We're leaving this morning for a few days in San Diego!

SWAP Time!

Well, my SWAP has joined 30 others from all over the world. See them all here: Timmel Fabrics. It really is a great collection of wardrobes. I did my voting last night. It was really hard.

Here's my SWAP album.

This afternoon I Don't Like Mondays popped up on my ipod shuffle and it made me cry a little.

It was followed by The Smiths' "Boy with the Thorn in His Side." Ipod shuffle gods, what did I do to you today?

I've nearly completed my first week of fitness boot camp. I have mixed feelings about it. It's a good workout but not quite as intense as I'd hoped. It's a lot of you get out what you put into it, but I feel they're not pushing me too hard. I'm motivating myself to get my money's worth from the class more than anything else. I'm considering tacking a couple miles onto the end of the workouts some days.

Our Weekend in Yosemite

It was cold and rainy. The pics are up on flickr.

Actually, on Sunday it was sunny and we warmed up as we hiked up, up, up the side of a waterfall. It got chilly as the mist from the waterfall sprayed on us and we were continuously changing layers, layers that were already slightly damp from hiking in the rain on Saturday, then sitting around the fire Saturday night trying to keep it strong enough to keep from going out from the rain. Everything was damp, cold, and smelled like a campfire. I frozed all night long and feared the tent would leak. It didn't, but everything was still wet in the morning even though the rain stopped around 10 pm on Saturday night. We might have heard bears in the camp on Saturday night, but we can't be certain. Something was banging around the food lockers, but it might have just been other campers. Yes. You have to lock up all your food and toiletries in food lockers at each campsite. It's been a highly active spring so far for the bears.

Sounds like a miserable time, doesn't it? Hmmm, I'm not going to lie and say something made all the cold and rain worth it. We did take two nice, but short, hikes, and we did have a good time chatting with our friends around the fire, and we cooked some pretty good food over the fire. But it would have been a lot nicer if it had been dry and at least 10 degrees warmer. Preferably 20 degrees warmer.

Yosemite is worth seeing though, and we hope to go back during nicer weather.

I just heard an avalanche from the other room. I'm positive it's due to Ellie + papers or something else on the desk. There weren't any crashing/breaking sounds, and the wedding invitations are squirreled away in a safe place, so I'm not going to bother getting up to investigate yet.

Our good deed attempt from last week did not work out. While the training looks great and fun, once you pass the training course you're on a year's probation where you have to dedicate a lot more time than we can to searching and rescueing. Plus there's the fact that we'll be moving relatively soon. If not a year from now, then within 2 years from now. So we really couldn't put in the time commitment, and it would have been a waste of resources for them to train us then have us leave them.

Our next good deed: We're donating a rice cooker to Salvation Army...

We're going to Yosemite this weekend! Yay! And we're going to San Diego in 2 weeks! Yay!

And on Monday I start my fitness boot camp. Mike and I are still attempting to get up early and run together a couple times a week.

procrastination

Mike's doing our taxes this afternoon. We're going camping in Yosemite next weekend, so today really is the last convenient day for us to take care of this.

The SWAP deadline is today. I finally got around to finishing my last piece yesterday.

This morning we walked up to a craft store to buy vellum for our wedding invitations. It was closed. So that's one part of the invitations we'll have to put off for at least a day, but more realistically quite a few days. In the meantime, I'm writing one part of the invitations and addressing all the envelopes by hand. We're going to San Diego in a couple weeks and trying to get the invitations finished before then.

Wedding stuff is unfortunately taking over our lives.

We are considering doing a good deed. Last Saturday the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Dept. was set up outside REI, and when I stopped to pet the police dog (he sniffed me first! I wasn't going to pet a work dog, but he insisted), the recruiters stepped in to talk to us about the volunteer search & rescue team. We decided it sounds like a good thing to check out further, so we're going to an informational meeting tonight. You go through a month-long training course that includes first aid, maps and navigation, and a fitness test. Then when someone gets lost in a park here in Contra Costa County, they call up the volunteers to start searching. Since we like to hike anyway, it seems like a good idea to put our hiking to good use. And they use mountain bikers, too, to do a quick survey of the park before sending people out on foot, so they were happy to hear that Mike's a biker.

I think our decision to actually go through with it is mostly going to hinge on how much the training course actually costs. We'll find out the details tonight!

Yesterday was Day 2 of getting up early to run together: Successful. We're trying to do it 3 times a week.

Mike and I decided that a few times a week we'd go running together first thing in the morning. It's getting too warm for running in the afternoon. Neither one of us is terribly motivated to wake up and run early though. Hopefully we can at least get out the door together, even if we end up running different routes. Today, day one: Successful.

We saw a mallard couple taking a stroll on the edge of the canal this morning. An elderly couple out taking a walk said "good morning" to us. We were one of those disgustingly cute jogging couples. At least we weren't wearing our matching jackets.