Just a quick note for those who check on my blog regularly — you may notice that some past posts have disappeared. That’s intentional! I’ve moved some of my wellness posts over to a blog on my self-titled website: LelandStrott.com
LelandStrott.com is an old website but a new project; I wanted to create a space to talk about the food, health, and wellness issues that have been so interesting to me lately. The new blog’s title is “Clean, Green & Sunny,” which perfectly describes the life I’m visioning & cultivating lately. Yep, you can expect some Universe & spirituality talk over there, too. That’s all part of wellness!
Some Adventure will continue to be the place where I (sporadically) talk about navigating life’s little adventures with creativity and charm. Summer in Baltimore is my favorite, and I’m sure there will be plenty to share!
I’d love it if you could check out Clean, Green & Sunny over at LelandStrott.com and let me know what you think. In addition to the old posts that have migrated, I’ve added some new content over the last week.
Today is Opening Day at Camden Yards — one of the best days of the year. It’s practically a holiday in Baltimore, where people take off work to fill the stadium and welcome the Orioles back for a new season. You can hear the roar of the crowd from a mile away. Walking down Eutaw Street, you can smell Boog’s Barbecue and the maple glazed bacon from Dempsey’s. Everyone you pass is decked out in orange, with a huge smile on their face. The energy level is astounding.
Early on in the season there’s a feeling that anything can happen. New seasons — be they sports seasons, New Year’s Day, birthdays, or Mondays — bring a clean slate. This time could be different. It’s a time for new goals, new hope, and new life.
Fresh starts are deceptive, though. Masters of crafts share common advice — Perfect practice makes perfect. Make time for what you love every day. If you don’t work at getting better every day, you’re getting worse. Every athlete knows you don’t come out of nowhere with a winning season. Success is something that’s built. With daily time and effort, anything is possible.
Baltimore sports fans start every season as optimists, and last year as the O’s continued to win, the feeling of Orioles Magic didn’t diminish. We barreled toward the post season, baffling sports analysts who predicted we would be stuck in last place in the division like so many years before. It seemed like a miracle, though knew the success was due to the wisdom of our manager Buck Showalter and the unwavering commitment and hard work from the team.
The regular season closed out and the Orioles looked to October. We beat Texas, then lost to those damn Yankees. While we didn’t end the season as world champions, those playoff games reinvigorated the spirit of Baltimore’s baseball lovers.
Today we gather again in Camden Yards, trusting in Buck and our team, and hoping we can take it even further this year.
Here’s to a new season — one that’s been a long time coming. Let’s go O’s!
So… wrestling has become a real thing in our house lately. I was mad about it at first, but my amusement got the better of me and now we’re tuning in pretty regularly for the likes of Monday Night Raw and Friday Night Smackdown.
Mike never watched wrestling regularly before, but he was familiar with it as a kid and the reason we turned it on to begin with. I never knew anything about wrestling except that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was part of that crowd before becoming my favorite family film actor, and that wrestling was violent and fake and my mom would die if she knew I was melting my brain by watching it. Sorry mom.
I get invested in TV drama very easily. Back in college I religiously watched reality shows like VH1′s Tool Academy and Real Chance of Love, and MTV’s Paris Hilton’s My New BFF. The worse the shows were, the more I liked them. The drama felt more real when the premises were ridiculous, as opposed to shows like The Bachelor that pretty much feel scripted from start to finish. As you can imagine, this put professional wrestling right up my alley.
Tool Academy — THIS was quality television.
It took me an episode and a half of Monday Night Raw to learn the names of a few of the wrestlers — Dolph Ziggler (who looks like the lovechild of Zach Morris and AC Slater), John Cena, CM Punk, AJ Lee — which is about as long as it took me to start caring about everything that happens to them. Seriously, it’s like finding a stray dog on the street, and the second you give it a name it’s not leaving your house or heart ever again.
Last night we hosted a party to watch the Royal Rumble, which, by the way, is a pay-per-view event that we paid a ridiculous $60 to watch. If you’re not as acquainted with wrestling as I am these days, the Royal Rumble is a last-man-standing battle between 30 fighters. The match starts between two guys, and every 30 seconds someone new is added to the ring. It’s cheesy, absurd — and we had so much fun watching. Was the show worth $60? Maybe, at least because we had really good company.
Before you get too concerned about our new hobby though (mom) rest assured that we’re still doing real adventurous things like trapeze and improv classes (me) and working on house projects and cooking plenty of chili to get us through the winter (Mike). So what if we tune in twice a week to hear what the Rock is cooking, too?
I wanted to cook more bread this year. I didn’t. But I have learned more about myself and how I operate, thanks to some insightful wisdom from Stratejoy and allowing myself the quiet time in my brain to figure it out. Turns out, I like to be busy — I just need to prioritize the things that make me feel like I’m taking care of myself — exercise, grocery shopping, doing laundry, cleaning, sleep. Basic human operations.
Do you ever feel like every year goes by faster than the last? I heard a theory that time feels “faster” because as we age, we have more PAST time to compare NOW time to. When you were six, a year was 1/6th of your life, so it felt like forever. I mean, in elementary school, nine months was an eternity to wait for summer vacation! Now at 25, a year is 1/25th of all of my time. That will zoom by — and then the next year will feel even shorter.
I’ll end this thought-scramble of a post with this: 2013 is my year for courage & action. I’m excited for all it has to offer. More veggies! More places! More people! More love! More blogging! More of everything!
