Introducing: Music for the Gym!

I am starting a new series on this blog about music to work out to. Personally, I would never make it to the gym if it wasn't for my iPod/iPhone. I'm not a huge fan of gym workouts and while I need them most in the winter, it can be hard to find the motivation to leave a warm house or office and trudge through the snow. Sometimes I'm able to trick myself into being excited for a workout simply by making a particularly fun mix that I look forward to listening to.

I'd like to share some of my favorite non-top-40 pump up music in hopes that it might help other non-meat heads do an extra rep or an another mile on the treadmill. Not that there's anything wrong with working out to top 40 but sometimes I get sick of Lady Gaga and Flo Rida and I want something different. I hope that you readers will use the comments section of the blog to share your own favorite workout tunes.

Lately, to switch it up and find some new material, I've been trying out different Pandora stations and listening to them on my phone. I've been getting good results with LaRoux radio. A electronic duo from the UK, LaRoux knows how to keep the party going. If you don't have it already, I recommend adding "Bulletproof" to your rotation. If you're looking to kick it old school, James Brown's album In The Jungle Groove is great from start to finish and a solid album to run to.

What's rocking your gym mix these days?

Stay tuned for music to do yoga to.

Vortexes, Radicles and the Healing Powers of Water

The temperature in Boston is currently in the low teens and we're expected to get more snow tonight. It saddens me that while we're getting bombarded with all this snow, and even people in Atlanta are getting hit by blizzards, residents of the arctic city of Iqaluit, Canada had to cancel their New Year's snow mobile parade because of unseasonably warm conditions. Apparently, the crazy weather of last two years cannot yet be attributed to global warming but might be a result of a weakening polar vortex. I wish there was something I could do, like send that vortex a care package full of Campbell's Chunky Soup and EmergenC. "Beef up vortex! You can do it! Hold that cold air up there!"

As huddle in my sweaters, cursing the vortex and awaiting New England Snowmageddon: Part 6, there are some things I am thankful for. On Saturday I attended the first session of the Boston Natural Areas Network's (BNAN) Master Urban Gardener (MUG) program. In eight weeks, I'll be a super volunteer for BNAN, equipped with new knowledge on pest management, composting, starting community gardens and other fun things. This means I'll be helping out in community gardens across the city. I'm hoping I can also use my new skills and new network to both start a community garden in the empty lot on my street and launch an annual Jamaica Plain Garden Tour. If fancy neighborhoods like Beacon Hill can have garden tours, why can't we? There are plenty of amazing private and public gardens in the neighborhood, as well as people who like plants.

In addition to being excited about the knowledge I'll gain in this program, I am very pleased with the diversity in my class. I was expecting the crowd to be mostly middle aged white women but we've actually got a great mix of ages, races and backgrounds, and there are a lot of dudes. Some folks know little about gardening and others have been gardening in zone 6 for decades. I feel like I already have 30 + new friends to dork out with and with whom I can make stupid jokes about seedlings being radicle. Most of all, I look forward to being addressed as "Master."

After my first class, Wyatt took me to the famous Cuddles and Bubbles hotel in Hyannis on the Cape. Some might find themed hotels tacky but I found hanging out in a hot tub all night to be particularly satisfying. We had wine, cheese and strawberries in the tub before heading to Main Street for dinner. After dinner, we got back in the water and ate chocolate. I'm not sure I've ever felt so relaxed. I felt like poop on a stick all last week and now, three bubble baths later, I feel like a rock star. Leslie, our AfroFlow Yoga teacher, always reminds us we're more than 60% water and praises the elements' healing properties. Especially now, I feel there is a lot of truth in that and I'm adding baths to my list of healthy habits. On the not-so-healthy habits front, my boss just brought me a box of Arab sweets from Jordan and I feel like the post-holiday diet is never gonna get off the ground. Oh well.

Oh America...

Three Cool Ideas

1. The Good Gym
Help someone run an errand while you get your work out in.

2. Neighbors for Neighbors in Jamaica Plain just started SnowCrew, a group of volunteers who help their neighbors shovel after big snowstorms. You can sign up to shovel or get help via text message.

3. In urban food deserts like Detroit, why not let Walmart move in to establish small stores?

Snow Day

Though most of Boston was shut down yesterday, the people of Jamaica Plain did some righteous sledding at Jamaica Pond. I went to join the fun, armed with a cardboard box, which didn't end up working. A nice couple took pity on me and lent me a saucer and I got five or six good runs in before it got dark. As I was leaving with my box, a passing teacher informed me that you have to put dish soap on cardboard boxes to make them go. That's what she does with her kindergarteners apparently.











Sledding was fun but dressing like a snow man is getting old. California, here I come!

Working Girl

Yesterday, I only talked to two people between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm. One was in a meeting. A meeting I was nervous about because I wasn't sure if I'd be able to communicate clearly, since I haven't been talking to anyone because this place is deserted.

Sometimes music plays in the atrium in our building. The cd or whatever the building management plays, has been skipping on the same note all day so it sounds like a rave. Every time I exit my suite I look for a small rave elf to sneak out from behind a potted plant and hand me some ecstasy but all I see is the Au Bon Pain attendant, wrapped in 3 sweaters, talking on her cell phone in Arabic.

I'll be really happy when January is over.

Travel on the cheap

In trying to book flights for summer weddings, I've been dismayed with what seem like incredibly high prices. My usual go-to websites and airlines (i.e. kayak.com and southwest) are turning up fares that make me want to cry. $400 to go to Nashville from Boston? I've flown to California for less.

Thankfully, this recent New York Times article offers some helpful tips on how to keep traveling in 2011.

If you have travel deal secrets, please share them in the comments box!

Pesky Millenials

In this piece, Daniel Pink, author and expert on making workplaces more awesome, discusses how we might cater to millenials' desire for constant feedback by providing workers with more than the annual performance review. How much can meeting once a year or even every six months really help someone? Now that I'm not in the organizing world, getting feedback on the regs, I totally sympathize with this notion. Academia, I'm finding, is pretty weak on feedback, accountability, idea sharing, and pretty much all the things that I learned were important in my organizational development classes in college.

In this other article, Pink addresses the benefits of giving employees time to do what they want. Google and others have proven that allowing employees to be creative can lead to great ideas like G-mail, so why haven't more companies caught on? This is something Wyatt and I have been talking about a lot. It seems like a no-brainer.

As a former solider of the non-profit world myself, I wonder how organizations can make space for their employees to do some creative thinking, without the incentive of bottom-line payback. Given the chance and the space to be more creative, non-profit workers might come up with brilliant new campaign strategies, reporting software and fundraising tools. The problem is, most people have too much work to set aside time for non-essential work. They need the management to mandate creative time, and even then, I've known folks who would probably keep working on their regular work. It's so lame! We're missing out on so much potential. Let's democratize the workplace. Creative time and regular feedback for all!

Holiday Highlights and The Tallest Man on Earth

The Jankas eat Turducken! In case you haven't heard of a Turducken, it's a chicken stuffed inside a duck which is then stuffed inside a turkey. A mail order from Louisiana, this one also had a lot of Cajun stuffing in it.






This is what I ate at La Rosa, a world famous Cuban place in Miami. It's a seafood stew named something that begins with a "z". We had one night in Florida on the way home from Belize and tried this place based on the Yelp reviews. It turned out to be phenomenal. My parents had skirt steak and lamb shanks in wine sauce, and my brother had house-made chicken cordon bleu. Our waiter, a Costa Rican guy, was really friendly and funny, definitely a plus after a long day of airports and airplanes.

I'm sitting in an airport again, the third time in three days and I've been listening to The Tallest Man on Earth's Wild Hunt. One of the songs on it was on all the best of 2010 lists and two friends that give me all my best music recommendations told me I'd love it. I feel like I am missing something. To me it sounds like Xavier Rudd remaking Bob Dylan and doing it badly. It feels similar to Ryan Adams' Cold Roses, a tribute to the Grateful Dead, complete with dancing bears inside the cover. It was sad. At least, it just wasn't that compelling. I feel the same way about Wild Hunt. And Kristian Mattson's voice is so annoying. Perhaps with time, I'll feel differently.






This is my brother with his Christmas gift, a Hezbollah shirt straight from Beirut. And we wonder why people think we're terrorists...

Can you Belize it?

Toucan.

You can see some more photos here.