Happy Birthday Charlotte!

Charlotte The Dog turns 2 years old today. Happy Birthday Charlotte!



Two years ago, she was born into the Morrow County Humane Society along with a few brothers & sisters who looked nothing like her. We're pretty sure her mom was that type of girl.


She's grown quite a bit in the last 2 years. She lost that puppy look and officially weighs 50 pounds.




She graduated Obedience Training and can

• sit
• stay (for 3+ minutes even if you leave the room)
• come
• heel
• speak
• shake (as in shake the bathwater off of yourself before I let you out of the bathroom)
• down
• paw
• touch
• ring a bell when she wants to go outside
• 'go lay down' (as in go lay down on your pillow until further notice)
• high five
• leave it
• drop it
• roll over
• give kisses
• and she knows her toys by name - she'll go fetch whatever specific toy you request (specific types of beer & snack foods are next on the list of items to teach her to fetch).

She experienced her first snowfall last Spring & swam for the first time last Summer.




She's run in a number of 5Ks with me and helped me train over the Summer for the Columbus Half Marathon.





She does not like hats


She likes to play with anything that squeaks (this includes live bunnies, but that's another story for another day) and when she has toys she really loves, she puts them in a pile & rolls on them like they're money.





She wakes us up when we sleep too late and lets us sleep when we tell her it's the weekend.

She loves a good sunbeam and is not a fan of the mailman, which works out great when she wants to tell him just how much she doesn't approve of his daily disturbance.



She definitely has attitude & isn't afraid to show it.



Happy 2 Years Charlotte.

Work/Vacation Balance

Matt & I have yet to figure out how to vacation. Specifically, vacation from home. Who knew that this was a skill we're not naturally born with? When we're slacking off, we feel like we should be working. When we're working, all we want to do is slack off. When we travel for vacation, we slack off the whole time & just feel guilty for the first few days. That guilt tends to wane as the alcohol gets poured.

When we staycation, though, the guilt takes over and we feel compelled to complete home improvement projects. The upside is that we are here to balance each other out. If Matt were here home alone, he would hit the ground running every morning and never stop. He's proven this with the patio project from his summer vacation. If I were here by myself, absolutely nothing productive would get done. I might play the piano, take the dog for a walk and go to the gym, but that would be the extent of my excursion.

What ends up happening is that we try to get the work out of the way early and end up working so hard that we're took tired to enjoy the vacation part.

Vacation Day 1
Clean the house nonstop from top to bottom until 4pm. Nap for an hour. Make dinner. Clean now-dirty kitchen. Go to bed.

Vacation Day 2
Wake up with a cold. Eat Christmas cookies & watch Polar Express. Take the dog for an hour walk. Hit the stores looking for post Christmas sales on home decorating supplies. Bring supplies home, tired & despising the mall scene, but happy with our progress. Hang curtains & set up lamps - hate it all. Take it down and put in 'return' pile. Make dinner. Go to bed.

Vacation Day 3
Pay some bills. Send some emails. Spend 4 hours scrubbing & waterproof painting basement walls. Collapse in exhausted heap on couch at 2. Putter & some light cleaning until midnight.

Vacation Day 4
Clean up basement mess from day before. Clean basement & do some organizing. Feel much better about basement livability & usefulness. Return bad purchases from day before. Scratch our heads over home decorating dilemma. Go to gym (yay!). Play piano. Eat dinner. Watch too much TV. Blog.

So there's a lot of working and probably enough relaxing. We just haven't figured out how to do vacationy type stuff while we still have enough energy to do it. Our vacation is bipolar. We go from work to sit and stare at the wall and then back to work until we can't work anymore.

Withdrawl

Is it a sign that I have a problem when I'm at the gym, surrounded by TVs and all sorts of interesting people watching and while I'm skiing to nowhere, all I can picture is my running route in my head and Charlotte's floppy ears bouncing around five steps in front of me?

I swear to you, every song reminds me of a certain street. Tegan & Sara's Time Running is the house where the other runner dude is always stretching and waves at us in the morning. The B-52's Funplex is the corner where Charlotte always expects her share of the water bottle. The White Stripe's Conquest is the stretch along the school playground. And The Arctic Monkeys Dancing Shoes is the street that lines the tennis courts - have you ever run with a lab past multiple tennis courts? The multitude of tennis balls is almost too much for her to handle.

And why is it that I don't remember the long stretch that never seems to end? Or that when my calves cramp up, they always do it right before we get to that school playground? Or that last half mile where I bargain with myself the whole way that I'll 'run to the next driveway' then 'to the next driveway' and so on.

Is this why women have more than one baby? You remember all the good things and forget that hard part? Regardless, I want the sun to come out for more than a few hours and warm up the air so my dog and I can go run in a big 4 mile circle - much better than skiing to nowhere, right?

Back from No Man's Land

So have I mentioned before how hard this whole MBA thing is? I'm pretty sure I gave up my favorite hobbies, socializing for the most part, a little sleep and a lot of sanity to get through that last semester.

The semester ended about 2 weeks ago and I'm just now coming out of my post-semester fog wherein I'm a complete idiot, incapable of stringing together more than 3 words at a time or holding a thought in my brain for more than 30 seconds. The day after my last final, Matt found me standing in the middle of the grocery store, just staring off into space. I have no idea what I was thinking about.

I can't even make conversation. Someone asks me how I'm doing and in my head, I'm saying something like, "Things are great. We're getting ready for the holidays and getting our shopping done..." Somewhere between my brain scripting these words and transmitting them to my mouth, regression analysis, linear programming and the Utilitarian & Kantian theories strip my words of any meaning and by the time my elegant narrative of our holiday activities makes it to my mouth, it sounds something like, "Huh? What was that? Sorry, I zoned out."

In the meantime, while I wait for my brain to recover, I spent the weekend with someone who doesn't require elaborate conversation and is good for tons of crafting and Christmas fun - my niece!

We spent weekend decorating candles, writing people's names with beads and trimming the tree.



(hey, my sister-in-law's name is Ana L. - I have to take advantage of it)

1st 1/2 Marathon

It was a success! I finished in 2:30 2:03 (stupid mixing up of numbers) and I didn't walk, which was my only real goal besides just finishing.

The race started at 7:30am and it was freezing out. 38 degrees and dark - I was in shorts. 'Nough said.

It was an amazing experience to run for hours with 11,500 people and to see so many people standing outside in the cold cheering us on.

My parents, Matt & his sister met me at mile 9, at which point I felt really good.




By mile 11, though, I would have paid money to sit down for a minute. Despite the guy chatting on the phone next to me, though, I muscled through and made it to the finish.



Matt's cousin ran the full marathon and finished in 3:30, which qualified her for Boston - way to go Heidi! And of course we had to pose with our medals afterwards.

Everyone

Someday, I'm going to invent an imaginary friend, name him Everyone, and make him happy. That way, I can claim that once in my life, I managed to please everyone.

Ever have one of those days?

That aside, the training for the Half is going well. A week and a half ago, I ran my last long run - 12 miles. Just one mile short of the half marathon. I feel ready. Except for this cold that I'm currently sporting, but I have time to kick that. My strategy for preparing for this race includes:

• Positive thinking
• A kicka$$ playlist
• Short runs between now & the race (especially in this cooler weather so I can adjust to the temp)
• Lots of water
• Not much salt
• Flat shoes

Most of this will become more important the week leading up to the race, but at this point, after about 6 months of training, that's what's going to get me to the finish line.

Falling with a Strategy

I accomplished my 11 miles this morning - woo!

This time I stuck to my normal route around the neighborhood so I could take Charlotte with me. She made the first 5.5 miles and then I dropped her off at home to finish on my own. I even managed to do that without hardly slowing down. We blew through the front door, I unhooked the lease, made a beeline for the fridge to grab a fresh water bottle, went out the back door and finished the run.

I love running through our neighborhood. It seems to be a very fit and dog-friendly place. There are always other runners out, people walking their dogs and I hardly ever make it through a run without seeing the local cops either in cars or on bikes, so I feel very safe. The only downside is that the sidewalks are anything but smooth. You would thing we'd been hit by an earthquake that uprooted all the concrete, which then settled in random heaps. I pretty reliably fall once every Summer. Usually on days when I'm especially tired and not picking my feet up high enough - today was one of those days.

I'd been thinking about my annual fall, though and I felt prepared. Usually I fall very superman-like and my hands take the brunt of the fall. I'm left to run home with scraped up and stinging hands. I've been tempted to ask one of those nice local cops for a ride, but apparently I'm too stubborn.

So today, I was running along our nice bumpy sidewalks and my the toes of my right foot tripped on the pavement. And suddenly, my body went into autopilot and I didn't realize what I was doing until it was already done. In the half-second it took me to fall, I let go of the leash and with whatever leverage I still had on the toe of my shoe, I launched myself sideways into the grass and rolled to my side before I hit. I made a very nice landing in some soft grass and I have no blood to show for it. Not bad. I guess it always pays to have a strategy.