Happiness Hill: August 2012

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Days 210 - 220 Slow and Steady

It's August! I've been doing almost nothing but going to work and then

going home to watch the Olympics. It's exhausting.

So exhausting that I've not taken many pictures!

So exhausting that I've not been able to eat like a grownup.

Well, I have been able, I've just not been motivated!

I made myself Alphabetti Spaghetti the other day. Isn't that classy?!

All I could think of was Rimmer, the whole time it was cooking.

Any Red Dwarf fans out there?

There was a beautiful sunset that I enjoyed during the commercial breaks.

Goodness, that's embarrassing to even type!

Sunday was definitely a day for rest.

She napped on the couch, on the coffee table, on the floor, on the deck,

under my bed, in front of the fan and probably more.

She doesn't judge my dinner choices.

She kept me company while I finished a fantastic book:

It took me a very, very long time to get through it (commercial breaks during the Olympics are both so long and yet so short!), but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and recommend it, especially if you're curious about the things around you. Lois would write a much better review, so I'll spare you mine, but it made me feel extremely grateful to be alive now!

This is from the preface, which I found here:
Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world--whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over--eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment--they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint of your walls and the water of your pipes. So the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

Curious??

Well, that's about it for now. I'm headed home to watch more of the Games!

Monday, August 6, 2012

Days 194 - 210 We Could Run Away

Well, there haven't been many pictures taken between this and the last post, but I feel like I've had almost no downtime. Until this past weekend. I napped at least twice each day yesterday and Saturday inbetween activities. It was wonderful! And lazy. Wonderfully lazy.

Day 199

Went out for frozen yogurt with friends after a tennis class. Yum!

Days 202-203

The Ragnar Relay!

I was a part of team Globe Trotters andI was in Van 2 with half of our 12 person team.

There were 6 of us piled in an Expedition for about 36 hours following our team members as we ran the 200 miles of the relay from Blaine to Langley.

We each ran 3 each, out of the 36 legs, making up a little more than half of 200 mile relay. I think. The details are fuzzy as I barely got any sleep!

It was exhausting and so much fun! I hope to do it again next year.

Part of our swag was temporary tattoos.

And this was pretty much the rest, minus the shirts and stickers for our cars. Part of this was provided by the Ragnar people and the rest by my awesome cousin Kiri and our Ultra team members Natalie and Maria. (N & M are amazing - they ran the same relay with half the people!)

This guy was amazing, too. He was part of the only 2-man team. Crazy! I heard him shout out his facebook page where we could post pictures, but now I cannot remember it. Probably for the best as I got mostly blurry pictures of him.

I never did see the guy who made up the other half of the team. I don't know how they do it!

There was a lot of pulling over and waiting for our runners to come by so we could offer them water, food, moral support and whatever else they needed.

It was more fun to be cheered on than I'd expected!

Uncle Gary got to run the leg that crosses Deception Pass.

It was early, around 5 am, cold and foggy and beautiful.

I only got blurry pictures of him running across - oh, well!

From the little you can see he appears to be very happy.

I love this place so much!

The weather shifted both days from crazy rain to blazing sun to drizzle to fog to being overcast. Thankfully it was pretty nice each time I had to run. It was warm but dry my first and last legs and perfectly cool and dry during my middle-of-the-night leg.

More waiting.

This was my longest leg, the one I was most worried about going into this, but it ended up being my favorite. I got to cross the bay on a long flat bridge around 3 in the morning. I could only see the lights of the refinery across the dark water and whatever area was illuminated by my headlamp.

It was the first time in my life that I felt like a runner!