Wedding Attire

Funny how blogs you read can impact your life.

I'm planning a post about my new tattooed life thanks to Running Bear.

Another change is that I'm actually thinking more about clothing thanks to another new blog I'm enjoying, Running on Lentils (go figure, another vegetarian runner, living in Pittsburgh where I'm visiting my in-laws this week no less?, it was a given I'd enjoy it).  One different aspect about her blog from others I read is that she does lots of clothing reviews, mostly workout wear. 

Anyway, in some ways it sometimes just makes me think more about what I'm wearing.  One of her recent posts focused on how a new top's fabric "pilled" a bit after wearing.  That's exactly the kind of thing I'd usually be oblivious to.  But now, I just find myself thinking about what I'm wearing more now (to run and in the real world).

One good thing about traveling for a wedding (and being totally averse to checking luggage) is that I have to actually decide on one outfit to wear in advance and then I'm fully committed.

This is what I've chosen for tomorrow night's wedding.  I've worn it once before (Easter 2012), but the material has a lot of stretch so it still fits well.

Reading selections

You can tell a lot about someone from the books they keep, right?

Well, here in Pittsburgh, we are staying with one of my husband's brothers and his wife and their bookcase is interesting and quite different from ours.  

 

Haha, yeah, so different.  Oh well, as long as we don't talk about politics or killing animals (well, I don't think he really kills most of them, but actually, isn't it worse to hurt them by hooking their mouths, depriving them of water, and then throwing them back?), it's all good!

 

Actually, we're having tons of fun here.  There is an amazing running trail (Montour Trail) that goes right near their house, so all 4 of us went this morning for about an hour.  The weather was insanely perfect -- humid, but cool (low 60s?), overcast but not raining, and the scenery was lovely -- so green and lush.  It was a slight incline on the way out, and downhill on the way back.  One of the best parts was watching my heartrate on the way back -- sailing slightly downhill going faster than marathon pace and seeing my heartrate significantly lower than it is when it's 15 degrees warmer at home. 

 

Also, I think we want to live in a retirement community.  Now if possible, but apparently they don't take you unless one spouse is over 65.  Thank goodness my husband is older than me.  Not even 20 years to wait now.  So many lectures, puzzles, movies, discussion groups, etc.  It's a shame that only one of my in-laws seems to be taking advantage of it, but to each his/her own I suppose. 

 

Tonight after dinner in the dining hall, we are all going to a lecture on the causes of WWII! 

Seeing the World

After lots of hemming and hawing, we had a big weekend on the "travel" front.

We had originally narrowed down the options for our fall 2014 trip to the following:

• India (definite)
• Nepal
• Sri Lanka
• Maldives
• Dubai
• Qatar

And the Dubai/Qatar choice was largely going to be shaped by airline.  We had two basic options:

• Fly through Qatar and earn miles, or
• Fly through Dubai and get to visit it (somewhere we really wanted to see, Qatar less so).

Well, it's all done and decided now, and plane tickets are purchased!

We ended up with 3 one-way tickets for now:

• Dallas to Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Mumbai, India to Dubai, UAE.
• Dubai to Dallas. 

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We will definitely buy plane tickets to go from Kathmandu to New Delhi or Agra (since that is international travel), but we'll wait until next credit card cycle to do that.

And we'll probably buy plane tickets from somewhere in northern India to Mumbai (but that journey could also be done overland, depending on where all we visit within India). 

We also made one more big step in the last week in terms of our trip.  We had our global entry interviews (including fingerprinting) and got approved, which was nice.

I'm so excited -- and a little nervous.  Going unfamiliar places is always so exciting to me, but there's always a little bit of nervousness too. 

We've got a lot of travel coming up on the immediate horizon too, but not quite as exciting and definitely more domestic.

Tomorrow, we're flying to Pittsburgh for 5 days for my husband's step-niece's (?) (brother's wife's daughter) wedding.  That will be lots of time with my parents-in-law, and we'll be staying with my brother-in-law and his wife.  Another brother-in-law and his wife are staying there too, and we'll actually have the house to ourselves for two nights, since the brother-in-law and wife who own the house are going to be staying at the wedding hotel Fri and Sat nights.

Excited about the wedding.  It's going to be at the Pittsburgh Opera and I'm sure it will be a lot of fun.



The happy couple.  They are both self-described foodies, dieticians by trade, and love working out.  Their first date was at a great restaurant they love, and their second date was the Pittsburgh Marathon.  So cute! 

Then next week, a trip home to see my family over the Fourth, including lots of good time with my nephew and nieces I hope, as well as some time with my grandpa (who is doing exactly the same, which is to say, not great, but not worsening at all). 

I got a message from my sister-in-law saying that they were registering me with them for a 4 mile race on the Fourth, which will be fun -- and I think my nephew and nieces are doing it too (though I'd guess the youngest certainly couldn't be, right?  she'll be 5 in August).  Buuuuuut, part of me wants to try to PR.  I ran a 4 mile at the beginning of this month and finished about 50 seconds off a PR.  And on top of that, my 4 mile PR isn't great.  On the pace predictors, my current 4 mile time predicts me at a marathon time I've accomplished several times.  I much prefer short-distance PRs that predict me at my dream marathon time, but the bottom line is that my 4 mile PR is old and should be beatable.  Unfortunately, the 4 mile race I do most often is in June, which isn't exactly PR weather in Dallas.  But a 4 mile race in July in Milwaukee certainly could be!  But it might be nice to run with my niece who is my goddaughter, that whole thing of getting her into running, family time, etc.  Guess I'll wait and see what the course looks like, how I feel, what the vibe is, etc. 

Houseguest week

I think my alcohol consumption in the last week was roughly equal to my alcohol consumption in the first five months of this year.  Yikes!

We had a friend visiting for the week and we had so much fun with her, but yow, I definitely drank a lot more than usual.  We went out to eat every night except one (Tuesday night she did the track meet with us, and then we had leftovers at home afterward).

She and I went to law school together (she was a year ahead of me, but we knew each other through a mutual good friend).  After graduation, we each went to work in separate cities, but within a year or two of when I graduated, she and her then-husband moved to Dallas and she came to work at the same firm where I worked. 

We lived near each other and we spent tons of time together, much of it at work, doing the typical big firm thing, we both pulled tons of all-nighters, or past-midnighters.  One particular routine (sad in retrospect) was that if it looked like we both had a late night ahead, we'd sometimes order dinner together from the same place and make plans to meet in the restroom on our floor at 10:00.  And without fail, as crazy busy as we were, we'd meet at 10, change into yoga clothes for working late, and brush our teeth and wash our faces before going back to our desks.  Having just a tiny little break and a chance to commiserate made it feel so much better that oddly, neither of us complained and in fact continued to work like that for years.  And go figure, I stayed single and she got divorced.  I could write an entire book on how big firm life can warp you and how unhealthy it is. 

Now, she lives in DC and works for the government and was able to manage a work-related trip here.  She came on Monday and stayed until Saturday night.  I was so happy to get the time together.  After spending so much time together for so long, it was hard for me when she moved so far away.  And it's worse because I suck at calling people or sending personal "catch up" emails, so while we were never fully out of touch, I felt like we were missing out on parts of each other's lives.  A week together was such a gift. 

We spent much of the week hitting up old favorite places and showing her a few of our new favorites. 

Monday night, we walked to a Mexican restaurant that is I think becoming a chain outside of Texas now (Chuy's, anyone have it not in Texas?). 

Tuesday night was the track meet, which was lots of fun.  I always think of her as being faster than me, mostly because she has been running longer than me and qualified for Boston years before I did, back when it still seemed thoroughly outside the realm of possibility.  She's taken some time off lately for a variety of reasons, but yeah, she's still an amazing runner.  She ran cautiously at the track meet and completely smoked me in the 100 and 200, and we ran pretty close together for the 800 and the 1500. 

Wednesday night was a girls night with another friend of ours from the firm where we all worked.  She used to live here in Dallas and we were really close (her son is my godson), but they've moved out to a very, very, very distant suburb so I don't get to see her anywhere near as much as I'd like anymore.  So it was a fun night of catching up. 

Back when all three of us were working at the firm (they were both married), my favorite place to get a drink and feel like I was being social (since unlike them, I was going home to an empty house) was to go to a lovely restaurant right by my house.  Many times I'd get friends to meet me there, and I actually had my 30th birthday at the chef's table there, so of course we were back when she was visiting this past week.

It was funny, I went running as usual Thursday morning and I told my running buddy, CW, that my friend had plans with her old boss to meet for dinner that night and I was kind of glad I was off the hook.  I love spending every minute with her, but I was kind of ready for a meal at home and an alcohol-free night.  I came home from my run and my friend gave me the news -- she'd rescheduled with her old boss for lunch since her old boss was heading out of town that afternoon, so we were on for dinner again.  (Nervous smile.)  We ended up at my favorite restaurant that night, a tapas place we can walk to.  Tapas is particularly nice with a fellow vegetarian.  And on the walk home, we stopped at the restaurant where I used to drink. 

I have always gotten the same cocktail there.  So I started with one of them.  And somehow seemlessly transitioned to something else.  When I crawled into bed after midnight, where hubby was sleeping soundly, I woke him up to tell him I had a new favorite drink.  "It's called 'vodka... on the rocks'!"  Is it possible for him to roll his eyes without opening them?  Haha.  Yikes. 

My usual cocktail:

The vodka:

But I managed to get up and go to boot camp a few hours later nonetheless, but there was a lot of time leaning over a railing and contemplating whether I'd feel better if I just got sick.

Friday night was a walk through the park, another restaurant (a fun purple cocktail), our local art museum, and then back to the same bar, this time with hubby joining us for the whole night.

Walking through Klyde Warren Park: 


My prinkly in pink cocktail at Stephen Pyles (didn't photograph the second one since, second verse, same as the first!): 

At the art museum, something interesting: 

And the description:

The main reason we went to the art museum was a special exhibit they had on Nur, light in Islamic art:

Then we just decided to wander the rest of the art museum: 

Something else interesting:

A description of what you're seeing:

And back at Abacus, this was a mojito, not sure where in the order it fit: 

And a big glass of "vodka... on the rocks": 

Saturday was sweating out a lot of the alcohol at a 90 minute Bikram class, then breakfast with another firm from the firm. I was wondering how that breakfast would go since they both came to our wedding in Italy separately and left as a couple for a year or two. It seemed like very shortly after they stopped dating, he got back together with an ex and within about two minutes got married and had a baby. Anyway, I should have guessed since they both wanted to see each other that it would be great and easy and fun all catching up together. I think it helps that they're both in good places now.

Not sure how any of them would feel about having their faces on a blog...: 

 

Saturday afternoon's highlights were shopping for cowboy boots and coffee with another friend we'd worked with, before we took her to the airport.

The house has felt really empty since she left, kind of a bummer.

But exciting travels in store for us this week, have to write about that later. Off to work now...