Alaska!!

My sweet hubby turned 29 last weekend! A few months ago I told him to take off the week after his birthday because I was going to take him on a birthday surprise vacation. I'm pretty sure he had a good idea of where we were going since we had been talking about doing it for a while. Sunday morning (his birthday) I gave him a book of hikes in Alaska to go along with our tickets for an Alaskan Cruise!!! A few hours later we were loading up on one of the cruise ships that we see docked in Seattle all the time. When we got to our room, Ryan had another fun surprise. I had them decorate our room with happy birthday decorations! It made the week even more festive! After dropping off all our stuff we headed up to the top deck for the departing party. It just happened to be an absolutely gorgeous day in Seattle, so we soaked up some sun while sitting out having drinks delivered to us...divine! With a little dance party in the background we watched Seattle float out of sight and our cruise had begun!

Day 2 of the cruise was an at sea day, so we spent the day relaxing on board and checking out the amenities. Before we got on the cruise, we were fairly well prepared to be hanging out with a lot of much older people. What we were slightly more taken aback about was the overwhelming about of obesity on the ship! I guess it makes sense with the immense amount of food on board and no real need to be active if you didn't want to. I think this motivated us even more to hit the gym daily and be as active as possible in each of the ports! Anyway, back to day 2. We went to a few of the events and checked out several of the bars throughout the day. That evening was formal night, yay! I love a good excuse to get all dressed up! Of course we got the obligatory cruise photo done that night too. 

Day 3 was our first port stop in Juneau. We didn't really know what to expect in any of the towns, but we were able to find hikes within walking distance of the port in each of the places. About a mile outside of Juneau we were able to start hiking up a mountain. There were amazing views everywhere, and we actually got to see and hear several avalanches on the mountains around us. We didn't end up making it all the way to the end of the hike since if became covered in snow, but we made it pretty far in and really enjoyed the surrounding mountain views and just the fact that we were hiking through Alaska!

After we came down from the mountains we still had a little time to kill in Juneau so we walked around the town for a bit and ended up in a little hole in the wall pub with some pretty awesome live country music. It went quite nicely with the reindeer sausage pizza we got too! 

Day 4...Skagway! Again we spent most of the time in port hiking up the surrounding mountains. Again we had to turn around before we really wanted to because we got stuck in the snow. We actually hiked for a while this time through the snow but towards the top it got really foggy to the point that we couldn't see very far in front of us and we kept hearing avalanches a little too close for comfort, so we figures we should call it a day. Highlight of this little hike though, WE SAW A BEAR!! It was my first time seeing a bear in the wild. We were actually on our way down from the hike and a pretty good sized black bear was just trotting in the opposite direction about 50 ft from the path. Unfortunately I didn't pull my camera out quite fast enough to snap a shot before in disappeared into the forest again. It was awesome though and if I didn't know that it could seriously injure me, I would think it was super cute and cuddly looking! Awesomely enough my mom had just told me the day before that she ran into a bear on a hike in Tennessee. Apparently this was the week for our family to run into bears!

The view at the top.

Day 5...another at sea day. No getting off the boat today, but oh my goodness, the views! This day we spent cruising through glacier bay, as in surrounded by glaciers. That's so awesome! We got to the end of the bay area and just sat there for about and hour soaking in the views. It just happened to be a perfectly sunny day that day too, so it was spectacular. We saw a little more wild life too including whales, otters, and mountain goats. The glaciers and mountains definitely took the cake though. We even got to see a few pieces crack off of the glaciers and fall into the water. 

Day 6 was in Ketchikan! We actually only had the morning in port so we had to get up bright and early to get out hike in before the ship took off again. We did the same thing, found a hike withint walking distance from downtown and spent a few hours hiking up a mountain until we ran into too much snow to go any further. When we were done we walked around the town for a little bit before boarding the ship again for a relaxing rest of the day.

Our last stop of the cruise was to Victoria, BC. We were in port there for a few hours in the evening. We had been there once before when I went to run the marathon, so there wasn't anything new we were dying to see. We just walked around the town for a couple of hours and came back to the ship for the last night of entertainment. 

Sunday morning we woke up back in Seattle. We had some breakfast delivered and packed up to be out of our room by 9. It was really nice not having to make any other travel plans to get home and just jump in a taxi and be home in 5 minutes. One more thing we can check off our list now, the Alaskan Cruise! Awesome time!

Catching Up

Just a few random photos/updates from the past few weeks before I get into the next big blog post! A few weeks ago there was a big earth day event on our base. Our group planned on doing a cook out as a fundraiser at it and we were all asked to help out with it. Since I don't have great muscles for setting up and tearing down and don't have any great desire to cook meat, I offered to bake some cupcakes to bring to the event! In keeping with the earth day theme, I made some carrot cake cupcakes with grass frosting and some chocolate dirt cupcakes complete with a little worm in each one! They came out super cute but I hadn't actually even tasted them before I brought them in and was just hoping for the best since I tried out new recipes. They were a HUGE hit! One of my bosses (who is typically pretty negative and doesn't dole out compliments much) came over to my desk later that day super excited and told me the chocolate cupcake was by far the best cupcake he had ever had in his life! I'll definitely be using both those recipes again!

In other cupcake news, little boy Ben turned 2 a few weeks ago! Of course I couldn't let that go by without a special treat! I found a few recipes for dog friendly cupcakes and tried one out. It was pretty much just a peanut butter banana cupcake without any sugar in it at all. Ben was pretty confused at first, but proceeded to enjoy it. Tara didn't hold back at all and devoured hers immediately ;)

In non food news, we made it to a baseball game a few weeks ago. It was especially exciting because it was against the Detroit Tigers! We went with a few guys Ryan works with and had a blast. I thought the Tigers had it clenched and they were ahead the entire game, but somehow the Mariners had a huge comeback in the 9th inning and won! Boooo. At least I got to cheer on the tigers.

A Few Randoms

Our big project for the weekend was clearing out the rest of that silly attachment to the back of our house. When Jordan was here, he helped us tear out about half of it, so this weekend we finished that off and now have an AWESOME back patio! Hopefully next weekend we'll add a little more plants around it and make it even better, but it's a perfect place for the grill now and we're finally rid of all the carpet that we tore out 8 months ago!

Seattle has been especially beatutiful lately. Although we still have those rainy days, we've been having even more nice sunshiney ones and I'm pretty sure we've both gotten a little color on our skin in the past few weeks!

A few days ago as I was riding the ferry home, an announcement can on the loudspeakers saying that were were 3 Orca Whales swimming next to the ferry! I immediately jumped out and happened to be on the correct side already so I got a great view! I tried to snap a few pictures with the trusty iPhone, but the one bellow is the best I got. I was able to see a lot more in person though. It was pretty awesome. We've seen grey whales before on the ferry and say a lot of humpbacks in Hawaii, but this was the first time I've seen orcas in the wild! Free Willy!!

Saturday night after Ryan went mountain biking we had some friends over to enjoy our grill. After grilling out I got a sweet tooth and decided to whip up some cookies and went for a chocolate white chocolate chip cookie. It was sooo easy and fast and turned out delicious. I will definitely be hitting up this recipe again when the mood strikes!

Finally in picture news, the Pioneer Woman picked one of my photos again as one of her top choices!! It always makes me super excited when I see my photo pop up. There are litterally thousands of entries, so I'd say having mine picked would mean mine is in the top 1-5%, which is awesome! This time again it was cell phone photography and I submitted one that I took at the Capital Hill Block Party, a weekend long music festival with bands and stages everywhere. It was a lot of fun! You can find the original Pioneer Woman post here.

Ouchie!

Just a few days after blogging about how excited I was about my running progress, all that got thrown out the window. I was just about to sign up for a half marathon at the beginning of May, then a week ago on an 11 mile run which I finished with a great pace, I strained my Achilles :( At first I thought maybe I was just sore from my run which would be totally understandable, so I rested for a few days. Then I tried running again and quickly realized it was not just a sore muscle. Ever since then it's been painful just walking or standing around. I went to the doctor this morning and he said absolutely no running for at least 3 more weeks...ugh! Good thing I hadn't signed up for that half marathon yet. It's so frustrating not being able to run now and I feel like I'm going to have to start my training all over again when I am able to run again...phooey!

In the mean time, we have had several great weekends here in Seattle and therefore have gotten a lot of fun yard work done! Yay for home ownership! Ryan mowed the lawn a few times. It's not a huge lawn so we just got a little push mower which seems to be doing the job quite nicely. We've also put down some more seed to try to grow more grass in some of the patchy areas. We're still trying to determine what kind of plants are already on the site, but have determined for the most part there's not much worth saving. We planted several edible things like blueberries, strawberries, oregano, mint, basil, cilantro, spinach, and arugula. We'll see if we can get any good harvests from any of them this year! My rhubarb is almost ready for it's first harvest!

We also added a little more color to our yard with some new flowers. I can't wait to see them all grow over the next few months and get even more full and vibrant! Our other yard project at the moment is tearing out the giant juniper bush in the front yard. It's huge and useless and breaks up the yard a lot which is no good when your yard is already so small! Unfortunately this guy has been here for a long time and has intertwined itself and has crazy roots so it's being a huge pain to remove, but we've made lots of progress!! I can't wait to turn it all into one continuous lawn. 

Iron Woman

No, I have no intention in doing an iron man anytime soon, but I am super excited about my results from taking iron supplements! For the past couple of years I feel like I've been getting more and more out of shape despite still maintaining an ongoing workout schedule. By the end of last year I ran a couple of 5ks in which I could barely make it under a 10 minute mile pace. Considering I used to be able to run a half marathon with a much faster pace than that, I was pretty dissapointed. No matter how hard I tried it seemed like my body was always completely fatigued. A couple of times I googled causes of chronic fatigue and one thing that kept coming up was an iron deficiency. I convinced myself that surely this wasn't the problem and I must just not be working hard enough. Over Christmas in Georgia my father-in-law told me that eating ice (which I had started to do pretty often) was a sign of an iron deficiency. This was the second time iron came up for me and made me start thinking! As soon as we got back from Christmas vacation I went out and got some iron supplements. I figured it couldn't hurt. We had also just moved to the Queen Anne neighborhood in Seattle which is pretty hilly, so I started hitting up those hills on my runs. The first few weeks it was killer! After about a month things started getting a little easier for me, so I signed up for another 5k. I figured maybe at this point I could make it under 9 minute miles since I was feeling a lot more energized than a few months before that. To my surprise I ran the fasted 5k race I had done to date! I ran it in 23:23 with an average mile pace of 7:31. I finally felt like I was getting back into shape! It's crazy that in less than 2 months I could drop over 7 minutes off of my 5k time!

Hoping this wasn't just a fluke I kept up with my running on the Queen Anne hills and signed up for another race that I did this past weekend. This time it was a 12k. I've done this race once before a couple of years ago. The path is right along lake washington and around the halfway point the Seahawks drumline is playing to pump you up and there were even Seahawks players handing out water to us along the course! Since it was over twice the distance of the 5k race and much more hilly, I was hoping to at least run it with around an 8 min mile pace and finish it under an hour. It turned out to be perfect conditions for the run and I ended up finishing it in 57:24 with an average mile pace of 7:42. Out of 754 females, I finished 10th! That made me feel much better about my training! I think I'm actually finally getting back into shape, and back to the moral of this story, I'm pretty sure it is all due to the iron supplements. Little did I know that I had an iron deficiency, and I certainly didn't think it had effected me that much! 

When I told my iron supplement results to my super smart scientist of a sister, she told me she noticed that looking at my '23 and me' DNA results it showed that I had a higher chance for iron deficiency. Apparently I'm not very good at reading DNA results since I didn't notice that! Good thing I have a super smart family :) Either way, I am thrilled to have discovered this and figured out a solution to it so I can stop beating myself up about my severe fatigue! Hopefully I'll keep getting better!

Stairs

Last weekend we did our stair climb that I mentioned a few posts back! When we first signed up I was a little nervous having never done something like that before. The first few weeks I tried to do a little training on that stairmaster at the gym. That made me even more nervous...that machine is tough! Turns out it's actually tougher than the real thing! I had no idea what kind of time I could get or how to pace myself on something like that. The stairwells were really small too so it was tough trying to pass people which we had to do quite a bit of since we were actually trying to get decent times. In the end I made it up the 1311 steps in just over 13 minutes. Ryan finished in about 12.5 minutes. Both of us got to the top thinking we probably could have pushed a little harder for better times and weren't really even all that pooped. I think it was a pretty good first try though, maybe we'll do it again next year and do even better!

We signed up for the event with two of my favorite middle school buddies, Sarah and Leigha. Photos are courtesy of Leigha's iPhone, thanks! I think we all had a great time and I'm so proud of everyone for finishing it! Go team!

Swish Swish in Winthrop

This post would have come a few days ago if Comcast was a little more awesome and didn't decide to only provide us the internet on certain days which apparently did not include the first half of this week. 

Last weekend we got to bust out our new skis again! Actually we went on a bit of a business trip which included hanging out with some pretty awesome clients of Ryans. We met them out in Winthrop (about 5 hours east of Seattle) to visit a site they had purchased a few months ago and are working with Ryan to design a vacation/retirement home. Winthrop is an awesome little town right at the base of the mountains with all kinds of outdoor activities. Last time we were there it was a little later in the year so we did a little hiking. This time everything was still covered in snow so we went skiing. Friday evening when we got out there, we took the clients over to the Rolling Huts to show them a few local examples of modern architecture and get an idea of what kinds of materials they were interested in. The clients also have a boxer and we had brought our dogs out, so Ben and their boxer had a blast chasing each other around.

Saturday morning Ryan and I met up with the clients for a few hours of cross country skiing. They have also just been getting into it, so it was fun doing a few little casual loops around the area on a beautiful day at the base of huge mountains. Later that day we met up with some other friends as well and all went on a site visit to the clients' site on the site of a wooded mountain. It's a great lot with lots of potential for sneaking a view of nearby ridges in the mountain. I can't wait to see what they come up with!

Saturday was also St. Patrick's day so I had to be a little festive dressing in green and letting Tara show off a little leprechaun hat ;) That night we made a big dinner while Ryan worked with the clients going over potential idea for their site. It was a great time with new and old friends!

Sunday we headed back towards Seattle with a little stop off mid way in Leavenworth for a little more skiing. By this point my muscles were aching from the day before and the snow was starting to melt a little so we just did a quick loop and headed home.