Baking Cookies & Blasted Dogs

Miles today: 5.7

Miles this week: 10.7

Miles in 2010: over 1000?

Today was a very special day. I had kinda been waiting for this day for a long time. Ever since Shelley started working at L'Arche, she told me a lot about the people she works with and how much personality they have.

Well Shelley and I have recently rekindled our running relationship, and so we finally made the plans for me to come over to L'Arche and help bake Christmas cookies. Appropriately so, since I own about 4 million bottles of sprinkles, have a great buttercream frosting recipe, and can use my lovely glacier ice blue KitchenAid stand mixer to mix it.

So I gathered up my sprinkles, cookie cutters, and that yummy buttercream frosting I made early this morning and I headed over to L'Arche to help Shelley and the rest of the L'Arche crew.

There is much to be said about people with disabilities. Working with people who have physical or mental handicaps (or both) is pretty much an experience that everyone should have at least once. I have been blessed with the opportunity to work with handicapped folks at a camp back in Pennsylvania ten or so years ago. The camp was a week-long, overnight camp called "Discovery Camp" where a bunch of us were counselors and the campers were these amazing people who were all handicapped in some way. Let me just tell you...that week each summer (I did it a couple of summers) was the most fun, full-of-laughs, hilarious, warm, and fulfilling week of those summers. We would sing songs from musicals, make s'mores at the campfire, and share Jesus in the afternoons. It really was a heck of an experience.

Anyway, back to L'Arche.

Shelley and I looked up a sugar cut-out cookie recipe when I got there. The first one said to refrigerate the dough for 2 hours, so that one was out. The 2nd one said you needed almond extract, which I forgot to bring. So, we just went with that one anyway because there was nothing about chilling the dough. Used a little extra vanilla in place of the almond extract and went on our way.

Cass and Kristen, two of the residents at L'Arche were our main helpers.

Cass and I met one day when Shelley brought her to the store (RR if you forgot) in October. Cass is pretty much hilarious. She now calls me my Heather and did this black lady soulful voice kinda yelling thing when I came into the house today. Oh my Heatha...my love! I love you, my Heatha!

Or something like that.

Well, if that doesn't automatically make you feel loved, I don't know what will.

What was great about the cookie making was that I learned some new things. First off, don't tease Cass. And if she's around, you probably shouldn't be playing Christmas music either. It puts her in a bad mood. She says everyone plays Christmas music too much and too early. Especially before Thanksgiving.

Another thing I learned was that there are some pretty cool inventions out there to help people who don't have much control of their hands, muscles, body in general. For instance, Kristen, who has CP (cerebal palsy) and probably a whole host of other things I don't know about or understand, is in a wheel chair, has little control of her body and limbs, and has a hard time talking. She's an awesome girl, in her early twenties, and totally wanted to help us with cookies.

So after Cass dumped flour and other ingredients into our mixing bowl, and then stormed off because of the Christmas music, Kristen helped us with the mixing.

Since she pretty much has no ability to hold a spoon and mix something, she wasn't going to hand mix the ingredients. But she does have this awesome thing that Shelley called her buttons that helps her with electrical appliance so that she can control them. Basically, you plug the buttons into the wall, and then plug your appliance into the buttons. You turn on the little adapter, and then you give Kristen this button thing that is powered by her touch. Your mixer is attached to the buttons adapter, and then Kristen presses her button, and that starts the mixer going. It's totally cool. So Kristen did most of the mixing while we scraped the bowl, and pretty soon we had dough that didn't look half bad. The button kind of looked like this, but not. Kristen giggled a lot when we used the buttons to mix the dough. It was adorable.

Then we looked back at the recipe and it said, chill dough for two hours. WHAT!!?!?!? We could've sworn that was the other recipe. So, we stuck it in the freezer for 15 minutes, and then got it back out, rolled the dough, and started cutting cookies. It was a blast. Kristen helped. We baked the cookies, burned none, and then let them cool.

A little bit later we got out the icing and sprinkles and went to work. You'll see above and to the right how they turned out. Super success.

This is me and Kristen with some of our finished products. She was pretty proud and so was I.

Right about when we finished up with decorating was when the boys of the house showed up...Tommy and Darren were all interested in the cookies all of a sudden because they wanted to eat them. Who wouldn't? That's Tommy and Darren in the pic with the ladies. Aren't they presh?

So, I've done no blogging today about my actual run, but there was a reason that I chose to write about L'Arche first. I just think it makes you appreciate things and see life from a different perspective. And maybe that's one thing I've enjoyed all year about this running everyday thing...learning about new people and new perspectives. I just like the richness of that.

My run today was awesome except for the blasted dogs. It seems that I don't have very good dog luck. Don't get me wrong, there are certain dogs that I love. My friends Sarah and Ryan have a Newf named Hank who I love. He is now on the West Coast with them in Newport, but he is a great dog. Even if he is running toward you.

My friends John and Sarah have two black labs, Duchess and Bruno, who are amazing. I'll let them lick me, slobber me, jump on me--no problems.

I like some other dogs, too.

But this year has been hard on me with some other dogs. I am now very afraid of any unknown dogs that come toward me. After the neighborhood dog incident that started in May (I think) with a dog I now know as "Boogie" (who names their dog that!?!?), I have not been the same around strange dogs.

Today's run can be included in the blasted dogs experience.

After baking at L'Arche, I sat around a lot and rested my bones. Then I decided to go for a run at 4:30. I was supposed to go on this same run at 6:15am, but I didn't wake up in time for that, so I headed out to the Jamerson YMCA and parked my car and geared up for a run up Enterprise Drive, down Bateman Bridge, through Poplar Forest, and around Wellington and Laxton Roads.

Everything was going fine. It was cold, but I wore my bright neon green Essential Run Jacket from Brooks and headed toward Poplar Forest. As I made the left turn onto the gravel road that leads to PoFo, I noticed two trucks (which inevitably meant there were people walking or people walking with dogs out there). I immediately had a passing thought to watch out for dogs because most people who walk dogs out there don't use leashes.

As I continued another quarter mile on the gravel road, I could see up ahead a man and two tiny dogs. But as I continued, I could also see that the man didn't have leashes but that the dogs were kind of following where he went. Like a nice guy would, he moved over to my right into the grass as I came up to him. His dogs followed. But then the dogs saw me, and started running towards me. The one dog which was closer was heading straight for me and it was barking and growling loudly. The man was yelling, Stop! Stop! but the dog wasn't listening. As the dog came to my feet, he was just inches away from me barking, snarling and jumping. I, of course, was stopped dead in my tracks, standing paralyzed with fear from this stupid little dog that probably wouldn't hardly harm me even if he did bite. I could have probably kicked it and sent it flying. But I was too scared.

And as the man walked up to me, he said, It's okay, he won't do anything to you. and he started laughing.

I'm not kidding.

laughing.

What the heck?

I didn't think it was very funny. I was about to cry. And he was laughing.

Well you can imagine that what followed was me not laughing. It was me yelling. I did not like the idea of the man laughing at me and how I reacted to his dumb dog.

I yelled at him and said, you think this is funny!? Then I said a choice word. Then I said something about how his awful dog should be on a leash. Then I used the choice word again.

He didn't laugh anymore. He actually said nothing.

I hope he felt bad. Because really, I don't think I should have to feel that much fear for doing absolutely nothing wrong while running through a pretty little farmland field. Ya know?

My run continued on with nothing special. I ran a good 5+ mile trek and headed back to my car, still a bit fired up about the man and his dog.

Oh well. Dogs are part of running apparently.