Winning the Lottery

I imagine the title of this post is a little misleading. No, I did not win THE lottery. I did, however, win A lottery. Last week, I entered the lottery to be selected to run in the coveted Peachtree Road Race. It is a very famous race with 60,000 participant slots. Many of those slots are filled with previous racers and Atlanta Track Club members and then the rest are selected by a random lottery. After patiently waiting all week and weekend long, at 7 o'clock this morning I checked my gmail to find that I have been selected...I am running the Peachtree on July 4th, 2013 with 59,999 others! 

I will be running with several of my friends/running buddies. Our entries were actually all tied together in a team and our team was selected to run. I know that at the very least, my usual partner in running crime, Jessica, will be running with me. You may recognize her from such events as: The Hot Chocolate 5K, Area 13.1, and the Spooktacular Chase. In fact, she has run every race with me except the Noteworthy 5K and I am so grateful that she has. I look forward to many more runs with her!

Anyway, I just thought I'd pass on the news. My very first 10K will be one of the most coveted races in the Southeast!!

Running Through Time

Hopefully everyone remembered to "fall back" at 2am today. I was wide awake and embracing the time change. I ran a 5K last night this morning entitled, The Anything is Possible 5K. The race started at 1:50am (10 minutes before the time change), so when you finished, provided it was within an hour of starting, you finished before you even started, therefore giving you a negative time!!! Talk about a PR! I was really pleased with this race as it truly was "fast" and "flat." If you have ever run a race that claimed to be those things, you understand that it never truly is either of those terms. This race truly was. I did not PR, like I had hoped, but I did better than 2 weeks ago with The Spooktacular Chase (which did have a hill of death)!

I ran the race with three of my friends and we had a blast!

Here we are before the race!

I truly loved everything about this race. The ambiance was awesome, the music was great, the racers were all in good spirits and ready to have fun. Not to mention, instead of a shirt, everyone received Old Navy pajama pants!!

Things I Haven't Done

Here is a list of the things I haven't done lately:

1) I haven't run since the last blog post about it. Partly because of the weather being icky on the days that I could run outside. I really have no excuses for not running indoor, considering that I have a treadmill!

2) I haven't started reading another book yet. Every now and then I just don't read. It's not that I don't feel like reading or I have too much to do, I just don't really get around to it. It's probably a good thing, though. Usually when I feel like reading, I read like my life depends on it!

3) I haven't baked a single thing since those cheesecake brownies I made back in July. I did, however, copy down a recipe for Tres Leches Cupcakes and I will buy the ingredients and make them this weekend!

4) I haven't visited with any of my friends outside of my co-workers. I don't know if it's because we all lead such different lives and/or our schedules don't mesh, or maybe something else entirely. It kinda sucks, too, because I really miss just hanging out sometimes.

Oh, I also haven't uploaded (or really taken) any pictures lately. I promise I will rectify that soon. I would upload one tonight, but the battery on my camera is, as usual, dead.

I feel like my blog posts are usually so full of the mundane stuff I do from day to day that I would shake things up a bit and talk about the things I don't do!!

Friendly Lunch and a Monsoon

I've been pretty busy lately. Not with anything in particular, just busy days cram-packed full of either work or home stuff to do. I will be a more consistent blogger, I swear!!

Thursday, I had lunch at a brand new Olive Garden with my bestie. I had a great time chatting and catching up and it was nice to finally have some "girl time." We hardly ever see each other anymore and that kinda bums me out. The food was pretty tasty, too! We had an appetizer of spinach artichoke dip (which came out as an entree) and the all-you-can-eat soup, salad and breadsticks (which came out as the appetizer). I learned that the gnocchi soup is pretty tasty (like a very thin chicken and dumplings), but I still like the pasta y fagiolli the best!

That evening, we had plans to meet some friends at Stone Mountain Park to take in the laser show. The weather as of late has been fairly rainy torrential in the evenings, so we were hoping for the best. Once we arrived, everything looked promising.

We brought a tent to set up on the lawn because there are usually a ton of bees swarming the grass in front of the carving. That ended up being the best idea EVER!! The afternoon went splendidly. The kids played with bubbles and we threw frisbees and played and danced. The laser show doesn't start until 9:30pm (to guarantee darkness). At 8:50pm, it started to sprinkle. Then, it started to pour. Everyone was running off the lawn to get to shelter. A few people brought tarps and were standing under those on the lawn. But WE had a tent!!! Ohhhh yeah! All 8 of us piled in, hoping it would soon pass. It let up long enough to enjoy about 5 minutes of fireworks, but the laser show was cancelled.

See? No rain. It lasted about 5 minutes before it started up again.

Of course, by the time we got confirmation that the show was cancelled, it started to pour again. The guys had to pack up the tent in the pouring rain while the kids and us ladies went to guest services to obtain rain checks. Despite the weather and the lack of lasers, we actually had a lot of fun! 

I'm still reading The Graveyard Book. I haven't really had time to dig in to it. (Haha! Unintentional Pun). Maybe this weekend.

Tomorrow's agenda? I'm baking cheesecake brownies for my boss's birthday and I am going to go for a 9 or 10 mile run (assuming the weather agrees). Not too much longer before the half!!

Play Date!

The kids and I went on a play date with one of Gabriel's friends from school, her sister and her grandmother. This was the first play date we have ever been on. Shane was, of course, sleeping from working the night before and from the lack of sleep he got on Sunday with me having to work and all. We met them at Chick-fil-A at 10am for breakfast. Apparently, CFA just changed their breakfast menu, because now all of the combos come with the fruit cup instead of hashbrowns. If you want the hashbrowns instead, it's a $1.30 upcharge. Oh yeah, you read that correctly, they charge more for substituting hashbrowns for fruit!!! Now, I kinda get it. You (CFA) are now forcing me to eat healthy and penalizing me for making an unhealthy choice. That's actually pretty cool, since it's usually the other way around, but in the grand scheme of things, the hashbrowns cost at TON less than fresh fruit. It's a good thing I usually only get the biscuit and a drink. (I really wanted those hashbrowns this morning, though) Anyway, they screwed up and gave us fruit cups anyway, so we had to have them bring us hashbrowns and we kept the fruit cups and the kids ate them! (Bonus!!)

We ate our food and then let the kids go outside on the playground while we sat and chatted about how our summer had gone so far. I think the kids played for a little over an hour before they started to get cranky from the heat and the running around. Plus, by that time it was lunch and there were lots of kids showing up with their "stay at home mommies." We decided it was in our best interest to call it a day. They are going out of town for a week and we will be out of town next weekend, so we plan to get together again before school starts.

After the play date, I decided to let the kids have a treat since they were cranky and hot. We stopped at the local froyo place and I bought us all a cup of tastiness! The kids really liked it. Then, we came home for a few hours before we had to leave again.

I learned today that I am dependent upon Shane to get Gabriel ready for Martial Arts class. I didn't know that his gee had a button on the side for a strap and, although I looked it up on YouTube, I could NOT tie his belt correctly to save my life!! I ended up bringing it untied with me and letting one of the employees do it for me. I have now made it my goal to learn the proper way to tie it!! Speaking of Martial Arts, our free trial ends this week and I officially registered him for ongoing classes! I hope it really helps him with his focus and self esteem. They are having a belt test in a couple of weeks, but I don't think Gabriel will be ready for it, but he should be by September. We'll see...

Oh, lastly, I am now reading, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It's a pretty short read and it's kinda strange. It's just interesting enough to keep me wondering, but it's not SO interesting that I cease to function due to the inability to put it down. I think I'm about a third of the way through it. It's about a baby that manages to escape being murdered like the rest of his family by leaving the house and going to the graveyard up the hill. The mother's ghost asks the ghosts of the graveyard to look after him and keep him safe, so they do. So, this kid is growing up in a graveyard. Weird, right?

It's Been A Minute

It's been a few days since I last posted. There hasn't been too much going on. I have been truly horrible at dedicating my time to training for the half. I'm sure that will come back to bite me on race day. I'm really going to try harder for the last next 5 weeks.

We spent the 4th of July at a friend's house. We actually spent the entire day there! There was a full food spread of slider burgers and hot dogs with all the fixins and sides. They had put tarps over the back deck, so the sun wasn't shining directly down on us and later (when it rained) the rain didn't fall on us or anything else. We also got the pleasure of watching them tell everyone their exciting news!! They're having a baby on around January 8th of next year!! (I've known about it the whole time, so it was fun to watch everyone else get excited). We ended the evening with, of course, fireworks!! The kids got to have fun with sparklers while the boys men detonated the bigger show. By the time we left, the kids were super sleepy and they slept late the next day!! (They usually get up at 7-7:30am)

Despite the fact that I haven't trained at all this week (and most of last), I made plans to go jogging with a couple of coworkers after I got off from work this evening and before Shane had to leave for work. We went to the very start of the trail and walked in the wrong direction for about a mile before figuring it out and turning around. We jogged at some parts. When it was all done, we had gone almost 7 miles. I wasn't wearing my expensive Experia socks today and my feet told me as much when I got out of the car at home to walk up to the house. I guess I know now that I MUST wear the Experias during the half if I expect my feet to stick it out with me!

I'm still working on using up the last of my vacation time before it rolls over again, so I'm not working much next week. I hope that means I can fit in some training runs! We are planning to go to Stone Mountain one day and I am having lunch with a friend on Thursday.

The Run That Just Didn't Happen

I haven't posted in a couple of days. This is mostly due to lack of things to say, but also because I have been dealing with quite a load of family drama. I'm not going to go into it, but it has consumed more of my time than I would have liked recently.

On Thursday, I ran 3 miles on the treadmill. It was a pretty good run. I ditched the MP3 player and just brought my tablet downstairs and turned on Pandora to the Pop Fitness channel. I have never listened to that station before, but it was pretty good. I skipped songs a lot less frequently on it than I do on my regular player!

Today was supposed to be my 6 mile long run for the week. I didn't get much sleep last night, but we still woke up early. I was planning to run early in the day because we had a lunch date with some friends and their kids and I wanted a chance to shower before leaving for the restaurant (an hour away). We ended up running so many errands before getting to the park to run that there just wasn't time for what I knew was going to end up being an at least hour and a half run, let alone time to get home and shower to leave again.  I was a little unhappy, but I figured we'd just fit it in later. I generally have an ongoing agenda/itinerary in my mind on my days off.

We went to Papi's, a great Cuban/Caribbean grill in Kennesaw. The food is SO good!! It was fun, too because the restaurant hostess set us up so that the kids sat in a booth and we sat at a table across the way from them. The kids seemed to enjoy being at their own table and there were 5 of them to keep each other company, so it left time for the adults to joke around and eat and talk. We stayed for a couple of hours!

There were some things on the way home we needed to stop and get before we head out of town on Tuesday morning, so we got that out of the way. My plans were to come home and mow the lawn before it got dark or rained or both, but I was so full and "run out" that I decided to wait until tomorrow. Hopefully, the rain will hold out and I will be able to, not only run my 6 miles, but mow the lawn and get the house cleaned up and our stuff packed.

I'm about to head off the bathe, read and catch up on sleep. I'm sure I'll have plenty to say tomorrow!!