Category: Uncategorized

Helloooo, strangers! Time to catch up again.

I haven’t shared much about the big life changes Aaron and I have made in the last few months because we’d been holding our collective breath, hoping everything would work out. Behold, everything has worked out!

Aaron and I put his Green Lake-area condo up for sale in mid-February. We struggled for many, many months with the unsavory people who frequented our street and the surrounding streets, and we made many, many phone calls to the police. I felt extremely unsafe walking to my bus stop, walking home, going for runs… you name it. It was super stressful, and definitely time to leave!

Because of the vibe of our street, we weren’t sure if the condo would sell, but luckily we went under contract with a buyer in mid-March! HALLELUJAH. However, the buyer asked for a 60-day closing (which is unusually long), so we spent two months hoping that everything would go smoothly with the deal.

And it did! We closed on the sale in early May, and moved to our new rented place on the Eastside. (For all you non-Seattle people, the Eastside refers to the suburbs on the east side of Lake Washington where people go to have children and be boring.) It is so quiet… so peaceful… and SO SAFE. We are ecstatic!!!

I acknowledge that this map is offensive to many people. It’s also hilarious. Also: We’re not even on the map now! But if we were, I think our area would say “HIKING” or “OUTDOORSY STUFF.”

It’s not even funny how beautiful it is out here. My Instagram feed has basically turned into trail porn.

Oh, by the way, I’m still training for the Eugene Marathon! I just finished week eight today with a 15-mile run, which can be summed up with one word: UGH. My new running paths don’t have bathrooms or water fountains at regular intervals like my Seattle paths did, so I ran out of Nuun halfway through and had to slog in the hot sun to the nearest convenience store (which was not near, nor convenient) to refill my bottles. I need to be more strategic as my long runs get even longer. This is some “Into the Wild” kind of sh*t.

Unrelated selfie from a few weeks ago, on an easier, rainy run.

My hunger is really ramping up at this point in training, since I ran 37 miles this week and 36 last week. Aaron is now biking 40 miles a day for his commute, so we’re both just tearing through food. Luckily, Aaron got a sweet BBQ for his birthday, and he’s keeping us well-fed!

Aaron with my mom at our Mother’s Day BBQ last weekend.

Dinner for two last night. Just kidding — there were some leftovers. 🙂

Now that we have our own garage, we have room for an extra freezer, which is home to half of a grassfed cow from Odessa, WA.

OK, that bacon on the left is obviously not part of the cow, but the rest of the freezer is packed full of ground beef, steaks, shortribs, roasts, and more — all butchered and flash-frozen, then delivered to our door by Rich Whitaker of Whitaker Grassfed Beef. It’s MUCH cheaper to buy a whole or half cow from a farmer than it is to buy grassfed beef from the grocery store, and it’s delicious!!

I think that brings us pretty much up to speed. Now that all the super-stressful stuff is over, I’ll try to get back to blogging more regularly. It feels weird to be training for a marathon without blogging about it!

So much to catch up on. Let just start with my run this morning and then work backwards, because that makes so much sense.

I’ve been having trouble slowing down, so today I was determined to take it easy and maintain about an 8:45 pace. Wheeee, look what I can do when I put my mind to it!

12 miles tomorrow — my first double-digit run of Eugene Marathon training. I was supposed to run 11 last Sunday, but I wound up leaving too late and had to cut the run short at nine miles in order to make it to Easter brunch with my dad in time.

The Easter bunny waits for no one. NO ONE.

A few days prior to Easter, Aaron had another surgery done on his shoulder. He separated his shoulder in the summer of 2012 and had surgery to repair it, but after he recovered from that, his collarbone sprouted a cauliflower-like bone growth (so gross) that has been bothering him for a while. This surgery was just a quick one to shave off the cauliflower.

Deja vu. Same surgery prep room as two years ago. Same nurses. Same surgeon.

Luckily, Aaron’s recovery has NOT been the same in that it has been so much faster! He was off all pain meds three days after surgery, and out of his sling on day four. Yay!

He’s had alllllll the time in the world to recover, though, since he quit his job the day before surgery, and doesn’t start his new (awesome, baller, so-proud-of-him) job until May 5.

This job change has been a loooong time coming. The company he just left is the same company I left in 2011 right before my big trip, and let’s just say it is a… challenging… place to work. I don’t know how he endured four+ years there. It’s time for a fresh start at a great company where many people would kill to work!

So, there’s the first piece of big news in our world. Second one coming next week. It’s goin’ down starting tomorrow!!!