Meeting Dean!

Hey guys! I hope you all had great Mondays. My boss took today off as a vacation day so I didn't really mind going to work (for a change!) Yesterday afternoon's storms lead to really nice evening so we took Pippin out for a 3 mile walk. It was really nice to head out well after 6 and still have daylight! Tons of people were out walking and enjoying the cool evening. Of course everything flipped around during the midnight hours. We went to bed around the usual 10.30-11.00 pm. As I was falling asleep I was dreaming I was on the beach, laying out in the nice sun (must be my sunburn talking!). I kept stretching and kicking my feet around which was annoying the crap out of Brent so he woke me up. When I told him we were sunning in the Caribbean he was a little more understanding. The next thing I knew massive rolls of thunder and lightning along with a ton of wind woke me up at around 12.30. Brent was awake, too and suggested I let Pippin in our room (he snores so bad we don't usually let him sleep with us.). We let him in and the storms were so strong we turned on the TV to enjoy the overkill of weather broadcasting our major networks provide. All 3 major stations always bring in two weatherpeople during storm situations and they tag team back and forth between all the various radar views and zooms. We were on the front edge of 3 strong storms. We turned off the computers, made sure our closet was ready in case we needed to "take shelter" and watched the broadcast for a while. Around 1.30 we got our strongest of the 3 which included tons of hail slamming across our windows. I hate that sound, it always sounds like our front windows are about to come crashing in. It moved on quickly and we tried to get some sleep but around 2.00 another strong surge came through and knocked our power out, right as I was trying to return to my beach vacation. I reset my alarm clock and the power immediately clipped back off. GRRR! We were so pissed and sleepy we got scrounged up a backup battery for alarm and then tried to go back to sleep. Then my alarm went off twice for no apparent reason!! Finally around 2.30 we went back to sleep. Needless to say Pippin and I did NOT walk this morning! We were lucky to have no damage, quite a few people in the Western part of the state died as a result of the tornadoes (I believe they said 19 people this morning on the news). The weather guy this morning called it a "clash of the seasons".

On a MUCH more fun note tonight we got to meet Dean Karnazes, UltraMarathon man! We read his book over a year ago, and Brent re-read it not too long ago. He was at Davis Kidd, an awesome local bookseller that has TONS of booksignings. This was his 30th stop on a 30 stop city tour, so we were very lucky to meet him! Friday he ran a marathon, Saturday a 50 mile race, and Sunday the Vancouver marathon. He took the red-eye to Nashville and wasn't a BIT sore. Good grief!! He gave a great speech about his book, his running, and just a lot of info about himself and his upcoming plans. He's planning to run 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. Geez! Some of them will coincide with official races (like Chicago and NYC), others he will run the official race courses with police escorts, just not on race day. He'll be running the Memphis marathon course (that Brent and I did the half last December). He was a really great guy, very nice to answer any and all questions and even showed us some shoes he has been working on with North Face. He's really just your normal runner who can run for a very, very, very long time. Brent and I got him to autograph our book and also have a picture made. (OF COURSE!) It was a blast, what beats talking about running??? (except for running). Afterwards we headed to La Paz for dinner. They have THE best cheese dip in all of Nashville. We don't normally order cheese dip, but this stuff is completely worth it. The food is really good too, but nothing beats their cheese dip!










Anyway, back to watching the game! I'm pretty sure Pippin is going to win our league, which totally blows my mind. Yesterday he was in the 97% percentile on Yahoo!!! He was ranked 38,000-something - I am ranked 350,000-something!!!! It's totally amazing. We've been trying to ask him about Powerball numbers to see what he thinks. He's obviously a little Buddha.

See ya!

Exercise-
Fri - 1 mile am walk with Pippin
Sat - 10.3 mile run
Sun - 3 mile run, 3 mile walk with Pippin
Mon - Rest day for everyone!!!!!!!!!!!