Last week I went to our local running shoe store, just two blocks from my house. When I explained to the super fit, older woman working at the store, that I needed new shoes for my treadmill desk, where I planned to walk for most of every day, she wanted to know what I did for a living. The simplest answer I’ve found is to say that I’m a consultant, who works for a computer company and that I spend all day at home, in front of a computer.

As someone who spends all day in front of a computer, I’ve given a lot of thought to ergonomics. I used to have constant shoulder and neck pain after sitting all day in my expensive, carefully designed and aligned office chair. About two years ago I switched to a standing desk and immediately felt better. At the end of everyday my body felt a little tired, just like my mind, but because I was moving around all day, my shoulder pain disappeared and instead I had mild foot and hip aches.

After the first year, I bought an anti-fatigue mat at a local kitchen supply store. Standing on almost an inch of springy foam all day removed the last of the aches and pains. The standing desk system made me feel good and I noticed that even on weekends, I preferred to stand rather than sit.

Last summer one of my co-workers installed a treadmill desk in his home and had nothing but good things to say about his health and well-being after slowly walking all day. It sounded like a great fit for me. The multi-tasking nature of exercising while at work sounds perfect. I started planning how the treadmill would fit in my office, how I would arrange my workstation and what treadmill to buy.

In the end I bought a new treadmill because I wanted one that was very quiet and wouldn’t be heard when I was talking on the phone. I also wanted one that wasn’t going to break or have problems shortly after buying it. The treadmill arrived last week. It weighs 350 pounds and is enormous! With a bit of struggle we installed it in my office.

SB and I then designed a series of three bracketed shelves, one for my monitors, one for my laptops and a third one for my keyboard. The keyboard shelf is designed to be easily removable, so that SB can also use the treadmill for general exercise.

Today is my first day on the treadmill. I’ve read that I need to take it slow at the start, only walking for a few hours over the course of the day. So far I’ve learned that walking and mousing is a skill to be perfected. I’m very excited about my new desk and believe that it is a great step towards my goal of getting into better shape this year.

The photo above shows the new treadmill desk, and my constant office companion, Zoe, relaxing on her new heated cat pad. The photo below shows my previous standing desk, also featuring Zoe, where she liked to spend her days, in the middle of my desk.

Oh, and my new Mizuno running shoes are working out great so far.

One of my big goals for 2013 was to refinance our house. The first thing I did was to reach out to our credit union to get an estimate on how much a refinance would cost and whether we could qualify. With assurances in hand and a bit of a steep bill, we started gathering the money we would need. One of the things the bank emphasized was that we should not have any unfinished construction projects.

Hmmmm…so what about that Feast Master? When we bought our house it had a swanky basement den, complete with carpeting, a shag lined bar and an in house bar-b-que, brand name “Feast Master”. The Feast Master did not vent into our chimney, but instead vented directly into the driveway. Our home inspector told us to never use the grill, if we didn’t want to have a house fire. As we learned our first winter, this also meant that cold air rushed through the vent and right into our house.

Last fall, SB started the demolition work to remove the Feast Master. It was hard, dirty work, breaking down the masonry and removing the bricks. Progress was slow and the priority was low, after all it was just our bonus basement room and not essential to our daily lives. However, it was certainly a construction project in progress. SB made a big push in December and January, breaking down the whole fireplace and hauling out the rubble.

Once we felt good about the Feast Master, I moved ahead with getting the home assessor to come in. I had no idea what to expect. He came in with the approach that any and every change we made to the house should count towards overall value and he also wanted to know if I had put together a comparable properties list. Had I known that I should provide him with a packet of improvements and comps, I would gladly have done that. I had been under the impression that the home owners were not supposed to influence the assessors with that type of information. I wasn’t even sure I would be allowed to talk to him.

The assessor poked around the house, asked his questions and made his report. In the end he determined that our basement den was now unfinished space, but that the total value of our house was still more than we paid for it two years ago. If we had left the Feast Master half finished, I’m not sure how that would have influenced the evaluation, if at all. How were we to know?

Yesterday we closed on our new home loan. Our old loan was a 30 year loan, at 6% with a 5 year arm. Our new loan is a 15 year loan, at 2.6% fixed rate. 2.6% !!!! Say what!?! Based on my estimate, over the length of the loan, refinancing is going to save us $258,000 in interest. Boom! Plus, we will own our home in 15 years, which sounds like an imaginable point in the future.

I’m really glad we moved ahead with the refinance. Now we just need to put some more time in to bring our basement den back to the land of finished, livable space. This includes, re-doing the stairs, replacing the windows, putting in new carpeting and painting the walls and ceiling.

I just bought the puffy coat I’m wearing and I’m totally in love with its downy warmth. When I have the hood up, I may look like a giant, dog devouring blob, or at least that’s what my dog thinks, but inside the coat I’m nice and cozy. Now if only I could find winter boots that I enjoy as much as this coat.

2012 in numbers:
- 1,965 hours worked and 324 hours of paid time off
- 1,549 visitors to this blog. February had the most visits and The Stuff Beast was the most popular post of the year. The most referred search term was “gorilla bread”.
- 527 photos uploaded to Flickr
- 31 tweets (23 personal and 8 professional)
- 25 blog entries (24 personal and 1 professional)
- 23 books read (5 non-fiction, 16 fiction, 2 professional)
- 10 books sold on Amazon
- 9 cities visited San Francisco (x2), San Jose, Chicago (x2), Orem, Park City, Las Vegas, Boston, Seattle and Victoria BC
- 8 yarn projects completed (1 crochet, 7 knitting, 3 frogged)

My personal goal for 2012 was to bring out my writing voice through blogging and tweeting. I also had sub-goals that included going to concerts, vacation travel and house projects. 2012 was a two part year, defined in the middle by a huge work project that happened in July and August. From January to June I was on track, going to concerts, vacationing in San Francisco and blogging once a week. After June things fell apart. Starting in July, work became an all consuming stress ball. On top of that, July and August were the home insulation months, with contractors coming by and the culmination of all our insulation planning. I took another vacation in the fall to Seattle and Victoria and then slid into the holiday season, never regaining my writing or concert going momentum.

It feels easy to think of 2012 as a bit of a failure. Even though I accomplished a lot, the accomplishments were not the ones I set out to achieve. In addition to all of the above, SB had a very unhappy year at work. With his work situation up-in-the-air, we had a general unsettled and unhappy feeling most of the time. Questions like, “Would we need to move out of Madison?” and “What does it mean to have a career?” were discussed at great length. The uncertainty has been exhausting but I’m happy to report that SB has accepted a new job in town and we are starting off 2013 on much firmer and happier ground. Whew!

My personal goal for 2013 is to achieve more physical fitness. I’ve learned in recent years how satisfying it can be to be more financially disciplined. Now I want to apply that same self-control to my body. I’m thinking about this in terms of life long habits more than what I can accomplish in the next year alone.

Other things I’m looking forward to in 2013:
- Getting back to blogging and tweeting
- Going to concerts, plays and other events
- House projects including finishing the basement, crown molding, a bathroom remodel, a kitchen remodel and a home loan refinance
- Selling, donating and generally getting rid of more stuff
- Travel vacations!

I hope you are also looking forward to an even better 2013. (The photo is from our fabulous zinnia garden this summer. I’m particularly proud of our gardens this past year and am looking forward to even more success in 2013.)

No one would call me a morning person. Nor could I be accused of being an extrovert. So why would I want to spend my vacation time socializing with strangers, first thing in the morning?

You can believe I was asking myself this very question on our most recent vacation, when we decided to go the B&B route for lodging. Bed and Breakfasts look so appealing from an architecture and off-the-beaten-track perspective. You get to check out someone’s fancy old, or new, house and whatever crazy furniture they’ve put into it. Plus, B&B’s tend to be in neighborhoods rather than tourist areas, so I can pretend for a few days that I’m a local.

We had fancy, rich breakfasts, with plenty of eggs and tomatoes, while we chatted with our fellow guests around a communal table. Sounds great, except I would dread coming-up with chit-chat before my coffee. After the social hour, those composed breakfasts would sit in my stomach like a lead weight, making our long days of adventure off to a series of rocky starts and irritability.

This post is more a reminder to my future self, than a particular story. Remember Marijka! B&Bs may not be the right place for us to stay. We’d be better off with an apartment rental like Air B&B or VRBO or even a regular hotel.

The photo above is the wallpaper in one of our B&B rooms. I’m still trying to figure out how I can hang some of that paper in my own house! Reminds me of the British Sherlock rooms.

I love this anguished lion statue, seen at Hatley Castle on my recent trip to Victoria, BC. The human eyes, the mouth gaping open, could it be more dramatic?

When I return from an unplanned blogging break, I feel I need to recap everything that happened since my last post. Besides working much to much this summer, my monthly music goal totally fell apart, I knit a couple things that I really hate and I didn’t even blog about it. How’s that for anguished confessions of a guilty blogger?

With snow coming down, this is a time for closure and looking forward to the beauty of winter. This weekend I dug up my zinnias and cosmos, replacing them with spring bulbs and poppy seeds. It was a wonderful summer of gardening successes, even with the hardships of draught.

Today I voted, marking the end of a perpetual barrage of political angst that has gone on for years. This is it, the final day. Tonight the results will come in and we can all move on. Holiday food and winter vacations can take over the space I’ve devoted to indignation and concern.

On Friday, the Department of Energy is coming for tea. I’ve been joking that Dr. Chu is coming to chat with me about physics. In reality, it is an insulation inspection, to see how the federal dollars were spent on our modest home. The final step in our Green Madison journey.

It feels good to blog. Why did I wait so long?

What a summer it has been! The insulation crew, electrician and roofers have come and gone. The house feels like it has been wrapped in a big, fluffy blanket. With the wall insulation, the neighborhood noises, both late night and early morning, have disappeared. Suddenly I’m looking forward to a bitterly cold winter, just to put the insulation to the test.

This project allowed us to check-off a few items that were on our must-do list since we first looked at this house. The attic had been lined with cardboard and newspaper, now that is all gone. The chimney leaked around the roofline, now there is no chimney. The basement shag carpeting had to go and now the basement has a new sub-floor.

We still have some more work to do in the basement, like removing the feast-master, replacing the basement windows, re-working the basement stairs and picking a new floor covering for the finished side. Those projects will come together in the next year.

In the meantime, we are taking a little break from house work and enjoying these few cool days of summer, after the incredibly hot and dry days of June and July.

Oh, and the stuff beast, it is still around, but is much smaller and tamer than two months ago. I continue to sell items off through Amazon and Craigslist. It feels good to know the true extent of what we own and also to know where it is and why we still have it.

We are participating in a City of Madison program to improve the energy efficiency of our home, called Green Madison. So far we’ve had the initial energy assessment. I wish I’d taken pictures during the assessment, since there was a big blower door installed in our front door and lots of use of a heat gun camera. Geeky fun and a chance to learn more about our house.

What we found, no surprise, is that our house has no insulation in the walls or basement and minimum insulation in the attic. The next step is to add insulation to all three locations. I’ve been busy gathering quotes on the work but the looming immediate next step is dealing with our stuff.

After we moved into the house, the attic, basement and garage became general holding places for loosely organized items like sports gear, winter clothes and crafting supplies. Mostly it is stuff that we want to keep and generally it is already grouped together, however our house did not come with many shelves for organizing. Last summer we tackled the garage and now it is on to the attic and basement.

The attic is going to be filled with fluffy insulation and while we are going to build a storage platform, there will be much less space for storing things up there. While all the work is going on, including removing the chimney, our attic needs to be empty. Where is it all going? To the basement!

The basement has its own set of challenges and its own set of stuff. The photos here are the before shots of the attic and basement. For the past few weeks we’ve started work on the basement, including buying shelving from Ikea, sealing the shelving, ripping out the carpet and installing a sub-floor. We are tackling the basement in three phases so that stuff in one part can be shuffled to the finished part without having to be removed.

Late yesterday I really started wishing we could be on one of those magic home improvement shows, where over the course of one weekend your room is transformed and everyone remains beautiful, clean and well rested. Instead SB and I keep chugging along, slowly bringing order to our house and hopefully, in the end, a lower energy bill.

For Memorial Day weekend, SB and I headed to the windy city for a mini-break. Since visiting the Morton Arboretum last summer, I’ve had my eye on the Chicago Botanic Gardens, on the north side of the city. I’d heard that because of their proximity to the lake, they have a special microclimate, allowing plants 1 or 2 zone warmer to thrive.

This spring has been so strange, I’m not sure I really noticed that the gardens were much ahead of my gardens at home, but there was plenty to be inspired by in their highly sculpted landscape. I now need poppies, after seeing a whole field of icelandic poppies in full bloom. Also, we need to train some climbing roses on geometric trellises, to decorate our yet to be built fence. I’m already looking forward to returning to the Botanic Gardens later in the summer.

Last week we put in a new garden along the side of the garage and planted our herb garden. As I laid the seeds in the ground, I thought about how optimistic the act of gardening can be. It is all about the belief in the future potential of these little seeds. After visiting the Botanic Gardens, I was thinking about how gardening is also about dreaming of colors, shapes, textures and smells. Gardening, a future fantasy for all the senses.

Speaking of the future, on Sunday, we had a planned surprise visit to one of my favorite gardening friends, Rosey Cheeks, to celebrate the soon-to-be birth of her second child. I cut it very close with my blanket gift, sewing in the ends on the car ride to Chicago. The honeycomb blanket had a photo shoot in the botanic gardens before starting its journey with Rosey and family.

I’m tired. In the past month I’ve been on Atlantic and Pacific waters, I spent thirty hours volunteering for the film festival and every other weekend has been filled with house projects and even an emergency shopping trip to Chicago. As I head into summer, there is just so much to do, it has been hard to find the balance between work, travel, projects and the rest and relaxation I actually need. On top of all that I’ve been battling some frustrating stomach issues, which just make eating a chore and totally contributes to my overall tiredness. Finally, I’ve decided that I’m done taking allergy medicine. I’m just going to soldier through this summer without any help, but already, waking up with a nose like a faucet every morning is such a drag.

Whine, whine, whine. This is all very tiring. Here are a couple things I’ve been enjoying recently.

We’ve been working our way through the documentary series Craft in America. It has really made me think about how one medium can really speak to you and another just carries no interest and to wonder how you discover those mediums that most resonate with you. I think trying lots of different craft forms is key.

One of the artists featured is a couple here in southern Wisconsin. They make amazing natural fiber baskets and jewelry. I’ve been pining after their necklaces and leaving the page open for SB to see. Loeber + Look.

I’ve also been reading a lot about bike commuting and I’m sold. Bike commuting looks fantastic! The irony is that I don’t have any commute, so I guess the message is partially lost on me. Check out this short video on bike commuting in Portland. A very nice, low budget documentary.