Giving Thanks!

So many things to give thanks for this year! This Thanksgiving, like most of my Thanksgivings lately, I started off the morning with a 5k turkey trot. I'm thankful this year that I ran my first official race with a sub 7 minute mile pace! I'd still like to work on my speed and hopefully break that 20 minute mark for a 5k, but this time I ran my 5k in 20 minutes and 51 seconds, with an average mile pace of 6:44! A year ago I ran turkey trot in 30 minutes and 58 seconds, so in a year I've cut over 10 minutes off that time! This time I was the 3rd fastest female and 14th place overall.

Other exciting news in the past week, I passed my first Architecture Registration Exam!! On to the next one now...woohoo!

When I got home from my run on Thanksgiving, I got right to some cooking. I spent most of the day cooking and cleaning in preparation for Ryan's parents to get into town. They got in early evening just in time for Thanksgiving dinner! It was a great dinner. I tried a few new recipes and I'd have to say the turkey recipe might have been my favorite out of everything. It was definitely worth the 30 hours of preparation it required! I got the recipe here, and stuck to it for the most part.

Ryan's parents were in town for the rest of Thanksgiving week and the beginning of the next, so we took a few days off of work and found some fun things around Seattle to do with them!

 Someone didn't like the Espresso we made him try!

 Our First Real Tree at our new house!

 Ryan putting on the lights

 Thanks so Jason's great idea, we put all of our race medals on the tree like ornaments

 Our Pretty Tree :)

 The market is all decorated for Christmas!

 We lucked out with some beautiful days in Seattle while they were here

 visiting the great wheel

 Yup, that's my husband

 Aaaand, those are my in laws ;)

 We went on a little hike near Leavenworth to wear Ben out

 Playing on the icy river

 Ben didn't really understand that despite the river being solid on the top, he should walk out to the middle! We got a few scares that he was going to sprint out there and break the ice and fall in!

 He liked to run all over the beach though

 And had fun jumping all around

 We spent the rest of that day in Leavenworth 

 It's all lit up for Christmas!

 Yay!

 Our little Georgians got to play in some snow too

We also spent a few hours one day at the EMP and went to the SciFi exhibit. It had the original Darth Vadar Light Saber in it and Yoda's cane. How cute is that?!?

The museum also had a horror film exhibit that had a scream booth in it that took pictures of you screaming :)

The last night they were here we went out to a local bar to play some trivia and got in a few games of shuffle board first. It was so much fun and out of about 30 teams we ended up tying for 11th, so that's not too bad considering most of the people there seemed to be regulars.

Beasts

This weekend Ryan was slightly cray-cray! We flew down to Sacramento for him and his buddy Scott to run the Spartan Beast. They did the Spartan Sprint back in the summer, so this was about a 4 times longer and harder version of that. It also just happened to be pouring rain and freezing for it too...eeeek! We flew down Friday night after work. Saturday morning we grabbed a quick breakfast and headed out to the race site which was in the middle of nowhere about 30 min east of Sacramento on a giant ranch. We got there in just enough time for the guys to get all checked in and get to the start line to start. The idea of these is that they start in heats of 300 and run into battle like the original spartans. Only this time the battle is against obsicals and your own determination.

While the guys were running, Scott's wife, Katie, and I were spectating. We spent most of the time near the start line where we could see them loop around for a few obstacles. Most of them we couldn't see though. Luckily we both had big boots on because it was crazy muddy there! A little over an hour after the guys started, they looped back around to the rope climb, so we got to see them do that first. Then they were off again for about another hour until the came back to climb across a long wall. If you can't complete or fall off of an obstical you have to do 30 burpees instead. The guys had to do that a few times and it looked misserable since the ground was all mud! A couple of hours later the guys looped back around into view and we saw them carrying sand bags up a super muddy and steep hill. After that they looped around to the last few obsticles and the finish line! I'm so proud of them for finishing...it looked really tough and not the most fun in cold rain, but they are BEASTS!!!

Originally we were planning on heading back to the hotel for a quick shower and going over to Walnut Creek to hang out and spend the night at Kimberly's. The race ended up taking a liiiiitle longer than we were expecting so we got back to the hotel after 5pm an were wet, cold, hungry, and exhausted. We decided at that point it was too late to make another drive out and would be better off just staying another night in Sacramento. We loaded up on some food, had a mini hotel movie party, and crashed big time. I'm bummed we didn't get to see Kimberly and Jason but we knew we would all just be huge party poopers when we got their anyway.

Sunday morning we got up bright and early and got our morning hotel breakfast. A few tables away from us was the guy who wins all of these races, Hobie Call. He's pretty much an obstical race celebrity, so that was pretty cool to see him. He had run the race (and won) on Saturday too in a ridiculously fast time.

We had left the dogs with a new dog sitter this weekend, so I was anxious to pick them up and see how they did. Turns out they had an awesome time. The family was sitting a few other dogs too, so it was a full house of dogs and one of the other dogs was a boxer the same size and age as Ben and they seemed to play really well together. Ben was so exhausted from all the fun that he slept the rest of the afternoon and evening after he got home.

Completely irrelevant from the rest of this post, we got a new car recently! It's a super cute VW Tiguan. We also, after living in our house for nearly a year, officially have a real door on the bathroom!! We're so grown up now ;)

Maui Wowie!

What an awesome week we had last week!! We went to Maui for a wedding week for one of Ryan's cousins. It has just started to get into winter weather (rain) in Seattle, so it was perfect timing to jet off to 80 degrees and sunshine for the week! We got there and checked into the hotel Saturday evening and hung out at the poolside happy hour until the rest of the wedding group arrived. You can't beat starting out a vacation sipping drinks with this view:

Sunday we all woke up bright and early thanks to all the time zone changes. I actually had to force myself to stay in bed until it was actually light enough outside to go for a run. We spent a few hours running and doing a little crossfit workout by the water before getting ready for a pool day. The resort we stayed in had 4 different pools. Two were by the bar that were open for everyone, one was an amazing infinity pool that was just for adults, and the last one had a sweet play structure and water slides for kids! Luckily we had a small child with us so it wasn't too weird that we were fully utilizing the water slides. It was great fun!

Monday was the official wedding day! Ryan and the guys took off in the morning to do a little hiking and cliff jumping. I spent most of the day hanging out at the pool with the bride before it was time to get ready. Once I was ready, I got the be the pseudo photographer for the rest of the ladies as they got ready and the bride had her hair and makeup done. We also had to get the little flower girl all done up for the big event. Just before sunset we all headed over to a 'secret beach' were the ceremony was held. It was a super cute little ceremony right on the water with all of us standing around them as the sun was setting. I can't wait to see all of their official photographs because the sunset that night was UNREAL! One of the best one I have ever seen. Perfect timing for all their wedding pics. Even my iPhone pics turned out amazing!

After a night of celebrating, we took it easy Tuesday morning until it was time for our next adventure...zip-lining! It was a fun thing that the whole family could do together which was awesome.

Tuesday was also the groom's dad's birthday, so we celebrated afterwards with a little mexican fiesta! Love me a margarita!

The night ended with a very sleepy little girl who needed Ryan to carry her back to the room...how cute ;)

Wednesday was another relax day at the resort. I really liked this resort, I felt like there was a ton to do there, it was gorgeous all the time, and people brought us drinks anywhere we went. I could get used to this!

Our last full day was a crazy fun filled day of excitement! We started out bright and early with a little snorkeling trip. I'm so glad we got to fit this in especially since I now have my sweet underwater camera! We started out at a little crescent shaped island off the coast. There were lots of fish and even a couple of eels at the bottom of the ocean. From there we went a little closer to the shore where there were sea turtles EVERYWHERE! I was actually a little nervous I was going to run into one at one point. It was so cute swimming with them!

The final shebang of the week was the whole group going to the Luau Thursday night! We had a big ol' roasted pig and lots of delicious drinks and a couple hours of entertainment. So much fun and a great way to top off the trip!

We hung out by the pool for a few more hours with a few of our group. The pools were soooo pretty at night too! Friday morning we all met for one last breakfast before packing up to head out. We definitely lucked out having the shortest trip to and from Hawaii. I love that it's faster (and often cheaper) to go to Hawaii than to the east coast from Seattle. I definitely want to make this a more often trip. Also, if you can believe it from seeing all the pictures that I did post, when I got home my camera card got corrupted and I seem to have lost about 200 pictures. I recovered about half of them, but there's still a lot missing. I'll keep working on getting those to show up again, but at least I have all the ones that I have! I guess I'll just have to go back for some more. 

Now it's back to work and back to 50s and rain again. Can't wait for our next trip!