Team in Training Triathete

As some of you may know, it's been a longtime goal of mine to participate in a triathlon. I've done a half-marathon (Minneapolis Aquatennial, 2001), marathon (Grandma's Marathon, 2005), and I felt like a triathlon would be a fun next step.

I've also always been interested in getting involved with the Leukemia and Lyphoma Society's Team in Training The Team in Training is a nationwide training/fundraising organization. This year, they are celebrating their 20th anniversary. In 20 years, Team in Training has raised 800 million dollars for cancer research!! This is a cause that is near and dear to my heart, as my older sister passed away from lymphoma in 1992.

This past Wednesday I gathered my courage and attended an informational meeting for the Team in Training. It was so inspiring! Tons of enthusiastic, friendly people who were really passionate about the Team. I figured there's no time like the present, so I signed up. I joined the team! I will be training for the Lifetime Fitness Triathlon, taking place at Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis on July 12.

The Team kick-off is on Saturday and training starts next week. I'm super excited to see how this experience unfolds. I'm sure you will hear a lot more about this from me in the weeks and months to come.

Ode to the Dog Bed

As many of you know, an important member of our family is our chocolate lab, Luther. We lovingly refer to him as our "hairy beast child," because in many ways he is our "baby." Luther is 80 pounds of love, energy, silliness, and loyalty. We can't imagine our family without him.

Anyways, after we moved into the house, we found that having a kennel set up was unnecessary. Luther has free reign of the house when we are gone during the day, and he lays by our bed at night. So we never bothered to set one up.

Soon, however, it was clear that Luther needed a soft place of "his own." We started catching him on the furniture, and he was really restless at night trying to get settled. So, with the help of cousins T.J. and Sarah (thanks, guys!), we ordered a bed from L.L. Bean. I'll let the pictures tell you the rest of the story...

As you can see, Luther loves it! Although he still is a semi-frequent floor rester, he does most of his lounging on his new, nicely monogrammed bed.

He still has a slight addiction to laying on the furniture when we are not home, but we are working on that problem (perhaps that deserves a post of its own).

All in all, Luther is completely content in his new house, loving the yard, the front window, and now his new bed! Our home would be incomplete without him.

the first post

So it has finally begun.

Our 'new' home is slowly, but surely, becoming truly ours! About a month ago we decided it was time to attack what we lovingly labeled the gift-graveyard, aka the place where we store all our unused wedding & shower gifts as well as all the other junk we've managed to accumulate over the years. We've been together in our home for a shade under four months now and I had no inkling that we could gather so much stuff in that amount of time. Grandpa Vic would've been proud to see us saving all the miscellaneous scraps of paper from 6th grade, broken CD's, and random notes from college classes.

What you see in the first picture is one of our many donation piles. Needless to say, over the past few weeks, we've gotten to know the folks at Goodwill quite well. In all we've gotten rid of over 400 individual things. Impressive! Special thanks to the challenge put up by Becky's co-worker Dawn. In her blog (which can be found here http://www.dawnline.blogspot.com/), Dawn encourages people to use January as the "Month of 100 Things." That is, January is a time to rid your house and lives of all the extra "junk." We have embraced it, carefully tracking each of the items we get rid of, and have been very pleased with the results. Thanks Dawn!

The second picture is pretty obvious. Over the long weekend we began painting the ceiling and walls of our front entry, living room, and hallway. The plan is to attack one area at a time and it's going well so far. We SHOULD have the living room and entry completely done by the end of the night.

Aside from the painting, clearing out our excess 'stuff' has allowed us to transform our basement into a comfortable and fun area to hang out. We've added a couple of space heaters, put down an area rug, installed four movie theater seats (originally from the Riverview in Mlps.), and purchased a combo foosball & air-hockey table. It's come a long way and we plan to take full advantage for our upcoming Super Bowl party.

Well, that's about it for now - sparing the reader all the dirty details. By the way, this is our first blog entry and we will (hopefully) add lots more in the future.

P.S. This post was actually posted by Jeromy, not Becky as indicated. We are still working out some technical difficulties.