Sorry.....

I didn't realize it has been two months since I put up a blog post.  Fail.

I'll use the 'we have been busy' excuse but that is always the case and a poor excuse.

Evidence of the hummingbird feeder thief

Sidney and I did another Spartan race since the last post.  We did the race in Austin.  Sidney did the kids one mile and I did the Sprint which was just over 9 miles this year.  The weather was nice in the fact that it was overcast and cool.  However there was lightning off and on.  They stopped the race several times and occasionally would not let us do obstacles because of the lightning.  What you could and couldn't do varied with each group and location on the course.  For example, we couldn't do a couple of bridges or the barbed wire crawl (oh darn).  Later in the day, after I was done, there was a big storm and apparently the barbed wire turned into a mud pit.  For many reasons, I was glad I was early in the day, starting at 9:45.  Because of all of the delays due to weather, the lines to get into the event were really long when we left.  At least we were on the course before the delays started.

        The last blog post had the story of the hummingbird feeder. We think it is a raccoon. It tracked dirty water everywhere. 🐾

All that is left after Sidney eats an apple

There is evidence of cows on nearly every race.  There were actually cows on this race.  The course overall was really nice this year.  Plenty of sections that could be run and a few technical sections.  The bucket and sandbag carry weren't too bad.  The new obstacles were the bender and the twister.  The bender was a reverse incline set of bars.  There were five or six horizontal bars that were mounted on supports such that the whole thing curved back toward you, like the inside of a small letter "f".  Getting over it wasn't hard as long as you could pull yourself up as there wasn't anything to climb on down low.  I learned how not to get off on the other side.... I was trying not to land such that I fell off the hay bales in the landing zone or knocked my teeth out.  Instead I hit my chest hard, almost knocking my wind out.  I will try something else next time.  The twister was almost like monkey bars but they were spokes coming out from a center support that turned as you went across.  Think Ninja Warrior type obstacle.  I made the first two before falling off.

Curtains first try

Curtains second try

Over all I was pleased with my race.  I had fun and worked hard.  I placed 6th of 198 in my age group, 76 of 1600 females and 556 overall of nearly 5000 athletes.  I think the late bad weather helped me place higher because my time wasn't spectacular.  Likely this is the best I will ever place but I did work hard for it.

The Sunday after the Spartan race, Sidney had a piano recital.  It is always good for her to have these opportunities and it's fun to listen.  It was pretty long because there were so many kids.  I think they will break it into two groups in the future.  The piano kids get to play on $18,000 Steinway pianos.

Sidney also got her braces back on right before school finished.  She has about 2 years in this set.  She has them top and bottom this time and on all of her permanent teeth.  And I'm broke.

We have had tons of lizards and frogs around.  I know not everyone likes them but we do.

I made some curtains for outside.  The sun shines in the afternoon and evening on the west side of the patio and it gets quite hot.  I put a roller shade up a couple of years ago but it wasn't holding up well and was challenging to roll down because I am just too short. So I ordered some out door fabric and made some curtains.  I am pleased with them and they are helping.  It was a lot of sewing.  Unfortunately they blew down while we were in DC and I needed to modify them.  I shortened them to where they just touch the rail and that seems to be working better.

School ended, finally.  A long year.  Sidney has lots of summer plans including DC which I will write about on the next post.  She also has Blueprint and several day camps.  We will end the summer with a visit to my parents and she will go up to Idaho to visit Kirk.