Surgery

 A year ago I felt like my world crumbled out from underneath me as I lost the use of my right hand for nearly 4 months when I fractured my scaphoid.  The scar has healed up pretty nicely and I'm mostly back to all of my old activities. I don't think I'll ever be able to do a push up again, my wrist just doesn't bend that way any more.  Any attempt to do so is pretty painful, but for the most part, life is back to my crazy normal.

one year post surgery

 Not one to leave well enough alone, I'm having surgery again today.  This time it's completely by choice.  My husband arranged for me to have LASIK surgery as a birthday present this year.  Apparently thick corneas are all the rage with LASIK, even my very thinnest friend has them. Me, not so much!  Mine are too thin.  Not that I mind saying that some part of me is too thin, but it does makes LASIK impossible, so it's PRK for the girl with thin corneas.  Pretty much the same procedure to correct the vision, but instead of cutting a flap out of the cornea and doing the surgery on the inner layer of the cornea I have to get mine done on the outer layer.  Of course, this takes longer to heal...stinking corneas!

The good news is that this surgery takes four days to heal from and not four months and then this girl will be contacts and glasses free!! Bring it on!

Gimme Some Sugar

You know me, I can't keep my mouth shut when I find something I really like.  Well I'm sharing a new favorite.  SUGAR. Ladies do your lips and the men who are kissing them a favor and get some PRONTO!  Not only will your lips be smooth as butter, but it's SPF 15, comes in clear and tinted colors (I'm totally diggin the Rose tint), and it has a kind of fresh taste to it!  Buh-bye lipstick, hello SUGAR!

Let's Try This Again...

The Lottery takes place Friday May 11th and the list of runners will be posted on Monday the 14th.  Once again I'm crossing my fingers that I'll get in the traditional way, and that this year will finally be my year to run this thing the way I know I can!

Update Sept 27th 2012

Me (in the yellow) and my running crew! Andrew, Kristie, Nick and Marlon

I AM READY!!! I finally found a group of really fun friends to run with.  I got in all of my long runs for the first time in 4 years of training and attempts at this race.  I have been consistently attending a body sculpting class that has strengthened all the muscles that I don't use as much for running. I believe this has put less strain on my running muscles and my joints and for the first time since I started running 5 years ago I have no knee issues! Wahoo!!!! So I think this will be my year to finally run this thing.  I am a little heavier and a bit slower than I was when I trained in 2009, so this wont be my year for speed, but I'll just be happy to finally run the whole race! My sisters Tara and Janelle, who shared their stories on the St George Marathon stories page, and my brother Billy will be running the race with me this time! 2012 will be our year!

** If you are coming from the St George Marathon Stories and want to read about my 4 runs at St George choose one of the links below.  

2009 I finished the race even though my knee gave out less than half way in Click here to read this story

2009 this is just a fun post but has great pictures from the course click here to go directly to this post

2010 Worried about reinjuring my knee I under trained and stopped at mile 21 click here for my 2010 experience

2011 Another lesson learned in my attempts to run St George

to read about run number 3 click here

2012 Here is my 2012 race experience 

Snakes, Bulls and Bees Oh My!!

Adventures with friends are always the best

Windy mountain roads, and a few u turns were all it took to get us to the Gorge Trail.

Wild turkeys and the questionable men hunting them didn't deter us from our course

And while we couldn't imagine jumping off the bridge like some kids we know, we were loving the views!

 As we rounded a corner someone noticed the hum in the air and then the swarm of bees overhead.  The sound was electric and the hive was massive, like the size of a large dog!  We contemplated a bit and then forged ahead...

not a single sting, but our heart rates were definitely up for bit after that! 

We laughed at the skull we found a little further along the trail as we had just contemplated our own mortality.

Not much further along Kim stopped Charisse from clomping onto a fat snake soaking up the sunshine in the middle of the trail!  We tried to get it to move and eventually had to go off the trail a ways just to  walk around it.

 We laughed as we joked about how bad things always come in threes and wondered just what would lie in our path next.

 Another few miles along and it was no laughing matter.  This bull and a few calves were posted in the center of our  path as we came up a ridge.  We patiently waited for them to move along, but they didn't move far and the bull gave us a serious stare down as we passed!

The hike was a good one, a beautiful 8 mile loop with some awesome freinds, but seriously...snakes, bulls AND bees? Oh my!!

Owning it

Tonight Brynne begged to have the Pizza Hut $10 dinner in a box...I have no idea where she heard of this or what it really consists of.  What I do know, is that we have about 5 pizza places within a half mile radius of our house and Pizza Hut is not one of them.  However our Target does sell Pizza Hut individual sized pizzas and I convinced her that would have to do the trick.  (As a complete side note and disclaimer here, Tuesdays are always my busiest days of the week. Throw in a baseball game, volleyball game, book club, two big projects due for different kids requiring a printer that decided to stop working, Dr appointments, all 4 kids heading in different directions all day, and a husband to drop off at the airport, and this mom wasn't home long enough to cook dinner for anybody!)  As we stood in line to buy the pizza Brynne says to me," Mom are you thinking you wanna look at the clothes after we get this food, cause I'm thinking I definitely do!"  I was totally laughing and remembered a page from a book Brynne had shown us a few weeks ago at her open house, and I had to share.  On each page there were clues about which insect was hiding behind a bush.  Here are the clues on the last page.

She is SOOOO my daughter!

School of Mud

For my friend Brandi and I the Lake Irvine Mud Run was the School of Mud! We learned a lot of great lessons this weekend... 

First lesson was that 12:30 is not early enough to leave home and miss that crazy LA traffic! What should have been a 4 hour drive took us almost 7!  

Even mini cadburry eggs were not enough of a distraction to keep us from wanting to climb out the windows.  As the freeway was doubling as a parking lot, we did a chinese fire drill and swapped drivers, from the middle lane no less! Brandi was impressed my aggressive driving and multi map tasking skills!!

We were good little students and went to bed before midnight. Of course Brandi was out a bit before this night owl, but who's keeping track?

As with a lot of schools you have to pay to go to, the uniforms are important. A last minute change in the weather prompted a quick trip to Target. After 20 minutes in the hotel lobby borrowing scissors and a little creativity, we sucessfully dismantled our cute short sleeve tops and had come up with these.   We weren't envious at all of the guys who's ENTIRE uniform solely consisted of duct tape! I don't even want to consider the process of removing it! 

Luckily our only textbook was this map!

It was easy to tell where our class was

Some lessons were learned the hard way, like don't be the first one through an obstacle unless you don't mind being the groups guinea pig! That lesson was taken in by Brandi with a super graceful face plant into the deep hole in the middle of our first mud puddle! 

Still she couldn't be any cuter, even covered in mud!

After that we weren't in too much of a hurry, and stopped for pictures along the way.

We were glad we remembered the lesson every little girl learns in elementary school, that shorts are always recommended under your skirts if you wanna play on the playground!

I learned that its harder than you think to get a mud fight started!  The only thing I ended up with were a few smears of mud on my face compliments of some new friends we made!

While water slide tunnels are tons of fun, landing in pool of muddy water thats over your head, well that part might be a little overrated...just sayin'!

Oh and so was scrambling up the slippery sides in sopping wet clothes...

Brandi was just glad that our shirts were closer to the same color again!

I learned that I might have some mud snob tendencies, I only like certain kinds.  For example the watery mud...I'm not a huge fan of it, and it smells.  Really, really, bad!

We learned great techniques for getting through the swampy mud parts, and how to get unstuck without loosing a shoe!  The guy to the left of us actually lost both shoes in the muck mid stride.  About 100 yards further along I saw a big guy trying to finish out the course in just socks!

This was a test to see if Brandi had learned anything in our first exam.  She got an A for letting someone else blaze the trail.

And by the end of our 3 mile class, she also got an A in climbing super slippery mud mountains!

I got an A in running down them without falling!

One of the most fun lessons we learned was that even a 5 foot tall bubble bath can't get you clean after the kind of mud we'd been through! Even our poor camera lens had seen cleaner days by this point, and we had nothing clean to wipe it with!

When class was out we were still smiling!

We learned not to underestimate the power of laundry detergent! Believe it or not, the white shoes and skirt look as good as new, but the socks and shirt were casualties of the day.  

But the lessons didn't end with the mud.  I learned that dreams really do come true. I actually found a Cafe Rio for lunch!! Brandi said my excitement at seeing it was almost embarrassing to watch, but whatever! I've only seen them in Utah and their salads are my absolute favorite!

I learned that I am not alone in my OCD tendencies.  Our next stop was for my first ever trip to Ikea.  The organization ideas there had my head spinning with possibilities for hours! Next up, South Coast Plaza Mall....We learned there are perks not to having too many friends in our car,  there was just enough room in the Jeep for all our finds!

Wandering aimlessly though the gas station collecting little snacks for the drive home confirmed my weakness for sweets.  If this weekend class was on being healthy I had just failed. But lucky for me it was the school of mud so I was completely entitled to be a pig if I wanted!!

Perfection

Perfection is pretty hard to come by, but every once in a while you get it.  When you do, I highly recommend you relish in it!

As the saddest excuse for a ski season was starting to wind down, mother nature saw fit to gift us with a delicious storm delivering more feet of snow in a three day period than we had seen all year.  It just so happened that our annual Tahoe trip was set to begin the very next day.  Our timing was pure perfection!

The gorgeous house we called home for a few days was perfectly located, and actually had enough rooms for all of us.  Not quite perfect for the Greenlaws who got to bunk up in twin trundle beds, and nobody would have complained if there were 6 instead of 4 full bathrooms and a hot tub, but seriously, it was pretty close to perfect.

The conditions at Squaw Valley on Friday were absolute perfection.  Clear blue skies, and just cold enough to keep all that snow exactly the way I dream of it!

The Larinator decided it was the perfect time to show us he doesn't ALWAYS wear khakis and a button front shirt under those snow bibs while Suzanne got to show off her cute new coat.

Tara was excited to for her first experience skiing in Tahoe, and Jason was still smiling after scoring a room at the house that would be perfectly accommodating should the ninjas choose to visit!

Reed and Shelley had skied the previous day in less than perfect conditions and were just glad that the wind had blown away.

Kirsten was perfectly happy to let Corey wander through the trees while she stuck to the tried and true.

Perfect passes

with perfectly creative form were seen pretty regularly from these guys

but if this run in had gone any further, the results would have been perfectly disastrous!

Unfortunately Tiffany's perfect notes couldn't be heard over the howl of the wind at the top of Siberia,

and our husbands were certain we were crazy when we decided it was the perfect place for a photo op!  

I discovered that three was the perfect number of faces for ski lift picture taking

And it didn't take long for these three ladies to decide they were perfectly suited to sticking together on the slopes.

 While we did get one shot of Kirsten facing forward 

She was perfectly comfortable putting her best side front and center!

While some of us were perfectly content just spending the day with our spouses

Reed and Shelley took it to the next level and came perfectly coordinated

two days in a row!!!!

Lunch time with this crew was totally entertaining.  

Some people are perfectly at ease wearing their helmets indoors and through meals just because they happen to rock the look.  Others do it purely in self defense. You never know when a light fixture will fall, the other shoe will drop, or when you'll just end up seated by Reed.

If you can't decide between a rare hamburger three times in a row or the pizza, this guy's got the perfect combination.  Hot chocolate, a hard boiled egg, and a pickle of course.

Perfectly normal...

Day two was off to a perfect start, taking 10 instead of 45 minutes to get to the resort, and front row parking!

Last year the men got all the attention ending with a swedish girl on sombody's  lap but this year it was all about the ladies!  I think I have some pretty cute friends, and the compliments they were attracting from the guys up here came as no surprise...but I just about died laughing when my friend kept a perfectly strait face and answered another couple,"Sure you can ride up the lift with us, you know we are a pretty good looking crew!"    

The views of the lake on Saturday were still perfect, but the day did play out a little differently than the one before.

We had now perfected the art of waiting for the rest of the group

and sometimes sampling a few laps along the way

The sun shone a little brighter and a little warmer than the day before

and by the day's end we knew perfectly well what it would be like to ski in an icee shaped like the runs off Siberia, and ice cubes the size of VW beetles!

The Larinator may have lost that perfectly happy smile just once due to an encounter he had with Olympic Lady

Reed  came across him and a yard sale there that allegedly only takes place once about every 5 years.  Luckily Larry's lovely bride perfectly recalled the mantra he so regularly repeats and did her best to cheer him up,"If you don't fall at least once, you're not trying hard enough!"  

Our evenings were spent with a perfect mix of ridiculous games (that the women won), eating way too much chocolate, and watching the classics such as Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and a smattering of BYU basketball.

Some of us might have been happy to turn the lights on and just leave them, but others really needed to work with that dimmer to be sure the lighting fit the mood just perfectly! This prompted others to burst out in song...

 Sitting down at a great restaurant can really be the cherry on top of a perfect day.  We made sure to call ahead to the restaurants in Tahoe to let them know we'd be coming with "Miss America" and in retaliation the next night, Reed became the mayor of Clovis.  I'm pretty sure that's how we got that perfect parking spot right up front.  On the way home we stopped somewhere we hoped we might get the Lee Fong special.

MSG or not, we were all perfectly fine with passing on the chicken claws and frog legs, regardless of how much salt and pepper were on them.

But if there was one thing not to be missed at the No. 1 Buffett, it was the ice cream. Jason's perfectly swirled cone left him one satisfied customer.

Tara was a little harder to impress, definitely not giving them a perfect 10, but by taste number 2 she did change her tune!

Between Reed and Shelley they almost had one perfectly balanced meal

Corey pretty much only ate the sushi so he could show off his perfect chop stick skills

Tiffany only needed one good reason to eat here, she didn't have to cook it!

And somehow the Larinator missed the memo on what number the buffett was.

One perfect weekend, two perfect ski days, and at least three perfectly good reasons to do it all again next year.

Another dose of perfection? Yes please!