why yes, we are hardcore.

saturday morning and the bikes are loaded up, millie for me, synergy for sallee. (sallee's old bike, jem, left us last weekend in a most dramatic and unexpected fashion. let's just say bike parts strewn on the road. she never would have made it 100 miles. but synergy is a champ!)



being hardcore, sallee had changed a flat tire by herself the night before. good as new. also being hardcore, sallee thought she could ride in a tank top. but, she was wrong. we rode a few feet and then went back and got her sweatshirt. it was cold.



this, my friends, is what we call clipping in. that's right, my shoe is actually attached to that pedal. and it is just as terrifying as it sounds. but, it means i am hardcore. and that's what matters.



thanks to a very detailed map provided by travis, sallee and i pretty easily completed a 21-mile-or-so loop out by the airport. we even rode over the boundary into north salt lake, which somehow makes it all seem so much more, well, hardcore. and, other hardcore road bikers were waving at us in comraderie, which makes me think we finally look like we know what we're doing. pretty rad. the only not-so-rad thing about the morning? a poorly aimed snot-rocket (what sallee calls a "farmer blow"). the landing spot was (unintentionally) my shoulder. gross. but clothes wash. and it was all ok because, i think as you can see here, frances+millie=true biking love.

frances cake, take four

miaken is the very definition of a friend crush. i had seen her around on facebook, linked to a lot of my friends and in a lot of pictures of things that looked totally awesome and i wanted to meet her so bad. and then i invited myself to rob's art night a little while back, and there she was! i may or may not have totally accosted her and forced her to sit next to me. or it may have just happened that way on its own. i can't quite remember. but, we traced our hands and turned the shapes into pictures, and she gave me a really great lead on a story for the paper and i invited her over for cake. friend dreams do come true!

miaken and i were meant to be friends because we were both craving some kind of lemon cake, but i didn't know she wanted lemon, too, until after i had already picked a lemon cream cake recipe. so it was like fate, you know? and we decided to make cupcakes, because lemon always tastes better in a cupcake form, i feel.

there were no major glitches in the preparation or baking. in fact, the cupcakes were practically perfect, as you will see for yourselves in a moment. the only minor snag was the frosting. we decided to eschew measuring and put in as much lemon juice as we wanted (the more the better, right?) but that made for some consistency problems that proved slightly difficult to remedy. the final product was more of a glaze than a frosting, but it was still completely delicious.

and, in the meantime, i learned that miaken is from kansas and she had her first stitches that very day (non-traumatic for her, in case you were wondering. she sort of liked it). we also talked about how she wanted to go back to school to study film, and she just found out this week that she was accepted! hurrah! it's a frances cake miracle!

susan just bought a new camera and was testing it out this particular day, so she documented the proceedings. i think she captured the divinity of these particular cupcakes very skillfully.

my body, myself (confessional #2)

i have a new bike. her name is millie. 100-mile millie to be exact, because i am going to take her on a 100-mile bike ride in one day less than one month (panic now). this is all incredibly significant to me, and i am going to tell you why.

i have never loved my body. now, before anyone panics, i should also say that i have never hated my body, either. and i have certainly never done anything on purpose to harm it. in fact, i am a total wimp and avoid the risk of physical harm pretty much all the time. what i mean to say is that i have never really loved my body in the sense that i have never really trusted my body to do anything, and i have certainly never counted on it to do anything well. i think i have the classic always-picked-last-in-elementary-school-gym-class syndrome, which becomes nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy in adulthood. the thought of doing anything physical-- running, water skiing, biking, playing soccer-- and particularly the thought of doing anything physical in front of other people who could, and most certainly will, judge me, fills me with insurmountable dread and self-doubt. for basically my entire life, i have avoided it at all costs.

this information often comes as a shock because i have a generally fit-looking body. i am, if you will, lean. and this, believe it or not (though i hope you do), poses a set of unique challenges. in our body and thinness-obsessed culture, i think we often make the assumption that skinny=happy. we assume that people who are thin must not worry about the appearance of their bodies at all. and that is simply not the case. i have felt just as much as any other woman that my body is unattractive and undesirable. i have worried just as much about what people think of how i look in a pair of shorts or a bathing suit. but because my body happens to look a certain way, i have often felt those insecurities were invalidated. this is not meant as a "pity me" moment. we all have insecurities. that is all i am trying to say.

i have also learned that we make assumptions about people based on the way their bodies look, most of which are mistaken. for example, i believe there are people who are just physically intuitive, who can pick up a basketball or put on some hiking shoes or hop in a kayak and just know what to do and do it well. i am not one of those people. (me+basketball=endless hilarity and/or serious injury to myself and others.) but i think i am often mistaken for one of those people because my body looks a certain way. i have often felt that people who are physically active and intuitive, but who do not look that way, resent this, or rather, me. i have a very clear memory of a girl in one of my college women's studies classes tearing up when she told us that she couldn't go to her senior prom because she couldn't find a dress that fit, even though she could run a mile faster than any other girl in her class. this still breaks my heart, and i agree that it is supremely unfair. but hate the thing, not the person. you know? as it happens, i myself resented this body-based tendency to assume for a long time, i think because it only made me more aware of things i couldn't do, but felt for some reason like i should.

needless to say, my experience is not unique and the purpose of this post is not to fish for some kind of assurance or pity, but merely to open a small window into life experience, which is what this blogging thing is all about, right? and the point i am really trying to get around to is that i started the process of tackling this issue head-on, which is what brought millie, and so much more, into my life.

the fact of the matter is, my body is exactly that: mine. mine to shape and to mold and to love and to take care of, or not. there is not much i can do about what my body looks like, but there is a lot i can do about what my body itself can do, what it can accomplish. in her book "reviving ophelia," the psychologist mary pipher talks about how important it is for girls to see their bodies not as decorative but as functional. functional! and when my body is functioning well, when it is riding a bike for 100 miles or getting up on water skis for the first time, it always looks better to me. it is easy to love my body when my body is doing.

the transition probably began last spring, when sallee and i started training for our first century (that would be 100 miles, people. i want to be clear about that) bike ride. we talked a lot as we rode up and down canyons and around and around parks about why we were doing this crazy thing. the answer? because we could. because it was empowering and invigorating and incomparable to teach our bodies to do something new, to help them do something hard, to look in the face of years of insecurity and doubt and to laugh. and then speed away towards something better. we rode 100 miles on our bikes! (and i totally dropped the f-bomb when we were done.) it was, quite literally, something i never thought i would do. and it felt oh-so-good. (it was also something that i, quite literally, swore i would never do again. millie and my completely sore, um, saddle, prove otherwise.)

i felt like the circle was complete, or getting closer, when i walked through the front door the other day in jogging clothes, sweating, carrying a yoga mat under one arm and millie under the other. it seemed, frankly, strange. was this me? well, yes. it was me. a new me. a me doing my best to become a better me. my old always-picked-last-in-elementary-school-gym-class insecurities are still there. i still get a pit in my stomach when someone suggests a hike or a game of ultimate frisbee. i still refuse to run with other people. i still beg not to be judged or left behind. the difference? when i am done worrying, when i am done begging, i do.

vernal equinox

here are some things i love about being an adult, particularly an unattached adult with very few responsibilities to anyone but myself. i can have a milkshake and french fries for dinner. i can leave my room messy. i can buy irresponsibly expensive shoes. i can go to movies on weekdays. i can stay up way past my bedtime watching cliffhanger episode after cliffhanger episode of "battlestar galactica." and, i can decide on the spur of the moment to go to vernal and visit the vanderlindens, some of my most favorite people from the mission, and some of my most favorite people on this planet earth.




in planning this weekend getaway i discovered that there are many a vernal-naysayer in the world. well, you should all know that there is plenty to do out there. a dinosaur museum? check. hiking and biking at flaming gorge? check. hilarious small-town movie theater? check. even more hilarious small-town gossip? check. see? more than you thought, huh?

the vanderlindens and i had so much catching up to do, we didn't get to most of those things, but we did take a lovely hike through dry fork canyon to see the indian petroglyphs. we're not sure what they mean, but we did learn that the V-shaped human form is called the "vernal man" because it is most prevalent in that area. vernal even has a native american human form named after it. and you thought it was boring!





































i rounded out the trip by stuffing myself with sister vanderlinden's famous pretzel dessert, and visiting my cousin natalie and her adorable family on my way out of town. and driving home i didn't even come close to hitting a single deer. aah, adulthood.

frances cake, take three

this is emily.




i met emily at the movies. she is the friend of a friend of a friend, and that was just too many people in the middle. so i decided to make her a friend of mine!

emily is definitely a friend worth having. she has a radio show (how completely awesome is that?) and she's from kentucky and she works in forensics, proving paternity and getting DNA off cigarette butts. she was even on russian television. since neither of us grew up in utah, we talked a lot about what a strange place it can be sometimes, especially when it comes to dating. but, not to worry. we're both glad to be here.

emily and i tackled a peanuter butter fudge layer cake, the first layer cake in the history of frances cake. while it was baking, we got a surprise visit from elliott.




since he's into the whole science thing, he and emily had a lot to talk about. but, since he doesn't eat sugar, he took off when the cake devouring began.

we cut the recipe in half, but it was still a pretty massive cake.






it was totally delicious, but also unbelievably dense. neither emily nor i could finish a whole piece. we attributed it to the large amounts of peanut butter in the recipe, but when i opened the fridge the next morning and saw an unopened dozen of eggs, it all became clear. whoopsie. it was bound to happen some time, right? i only wish i could say that was a first...

this does not make me happy.

hello, weather? this is frances. today is may 1st. enough already.

don't know much about history...

when i first moved here, i lived in a neighborhood called the avenues, which i like to call the san francisco of salt lake. it is a charming part of the city, close to downtown, filled with hills and trees and cafes and art galleries and old chapels and historic houses. the house i lived in was, in fact, built by my great-grandparents and is currently owned by my uncle bob. he LOVES giving tours of the house, pointing out original lighting and other historically significant features. (not in the category of historically significant, but certainly in the category of interesting, every single room in that house has a door to the outside. my great-grandmother didn't want anyone tracking mud through the house and thought entering a door directly into whatever room was your ultimate destination would solve the problem. i never heard any compelling evidence that it worked, but having that many doors certainly added to the problem of my living in constant fear of a break-in.)

i often wondered what kinds of stories lived inside the other houses i passed every day in the aves and, thanks to my totally awesome and in-the-know cousin, keri, i got to find out. keri is an architect and preservationist and, for the second year in row, took me along on the utah heritage foundation's historic homes tour a few weekends ago. this year's tour was of houses in... you guessed it... the avenues! some of them were stunning, and some of them you couldn't have paid me a million dollars to live in, but it was really fun to poke around inside and imagine what life is like there now, and what life was like there then. some things we (and i really mean i) learned:

1. the best way to kill your wife is to build her a new house. several of the houses on the tour had been built by husbands for wives who died before the homes were completed. suspicious.
2. sleeping porches were all the rage in the early 1900s. (is that the 20th century? i always get confused.) it was a commonly held belief that sleeping in the outside air would prevent and/or cure tuberculosis. these days, former sleeping porches make lovely, sunny, windowed family rooms.
3. old school bathtubs (made out of either steel or iron. again, my memory fails...) are too heavy to haul out of old houses, so most of the places we toured still had the originals. no explanation of how they got in the house to begin with.
4. little benches in the corners around a fireplace are called ingelbrooks.
5. some of the houses in the avenues have underground tunnels, some leading out to the middle of the yard, some leading to as yet undiscovered destinations. our guess as to their purpose? an escape route and/or hiding place for polygamist wives.











once we were done with the houses on the tour, keri, her mom, kathryn, and i drove past some historic houses in the avenues owned by our own extended family at one point or another. we drove past aunt elizabeth's old house on D street, where both kathryn and my mom had their wedding receptions, and past the old B street house, where my enterprising great-grandfather built four garages, used one and rented out the other three. (why did i not inherit this kind of genius?)

and, in perhaps the most stunning historical preservation of the day, we saw a fellow tour-goer wearing turquoise overalls. let me repeat that. turquoise overalls. when was the last time you saw those? i thought so.