2-legged and 4-legged photos

Gus & Graham are my weekend companions this weekend while CJ & Nadia are off to Portland. They and their cat friend, Charlie, are cute couch surfers and good hosts (cable--whoo-hoo!), although they had a few loud barking outbursts during the night. They also have a home alarm...I hate those things and this one, of course, is a little different than the one I proudly mastered last month at Michele & Jill's. It seems pretty idiot-proof, but...I did have a dream, I think, about screwing up and setting it off.

Also, Heather just sent me a photo of she, Chase, and me from their party last weekend, in Oly...

Finals week, 2nd quarter

Whoa, my blogging has been pretty dang lame and sparse again lately...sometimes I think "Crap, I gotta update my blog because SO MUCH has been happening," and other times I think, "Um, nothing is really happening and I haven't done anything resembling triathlon training in months, so why blog?" Plus, now that the Seattle P-I in hardcopy has died and gone online, there's even more competition online for readership, so my 4 faithfuls could be drawn elsewhere to catch up on the haps in Seattle...

Let's see, what's up...I'm one clinic session (Monday) and one more Final Exam (Tuesday) away from being done with the 2nd quarter of school. Holy crap--it's flying by! Things have been busy lately and I'm definitely ready for spring break...looking forward to visiting my mom & Rolf the first week of April where it's recently been 81 degrees. Last Sunday, when it snowed yet AGAIN, the irony of simultaneously seeing daffodils on my counter and snowflakes the size of my hand out the window was not lost on me. I'm so DONE with winter! Tomorrow is the first day of spring (according to the calendar, anyway)...bring it!

My hamstring is still a pain in my ass, literally and figuratively. I've had several dreams about running and I tend to look mournfully at people jogging around the city and my 'hood when I'm out and about. I really wish one of the $%*&#! sedentary Americans (that'd be about, what, 98% of the population?) would just give me one of the hamstrings that they obviously aren't using. People who bitch about how much they hate to run and don't want to do it are getting even less sympathy than usual from me. Anyway, the ham is up and down day to day...and I guess it's a little better overall. My lovely classmates have been awesome about working on me, I can spin on my trainer a couple days per week (sidebar: I caved and had to bust out the HR monitor just to feel a little normal within the last week or so) and I have been swimming about 4x per week...although my shoulders have gotten a little cranky now, too (crap!). I often walk to school and, when I hit an incline, I usually walk backwards since that doesn't hurt...I look pretty wierd, I'm sure, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. Fortunately, I have not yet fallen on my butt or run into anyone while walking backwards. A few of my pals at school have noticed the contrast between my left and right hamstring in the last few weeks...since they hear me whine and work on my legs frequently, Mari, Shannon, and Phoebe have all told me that the left (healthy) hamstring is larger than the right. Great, I'm an example of atrophy at its finest. SIGH.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the weekend (yea!) and another short dog sit gig. Last weekend, I was at Stacia's with her dogs, and this weekend, I'll be at CJ & Nadia's with their 2 dogs (and cable!!). I'm thinking that, even if massage doesn't work out well, I'll have practiced other things during massage school that might, i.e. a laundry service (good god, massage generates a lot of sheets) or a pet sitting biz.

Short road trip report...

Last week I had 2 tests and a paper...it was a(nother) pretty busy week and I was really happy to get to the first totally "free" weekend in a while (i.e. all mandatory massage hours for this quarter are DONE and I'm just doing them for fun now-boo-yeah!). Friday was one of my favorite days in a long time...in the afternoon, I went to see Dale, the pain guru, for a hamstring treatment. A friend from school, Shannon, went along, and a 1-hour appointment turned into a 3-hour tutorial as Dale spent a lot of extra time with us. We walked out feeling like we'd gotten a semester's worth of instruction and I think Dale enjoyed it as much as we did...he's becoming a great mentor. Friday night, I had a fun girls' night dinner with Tatyana, Liz, and Rebecca that gave me a long overdue reason to make a huge batch of chicken enchiladas...I've been craving the chance to cook for people lately, and we had a great evening over on Mercer Island (The Shoebox is a great place to create food, but not such a great place to host guests, so Liz hosted!).

On Saturday, I went south to Portland to play with Holly...followed by a stop on the way home in Olympia on Sunday to couch-surf at Heather & Chase's for the L-Word finale. Holly and I went to the Portland Saturday market and then to this cool micro-brewery called Hopworks Urban Brewery (HUB), where one of the master brewers, Jamie, is a friend of hers. Jamie....seen here...gave us a cool tour and, of course, some samples. Way fun and some super great beer.
We also went for sushi with some fun girls on Saturday night and I got to see more of Portland on Sunday before I drove north.

This morning, I woke up at Heather & Chase's to snow (AGAIN??!!) and drove home in time for clinic/school this afternoon and book club...it was a good full low-stress weekend, and pretty much all fun except for sitting on an icepack in the car for the hammie...did I mention that twice in the last week, I've had dreams about running? Can't wait till those dreams become reality again...