Blogalicious De Lara: May 2006

I Hate Running.

I hope everyone had a nice 3-day weekend and remembered to take a few moments to reflect upon why we take that day off.

i had a great weekend! a definite highlight was running a 5k in laguna hills with jennifer on monday morning. half of the route wound around the streets of leisure world and there were tons of cute little retirees out on their lawn chairs waving little american flags and cheering us on. it was good times for sure!

we signed up for this race about a month ago, as motivation to keep some sort of regular training schedule. it actually worked! i exercised more consistently over this past month than i have in a long time.

we held a pretty good pace and finished in 31 minutes (621 & 622 out of 1321 runners). it's pretty pathetic compared to how fast we used to run in high school, but for us golden girls, we thought it was pretty good.

they actually issued each runner a chip to attach to their shoe. time started when you hit the pad at the start line and stopped when you hit the pad at the finish line. gotta love technology!

but the best part was that if you pre-registered, you could have a personal quote printed on your race bib. there were a lot of messages of support, religious references and team names...but our favorite one, by far, simply said: "i hate running". jennifer and i were kicking ourselves for not coming up with that one. funny stuff.

anyway, this was such a positive experience that i am giving thought to participating in the mud run again this year. the race that benefits the ymca falls in october each year. jenn and i will probably hit up one more 5k as well as a 10k before the pendleton race actually comes around, so if you are interested in joining up with any of these little adventures, let me know. the more, the merrier!

I'm 10,372 Days Old Today

This website is fun: http://www.paulsadowski.com/birthday.asp

Here is one of my favorite parts:

There are 220 days till your next birthday
on which your cake will have 29 candles.

Those 29 candles produce 29 BTUs,
or 7,308 calories of heat (that's only 7.3080 food Calories!) .

You can boil 3.31 US ounces of water with that many candles.

We're Rich!

So...the other night, I was walking home with Connie and Kristine after dinner at CPK, and I found $36 on the ground. I never find money. Never. So of course, I started screaming "We're Rich!! W're Rich!!!!" (Which I thought was a completely appropriate response.)

Anyway, none of us could retire on the $12 each we walked away with, but hey, free money is never a bad thing. Yay!

Water Bridge

Okay, I'm sure you've all been forwarded this before, but I hadn't seen it until my friend, Jenn, sent it to me. I just couldn't believe it, so I checked it out on Snopes ( http://www.snopes.com/photos/architecture/waterbridge.asp ) and it was real! Crazy!

The photograph displayed above is one of a real structure, a kilometer-long "concrete bathtub" water bridge over the Elbe River in Germany that joins the Elbe-Havel canal to the Mittelland canal near the eastern town of Magdeburg.

As Deutsche Welle described the bridge upon its completion in 2003:

Taking six years to build and costing around half a billion euros, the massive undertaking will connect Berlin's inland harbor with the ports along the Rhine river. At the center of the project is Europe's longest water bridge measuring in just shy of a kilometer at 918 meters. The huge tub to transport ships over the Elbe took 24,000 metric tons of steel and 68,000 cubic meters of concrete to build.

The water bridge will enable river barges to avoid a lengthy and sometimes unreliable passage along the Elbe. Shipping can often come to a halt on the stretch if the river's water mark falls to unacceptably low levels.

Plans for joining the two canals had been conceived as far back as 1919, and construction on such a project began during the 1930s, but first World War II and then the post-war division of Germany put the project on hold until after German reunification was achieved in the 1990s.

Anyway...thought this was fun.

Class of '96 Baby!

so i mentioned in a previous post that i got an invite in the mail for my high school reunion. after much consideration, a small group of us decided to put together our own little reunion outside of the dinner event being offered for our entire class.

we threw out dates and locations and suddenly a weekend in vegas was in the works. we ended up with 10 from our original class (plus 4 significant others). it was a great group and we definitely did vegas right... dancing friday night, a cabana by the pool on saturday, dinner in a private room at the wynn steakhouse and a hilarious show (avenue Q) saturday night (followed by a little late-night table play) and a buffet sunday morning to finish it off. here are a few photos...

our friday night group...