Pining for the Fjords

Need to get caught up?  Here's Part One . When last I blogged, we covered the first day of Mom's visit earlier this month and our excursion to the Stahl House in the Hollywood Hills.  Her second day with us, Sunday, found us mostly hanging around the house, working on random stuff (she unpacked and organized ALL of our books - not a small undertaking), although she and I did venture out to have tea at Elise's Tea House in our Bixby Knolls area of Long Beach, which was fantastic (seriously, of all the high tea's I've been to, and it's a lot, folks, this was the best food I've ever had at one.  I can't wait to go back).   On Monday, we were up on the early side of things and heading toward Santa Monica and the coast to see the Getty Villa.  I've been to the Getty Museum before, on a visit to see Dad when I was growing up, and it's absolutely amazing.  However, since we only wanted to spend half a day or so in museum-type settings, we picked

Right after we moved into the new house in Long Beach, we had our very first visitor - my Mom! Mom and I, heading to tea! Although the timing seems ridiculous in hindsight (she landed just three days after we started sleeping in the new place), she actually booked her trip way back in mid-May, right after we moved to California.  She ended up changing her flights three times, first to arrive in Orange County, then in Ontario (when we thought we'd be in Glendora for her trip), then to LAX, as that's the closest big airport near the house (Long Beach is actually our closest airport - only 2 miles away - but it doesn't have great flight options to the east coast - yet!).  As it turned out, she'd have to change flights even more, due to the one giant dust storm Phoenix gets each year; Sky Harbor was her connecting airport on the way to see us, and when she booked the flights, we figured that would be no big deal - Phoenix is never delayed!  After being routed from

In the midst of moving, saying goodbye to Bella, having Mom visit for a few days, and everything else that was going on, I was still attempting to train for the Long Beach Marathon, which is held in October.  As part of training for a full marathon, I normally try to run a half marathon (an actual race - I run a half marathon every Saturday or Sunday in training) or 10K about 6-8 weeks before the full, to get race experience and practice my pacing.  A few months back, before all of this craziness began, Chris and I both signed up for the Summer Bliss Half Marathon, to be run on the Long Beach running path, starting and ending near Belmont Shores. Although I didn't run for a solid two weeks due to everything mentioned above, I was able to start squeezing in some workouts the Tuesday before the Saturday race, and given that my previous training runs had taken me up to the half marathon distance, I felt I could at least finish the race.  Chris, for his part, decided to bail complete