peas and carrots

So I know it has been too long since I last blogged, so here I am. I have been busy the last two and a half weeks, doing pretty much nothing. The week after finals, I went to Homer to see my family there and to hang out with Steve while he worked there. It was pretty fun and relaxing. The weather was clear blue sky and bright warm sun and I even acquired some freckles while sleeping on the porch during the sunniest part of the day. Then we headed back home for a week of graduation festivities for Beka, my little sister. We got to spend a lot of time with my Grandpa, who was here visiting from Michigan for Beka's graduation. Steve and I also bought a newer car, a Jeep Cherokee, which we are pretty excited about.

Sunday was the Gold Nugget Triathalon, and it turned out to be very hard but overall a great experience. The race included a 500 meter swim, a 13 mile bike and a 3.1 mile run, in that order. The bike was definitely the easiest part for me, I really enjoyed that portion of the race. I got to use my new road bike, which made it even more fun. It was exciting to see how hard I could push myself. I had planned on training for the swimming and running portions of the event, but that just never happened. So I went into it having not been in a swimming pool for over a year and not having run more than 100 yards for over 6 months. I was still pretty happy with the results. The woman who won the event, Shannon Donely, finished with an overall time of 1:05:19 - One hour, five minutes, and nineteen seconds. My overall time was 1:44:56 and I placed 569 out of 1500. So that's pretty good in my book for not training AT ALL. In fact I have been really encouraged to train hard for next year to see how well I really can do. Here are the split times of the Donley first, then me:

Swim Bike Run

06:35 35:55 20:29

13:39 50:33 34:29

That leaves me with plenty of room for improvement, especially in the transition times, which I haven't shown above, but are added into our overall times.

This week I have been recovering from the triathlon and getting serious about my small produce garden. I planted my flowers on Monday, and built a little raised bed for my strawberry plants, peppers, peas, and carrots. I planted the strawberry plants, and transplanted my little pea and carrot seedlings from inside as well, but it will be a while before the peppers go out there, if ever. I'm hoping these strawberry plants do okay; my last bunch grew like crazy and were overall very productive - until the lawn maintenance people thought they were weeds and WEEDWACKED THEM. They were COMPLETELY OBLITERATED. As you can probably tell, this was not a pleasant experience, and I'm still recovering. I'll update pics as the "garden" (if you can call it that) grows. Now off for a nice bike ride with my boo to Kincaid.