good or bad, we posted a CL ad for the deceased xterra before heading into town for more car shopping this morning.  hubby’s phone did not stop ringing all day.  we actually had people waiting in the parking garage to look at it when we got home tonight.  craziness.  and yet my furniture that i’ve been trying to sell on CL for the last four months… crickets.  so, after fielding calls, texts, and emails all day while trying desperately to find our new car, our xterra is now gone.  sold for more than we asked for it (which doesn’t surprise me so much since the volume of response must mean we way underpriced it). 

so long, old friend

she has been such a good car

she has carried us (and housed us) all over this country

and now the pressure is really on for us to find something.  and i learned something very interesting about the auto industry today… turns out most of the big name dealerships are closed on sundays.  while i generally respect a corporation that holds on to that kind of value, i was a bit shocked about it in this industry since it seems to me that most people only really have time to car shop on weekends.  i guess maybe that’s just us though.  anyhow, we could only find two dealerships open today and one of them took up almost the whole afternoon.  we test drove three more cars and still don’t know what we want.  we’re all over the place.  i think the current front runners are the hyundai elantra gt, honda civic lx, toyota prius ii (hippies!), and volkswagen jetta.  all over the place, i tell ya.

we headed to town at 10:00 this morning and didn’t make it back home until 20:00.  we went to five dealerships, looked seriously at about a dozen models, and test drove eight.  i am exhausted and i don’t know that we’re any closer to knowing what we want.  hubby is pouring over numbers and working his analytical magic.  we have a rental car for a week so we’ll definitely need to pick a winner quickly.  it’s not fun car shopping when you actually have to.

so 2012 found me looking longingly at new cars.  our xterra has been great but this salt air has really taken a toll on her and her rust holes are getting a little embarrassing.  in all fairness, i never had any intention of trading her in.  i figured we’d get a little car that is good on gas and keep her for in-town hauling stuff.  after all, we can’t get kayaks or surfboards or lumber into a little fuel-efficient car.  yep, we were going to be a two-car family again for the first time in over a decade.  we looked at cars pretty heavily back in the summer and then hubby decided to buy a new house so i joked around about how his house trumped my car.  i guess the poor xterra must have misunderstood me and thought i was really trying to get rid of her.  tonight, hubby left for the bridge run and returned home twenty minutes later.  she died.  it was all he could do to get her back home from the 1/4 mile she had made it.  he was distraught and i tried to comfort him.  i asked if it’s possible that it’s just something minor but he said i wasn’t there to hear her death rattle and he doesn’t think so.  crap.  i never thought she’s actually die on us.  i just didn’t think it was possible.  rust until all that was left was a chassis?  sure.  but die?  never.  guess who’s going car shopping this weekend?  which, of course, means we have to rent a car to get to the dealerships.  happy new year!

i was so busy focusing on last year’s recap yesterday that i didn’t bother to talk about NYE.  we rang in the new year quietly with our friends, trainwreck and chef.  we joined them for a fancy schmancy dinner and then went back to their house for pajamas and games.  we were all in bed just after 2013 came to our time zone.  new year’s morning started with the boys going for a run while us chicks did a walk and then, after breakfast, chef and i went to see the new les mis movie, which was a phenomenal screen adaptation by the way.  hubby and i finally made it back home in the late afternoon and did some straightening up around here.  it wasn’t the wild and crazy party that we have sometimes had but i enjoyed the subdued celebration.  and now, i get to start hounding hubby in earnest.  he is officially in training for his first (and last) ironman.  this means that i have to be a patient and understanding wife while my husband leaves me alone most of the year and i have to be supportive and prod him to do so.  it will all be worthwhile when i’m the proud wife cheering on my husband while he undertakes this monumental challenge.

i was in a pretty dark place when i disappeared from here back in 2011. i won’t dwell on that. a brand new, sparkly year has come around and it is going to be a great one! afterall, it’s ’13… my lucky number! 2012 ended up being a pretty good year in its own right.

• after spending the month of december 2011 and january 2012 in the hospitals with hubby’s mom (stroke) and my dad (broken hip), everyone was healthy and happy for the holidays this year. MIL is still working hard on her road to recovery and dad has a new health concern that has left him doing monthly treatments all year but they are still in our lives and they are back to enjoying their own lives (dad is especially enjoying his retirement that he finally earned in 2012!).
• i signed up for my 3rd half marathon and sold my registration after a month of training.  i wasn’t feeling it and i have no regrets about it.  it was a great decision.
• i dropped 40 pounds in seven months by making healthy choices.  i exercised more regularly (aquajogging rawks!), watched my portions better, and became more conscientious of where my calories were coming from (no, i do not need that giant glass of milk every night with dinner, no matter how much i love it!).  i now fit into clothes i haven’t been able to wear in about eight years.  sadly, i had just given away the majority of my skinny clothes a couple months before i started this life change so it was a heavy shopping year. 
• i gained back five of those pounds over vacation and the holidays but i’m so not worried about that.
• vacation was epic!  it’ll take me forever to get the travel log finished since there are over 3k photos for me to sort through and narrow down but it was a month of living history.  hubby and i both hit our #1 bucket list destinations (israel and egypt, respectively) and so much more.  i still can’t believe we saw all that we saw. 
• my brudder gave me a new niece and she is perfection.



• we moved into a new home, which is almost the same as our previous home except that we no longer have noise above us.  the moving stress was nearly too much for me but we are doing all the upgrades we always wanted to do and it is turning into a gorgeous, if slightly smaller, home.

the most important thing about 2012 is that we got back to focusing on fun and happiness and i quit letting so much gloom in.  the fact that everyone keeps complementing me on my svelteness has also helped my self-esteem.

so after hubby spent several hours on the phone yesterday evening trying to figure out what had happened with our cruise and trying to correct it, things looked pretty dismal.  i even went ahead and let my boss know that i would probably be working next week after all.  the cruise we were supposed to do was now full and the cruise line informed us that they would put us on a wait-list but that there was only a 5% chance of us getting on, which was what the travel agent had told us as well. 

 in an effort to turn his wife’s frown upside down, hubby spent his lunch break today trying to find an alternate cruise for this weekend.  pretty much everything is booked.  i think he found a cabin on a different cruise line out of new orleans but it was single bunk beds.  yeh, not for our anniversary.  then he tried one on the cruise line we were supposed to be going with out of tampa but they only had a super swanky cabin for something like $2k more than the cruise we lost.  nope. 

BUT… as hubby was getting ready to hang up, they told him that he should try the cruise out of mobile.  WAIT A SECOND!  that’s the cruise we were supposed to be on that was fully booked and we were wait-listed!  it was more expensive than when we had originally booked and hubby hung up with the cruise line and called the travel agent to give them a chance to make things right for us.  they were able to book the cabin for us at the higher rate and then reluctantly offered some onboard credit to make up for some of it – of course that was after hubby kept reminding him that we wouldn’t be going through all this if he had done things correctly the first time around.  i still don’t think they’ve done enough to fix things but hubby is in charge of that.  and i’ll definitely be posting some reviews of their agency when we return.  like i’ve said, i have no problem with someone or a business making a mistake but they sure as heck ought to take responsibility and make it right. 

in any case, out of a pure stroke of right time/right place, my husband managed to get us on the fully booked cruise that we thought we were going to be on to begin with.  i immediately started the online check-in process and it appears that we’re good to go.  i’m not going to get overly excited until we’re on the ship, in our room, and pulling away from port.  right now, i’m still fairly irked that they managed to make the most relaxing possible vacation into a huge stress, but i’m cautiously optimistic that we will be at sea and sipping champagne for our anniversary.

*UPDATE – 24may2011*
so i got a call from the agent’s boss the day after this post.  he wanted to be sure that we had been able to do the online check-in with the cruise line and that everything had worked out right.  he also asked for our mailing address and stated that he wanted to send us a token of apology.  i thanked him for his effort and calmly mentioned that i was just relieved that our vacation hadn’t been spoiled by such a frustrating experience.  i stated that i was still disappointed that we not only had to go through all the stress but that we also ended up paying a good bit more than we thought we were spending when we originally booked this weeks ago.  i was not confrontational and i was not emotional, i simply stated my feelings quietly and courteously.  at that point, the man stated that he was going to send us a check for the difference.  that’s it.  that’s all that they had to do… you made a mistake = you make it right.  i expressed to him our sincere appreciation for stepping up and correcting the problem.  of course, they are lucky that hubby’s diligence got us back on the cruise because i don’t think there would have been any making it right if we had lost our vacation altogether.  in any case, i just wanted to tell the rest of the story and let you all know that it was rectified.  when we got home and i finally checked the mail several days later, i found a check as well as a box of gourmet brownies with a card of apology.  i will not be providing any negative reviews of this agency.

my prayers for a tapeworm have finally been answered!  that’s the only explanation i can come up with for why i’m suddenly seeing weight loss after all of these years of increasing activity and decreasing junk food and just getting fatter and fatter.  truly, it makes no sense.  last year, i trained for and ran my first half marathon and then hiked the grand canyon (which burned way more calories).  you would think that huge spike in activity, paired with better eating habits would have made me all kinds of svelte.  after four months of expending large quantities of energy… i hadn’t lost a single ounce.  and since weight can be deceptive, i’ll also note that none of my clothes were any less snug.  on the contrary, i went up a size 🙁  very frustrating and demoralizing, that was.  this year, i’m down 8+ pounds since jan 1.  i’m getting very close to seeing the next lower tens digit on the scale.  and i just don’t understand it.  nothing has changed.  my eating habits are the same as they’ve been for the last few years… overall, i eat fairly healthy but i’m more a believer in “everything in moderation” so i don’t deny myself less healthy foods.  my training for this year’s half was similar to last year’s except i did try to keep up better with cross-training.  my overall activity has greatly diminished since about two weeks prior to the 13.1 because of injuries that don’t seem to want to go away and yet the pounds keep going down.  my mind is officially boggled.  not to look a gift-horse in the mouth… seeing encouragement on the scale is nice but i’d rather have baggy clothes.

as is the norm in march, my thoughts lately have been turning to ron.    we’re coming up on five years since he’s passed.  i’ve still never figured out why i think of him so much but i do.  this morning started out with an email informing us that another coworker, s.p., passed away yesterday.  he was an orlando employee and i only met him a few times.  the thing is, the first time i met him was also the first time i met ron.  it was probably a decade ago, when hubby and i were still in orlando, and ron and s.p. were passing through on a business trip and wanted to get together with hubby for dinner.  i met them together and they were quite the pair, hilariously feeding off each other.  the last time i saw s.p. was at ron’s funeral.  we actually tried to see him when we were in the office back in november but nobody knew where to find him in the great sea of cubes.  it sounds kind of bad but this has just increased my sadness over ron this year.

is that it’s just so easy to miss more.  i slacked monday because i felt like the crud in the tread of old shoes.  so i did monday’s run yesterday and was going to do yesterday’s five miles today… and i would have but hubby walked outside and came back in with a diatribe about being sick of being so cold… next thing i know we’re snuggled up under a blankie on the couch watching a movie.  and it was so, so easy to skip the run.  such is life.  i’ll do five tomorrow on the bridge instead of the four on the schedule.  i’m really not worried about it because my training has been going so well and i don’t feel like this little bit of slacking is going to hurt my race at all.  it’s just funny how easy it is to get lazy now.

this week will be the first week of my training that i didn’t complete all of my runs. i know it’s not going to be a big deal in the grand scheme of things but i was so proud of how well i was sticking to my schedule so it feels kind of like a let down. it’s just been a poor weather week. my tuesday night run got moved to wednesday night due to severe storms on tuesday. last night’s bridge run got rained out. if i hadn’t been fighting a cold all week, i might have gone out and run in the rain but running in 40° rain would not be conducive to staying healthy. turned out to be just as well since a major migraine started last night anyhow. the bright side… i’ll be running eleven miles in the morning on semi-fresh legs.  now if i could just get my head to stop throbbing…

i’m refusing to have a birthday this year.  i just am not going to do it.  i’ve never really worried over age but, all of a sudden, i’m having terrible anxiety about turning another year older.  or, more to the point, another decade older.  it’s really been getting to me for months.  i was looking back over what i had to say five years ago:

monday – 30january2006 – 17:12
it’s official. i’m old. one-quarter of a century to be exact. i never really considered 25 to be one of the milestone birthdays but i think it kind of is. i feel older now. not decrepit and worn-out old, but no-longer-a-teenager old (yes, i have been trying to hold on to that for the last 5 years). i guess i actually feel like a bonafide adult now. scary. so i suppose it’s time for a look back on my first quarter of a century.

i have:

• survived and {mostly} recovered from two semi-violent victimizations
• graduated from college three years after my high school graduation (even though i took a two-semester hiatus as a result of the above)
• paid my credit cards off monthly for the last 4 years
• had the wedding of my dreams
• married the most wonderful man on earth
• visited all fifty states in the u.s.
• seen a moonbow
• taken a two-person roadtrip that covered 23 states, 8000 miles, 9 state/national parks in 19 days
• walked through glacier melt (ouch!)
• watched a whale fully breach from 20 yards away
• hiked through rainforest and waded through water to see a hawaiian waterfall
• watched the sun rise from the top of a 10,000 foot volcano
• rode a bicycle 38 miles down that volcano
• visited three canadian provinces
• crossed the world’s longest wooden bridge
• visited ten european countries
• avoided speaking english (as much as possible) in 7 of those countries (dutch, polish, and czech are all greek to me)
• paid off a house in two years
• become a completely different person for the third time

anyhow, it’s been a great birthday. my wonderful hubby surprised me with a reservation at the melting pot. it was fabulous! exactly how i remembered it. what a terrifically thoughtful husband to take me someplace even though it’s not his thing. we had a fantastic meal and then visited my furniture and went to kohls. a good evening was had by me (and i even think he enjoyed it a bit). but my birthday really became official when my mom called me at 13:33 to tell me the story of what i was doing 25 years ago (namely, putting her through 36 hours of labor and making her miss three meals in a row). i appreciate that she calls me every year at 13:33 to tell me the story of me. it really makes my birthday every year.

you see that?  i was all accomplishments and wonderment and i couldn’t imagine life ever again being less than fabulous.  so much has happened since then – some good, some bad, some shattering.  and, ironically, that happens to have been the last year that i got that special call.  now, this past year+ has been full of trials and tribulations that have left me jaded and cynical all over again.  this sounds like a pity party… i know that i am blessed and i am thankful…  but my life is not what i thought it was and it is not following the path that i had believed it was.  i’m getting ready to enter a new decade of life and i’m so very uncertain and scared.  i’m having to face the fact that my youth is behind me while redefining my expectations.  it really is a lot to swallow and i’m just not ready for it yet.  maybe next year.

apparently, i’m an exercise blogger.  whodda thunk it?  clearly, over the last year, that’s the only topic i’ve really felt blog-worthy.  good thing i never had a big readership to begin with because i’m sure i would be boring them all away by now.  fortunately, this little piece of interweb real estate is all about me so i post what i want and these days, that’s exercise.  but, hey, that’s exciting stuff for this couch potato!

so after all of my recent posts about PRing on the bridge, i had wanted to post this article.  this incident happened around the same time i was celebrating my bridge victories.

A runner hit by a utility trailer tire on the Hathaway Bridge on Wednesday is still in the intensive care unit at Gulf Coast Medical Center following surgery for an epidural hematoma.

Kaitlyn Livings Beckham, 18, of Panama City Beach, was hit with the tire after it “rolled and/or bounced” over the 3-foot retainer wall between the traffic and pedestrian lanes of the bridge shortly before 4 p.m.,

those who have come and run the bridge with me can probably appreciate what a freak accident this was.  i’ve been running that bridge for 22 months and have never felt unsafe.  sure it’s close to traffic but there is a sizable shoulder and a retaining wall, making it far safer to jog along than any of the other roadways around here.  this poor girl was totally caught up in wrong place/wrong time.  for a tire to fly off a vehicle in the right direction and in such a way to be projected over that wall AND a person to happen to be in that location… wow.  happily, i have heard that she is recovering but i felt so bad for this poor girl.  running:  hazardous to your health!  😉

life is a funny, funny thing. one minute, you feel like you’re on top of the world, and then life knocks you down ten pegs. the fact of the matter is… i have a fabulous life. i know this. i am thankful for this. i am truly blessed. but life is still life. and we do not control our worlds. and sometimes our world will tip upside down to spite us. all i can do is hope and pray. and i do. i hope. i pray every day.