It’s the big birthday today! 50 years old.  Sometimes I just don’t know where all the time goes. It seems like I just turned 40 LOL.

I wasn’t sure I was going to bike 50 miles or not. The weather wasn’t supposed to be great, so I had assumed it wouldn’t happen, but it was kind of sunny out and so I took my bike and myself out for a birthday bagel:

John was working, so I was solo. I figured I would take a long ride after breakfast and see where I would end up. It was fairly cool for riding in the upper 50s to low 60s.

I got back home at mile 26 and had to check and pack some orders. I decided I was going to shoot for the 50 miles even if it meant having to split it up because of working – not to mention biking by myself. That meant it was a bit of a boring ride because I was just putting in the miles closer to home in loops. I did 3 runs. The first was the 26 miles. The second was 16 and the last was 8 miles.  The last 4 or 5 miles and I was ready to be done. Not really physically, but mentally done. But – I did it!

This is an unfiltered post 50-mile look:

As I said on Facebook – next year I’m going metric.  50 miles is a lot of biking – 4 solid hours of riding time. I knew if I didn’t do it that I would have regretted it in the end for a milestone birthday.

That many miles meant a big piece of cake!  We had people over, so it had to be shared, but I still got a nice piece with a big flower of icing 🙂

This was from a local bakery. John has been so busy that I didn’t want to have him under pressure to make a cake this year. This was really good. Almond cake with raspberry filling and buttercream (of course!).

Now starts a new decade and I look forward to all it has in store!

I had an unexpected day off in the middle of last  week. For Christmas, my sister had given her husband and our dad the gift of a striped bass fishing tour.  Fast forward to mid April and Colleen texted me that there was room on the boat and asked if I wanted to come on May 16th.  I said yes in my mind thinking the 16th must be a weekend because why would it be scheduled on a weekday?  Then promptly didn’t think about it again with my overworked brain.

Then a week or so before the excursion, I asked John if he was going to need the car that Saturday. I said Saturday the 16th. He said that was the 19th. Puzzled confusion at this point and I realize that the fishing trip was actually a Wednesday LOL.  It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know that when Colleen asked or I likely would have said no. However, I deserved a day off and John could cover for me.

The tour was on the Hudson. Here is the dock:

Our boat was the last one on the right.  Not a very big boat. There was the captain and his first mate, plus the four of us. I think that would be the max.

The tour went into the Hudson. It is striped bass season and you don’t need a fishing license, but you do need a marine registry to fish for it. In NY, it is free to get this, which is pretty nice! Not only that, but you could register online and print out your registry. One of those times when technology is so awesome!

Ready to go!

We moved around to various spots, but didn’t have much luck with the striped bass. My father hooked one, but it got off the line before he could get it in.

Waiting for fish (I was snacking 😀 )

This is the Hudson and there are a fair number of bridges that cross it. When a larger boat goes through, they don’t lift the bridge, but it gets turned:

This bridge was for trains.  The boat goes through and they close it back up.  That boat on the right had a large antennae on it, which is just visible in the picture. They didn’t think it would fit under the bridge, so it was opened to let them through.  On a side note, there is an osprey nest at the top of that bridge and we saw one of the adults a few times flying around.

Striped bass eat herring, so our captain was fishing for herring during the tour for our bait. I wanted to try it, so he set me up with the pole and special lures.

Catching herring is really easy. Who knew?  Here I am handing one off to the captain to put in the bait bucket:

My herring:

I also caught a perch. We were trying to make it look bigger by putting it closer to the camera LOL!

He got sent back into the river to live another day.

While no one caught a bass, it was a nice day to be out on the boat and relaxing with family!

I was solo for dinner tonight. When we went grocery shopping over the weekend, I snagged an easy dinner for one of the nights he would be out.  This sounded appealing to me:

The whole bag is one serving and it makes a huge bowl. I couldn’t quite put all the lettuce in my bowl, but I was able to mash it down LOL.  I wanted extra protein, so I added some chicken breast on top. Ta da:

Doesn’t that look good? It was really tasty.  There were bits of dried pear mixed in with the nuts, but more pear flavor came from the dressing, which was a little weird because I wasn’t expecting it.  I would definitely get this again – especially in the hot summer months.

Anyway, on to the other part of the  title for this post. I posted way earlier this year that John was doing stained glass.  He decided to take it to the next level and open a business.  He focuses mostly on nature and flowers for his glass work.  He did a show last month and here is a portion of his setup:

The show itself wasn’t that great, but he did sell several of these pieces in his Etsy shop. The bird of paradise has been a popular piece:

And a plug for myself here in taking this photo for the white background 😀

His specialty is the potted orchids, or I guess I consider it his specialty:

Here is a link to his Etsy shop if you want to see some of his other pieces. Glass Art by John

His shop has been open for about 6 weeks and he also is on Amazon Handmade. He was surprised that he has been getting sales, but I wasn’t. I’m so proud of John and his creations!

This whole year so far has felt just crazy, crazy.  Lots of stressful things and as many of you know, I’m a stress eater. I managed to put on about 10 pounds in 2018, which most certainly wasn’t on my goal list for the year.

Now some of the stresses have eased and I’ve decided that starting right now, I’m going to take better care of myself. Making better eating choices, trying to limit the extra hours I spend on the business (this is super duper hard for me), and getting out and doing my meditating — I wrote medicating LOL — in the garden. Now that warmer weather is here, there is a lot to do outside.

Back to my basics for eating, like my dinner tonight:

Making a concerted effort not to grab dry cereal for a snack at night and choose fruit or a York patty, which I don’t overeat for whatever reason.

Biking season has arrived and there will be a lot of that going on now.

Onward and downward, right?

I’m so glad to be back home! Got in around midnight on Saturday and My butt is really dragging today lol. I’m doing this post from my phone as I am having trouble downloading pictures to my computer. Sorry if the pictures are whonky. Technology….

The conference went well. It was jam packed with seminars and lots of networking with old customers and hopefully many new ones. Met some customers that have been with us for over 10 years! So nice to put faces to names.

Check out the creativity of some of the guild members:

.

.

All of that is soap, molded and carved.

I took one evening for myself and got in a workout

And then a swim

I also had the chance to meet up with a blog/FB friend. Sandy was reading my blog for many years. She took me to dinner and we had a great time chatting.

.

Every time I’ve met an internet friend in person, it feels like slipping into a comfortable pair of shoes. Conversation is easy and plentiful! Thank you Sandy!

There wasn’t a ton of down time , but I did get a chance to walk around some, including to Olympic Park.

.

My hotel is the cylinder

.

There is a lot to process from this conference and now the month of May is going to focus on me and taking care of myself.

Arrived in Atlanta today on about 3 hours of sleep ?. I’m at a conference for the soap guild representing our supplier company. I’m staying at the Westin Peachtree. Nice room.

27th floor! Good thing I’m not paying for the view

.

My table

Lots of networking to do and getting to meet some of our customers face to face, which is always nice. John is holding down the fort at home. Four days here. Hoping to meet an FB friend for dinner one of the days as well.

Hooray for Friday!  I am feeling a bit overwhelmed with business stuff lately.  I wish I could afford to hire an assistant or at least a cleaning service for the house!  I have a wholesale show coming up Monday and Tuesday and then the next week I’ll be flying out to a conference in Georgia – my first time to that state! I won’t have much time to explore, but I imagine the weather will feel a lot warmer there than here.

Not too much riding happening because of cold and rain. The roads are clear and lawns are clear, but the bike path to the lake is still not quite open, which is not unusual.  Last week I got about 5 miles from the lake and ran into this:

Today I wanted to see how much farther I could get. Just around the bend from the above picture:

Not a lot of direct sun gets here, so it always takes a long time to melt. It will probably be another couple of weeks at least to get all the way to the lake.

My eating has been a bit all over the place. My usual stress eating. 😛   John made pizza again tonight, which he does almost every Friday:

John cooks for us more often than I do 😀    Here was some quick doctored up soup:

Pixie gets annoyed when I’m busy and moving around a lot because it takes away from her lap time. So she decides she is going to create it. Who needs a lap?

I think her face says, “I’m relegated to the butt.  No bueno”.

I found a new hobby I would like to pursue for my downtime – paper quilling!

Have any of you tried this?  It’s fun and I’ve been doing flowers like the tulip above. That is a tulip in case you didn’t guess that 😀   I hope to do more of this in a few weeks when all the madness settles down.

Hope there are still people reading!

Hey – I’m back!  Still waiting for spring. We actually had snow the other day. Again. At least it’s pretty much melted today, although our temps are still only around 40 right now.

The antidote to this? A gardening class!  One of the local nurseries held a container gardening class. I don’t do a lot with containers other than stuffing a couple annual pots into a container and calling it a day, so this was a good class for me to get ideas.

Here is a baby greenhouse in early April:

These are all gearing up for May when the big buying season happens, which is basically Mother’s Day through Memorial Day. These will all be ready to plant outside then.

We started off by picking out our pots and filling them with soil. We had a style choice from a couple of hanging baskets or a patio pot. I don’t hang flowers currently, so I was one of the only ones to choose a patio pot.

The filling station:

We filled the pots half way and then added a couple tablespoons of slow release fertilizer:

Then filled the pot:

Yay  – playing in the dirt!! 😀

There were stations set up with different plant combinations. You always need to keep in mind where your container is going to be and how much sun it will get, which will decide what flowers to put in.  One tip – halfway through the growing season, fertilize with a quick release fertilizer (or bloom booster), especially when the pots start looking tired.

Everyone had a 12-inch pot, regardless of style. These are small baby plants provided by the nursery, so we used 9 plants for each pot.  If purchasing the 4-inch potted plants, use 3 of them instead of 9 – or use 5 or 6 of the 6-pack annual size.

When doing multi colors, place all of the same color in the center and then alternate the other colors in a ring around the edge about 1/2 inch from the edge of the pot.

We had some design inspirations to choose from.  I liked this one:

However, me being me, I swapped out one of the plants. I used a blue superbells instead of the dreamsicle.

I put the blue in the center. See how these are smaller than the 6-pack size of annuals?

I love the superbells – or in real terms, the Calibrachoa if your nursery doesn’t carry Proven Winners – although most do.  They bloom all summer and fill up a pot nicely.

All potted up with my 3 plant tags to remember which ones are which. We then put a large marker in these with our names on them.  The nursery is holding these in the greenhouse until we pick them up in mid May, although we can visit them any time LOL!

I can’t wait to see how pretty this looks!  I’m glad I wasn’t the only person that said goodbye to my container…. garden nerd…

Here are some combinations that you can use for container ideas. These are all for mostly sunny areas.  Callie means Calibrachoa, which is also the name for the Superbells

.

.

.

You can just write the names down and ask for them at your nursery. They will be able to tell you similar ones if they don’t stock those, but again, Proven Winners are carried in most places.

I didn’t leave empty handed, though. Everyone was given a little potted marigold on the way out!

Yay to be planting again!!

I decided that despite all the cold weather, it was time to take down the winter flag and hang up the tulip flag. Despite the fact that temps are in the 30s.  We had a “warm” day today that got up to 45 and it felt pretty good, I have to say. We took a nice long walk, except now I have a chill tonight… sigh…

Anyway, pretty routine stuff. Our usual Bagel Wednesday:

I seriously could eat bagels all.the.time  – but only if they are really good bagels. Our local coffee shop makes them in house and they are sooooo good!

I’ve started doing some daily meditation. Biz mentioned the Oprah/Deepak Chopra 21-day meditation series and I thought, “What the heck” and signed up. Because it’s free. 😀

I really struggle with meditating. It’s not even that long. My mind is so used to multitasking all the time that I can be repeating a mantra in my head and still be thinking about something else.  I have a lot of work to do on that.

Regardless, it’s good to do and the meditations are only about 15 minutes long. I am liking the Sanskrit mantras, too.

Moving on to the signs of spring – I have to say THANK YOU that we didn’t get anything from that last Nor’easter.  We’ve had enough snow.  Our front yard gets full sun, so a lot of our snow is gone there, although it’s still around.

It’s funny how we have this bare lawn and on each side of us, there is a snowy yard. Nature must know how badly I want to see the ground 😀   And I did see something!  Check it out:

Tiny, tiny tulip sprouts!  I was so excited to see these!  They won’t be blooming for another month, probably, but they have made their initial appearance. Spring will come, dammit!  Not only that, but this weekend is the Capital District Garden Show so I can bask in greenery and flowers for real.

Here it is March 18th and it was 4 degrees when we got up this morning. Four. I’m usually pretty positive about winter and such, but I am so over this cold weather. I want spring! I want riding! Wahhh!

Okay. I feel better now …somewhat….

Cold or not, it was still time for St. Patrick’s Day festivities.  We gathered at my sister’s house for some food.

Corned beef:

Irish Soda Bread:

Colcannon, which is a potato and cabbage dish.

This is a nice vegetarian side.  We used this recipe.  John made the colcannon and I cooked up some bacon for the non-vegetarians to sprinkle on top.  This was a keeper, too.  Steamed the potatoes in the Instant Pot, which worked great. 12 minutes after it reached pressure and they were nicely done.

A tasty beverage:

And some game playing.  We played Clue, which I haven’t played in years!  Also this one:

If you guys have not played this, you really need to get it. You just end up laughing so much!

Here’s hoping for more spring-like weather coming. I’m going to hang my tulip flag up to see if I can remind Mother Nature what time of year it is.

Did you do anything fun  for St. Patrick’s Day?