Healing Rain on a Sunny Day: Early Morning Ramble

Or, what else can you do when you wake up at five o'clock in the morning

This is the problem with going to bed at 8:15 pm, you wake up before dawn and you wonder why you can't get back to sleep.

After rain

I was so tired from working out yesterday at koko. They are doing this new challenge where you do pushups, planks, and those jumping squat things and you get points and whoever gets the most points will win a bottle of wine. Well, I can't do pushups. I don't have enough upper body strength and a long body to be all jelly like while I'm trying, so I stuck with the other two. I did the plank for 14 seconds. Not bad for having never done it before. Then I did 17 of the jump squats. They aren't as bad as ok thought they would be, I just think I'm super sore because I want warmed up when I did them. I then did my normal two cardio sessions and one strength session. I'm trying really hard to be ready to hike this summer.

Climb the oak tree

Hiking is one of those things I have done my whole life. I didn't start enjoying it until I was older for several reasons. The first was that I fell down a lot as a child. I think my body constantly growing messed up my center of gravity so much that I would lose my balance and footing easily and fall down. I am a master at falling down. I do it with grace and finesse. All joking aside, I did fall down a lot and scraped my knees up and had dirt and mud all over me. I didn't really enjoy hiking that much then. Another reason I didn't like it was that my calf muscles would cramp really badly after about twenty minutes of hiking. Now I know how to deal with it because it is normal for my legs to do this, but then it was just a painful experience and I would want to cry and sit down (which doesn't work when the rest of your family wants to keep going). My best way for working out the muscles when they start cramping now is to walk backwards up the hill. Don't do this if you are near a cliff or on treacherous footing. But a nice wide, relatively smooth trail will be fine. This will really stretch your calves and hamstrings. The third reason I didn't really like hiking: bugs. I'm not saying I'm afraid of bugs. I'm actually the one who is usually catching them to bring them back outside. I'm talking about gnats, mosquitoes, and bees. Gnats somehow always go up my nose and into my eyes. Really bad if you are wearing contacts. Mosquitoes bite me. If there is a mosquito within a half mile of my location, it will find me and bite me. I'm not kidding. And bees think my blonde hair is a giant flower and dive bomb it over and over again. The best thing to do for all of these: wear a hat, wear unscented deodorant and shampoo, and eat garlic. Garlic will keep the small bugs away, the hat will keep them away from your head and face, and boring deodorant and shampoo will not attract them in the first place.

Pasta with Vegan Pesto and Daiya

Recently, hiking has become much more fun for me. I usually don't fall down (and when I do I'm wearing boots with high ankle support so I don't sprain them again) and I can keep up with my dad and brother most of the time. I'm planning to do lots of fun hikes this summer!

Angel Hair with Vegan Pesto and Tomato Paste

I've included some pictures of foods I've eaten recently. Do you like it when I add these to posts? Let me know in the comments below.

Sushi Rice with Eggplant Punjab

In a few weeks I'm going to be traveling more, so you will see both fewer posts and more pictures. I hope you enjoy my travel posts because there will be lots of fun happening in them.