High Five for 5

Saturday I finished my 5th 1/2 marathon! That trumps the pain and "poor" performance I had. I only finished about 30 seconds slower than my finish time last year, but I was in a great deal more pain thanks to my hip. I had to stop several times to un-cramp it only for it to seize up again a half mile down the road. Very frustrating and took all that I had to finish. My friends were at the finish line to share in our victories (Jack and Kate had PR's!) and my sweetie gave me the best hug that brought me to tears.

Running has changed my life and saved my sanity. When I had my "aha" moment about my health and weight, I started walking. Walking got boring as it takes a long time to get to where you want to go, so eventually I started to sneak-run. I would run on the trails above my home where it was private and nobody was there to see my attempts.

Then in 2009 I ran my first 5k, The Human Race. I was 228 pounds and I ran the whole thing. I didn't stop to walk once and am pretty certain I was the last runner to finish that day, but goddammit I did it. And I haven't looked back. I may not be a natural runner and I am certainly not a fast runner, but I'm out there. And I love it. I mean I hate it, but I love what it's done to my life.

Running saved my sanity when I was in the early days of my separation. I felt frantic and sad, angry and free. Running made me forget all the chaos in my life and focus on me and who I was going to be when I came out of this awful thing called divorce. I am thankful that my body is capable to run, and I am proud of the changes in my life and happiness I've found.

Sold Out: 26,000 strong (Mike finished 8,573 and I finished 12,247th overall). Mediocre, that's me! And I'm alright with that. :)

I don't know where my "in-focus" pic is but this is my girl-Friday. We've Three-peated the Rock and Roll 1/2. It's our run-mecca. Running has changed her life too. And her body... oooh-eee she is smokin long and lean!

It is damn early to be standing around Tukwila with 26,000 people. My friend Jack has participated in several events with us (you may start to recognize his face on here). He graduated with Mike and his locker was next to mine for 2 years in high school. He signed every single page of my annual one year. Every. Single. Page. He is a funny, funny man and an inspiration to many. He's lost over 80 pounds and is a race maniac!

I think we've all let our children believe that our medals equate our winning of the race. It's a little bit of magic and I love to see their eyes light up to think their parents WON. That spark of pride. MY mom (or dad) is the WINNER!

How do you feed 26,000 people that just finished 13.1/26.2 miles?

Our 3rd picture like this one. Ok the first one I was waaayyy heavier, and the 2nd one Kate was waaayyy not smiling!

My sweetie and me. He wasn't out running 1/2 marathons when we started dating. He had run in high school, but I may take this moment to mention that his 20th high school reunion is this summer. But I weaseled him into committing to the rock and roll last year (because it's a smokin deal if you register for the next years race the day before this years race) and he reluctantly agreed. Since he agreed to that, we've done several fun runs, another half marathon and have plans for many more in the future! I love that he participates with me. We celebrate each others accomplishments and just plain enjoy each others company.

I wanna rock and roll all night...

Or is it more like: I wanna rock until late in the evening, and party until a reasonable hour...


It's hard to find gifts for my sweetie, so when I heard the hottest show on earth was coming to Everett, I thought it would be a fun date night, and at the very least we could claim to have seen Kiss live, never mind that it's 20 years too late!
Now, growing up I was more of a Cure and Nirvana girl, not so much on the glam rock. Of course who doesn't know at least one KISS song though? And I'm actually a huge fan of Gene Simmons reality show Family Jewels.
Long story short: Neither one of us could identify a song until the very last one before the encore. Then it was awesome! But the whole show was the epitome of a Rock show. KISS knows how to get it done!

The local KISS tribute band was outside taking pictures with most of the crowd, and guess where their seats were inside? Yeah, they're pretty cool to get your picture taken with, not so cool to sit behind.

My view of the stage thanks to fake Gene Simmons:

And my view of the back of fake Gene's head:

This peach of a fella smuggled in a half-dozen airline bottles of Black Velvet and began heckling the tribute band to stop taking pictures because KISS wouldn't come out until we sat down. Um, yeah buddy... KISS is waiting on US. Right.

Poor fake Gene's feet were killing him and he finally took a seat to rest so Mike and I photo bombed him. We figured he wouldn't mind since we were the unfortunate souls seated behind him.

The good thing about being stuck behind them? The couple next to us bought us a beer to drown our sorrows. We got to see a couple of good fights, lots of drunk shenanigans, a little bit of a contact high from the fans behind us, and we left deaf. A true rock show through and through.

The last week of school (finally!)

My poor kids were in school for what felt like forever! But we made it (although we did cut it a half -day short so they kids could go to Whidbey for the weekend).



Boo and Natalie getting a good scrub-down before heading to the island for the weekend. It's all Pickles can do to restrain himself from getting in the tub with them. He sits with them like this for their entire bath.

I made my eyebrow plural this week too... I get them threaded and I love the results! I paparazzi'ed this lady getting hers done before me.

Gifts for the teachers. I heard they liked them... The kids didn't get why I glued a pencil on the clipboard. "Why would you do that?"

Brady declined his photo, but Natalie was more than happy to oblige. No more Kindergarten for this girl!

Mud Puppies and Two Wheelers

What a fun run. A group of 10 friends (and friends of friends) met up in Carnation at Remlington Farms on Saturday to run 3.3 miles in the mud and rain. We all ran together so we got to help each other out at each obstacle (I'm still recovering from the scratches and bruises from the walls and crawling through the mud pits) and laughing at each other as we got stuck in one particular mud pit and ended up rolling our way out of it rather than risk sinking up to our thighs again!

The Before and After shots are spectacular. This race was 10X more muddy than the Warrior Dash or Pineapple classic. I was muddy from head to toe, nothing was sacred!
The kids got to spend the day on the island with Grandma and Pa... I told the girls (to Mike's protest) that they couldn't ride the dirt bike until they could ride their bicycles without their training wheels. Mike said he was riding a dirt bike before he could ride a bike, but I know our girls were just being lazy about learning to ride without training wheels and thought it would be good incentive (Aunt Jacquie and Jeff backed me up, heh heh). Well, not 30 minutes after we dropped the kids off at the ferry do we get this photo from Grandma:

With the title "Next up" followed by this picture:

We think it's pretty cool that our girls learned to ride together and on Whidbey, the same place where Mike and I took off our training wheels for the first time as kids...

Oh, and not 24 hours after those training wheels came off and the kids came home, Boo was in the alley poppin wheelies! Natalie popped one or two off herself as to not be outdone :)

Woodland Park Zoo

Last week Brady's class got to head to the Woodland Park zoo, and the girls and I got to tag along.

My crew. I had to walk around with an orange name badge that says "Chaperone. I am responsible for my children." Man, that's a lot of pressure to actually state that I'll be responsible for my children.

10 Years

These are the days I hate having a photographic memory. I remember too much of this day, too much of the 6 months prior to this day. From January 6 to June 10, 2001 my world revolved around Providence hospital here in Everett. And then when I had to leave the hospital for the final time it was like "now what?"

That was the weekend my Uncle John was to donate marrow since he was fortunately the one sibling (my dad was the youngest of 5) that matched. But chemo had taken it's toll on my dad's body and it had quickly become an 'either/or' situation of how to die: multiple organ failure if we kept on with the chemo; or end the chemo and let the Leukemia do it's dirty work.

I was all geared up to take leave at my job and live for the next several months in Seattle with just my dad in a cute little apartment I found in Capitol hill near "The Hutch" while he went through the bone marrow transplant process. And now... I just didn't have to do that anymore. Everything I had been doing for months was done. He lost. I lost.

But he waited for Rich and me. I had no idea that people had being trying to reach me all morning to tell me to get to the hospital. I was already on my way on my own accord and walked into the cancer wing like I did every day, and into my dads room. And then I heard him breathing and I knew. I had heard that labored breath before and now I recognized it as the breathing of someone dying. My brother hadn't arrived yet, and I don't know times, but I know Rich hadn't been there long (long enough to grasp what was happening) and as we each held one of his hands and told him it was ok to go and told him all the things we probably should have told him to his face years prior, he took his final breath.

I wish he could have held my babies in his arms. I wish he could have been here when my marriage fell apart. I wish he could be here to see that I found Mike (my dad loved football, almost as much as I loved the players.) He totally would approve of my sweetie.

10 years later and I still miss him.


Shafter, CA: I had to be almost 5, Rich just a little baby.
Richard looks like he's about 6 or 7? Mid 80's. At home being silly.
Outside of Captian EO, Disneyland 1988. I was getting to be too cool to hang out with my parents (gag). I thought my fake wayfarers with the hang-10 footprints across the top were THE COOLEST THING EVER. Heck, I was the coolest thing ever!


Let's see if I can get these pics right: At our home in Shafter, CA; Mendocino or Greenhorn camping/hunting on the Borton property; at Morro Bay (in our matching plaid shorts); in front of the family business: The Saratoga Store.

Mommy needs a cocktail.

*Mommy needs a cocktail is a great blog by the way*

It's Tuesday. And Tuesdays have notoriously been my Monday. I can mentally recall numerous unpleasant events and they more-often-than-not happened on a Tuesday.

Tonight's capper came after I was making some croutons for our dinner and they got a little extra 'croutony' (read: burnt). I quietly pulled them from the oven, walked over to the liquor cabinet, and pulled out a bottle of wine. I poured myself a glass and made the rest into Sangria (by the way it's not very good, I wasn't very focused on my recipe, but it goes down just the same).

I don't make it a habit to write about my divorce here, but I feel like I'm going to explode if I don't say something. Yes, it's been 18+ months since my marriage ended; but that doesn't' mean that I'm legally divorced. Oh, no. It's been a long list of inaction, inaccuracies, and incompetencies. And I was dealt another blow today. I worked my ass off to ensure that paperwork was gathered and turned in before the 3 day weekend because I was promised that it would all be turned into the courts that Wednesday. Well, I called today only to find out that absolutely nothing happened after I hung up the phone 12 days ago. My stomach is in knots because I have this overwhelmingly contradictory feeling of wanting to throw up my hands in defeat and balling them up into fists.

So I'm enjoying my 2nd glass of wine on a Tuesday evening.

Border to Base

I did it again. I swear these 2.27 miles are as hard as any half-marathon I've ever done. Some of these police officers are actually in shape and not the donut-eating stereotypes of their profession! Last year I ran with a 15+ Ironman competitor (to which I was tasting blood at the end) and this year I ran with a marathoner who was also the top of her class in academy, so she was quite the bad-ass and I was sucking wind in a desperate effort to keep up with her (I did make her carry the torch most of the way ): )
BUT... my little gps thingy said that I ran my fastest mile. So I got that going for me. And I did it. So I got THAT going for me. And I still toughed it out and went to the gym this morning and still worked my rump off at both. So today was a good way to start June. And someone reminded me that it's National Running Day today. Check!

Before: (The kids got to ride along in the RV which they thought was AWESOME. They drove by me waving frantically out the window, it was very cute!) They also thought it was pretty cool that mom had 2 motorcycles and a SUV motorcade... I thought it was pretty cool too ;)

After: The kids got to hang out with Officer Janet (and run rampant in her patrol car) while I got a ride back to my van from the sweet Anacortes Citizen Patrol lady (you know, the retirees that patrol for people who park in handicap spots and who need a safety check while on vacation).