Pining for the Fjords

Very much like My First Science Kit, except not nearly as cool. Unlike Chris, who started athletics in his infancy (almost), I came late to actively participating in sports.  I was an extremely bookish kid growing up, and while I loved to watch sports (and still do), I was never coordinated or fast or skilled enough to participate, either on a team or individual basis (for my gym credits in high school, I took “Individual and Dual Sports,” where we played badminton, croquet, and shuffleboard.  I maintain a love of those games even today).  A few years after Chris and I got married and moved to Arizona, I started to notice some weight gain slowly creeping up on me; while the gain was never a huge amount, after the stress of finishing college, getting married, moving all the way across the country, finding new jobs, getting Chris into school, and buying a house, I realized that I had increased from a size 6-8 to a 12 or so.  There’s absolutely nothing wro...

Although I try to be careful when I’m out exercising (as well as in life in general), sometimes, despite my best efforts, things go awry.  In the past, I’ve crashed off my bike a few times, although thankfully, I’ve always been able to walk away and never really incurred a ton of damage to the bike itself.  I’ve also wiped out several times on the road and trail, all just from tripping over my own two feet.  Although I normally have to take some time off to recover, I’ve again always been lucky that I’ve still never broken, torn, or detached anything that needed significant healing time or surgery. A wipeout at the Elephant Mountain 50K a few years back Last Sunday, I headed out for an easy hour ride along the New River Trail, the pedestrian only (well, no motor vehicle access) paved trail that runs right next to our neighborhood.  Between Chris and I, we run and ride the trail every single weekend, and it’s one of our favorite features of the area where...

We’ve been pretty darn lucky this year, here in the Valley of the Sun, in that it didn’t start to get supremely hot until the latter part of May, waiting until this point to consistently hit triple digits.  Additionally, we’ve been having more rain than normal for this time of the year, and while the humidity is destroying my early morning runs (this Thursday, I did 7.5 miles – 4.5 of them tempo pace – in a temp of 78 degrees with 88% humidity.  There was a reason I left Florida, y’all), it’s been keeping the temps down a bit longer.  Regardless, it’s pretty easy to see that summer is in full swing, and for Chris and I, that means weekend mornings at the movies! I was going to put the movie poster for Jurassic World here. You know, the one with Chris Pratt on a motorcycle, running along with a pack of raptors, and then I was going to make some crack – in a movie announcer voice –  about how “this summer, Chris Pratt is…the velociraptor whisperer....

Huzzah!  It’s open! As I noted on the blog a few weeks back ( this entry about cruiser bikes), we are lucky to have Dubina Brewing just a few miles from our house and another new brewery, Richter Aleworks , building a location a few miles in the other direction (Richter’s upcoming location is on my morning running route, so that tells you how close it really is to our house).  We also found out last week that the outstanding Peoria Artisan Brewery will be opening a second location this fall, also only a few miles from our house.  Truly, we’re blessed with an abundance of good beer around our house, not even counting the gallons that come out of our spare upstairs bedroom. In addition to these guys, but a bit further away, there is another set of newer breweries opening on the west side of Phoenix, and we’ve been venturing out to try them as we hear about them.  We attended the grand opening of Freak’NBrewing Company last year, and they seem to contin...

For Day 1's coverage, click  here , for Day 2, click  here , and for Day 3, click  here . On Day 4, we awoke a bit later than usual, apparently finally getting used to this “being in a place without dogs” thing.  We took our time wandering around our room before venturing across the small road again, this time to Starbucks for breakfast and coffee/tea.  We hung out there for awhile, then headed back to the hotel, this time to change into our bathing suits and hit the hot tub (there was a heated pool as well, but it was still too cold for really hopping in the pool.  Once we’d baked (poached, technically, I suppose) our internal organs enough, it was back to the room to shower and get ready for real. Since we knew we had our Firestone Walker tour coming up later that day, we didn’t want to spend more time wine tasting.  In perusing the map we gained the day before at Zenaida, we noticed a spot on the map that sounded promising – the Estrella Warb...