Sacrificing for the Run

I seriously hate waking up before 6am, especially when I was woken up at 2am by yet another earthquake, an aftershock of the 7.2 from Sunday. This one was only 4.4 though... but it still woke me up and I couldn't fall back asleep right away. So when the alarm went off at 5:50am, I could not peel my eyes open. Argh, the sacrifices I make for running. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it.

We got up to Moonlight Beach in Encinitas around 6:45am to run with our running club. It was 8 miles for Todd's group and 7 miles for my group. We started at the same time. It was cloudy with marine layer when we started, and it stayed like that the whole time.

At the beginning of the run we had to go down a big hill.






Then immediately go up a big hill.


We ran north 3.5 miles from Moonlight Beach to Carlsbad, then turned around for the other 3.5 miles back. Along the way there was ocean view.


All the local training teams are out there today! Everyone is getting in gear for the San Diego Rock N Roll Marathon and Half Marathon on June 6th. Todd and I are running the 1/2 marathon. I saw San Diego Track Club and Team In Training out there today.

I beat Todd back to Moonlight Beach by a couple of minutes, but he ran one more mile than me.




I felt pretty good. I ate a Luna bar on the way to the run. Then I had a 10oz bottle of Ultima and a 10oz bottle of water with me, along with a packet of vanilla GU. I ate the vanilla GU at around 4 miles and it kicked up my energy for the rest 3 miles.

After the run, Todd and I headed a few blocks over to the Potato Shack and had breakfast there. Yum! I forgot to take any photos, but I had an egg, cheese, tomato, and bacon breakfast sandwich, along with potato wedges. Todd doesn't eat breakfast food, so he had a mahi sandwich with french fries.

Location: Encinitas to Carlsbad round trip
Distance: 7.01 miles
Time: 1:18:46 (one more minute than last week's 7 miles)
Avg time/mile: 11:13
Calories: 694 calories

I found out from our friend Monika today that The Rock Church has a running ministry and the group runs six days a week all across San Diego! How fun is that? To combine running with fellowship with other Christians. We're definitely going to check it out!

Did you see the Snap! mini kit freebie that I created for the Little Dreamer Designs Apprentice Program? My friend Becky made a layout with it and it's just adorable!

You can see the full credits here.

Lastly... I found out something cool yesterday. My friend Jennifer Wilson at Simple Scrapper emailed me and told me that my paper block letter templates was mentioned in the current episode of Paperclipping Roundtable podcast. There's even a link to my Little Dreamer Designs store from there! I knew my friend Heather was chosen to be the "real life scrapper" on an episode, so it must have been her in the podcast! I downloaded it and listened to it. It was quite fun, and the mention happens at about 57 minutes into the show. If you've never listened to a Paperclipping Roundtable podcast before, you should check it out! :)

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Free Is Good

Hey I have a little surprise for you today!

Little Dreamer Designs is having their Apprentice Program right now, where new designers applied and got accepted into the program to learn new skills in designing. I am participating in it, because I love to learn new skills, it makes me happy. :) I won't be competing to win a spot in the store... because I sell there already. However, I wanted to add new skill sets and product repertoire into the mix!
Anyways, this is the long way of telling you that I have a mini kit freebie for you over there in the LDD Apprentice Gallery that you can download!





You can download it HERE at the Little Dreamer Designs Apprentice Gallery. (You may have to log in to see it, not sure.) Please leave a comment there if you download!

And here is the link to the whole gallery so you can look at all the freebie mini kits and support all the participants!   Make sure you leave them comments if you download, so that they could be encouraged.

The next few weeks in the LDD Apprentice Program will be a lot of fun!

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Coo Coo For Carnitas

I can't take credit for today's blog post title, because it's a direct quote from our friend Pete.

Pete and Todd set up a "skate date" today after work at Miramar Lake. Todd is starting to skate again and Pete had never been to Miramar Lake, so he wanted to check it out with his skates too. So we met up there after work so the two of them could skate and I could run.


They skated five miles and I ran 3.1 miles, in about the same amount of time. Well, I might have been a couple of minutes slower. I had gone to noon time Pilates class at my work gym, so my legs felt a little bit sore. I powered through it and tried to run faster, since I knew I was just going 3.1 miles. It was breezy at Miramar Lake. If I hadn't been running I might have been cold even. It's been only around 60 degrees in San Diego this past week. I ate a banana after work so I wouldn't starve.

Location: Miramar Lake
Distance: 3.10 miles
Time: 31:50
Avg pace/mile: 10:15 (yahoo!)
Calories: 302

After the skate date, we took Pete to Chile Peppers and introduced him to the carnitas there. In our opinion Chile Peppers has the best carnitas in San Diego. It's crispy salty meat! What else could be better, LOL. Pete was super-excited to try it out. He even said this was the reason he wanted to come on the skate date, ha ha. Then when we were ordering, he said he was "coo coo for carnitas". So I told him that I was stealing that for my blog post title.

Pete and Todd with their various carnitas incarnations.


Todd and I. I always look especially lovely after a sweaty run and without makeup.


The carnitas passed Pete's coo coo test. Yay!

So I don't know if you've noticed, but I haven't scrapped a page in about two weeks. I just haven't felt like it. Which is okay. I just try to go with the ebb and flow of creativity. If I beat myself up over not scrapping, then this hobby becomes NOT fun and I wouldn't want to do it anymore. What brought me out of my scrapping hole?

This kit called "Creator" by Peppermint, who is guesting this month over at Scrapbook Graphics.  It is a kit about creativity, imagination, and legos!  What a great concept!


There is a coordinating Creator Alpha that is just the cutest lego alpha I've ever seen.


So I thought it was the perfect time to pull out those photos of when Peppermint and Tom came to visit last July and we went to Legoland together.

Click here for full credits.

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Seven Miles + Reunion with Old Friends

I was going to title this blog post, "Seven Miles, Old Friends, Pillow Fight, 7.2 Earthquake, and Taxes", but it seemed too long. :-| I could have just titled it "Weekend Wrap-up" or something like that.

On Friday night, we were going to eat leftovers for dinner, but I had another last minute idea. I hardly ever have cravings for this, but on Friday night, I suggested to my husband that I take him to Wings-N-Things. Todd was super-excited because he loves Wings-N-Things and I hardly ever want to go there. So we get there, and they're even showing his Cleveland Cavaliers on their big screen TV. So we parked ourselves in front of the big TV, ate some buffalo chicken strips and salads, and enjoyed the fountain Coke Zero. Todd could not be happier!

We installed the Netflix CD on our Sony PS3, finally. So now we can stream movies from Netflix right to our PS3 and watch it. We used it Friday night to watch "Fletch". What a classic! I had forgotten the whole plotline so it was like watching a brand-new movie. Chevy Chase was so classic in that movie! "Dr. Rosen Rosen", LOL!

On Saturday we didn't run with our running club again, because it was a very hilly trail on the agenda. So we went to our favorite place to run nowadays, Miramar Lake, and started running around 9:45am. It was sunny but not too warm. I took it easy because I knew I was going to try to go for 7 miles. One 10 oz. bottle of Ultima, one 10 oz. bottle of regular water. Ate a packet of vanilla GU about 4 miles in (45 min). Last three miles were fairly easy. In fact last two miles were both under 11 min. I have a knack for running faster when it gets to the end, LOL. Maybe I just wanna finish it and go eat something good. :p

Location: Miramar Lake
Distance: 7.01 miles
Time: 1:17:46
Avg pace/mile: 11:05
Calories: 698

Needless to say, I was pretty hungry when I got done. We went home to shower, and then we were supposed to meet up at 1pm for lunch with our friends Dan and April and their kids, who are visiting from Dayton, Ohio. They used to be our neighbors two houses down! But they called around 11:15 and said they just got into San Diego and the kids were too tired, so they were going to rest first and meet us for dinner. We were fine with that. We ended up eating leftovers for lunch.

We left our house around 4:15pm because we wanted to pick up some cupcakes to bring along for everyone to enjoy. So we stopped by Haute Pink Cupcakes and picked these babies up.

There was oreo, chocolate, carrot, lemon, chocolate chip, and coconut cupcakes. Yum! We were so hungry we wanted to steal a bite, but we didn't want to arrive with less cupcakes than people. :p

We met up with Dan and April and the kids at their hotel downtown. Then we walked a few blocks to Fred's Mexican Cafe. We had gone there before at Taste of Downtown and had good samplings there. We ordered some margaritas, an appetizer, and all kinds of good Mexican food.










It was really fun to catch up with them. We haven't seen them since 2000! (Well, I saw April briefly in 2005 while traveling for work.) Lots of things have changed, but they're still their fun selves and we remembered why we were friends and neighbors. (We were coworkers and friends first, then they bought the house two houses down from us!) At one time in the mid-1990's, all four of us worked for the same company! After dinner we walked them back to their hotel and parted company, because they were still on East Coast time and they were tired, especially the kids.

On the way back to get our car, we walked by this scene...





A big public pillow fight at Horton Plaza! I risked life and limb to walk closer to take these photos. I got bonked on the head with a pillow even. Came home and googled it. Turned out that yesterday was International Pillow Fight Day. Who knew?

We were going to go to church today but decided last minute to stay home and watch our church on the internet hooked up to our TV. Todd's plan for today was to install our new whole house water softener. However, he needed some parts, so he went to Home Depot. Unfortunately Home Depot didn't have the right parts, and we need to get them from a plumbing store, which was not open today. I did taxes almost the whole day, which was super-fun, especially since we owe a bunch of money. Boo! While I was in the middle of doing taxes, I heard a rumbling, which is always a clue that an earthquake was going to happen in a few seconds.  It started mildly, but kept getting stronger and the shaking intensified.  Finally I decided to get under my desk because I had a feeling that this one was big, and long.  It stopped after about a minute.  I immediately looked it up at USGS and it was centered near Mexicali in Baja Mexico, about 120 miles from here.  They initially said it was 6.9 on the Richter scale, but later upgraded it to 7.2!  Nothing was broken or damaged at our house, thankfully.  And most importantly, we're all safe.  But I did make myself some nachos to cheer myself up.

At least the taxes are done. I'm not paying until April 15th though!

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Happiness In The Details

On Tuesday night we finally had dinner with Todd's running friend Yaiza and her boyfriend Karsten.  We met at Shimbashi in Del Mar.  I say "finally" because we have wanted to get together for a while, but it was difficult to find a time good for everyone.  We had never met Karsten before and were looking forward to it.



Yaiza and Karsten were very easy to talk to. It's a trait that I really like in people. I'm not the most outgoing person in the world, so when I find people that are easy to talk to, I really enjoy it. We found out the story of how Yaiza and Karsten met. We found out he's smart (post-doc researcher on neuro-sciences). And that he eats fish heads.


That would be the fried version of this little guy, after we ate the sashimi off him.


The food was awesome, but in true Japanese style, the portions were small. I don't think I remembered to take photos of every dish we ordered, but here are some of them.








These mushroom sushi were muy delicioso.

After dinner, we walked a few blocks down the street to Crepes and Corks Cafe. We had never been there, but Yaiza has gone there for lunch before. We're fans of crepes though. We sit down to order, and the owner came to talk to us. He's French! Oooo, a REAL crepe place! :p

We had nutella and pear dessert crepe and it was awesome. I really like nutella!


We had a lot of fun with Yaiza and Karsten. Hopefully we can get together again soon.

Now for the title of the post. Yaiza had mentioned something about my blog during dinner, how I go into the details. Todd told her why I go into so much detail when I blog. In short, because it brings me joy. The little details of life bring me happiness. Of course we all remember the big events of our lives. But it's the everyday details that we forget. I try to be specific and detailed in my account of our days, because when I go back and read my previous posts about my life, I'm reliving the happy moments in detail, and I'm really happy in that moment again. I can't tell you how many times someone mentioned something about some event we did together, and I went back to my blog and read my entry and I'm thinking, "Wow, I forgot all about that! That was so cool!" Even if nobody reads my blog besides me and Todd, I'm happy to still do it, because it's where I can relive my happy moments.

I've been re-reading the book "The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People", because I felt like I needed it. It feels like I'm reading a whole new book, because I'm bringing the last few years of my life experience to the table this time. What I like about this book is that there's research papers backing up each point. So you can go into the index and reference the study, and maybe even find it on the internet to read.

Anyway... #80 is REMINISCE. "Think of the happy times you, your family, and friends have had together. Recalling happiness of the past has the powerful ability to bring us happiness in the present." Wow! This is how I feel! This is why I spend the time to blog and scrapbook! I hope I don't lose sight of this as we go through the daily routines of life. You should be encouraged about this side benefit of your scrapbooking as well. :)

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