tends, even on weekends, to be quite long. My list of chores and tasks to do last Saturday morning before Dad and Ellen arrived for a Father's Day visit was really quite ridiculous, and I spent the first hour after they got here scurrying around trying to finish things up.

When I took the Predictive Index personality-type study a couple of years ago, I came out as a "High C" among the four drives: A=to dominate; B=to induce positive response; C=for stability; D= for certainty. Here are the likely behaviors of a High C: to be methodical, to do one thing at a time, to finish a task before moving on, to be patient, to be process-driven, to be persistent, to be a creature of habit, to be focused, to fare less well under pressure, to be reactive.

Yep, that's me.

So this constant fretting about work, plus a full calendar in the coming months (meetings and big projects for work, vacation, not to mention the things I want to do, like taking an afternoon by the pool and spending a weekend with Bill) are making my heart race and my shoulders crunch. My deep and abiding fear is that I don't have time for the things I want to do, and that these next few months -- summer, my very favorite time of year -- will slip out from underneath me.

This makes me extremely sad.

a terrific dinner.

Tonight, we made a dinner out of side dishes, and it was wonderful, the perfect thing for a warm evening. Both of the recipes came from Williams-Sonoma's "Grilling: New Healthy Kitchen," which Mom gave Rob last summer. Nothing we've made from that book has disappointed. Here's what was on tap:

Mushroom Bruschetta
1 lb. portobello mushrooms, cleaned and stemmed and sliced into 1/4-in slices
tossed with a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed
olive oil
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
salt and pepper

2 slices of country wheat bread (per person), drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt

Marinate the mushrooms up to 1 hour before dinner. Grill over medium-high heat for about 3 minutes per side. Grill bread slices for about a minute per side.

Arrange grilled mushroom slices on grilled bread; top with crumbled Feta and slivered basil.


Chickpeas with Baby Spinach
In a baking dish, toss a can of chickpeas (drained and rinsed), 1 thinly sliced tomato, a good glug of olive oil and salt + pepper. Broil about 8-9 minutes until browned on top. Remove from the oven and immediately toss with a big handful of sliced fresh baby spinach and the juice of a lemon.

Plus, I made a quick lemon-olive oil salad dressing and tossed that with greens just picked from the garden. It all tasted fresh, light and healthy. Delish!

yum.

In addition to 101Cookbooks, which I love, I've run across another terrific food blog called Smitten Kitchen. Mom, you gotta check this out! I think the potato pizza is on deck for this weekend.