"Dying" Adventure

How I spent my Saturday: 13 colors, 232 shirts. And a 1/2 marathon

My sister came over to my neck of the woods last weekend. She doesn't get over here very often, but when I left her a very sad, begging message a few weeks back, she agreed to take a little road trip.

What was it that motivated her and a friend to drive 6 hours? Well, the promise of a weekend full of tie dying of course. My sister is a tie dying guru and I had never tie dyed anything--until this weekend. So when I decided that for 8th Grade Celebration Day, I was going to tie dye 232 white t-shirts, I knew my sister was the woman to call.

So Friday I took the day off of work to begin twisting and rubberbanding the t-shirts. My sister, nephew, and sister's friend arrived Friday late afternoon and we continued working until 11 o'clock Friday night.

(The boxes of t-shirts waiting to be twisted)

I woke up 4:30 Saturday morning to get ready for my 1/2 marathon--I will not be telling you any more about this run except that it sucked! And I went to the urgent care today (Monday) to get 2 liters of fluids because I was still dehydrated. Anyway, after the 1/2, we moved all of the t-shirts and dying stuff out to my parents house and set to work.

Did you know that tie-dying is a very involved process? Soaking in a "fixer", then rinsing, then squirting on dye, then more rinsing after the dye has set for at least 4 hours, then washing and drying? Holy cow! I finally had to stop at 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning because I couldn't take it anymore. By that time we had completed the whole process for about half of the shirts.

(Did you notice my sister and I were both wearing tie dye t-shirts? Funny. Please excuse this picture of me. It was taken at 12:30 a.m.)

My sister and her friend finished up the shirts while I was at church on Sunday. I was so glad she came.

What Running is NOT

Hard running/training does not...

• provide relief from menstrual cramps
• diminish, decrease or eliminate menstrual cycle

Sometimes I really hate that my body is the exception to most rules. This morning was a 8 mile tempo run. Took a baby aspirin before I went out. About mile 5 really started to feel like crap. Got the miles and tempo pace just right, but almost couldn't drive home because of the pain. Got home, tried a hot shower, heating pad, hydrocodone, throwing up...NOTHING worked to make me feel better. Honestly thought I was going to pass out from the pain. Almost worse than labor. After about 3 hours finally was able to fall asleep. Woke up and felt a little better except now I am totally dehydrated so will spend the rest of the day drinking fluids.

200K and Counting

Summers meant road trips when I was growing up. It was most often my mom driving 5 kids from Tucson to Grand Junction, CO to visit my paternal grandparents. Or mom driving 5 kids from Tucson to Anaheim, CA to visit my maternal grandparents. The first trips I can remember were taken in a Ford Grenada. And then we had a Chevy Citation hatchback. The Chevy might have had air-conditioning, but the Ford definitely did not. To help pass the time, mom employed a variety of tricks. When we were really little, she'd start real early in the morning. She'd move us all to the car and then we would promptly fall right back to sleep. When we woke, she always had books on tape for us. As we grew, and could read on our own, we had books from the library to read. She also taught us how to read road signs. As our math skills developed, she would have us figure out just how long it was until we got to our destination. We would also figure out how much distance had passed between road signs, how far to the next town, etc. Mom also made sure to stop a rest stops. And that we read any informational signs at the rest stop. Another thing mom always did was notify us of when the odometer was getting to roll-over. She made sure we noticed at the 100's, 1000's, and 10,000's. That was my favorite part of the trip--watching the zero's roll-over. So for the past few weeks, I have been giving the kids the count-down to the Honda rolling over to 200,000. Carson especially seemed to like the count-down. I was trying to make sure that we were all together when it hit 200K. But, I missed. The Honda rolled to 200K as I was on my way to the gym on Friday morning and I was all by myself. I was disappointed that I didn't have anyone to share that with and Carson was bummed that he missed hit. I did take a picture of the odometer on my cell phone, but Katelyn is now the proud owner of that phone and she promptly deleted the picture not recognizing the significance of it. Oh well.