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. 

In the Navy

I have officially put in my request to separate from the Navy! Pending approval, I should be back to my old civilian self in January of 2013. Having said that, I realize I don't have that many photos of myself in uniform doing Navy kind of stuff. This past week I got a few good ones!

Every couple of months all of the officers get to spend the day together doing something fun/educational. This time we went on a tour of some of the oldest dams in the state, the Cushman Dams. Here's the group that made it out for that day of fun that just happened to be a gorgeous day with some great views ;)

This weekend we also had a big celebration for the Birthday of the civil engineer corps at the Seabee Ball. One of the officers' wives snapped this shot of us, so thanks to Michelle for that! It was actually a pretty good time, but it drives me crazy that I have to wear a sensible suit uniform when all the other ladies get to get all dressed up in ball gowns...not fair! Ryan looked smashing in his suit too!

Whistler, BC

We finally made it up to Whistler for a little fun in the snow. I can't believe it's taken us this long to make it up there and now that we went, we're definitely hooked! It was so much fun! We got up there late Wednesday night and did most of the fun on Thursday. It was a perfect day, sunny skies, and not many people on the mountains since it was a weekday. We spent the whole day snowboarding, and the mountain was amazing. There were so many runs from the very top that we went all the way up there and it took a good amount of time to get all the way back down. I love that, being able to spend so much more time riding down the mountain than riding the lifts up it. 

For some reason after about 6 hours of snowboarding, we though it was a great idea to do some night cross country skiing. As I mentioned before we're pretty sold on that sport as well, so we ended up getting our own skis before this trip. It's perfect timing since all of the end of season sales are going on now. We have a couple more cross country ski adventures planned in the next few weeks too. We ended up getting the skate skis, which are a little more difficult than the classic skis that we had rented the last time. It was an interesting time trying to figure them out, and maybe not the best idea after snowboarding all day. Needless to say we (and especially I) were really sore the next day! In fact, I was too sore to really try to do much of anything the next day. It wasn't that great of a day out either, so I passed up the mountain while Ryan gave it another go.