Keweenaw Trail Running Festival

da na na, I SURVIVED, it's amazing! :) Now with under a month for the triathlon (wah), we've got tons of training left and plenty more good times to be had.

The Trail Festival was very fun. Mari's mom and sister came up to check it out and we even had Arni (downwind sports owner) on the trail helping everyone out (but mostly to cheer us on). Adam brought Jake, Zoey and Casey, so all in all, we had quite the crowd.

Greg whopped on everyone and finished with a time of.. oh wait, results aren't posted yet... but those will come Mari came in a bit in front of me, and I dragged up the rear. But hey, I beat a few people.. :)

So here's a pic of Mari and I after the race, lookin sweaty and oh so fine -- for more pics, go here.

excessive amounts of strawberries....

Wouldn't ya know with the Strawberry season almost over, that I would be able to drag Adam out and force him to pick strawberries with me. However, I recommend that before you decide to go strawberry picking you should determine the amount of strawberries you are willing to deal with after they are picked...

Needless to say Adam and I picked a flat each... Which is equivalent to 16 quarts of strawberries... Since I was in the kitchen being tempted by these great tasting treats, I decided to eat as many as humanly possible -- also not a good idea.

A few good things did come from strawberry picking... I learned online recipes aren't always accurate... proven by Adam trying to make jam with vinegar.. hmm. Fruit roll ups, when dried in the oven can break into a ba-jillion pieces. Dehydrating strawberries can be fun... when you can think of stuff to do with them afterwards.. and tummy aches from strawberries can be soothed by drinking lots of water. last but not least, using that ice cream topping that hardens when cold can be awesome on strawberries.

And, you can have a full top shelf in the fridge w/nothing but berries..

August 6: I can do it!!

Alright, so this is how it went down. In the early month of may-ish? I decided to explain to Mari that we need to do a triathlon this summer. Mari shot this idea down with incredible speed! Her needing to generate a thesis was the major problem... but then there was Neil... Neil is a friend who ran the Copperman Triathlon last year, and has an incredible ability to persuade.. Hence, Mari calls me up late May/early June to inform me that we are running the Copperman...

and it's all downhill (or up?) from here...

Oh man, what a couple of weeks. We put in a decent... 4 days training and then I left for the vacation/wedding in Virginia.. I was so adamant about my training... not. But here we are, already July and Mari and I are workin it.. :) or tryin to..

On an even sadder note, we also signed up to run in the Keweenaw Trail Running Festival, which is a 10k, and practice for the tri. Did I mention that it's on July 8th? yeah... oh man.

Good thing I bought an uplifting book today entitled: "Triathlon Training in Four Hours a Week." The biggest thing is going to be a positive mentality! right? I hope so...

virginia and back!

Now that I'm back in Houghton, I'm busy missing vacation...

We got to (Adam's) Aunt Judy's house after a riveting 11.5 hr drie (the last hr and a half were construction, yay) and she took us to get the night view of the memorials!! It was really interesting to see how famous figures have been remembered. This picture is taken with Thomas Jefferson's feet -- he is a very popular guy in Virginia.



Virginia was a lot of fun, as was West Virginia and Washington DC. We had such a variety of things to do! My Aunt Carol and Uncle Greg hooked up with us in DC where they got us an "all-access-behind-the-scenes" riotous time. Private tours of the capitol building AND the national archives were very fun! The weather was perfect!!

After Virginia we hit up some Williamsburg action -- good times, especially at night with the ghosts!! The ghost tour we took was a tad bit on the scary side.. but enjoyable :)

After the wedding we made our wonderous car ride back home and then took a mini vacation at my house! Looks like Zoey was semi-supervised by my brother and ended up being a little bit more of a terror than we are used to... looks like it might be awhile before I can talk my fam into pet sitting again... oops...

thus ends my good time vacation! back to work...

Puppies to the third Power...

If that isn't a MI Tech title, I don't know what is... Anyways, I decided to get some pics up since I'll be off on a fun and exciting adventure to Virginia next week!

Jake and Zoey


Casey and Zoey


Sad news, Jake goes back to the shelter tomorrow :( It was fun being his foster mom... Hopefully he'll get adopted by someone now since he's had more socialization -- but maybe i'll just adopt him myself. After I've had the chance to socialize a few more deserving fur balls.