jetsetting blogger

I'm back to hecticness at work which means no running during the week. It also means my long runs are getting harder to sustain on no other exercise.

I'm in Toronto now (got up at 4am PST and went to bed at 11pm EST so no time for exericse), but i'm hopeful this week I can get a few workouts in.

The good news is that Dave is putting the finishing touches on my awesome closet renovation! We did most of the work this past weekend and I'm so thrilled with how it came out.  now to convince him that we *need* the crown molding for the top... :)

Full post of pictures, reviews, and info on the process coming Thursday next week when I'm back at home with my camera!

2 post Sunday

Well, 2nd post for me today. I didn't end up going to yoga because I had a groupon that is only good for a month and I'm traveling for work 10 days out of the month, so I decided to skip this time and pick it up after I get back in town.

Instead, Dave and I went to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock. I don't want to give anything away, but it is amazing, if you think it looks even remotely good, you need to go see it.  and bring kleenex!

Then we tried our hand at making General Tsao's chicken from scratch.  It was AMAZING! but next time I think we'll grill the chicken instead because I just felt gross watching it fry in all that oil!

Riley has been sleeping all day.  I guess our run tired her out as much as it did me!

Went for a run today

6 mile run - 64 minutes, 8 seconds. raining the whole time.  Riley was a trooper and came with me the whole way.

Now, to drink my body weight in water and prepare for hot yoga this afternoon.  This could be a disaster, or really good.  I'm hoping the stretching will be fantastic for my muscles. all of the balancing exercises, well, that should be interesting.

Also -huge sad face.... I got a blister while running.  Pretty sure any future pair of Asics are out for me, because the first pair I ever ran in were Asics and they gave me a blister in the same spot :(  They were fun colors too, which is a bummer.  back to the drawing board!  At least I'm well within my 30 day return window!

Swapping a long run for painting... again

Well, the snow has finally finished (we ended up with about 16") and the rains have come in and started to melt it all.  I'm still a little apprehensive to run outside given the slush and ice, so decided to tackle a home improvement project today instead.  I will take Riley out and see how well the public trails are salted tomorrow.  My goal is a 60 minute run (hopefully about 6 miles).  Still need to break in the new shoes and see if they are going to work for me.

Anyway, Dave and I have been drooling over those fancy closet organization systems for awhile.  you know, the ones that have drawers built in and look like furniture?  We decided that would be our January house project so we have been researching and finally purchased a custom designed system from easyclosets.com.  So far, I'm impressed.  We provided the closet floorplan (measurements, etc) and told them what I use the closet for (i.e., how much tall hanging space, drawer space, shelves, etc do I need) and they custom designed something for us for free.  We purchased the system, and now we are taking advantage of their free shipping and waiting for it to arrive (ETA next Friday 1/27).  So this weekend's project was taking down the old wire shelving, filling in the holes and painting. We didn't really want to buy more paint and had JUST enough left over from painting the master bedroom and hallway so I decided to stick to that.  I added some plyometrics into the mix on the second coat so I wouldn't have to use the ladder :)

For now, all of my clothes are in my office and I am so excited to show you the before and after pictures next weekend!

On the docket this week: my first allergy shot appointment.  Hopefully this will start making me feel better around Riley, but it's going to be a long road (3-5 years of shots... yuck!)

Snow Shoveling

Snow shoveling is a great workout! Coupled with my ab workout yesterday, I'm feeling a little sore!  I worked from home again today... Snowpocalypse is suppose to arrive around 4am. Considering we already have about 9" on the ground.. .we'll see how much more we get!

Workout today (or lack thereof)

Well, Dave and I worked from home today considering we have about 7-8" of snow.  My goal was to go out for a run, but after running out for a quick lunch, Dave mentioned a few times that he thought it would be too icy.  I'm pretty sure that was his code for "I'm concerned you're going to fall and kill yourself, please don't go run" so I stayed inside and snuggled with Riley all afternoon.  I was feeling pretty guilty about my laziness, so after dinner I busted out 2 sets of 20 crunches, bicycles, reverse crunches, planks and side planks (well, I only made it through one set of the side planks... they are my nemesis!).

Thursday is going to be a looooong day.  I have 6 candidates coming for interviews and then my brother is coming into town to go skiing with some friends and wants to meet up for dinner, so Dave and I will head downtown to have dinner with him.

Friday is another 6 candidate day, so I can pretty much plan on not getting a workout in Thursday or Friday.  So... tomorrow and Wednesday it is.  My goal is to run at least 2 miles each day... I need to start getting back into it more regularly and not beating myself up over not gettng in my prescribed 3 miles.  I ran the Vancouver Half last May on one run during the week and a long run on the weekend (albeit, I had a decent base), but I can't stop doing this "all or nothing" garbage, where a run isn't worth going on if I can't do it 3x during the week for at least 30 minutes.

And... I need to actually register for the 1/2 marathon at the end of March... having paid money will hopefully help kick my butt into gear.

amazing dinner

I know, I know, 2 posts in one day. But I had to blog about the amazing dinner we just had.

We tried 2 new recipes, which always makes me a little nervous but they were both a huge success.

The first was these Maple Bourbon Glazed Pork Chops (yum)!

But the star of this dish was the decadent Mushroom Risotto we made.  We had risotto for the first time several months ago and all I've been reading is about how difficult it is to do well (um, Gordon Ramsey anyone?).  Not sure if ours would pass the Hell's Kitchen test, but it was pretty amazing.  Very time intensive (you kind of had to babysit it) but well worth it.

Dave cut up fruit for dessert and normally I am firmly in the "fruit is not dessert!" camp, but this was the perfect sweet topper to a very savory meal.

We LOVE trying new recipes, but the hustle and bustle of the work week doesn't always lend itself to doing so.  Thankfully the snow put all of our plans on hold.  After my run and after Dave shoveled the driveway, we hung out for a bit and then took Riley out to play in the snow. She loved it.  We came home, hunkered down and watched The Help, and then set out to create dinner.  It was glorious.  We are hoping for a bit more snow tonight so we won't have to feel guilty about working from home tomorrow :)

It Snowed!!

For those of you who are familiar with weather in the Seattle area, you know what a big deal this is.  My neighbor claims we have 6" but I think it's more like 3-4".  Being a Michigan girl who transplanted to Seattle, I think it is hilarious when it snows.  cars are abandoned on the side of the road, no one goes out... hilarious.

Since I didn't start running until after I moved to Seattle, so I decided to lace up my new running shoes and head out.  Running in unplowed snow is much like running in sand... hard!  I did 2 miles before getting back to the house, and I should've worn sunglasses to protect my eyes from the snow that was coming down.  Riley's bandages came off yesterday so I took her with me and she had a blast!!!

4 miles... 48 minutes

slowest miles in awhile, but considering I was thisclose to cancelling, I'll take it. I keep saying it, but I need to start finding time to run at least once or twice during the week or that half marathon in March is going to break me.

New shoes purchased today though - I'm excited to try them out!

Hard to believe that a year ago tomorrow I was running my first marathon! Huge shoutout to Kathleen as she tackles the same marathon tomorrow (she is my running idol! much faster than me)

My running partner is incapacitated with an owie paw so we are snuggling today!

Hawaii Recap

This is L-O-N-G, sorry!

So I should start off by saying that before this trip I was a Hawaii skeptic.  Everyone said it was so fabulous, but I was kind of wondering what made it so different/better than the Caribbean.  I decided Dave and I definitely need to check it out while we live in the PacNW because who knows how long we'll be living here (I have not so secret dreams of either moving back to the midwest one day - home prices what?! or moving somewhere warm warm warm like Arizona).

So over Thanksgiving we assessed the vacation time off situation after using a shit-ton for the wedding and realized we could swing a week off over New Year's since we wouldn't need to take as many vacation days (and my ever so generous GM gave us 2 extra free days off over New Year's weekend).

We decided to go to Oahu because it was cheapest to fly into and we used hotels.com/hotwire/priceline for our two hotels.

We arrived in Honolulu about 11:00 at night and headed to our hotel and went to bed.

Saturday, December 30th: Tons and Tons of driving around to acclimate ourselves to the island, so unfortunately, not much working out this day.  But, we did walk around the new Disney resort - which is super posh and not overtly "Disney"

The next day (NYE) we hiked Manoa Falls, which was just gorgeous!  It was about 1.5 miles round trip but felt like a lot more because of the elevation gain.

We ended up pretty muddy, but decided to see what else we could find to do and where we could eat lunch.  On the way to lunch, we stopped at the Pali Highway lookout, which was a gorgeous view.  A quick search on my phone revealed that there was a short hike on the old Pali Highway.  We decided to try that.  It was a VERY  steep downhill, and since it was an out and back, it was also a very steep uphill! we got about a mile down the road before the road kind of disappeared so we turned around and headed back to the car.

We then drove up to the north shore and sat on the beach and watched surfers. We came home and went out to a fancy dinner, opened a bottle of champagne on our roof (realized it tasted like crap) and fell asleep at 10:30.  Rockstar New Years Eve over here!

New Years Day we drove back up to the North Shore to go on a whale watching cruise.  It was awesome!  We saw a few whales and a few people saw a shark too!  After we were done there, we went to the Dole Plantation and had Dole Whip - yummy pineapple flavored soft serve!

On the 2nd, it was time for us to check out of our first hotel and move to a hotel on Waikiki Beach.  they upgraded us to a corner room which was awesome, the only stipulation is that it had 2 double beds.  If you know us, you know this is not an issue.  While we love sleeping together, we reserve at least one night a week to sleep in our own beds.  During marathon training, Dave slept in the guest bedroom every Friday night so I wouldn't wake him when I woke up to go on my long runs Saturday morning.

On the 2nd we hiked Diamond Head to watch the sunset.  It's a pretty steep elevation gain with a few sets of gnarly stairs.  They said to allow about an hour to get to the top, especially if you're not in great physical condition. We were super worried about missing the sunrise... we made it up in 18 minutes!

We actually started heading down to one of the lower lookouts because we thought the cloud cover was too much, but then we saw it! (excuse our sweatiness!)

I was feeling so good when we got back to the hotel that I decided to go for a run.  There was a woman and man running around the same pace as I was, so I made it my personal mission to stay in front of them (geez, competitive much?)  That led to 2.75 miles in 27 minutes.  Not bad for not running for awhile.

On this day it was time for us to check out of our first hotel and move to a hotel on Waikiki Beach. they upgraded us to a corner room which was awesome, the only stipulation is that it had 2 double beds. If you know us, you know this is not an issue. While we love sleeping together, we reserve at least one night a week to sleep in our own beds. During marathon training, Dave slept in the guest bedroom every Friday night so I wouldn't wake him when I woke up to go on my long runs Saturday morning.

The next day we did Pearl Harbor and went back to the Disney Resort to see if we could sneak in and use their pool.  No dice, so we hung out on the public beach and then went to a luau, which was really fun!

The next few days blur together quite a bit, so I'll just give one big update :)

We did a 3 mile hike that was honestly the hardest hike I've ever done.  It was SO muddy!  we were sliding all over the place, but the resulting view was worth it:

The last morning we were there we went snorkeling at Hanauma Bay.  AMAZING!  there were so many fishes that were brightly colored and they were so close to the shore.  it was awesome.

Alright that's it for now.  My exercise over the last few days has been painting! I painted our living room/dining room/kitchen (it's all one big great room) and the dog's bedroom (don't laugh, with a 5 bedroom house and no plans for kids, the dog has her own room too!).

MIA...

I know my one reader was very concerned with my absence this week :)  Let's just say, Hawaii was a terrific success. I ate tons of food, but managed to get lots of physical actvity in.

full trip report and pics coming soon :)