Picture of the Year

The girls are back in school, leaves are coming down, much of the flower garden looks ready to be put to bed, we're looking forward to a harder winter than last year and road salt ten dollars a ton higher. My mind is looking forward to the end of the year, and looking back for a picture of 2014 to post on my side bar.

I realize I don't have that picture. If I did, it would be Carly and me. But, I don't. Carly is my personal trainer, who looked at me and the black eye and the cane last February and informed me I simply needed my core back and she would see to that.

I've taken some pictures over the year, but not of the studio, or the twice weekly sessions. I started with one pound weights. Carly called them pacifiers. That's what she called my cane, too. It lives in my car now, and I do twenty five reps of whatever I'm doing with an eight pound weight in each hand.

We've met most of her goals, except for riding bicycles down the towpath trail. My head is still not ready. "Hmpfh," she snorts. "We will be riding next spring." I'm sure she's right.

If a picture of two old women shows up, and one of them is fit as a fiddle and the other is me, that will be the picture. In the meantime, here are some pictures I've taken since last February.

Carly's studio is on the left end of the building, the windows at the very top. The rest is apartments, businesses, and a luxury residential suite on the right. It was the apartment of the man who bought up much of Peninsula to save it from development and zoned it into a kind of Brigadoon while he was alive. His foundation rents the apartment as a sort of get away to people who can afford it.

The first fifteen steps. Plus two not photographed.

The spruce up there on the right is lovely to smell on the way by.

Seventeen steps to the first landing.

An elevator. But, you must find Artie, the building manager,

to activate it in the basement.

And the elevator stops at the top of the first flight.

There are still sixteen more stairs to the studio.

I've never taken the elevator.

Looking up at the ceiling and skylights from this staircase.

Looking down at someone's door.

That will be me tomorrow afternoon,

Climbing fifty stairs, 

Water bottle and gym shoes over my shoulder,

because Carly is determined we will ride bikes come spring.