Men rule!

Hey guys! I can't believe the weekend is almost over, again! We had a great weekend, super busy, but nice.

Fri night we vegged out. The rest of the weekend we're usually all over the place so we've gotten used to relaxing on Friday nights. Brent wanted to eat at Jim n Nicks, a BBQ place about a mile from our house. We ended up waiting 40 minutes for our food. People who came in after us were already leaving before we got our food. He had chicken fried chicken and I went with a healthy smoked turkey. I think we decided they had to go and find a wild turkey to make our dinner. I don't get it, but it's just another reason we hate chain restaurants (and that's all we have in our cookie cutter 'burb). I greatly prefer a nice ethnic restaurant any day of the week, we just sadly don't have them out here. Anyway, we're not going back, not that they would care. Later that night Brent surprised me with this new "artwork". It scared Pippin so much he started barking at it! Ha!

Saturday am we got up early (7:30) to do our 8-miler. With massage appointments across town at noon we needed to be showered and out the door at 11:15. We headed out around 8:30 and the nice fog that had been there an hour earlier had been replaced by the bright sun. It wasn't terribly hot, but some clouds would've been nice! We did pretty much the same 6 mile route I did Thurs night but added two of the 1.2 mile laps through a neighboring hilly subdivision. Things started out boring enough, with the only excitement being some mud and puddles to avoid. We weren't going terribly fast, my goal was to run 9's since we're saving our legs for next Saturday. Things were going fine until we got to the top of the hilly subdivision, tired and hot, and a stupid German shepherd and Chihahua were loose in their yard and decided they wanted a piece of us. I had completely forgotten the Dazer! We yelled and of course their irresponsible owners were nowhere around. Even though we turned around to go the other way they wanted to follow us, so Brent ended up throwing some construction stuff from the home being built next door to them to get them to leave us alone. I hate people like that. No worries, I'm reporting them this week. There are too many kids in our neighborhoods who can't defend themselves for people like that to disregard the rest of us who pay our taxes as well. We continued on and the rage we have for crappy people like that fueled us to do the second lap in that hilly neighborhood quite a bit faster (we stopped right before we got to the dog house and turned back around). Then we ran through a different subdivision and over to the neighborhood park where a fellow runner was enjoying the misting station. It's this tall green pipe thingie with a bunch of various nozzles that mist water. Brent and I ran through it twice and it felt SO refreshing! I'm so glad all the water fountains and water features are turned back on!! From there it was just a trip past the cows and we were home! We turned it up a notch on the final mile back and passed two Indian women out walking. All I could think of was "I wonder where they live and if they have any yummy Indian food leftovers in their fridge!" We ended up with an average pace of 8:59, which includes some time spent during our dog attack (I forgot to stop my watch since I was a little busy not being a Milkbone).

From there we got cleaned up and headed over for our massages!!! For the first time ever Brent and I both ended up with guys! I usually have the same woman, but the spa has gotten so busy you need to call waaay in advance to get particular people. I really didn't mind having a guy, but I had told them Brent prob wouldn't want a guy (they asked when I booked). Anyway, we both had an awesome massage. My guy had some massive muscles and he pretty much beat me up - which is what I needed. At one point he was sort of jerking my leg to stretch it various ways and pulled me halfway down the table! I think I was a 120-pound rag doll to him. I think I really do prefer a guy now! They're much stronger so they can really put more pressure and strength into the massage. Brent's guy ended up being a former RN and is really into therapeutic massage. His neck is still hurting him (from when he pulled it right before Miami) and the guy spent a LOT of time working on his neck. He also told him he was in amazing shape, which Brent loved! We walked out of there absolutely giddy! (And quite a bit lighter in the wallet, but hey....)

From there we grabbed some lunch and wandered around the mall. We also did some shopping and looked at bikes at REI. We'd like to get some bikes soon, so we've been doing some shopping. I think we're pretty settled on getting some Treks. Once we got home we took Pippin for a nice 3 mile walk to see all the water in the creek that runs outside our subdivision following all the rain we had Thurs & Fri. It was pretty warm so when we made it to the little park I turned on the misting thing for Pippin and he loved it! Dogs and runners both give the misting fountain a thumbs up this weekend!

Today we did an early morning run over at a "natural area" part of the greenway prob 5-6 miles from our house. It's a really pretty area to run, there's a lake and also some wetlands. We saw a couple of wild turkeys, some Canadian geese, a rabbit or two and a couple of other runners. We greeted the turkeys with a "gobble gobble" (he was not amused, the other one ran away) and told the Canadian goose how much we really liked Canada, especially their flag. The rabbit was too fast to really talk to. This was just a 5 mile recovery run, and I wanted to keep it slow. The first 2.5 miles were pretty muggy, then the rain started and it felt SO good! It was incredibly refreshing and we just enjoyed it. We went faster in the rain just because it was such a nice feeling, much better than the humidity we had for the first half of the run. My Garmin kept going in and out so I think our pace ended up being around 9:10 for the run.

The rest of the day ended up being nice and sunny so we worked in the yard and got a ton done. We trimmed trees (Pippin loved chewing the branches!) and cleaned all the weeds out of flowerbeds, it's time to start planting flowers here! We got a lot done out there and then took a bunch of crap over to Goodwill and did some grocery shopping. I think it was around 8 oclock tonight before we ever got to sit down and relax today! As always there are still a few things we didn't get around to this weekend, I wouldn't know what to do if I ever crossed everything off of my to-do list!

Anyway, I hope you all had great weekends and I can't wait to read all about them!

Rae

Exercise-
Sat - 8 mile run, 3 mile walk with Pippin
Sun - 5 mile run, lots of yardwork!