Catching up

I've actually been up to quite a bit lately and that even includes some exercise!  As promised, at the bottom are some pictures from the Tulip Festival from when I ran ("ran") the Blooms to Brews 10K.  It was an incredibly bright day when I took these but the overexposure really makes the colors pop.

The weekend after Blooms to Brews I went to Bend to visit my friend S's dog Kip (the black dog smiling below).  Okay, also my friend S and her husband and her other dog Lily (the white dog below) and the four kittens they were fostering.  S is the one who fostered my two gigantoids; she raises good pets.  We've been friends since about 1997 and when she lived here we used to hike all the time.  In the early days she had an awesome Collie named Jasper and then later it was Kip and I had my dogs and then later Lily joined in.  My dogs got too old to hike and Kip -- a tripawd -- is also a senior dog and can't go very far anymore either.  But every time I go visit we do go hiking and this time we took Lily and some other friends out to hike the Falls River trail.  As you can see, absolutely beautiful and really great weather -- it snowed like a week later down there.  

I also got in a kitten fix.  Two boys and two girls, only a few weeks old and about as big as your hand.  Sadly the buff colored boy didn't thrive with them (from a different litter) so he's now being fostered by a vet tech to give him some extra attention and medical-y stuff.  The other three are definitely thriving and growing like gangbusters.  So cute!

In other news, I finally made it to the gym I joined.  Planet Fitness is right up the street from my house and I find all of the purple amusing as well as the fact that they spelled judgment wrong everywhere (no extra "e" people!).  My friend Julie joined too so now we've set up a schedule of three times a week, Tuesday and Thursday at o'dark thirty and then Saturday mornings.  Julie still can't run and won't for quite a while so this is a good way for me not only to get my butt into the gym (failure to show up means being hassled unmercifully by text message) but to take it easy in building a base back up.  Plus, weights; I have zero upper body strength.  Really, I don't know how I manage to keep upright with these boobs.

I also joined a Meetup group that does walks and hikes on the westside at times I can actually go.  I did my first four mile hilly walk with them on Monday (and got in a dog fix, we had three corgis, a weimeraner, and a greyhound) and plan to hike with them on Sunday.  I'll be running again in no time!

Cheers,

the CilleyGirl