Kids & Family

Woman Rewards Her Walking with Writing

For every step she takes, Linda Schaub rewards herself with a keystroke.

OK. That's a stretch, but not by much.

The Wyandotte woman is an avid walker and enjoys writing. So she's paired the two together and rewards herself with writing a daily blog post for all the walking that she does. Her writings sometimes center around her walks, so it's almost as if you're right there with her (but while you're sitting eating ice cream as she's out pounding the pavement!)

Her blog posts also cover topical events going on in the world, as well as funny, relatable anecdotes of friends and family.

Patch recently spent a few minutes chatting with Schaub about her blog and why people should check it out.

Tell us about your blog and what it's all about.
When I first began my blog, I really only intended to focus on walking. My earliest blogs incorporated my daily mileage and what interesting things transpired during that day's walk. Often while walking I'd see something and make a mental note and the first time I got back online I'd type up that note.  Many times I will walk into the house, and go to the composition notebook I have and jot down the ideas to expound on later; I have many "unused ideas" of things I saw to share with you in later blog posts. While the Winter/Spring months were not at all conducive for walking, this Summer of 2013 has been great. I never ever expected to enjoy so many walking opportunities in the Summer as I am usually trying to water or wrangle weeds or doing some type of yard work in the early morning before work.  I don’t like to walk in the heat of the day. The cool and rainy Summer clime this year allowed me to walk nearly every morning ... the more I walked, the more opportunities to see things which also triggered thoughts from my memory bank, mostly nice memories; some not so nice. For many months I wrote just for myself and my neighbor Marge Aubin who had encouraged me to write again.

In my mind's eye, having not written anything since my college days, not even keeping a journal, I felt "rusty” and not sure I wanted to share my writing with the world. As I walked and wrote more I felt comfortable with conveying recollections of events in my past. At one time I e-mailed Marge and told her that as the only reader of my blog and privy to my deepest thoughts, she would likely know more about me than she could have imagined by just being a friend to my mom and I all these years. The blog made me feel free to divulge inner thoughts and dredge up past experiences of my family or myself . As I wrote more and more I no longer felt “rusty” and gained newfound confidence.  I really enjoy writing the blog and look forward to sitting down every day to write.  When I looked back at the work I have done to pick a favorite blog post, I could hardly believe that I’ve churned out so many words and thoughts.  It is like I have created a log which memorializes who Linda Schaub is, where she has been and what people played a role in her life.   Since I do not have a child or grandchild to bounce on my knee and say "when I was a little girl" or "when I was growing up" these posts will tell a tale all their own and give you insight into who I am.

What's the story behind how your blog came to be?
The first blog I wrote at Patch on Aug. 10 told about why I started writing the blog.

What's been your favorite blog post? My original blog post is my ALL-TIME FAVORITE. I really wrote from the heart about starting to write again after so many years and it also the concept of how my blog began.

The post entitled “Joey” was written to remember the 30-year anniversary of my beloved parakeet Joey’s death and was quite a catharsis for me.  That little bird meant the world to our family.  This little tribute to Joey and the heartache over his death seemed just as fresh as thirty years before and tears were streaming down my face most of the time I was typing.  But in writing that post, I remembered a few good and sweet memories so it made it all special to me.  I revisited the heartache of losing a pet in the past few weeks when a friend of mine lost her beloved 15-year-old dog.  She was inconsolable and still is.  I reached out to her and tried to share her pain and cried when I read her Facebook posts about the loss of Patsy.

I felt a real spiritual, almost surreal connection at the Park the day I wrote “Sunbeam. It was one of the most-peaceful times I have ever spent and I hopefully communicated what I felt in that day’s post.

Why should people read your blog?
Hopefully people will read my blog to find commentary on my discovery of the day.  There is always something or someone that crosses my path and is fodder for a post.  What you will find is tidbits from the trail, sometimes witty, sometimes reflective - hopefully always something you'll enjoy reading and you won't abandon my blog posts along the way because I’ve bored you.  If you are young, perhaps I will share something you didn't know or you can relive a past event (like 9/11 as an example) through my eyes. If you are my age (57) perhaps you will identify more with what I am trying to communicate as we both lived through a particular era.  I hope that someone will subscribe to my Patch blog “Reflections and Recollections” for a chuckle or to find out my latest escapade or visit to the Park and hopefully you’ll take time to wander around my original blog, “Walkin’, Writin’, Wit & Whimsy," which now numbers nearly 150 posts.

What you will not see in my blog is my suggestions for household hints for great housekeeping, cooking shortcuts or favorite recipes because that is not me. I'm not a stellar housekeeper and I am a lousy cook. In fact I live on pretty simple fare. I can however extol the virtues of a good chocolate chip cookie if I was asked to do so. I also no longer would offer gardening tips or offer up photos of my prize-winning garden because my yard no longer fits into that category, though for many years it would have. Rats have become a fixture in the neighborhood and my backyard paradise is now "paradise lost" and I no longer find pleasure and comfort being there as I did in the past.

As an icebreaker, whenever someone is hired at Patch, they have to reveal their first concert and their most embarrassing song on their iPod. So, what's yours?
Well this answer will certainly date me. I would have to say that the first concert I attended was in the gym of Huff Junior High, which was the middle school I attended in the late 1960s. Around 1968 or 1969, Tommy James and the Shondells came to the school gym. I don't even remember if we had to pay to attend. The pull-out bleacher seating was set in place and we all sat smooshed together like sardines to watch this Michigan-based group belt out “Crimson and Clover” on a makeshift stage on the tarp that covered the waxed gymnasium floor.  We screamed and feigned fainting and had the audacity to ask for autographs afterward while hovering around like groupies. I wonder if anyone even remembers Tommy James and the Shondells? Did you know that Alice Cooper and Bob Seger also played Downriver gigs before they got famous?  Bob Seger lived in Lincoln Park a short time and attended LPHS. He played at the old Park Theatre, but I never saw him at that venue. My first big-arena concert was to see Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. It was at Cobo Hall in the early 70s and I wish I could say it was during the taping of "Live Bullet" but it was not.

I don't even own an iPod and I am probably the only person alive who has never used one. Someone showed me a few minutes of a movie they had loaded onto their iPod once and that's the only time I have ever seen one. I own a Sony Walkman which I've had for years and years - can this count? Right now it is hanging on my exercise bike downstairs. The exercise bike rarely gets used, thus the Walkman shares that same rarely used status as well. The last tape I listened to was the soundtrack of the movie “Falling from Grace” featuring John Mellencamp; I bought that cassette tape because I really liked the title song. I had alot of LPs back in the day, then I graduated to 8-track tapes.  (Groan, now I am really dating myself.)  I bought a few cassettes of my favorite artists from my LP collection, but since I commuted to work by bus for some thirty years, I never logged alot of time in the car so I never even took the cassettes out of the house.

Now the lazy me generally listens to music on the radio, mostly WOMC 104.3 which features oldies, and sometimes if I am thinking about a particular song from the past I will hop onto YouTube and search for it and enjoy it there. Sometimes I listen to Pandora on my laptop and my playlist is diverse and ranges from  Fleetwood Mac to Gordon Lightfoot and I enjoy most of Michael Jackson's songs.  I have a few fun tunes on YouTube I regularly listen to - "Rainbow Connection", "If I Had a Million Dollars" and "You're So Sweet". I play at least one of those latter songs a day for Buddy my canary; he will sing non-stop the entire time the song is playing. Now that last song by Neil Diamond is embarrassingly corny, but before I take Buddy's covers off to wake him up every morning, so as to not scare him, I sing that song to him first.  That itself may be scarier than suddenly removing his cover!  I know all the lyrics to that silly song by heart.

Your blog posts sometimes talk about your friends and family. How comfortable are you with sharing such personal stories? I think it takes character to share your inner soul with others, though at the beginning I was not forthcoming about much more than my daily walking mileage efforts and what transpired along that morning’s walk.  I can write about myself alot as there is only me … I have no family except Buddy, my mop-top canary.  As to calling my grandfather a "cantankerous old coot" a few weeks ago, well - he was and deserved that moniker.  Everyone has funky little things from their past.  No person nor their kin have enjoyed a purely pristine past and I suspect that the persons in my life and their travails, trials and tribulations helped mold me into the pragmatic person I am today.  I lead a simple life. I don't apologize for my simple life. I work from home with Buddy within earshot during the day. I work at my kitchen table on a laptop. It is not an elaborate office set-up.  There is no water cooler to kibitz with co-workers, no impromptu conversations in the elevator or in the ladies bathroom. Yet, I don't miss the lack of camaraderie nor that daily routine. I've been there and done that to use that phrase. No dressing up for work anymore … sweats or shorts and tees, plus a topknot and glasses perched on my nose are all the prep for my workday. I sometimes put in more hours that I did when I worked on site - I certainly am more productive in many respects without the big burden of commuting. I feel liberated and I am about as happy as anyone could be. My world is certainly not for everyone but is perfect for me.  Life is good and I hope my contentment is reflected in my daily posts.

To be notified of Linda's future blog posts, click "Get email updates" at the top of her blog.

If you have an interest you want to blog about, it's super easy to get started! Just click "Blogs" in the main navigation bar above. Then, in the upper left-hand corner, click the "Start your own Blog" icon. You'll then be asked three things: to name your blog, to write a short description of the blog and to upload a thumbnail to appear on the account. Once you hit the "Create your blog" button, you'll be on your way to making your first blog post. It's that simple!

Any questions? Email Patch Community Editor Jason Alley at jason.alley@patch.com.


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