Pining for the Fjords

Okay, so I know that I already blogged about Tara and Ryan coming to visit us a few weeks back, and in that blog, I discussed the Coast to Crest run we did.  Once that happens, I normally don't revisit races, other than to link to them in subsequent blogs for random reasons. HOWEVER. I finally got around to downloading the pictures from the event from the race's website, and they are pretty magic.  First, it's super cool that Tara and I ran this together, because we have all sorts of shots of the two of us during the event.  That includes this one, which the race organizers obviously liked enough that they put their watermark on it - maybe we'll be on a brochure in the future! Neat, right? Okay, let's do these chronologically.  Here we go.  First, the 10K took off. Can you see Chris? He's kinda blurry, but he's like eight feet taller than everyone else, so he's easy to see. He's wearing blue, and he's right in th

Every week as I get ready to write this blog, I sit down and think, "okay, what's happened lately?  Did I have a race?  Did someone visit?  Did we do something cool?  Did we go somewhere?"  If the answer to all of those questions is "no," then I fall back to my old filler standby, yet another post about the yard.  It's time for Part 9! Since it's been a while since Part 8  (last October - dang!  We've been doing stuff since then!), here's a quick recap: we got cement!  Woo hoo! About a month after Coastline came and poured us our patio in the back yard, we found a weekend where we weren't doing any running or traveling and the weather would be nice (one big advantage of SoCal over Phoenix is that you can do outdoor projects in the summertime without dying of heatstroke - winning!) and in mid-June, we started working on building ourselves a pergola.  As you might imagine if you've ever met him, Chris had been doing all sorts of researc

In the almost two years since we've lived out in California, we've had all sorts of great visitors to our house in the LBC.  My mom has come a few times, Chris' Mom and her fiance Andy visited last Thanksgiving, Chris' Dad visited last October, and we've had several day-trippers as well:  Meg and Murph, Uncle Gene and Aunt Linda, and of course, my Dad and Risa multiple times (it helps when you live just 30 minutes away).  This weekend, we were pleased to host our friends Tara and Ryan, with whom we became close in the past few years, joined together by our shared hobby of spending hard earned cash doing lots of exercise for no foreseeable reason (of the four of us, I'm the only one not an Ironman, if that tells you anything). We initially planned to see Tara and Ryan last November, as Ryan was originally on our Ragnar McDowell 2017 Team, but when health concerns caused him to drop, and Tara's cousin's wedding occurred the same weekend in Tucson, we sta