Pining for the Fjords

When last I blogged , Kristen and I made it to Vegas and spent Sunday evening wandering the Strip, seeing the sights and eating and drinking delightful things.  Unfortunately, after we headed back to the Monte Carlo, the rest of our evening was not as lovely; we had some extremely noisy neighbors that kept us up through most of the evening, requiring a call to hotel security to ask them to intervene (when Kristen called, the security guys went, “oh, it’s room 206, isn’t it?”  Apparently, other folks had been calling as well).  Since morning found us worn out from tossing and turning all night, we decided some serious R&R was in order.  Kristen booked herself a massage, and I headed down to the pool area to enjoy it before the heat became too scorching. At the pool, tanning my calves As the sun rose higher in the sky, I moved around a bit, not really wanting to be in the sunshine.  As is my wont while in a lawn chair, I nodded off in the shad...

Another summer means another road trip to Vegas!  Huzzah! A few months back, my buddy Kristen (we've been friends since we started Academic Counselor training on the same day 11 years ago at UoPX and discovered each other reading books on lunch break) emailed me and said, "hey, dude, I know this is random, but do you want to do a girls' trip to Vegas?"  I was like, heck yeah!  Although Vegas is not at its most pleasant in the middle of summer, it's generally 10 degrees cooler than Phoenix at any point in time, so it was off to the far northern reaches for us! We've each been to Vegas multiple times (thanks to it being just a short flight/medium drive from the Valley of the Sun), so we didn't have a huge agenda per se, but we each had our favorite locations we wanted to be sure to hit.  I had some discounts at the MGM resorts due to this online game I play (it's called MyVegas, and if you do Vegas regularly, it can be handy - thanks to Erin for teac...

Those of you who know us now are probably familiar with the three furballs in our house: Bella, our oldest dog, a 13 year old lab/Rottweiler/hound mix; Kaylee, our alpha, a 9 ½ year old Doberman/shepherd/dingo blend; and Harley, our big dude, a 9 year old full blooded English mastiff that used to belong to my co-worker Krystie.  If you’ve only known us for the last six years or so, however, you missed out on becoming familiar with our first dog, Luigi, or as we liked to call him, Weej. There he is! Weej was a special little monkey, and although we don’t really actively miss him being in our lives, he certainly brought a fair amount of laughter and hilarity into our house.  Weej was the first dog we adopted together, just a month or so after we became engaged in September 2002.  We went to the SPCA in Jacksonville, and the minute Chris saw him, he fell head over heels (me:  [pointing at Weej] “you want that one?  What about this one instead?” ...

Since it’s summer here, and approximately 1000 degrees, most of our races and whatnot have ended for the season.  Although we have a few short trips coming up in the future, not much is happening right now.  What to write for the blog, then?  Time for another trip down Memory Lane! When Chris and I first moved to Arizona in January 2004, we were flat broke.  I had just graduated from the University of North Florida with my Master’s degree, Chris had just finished his enlistment with the Navy, and both of us were completely jobless.  For the first month or so, we lived mainly off gift cards and money from our wedding, held just a few months before we headed west.  Because of this, we spent our time finding all of the free things to do in Phoenix, mainly checking out books from the library and hiking on South Mountain.  As I recall, we also stayed up late each night and watched a lot of Blind Date , because Fox was one of the only channels tha...

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...