Weekend wrap

Ali  didn’t have to work on Friday.  She was able to get a good amount of stuff around the house done which lightened what remained for the weekend.  I appreciated her efforts.

One of the reasons it was helpful was we had to time another race Saturday morning.  This is probably my least favorite race to time because it is literally held on the beach.  Sand, wet, salty air and electronics are not a good combination. It makes for a lot of post race hassle with additional clean up.

We had an issue right off the bat.  The electrical outlet that we had used for the race for the past 3 or 4 years no longer worked.  We had to run a couple hundred feet of extension cord from the another pavilion in order to power the site.

Despite the sandy conditions, timing the race went smoothly.  I saw something new at the finish line, a young girl doing a handspring across it.  I’m not quite sure what was her inspiration.

Like I mentioned, when we got home there was extra sand removal work to do.  While I was outside vacuuming sand off the timing mats, Ali was inside washing sandy timing chips. It was tons of fun.

After the majority of the post race stuff was done Ali retired to take a nap while I kept knocking stuff out around the house.  Again, my plan was to keep Sunday pretty much labor free.

I have still been having issues with the neighbor’s chihuahua’s incessantly barking.  She said that she has been disciplining them when they are inside (which seems to be rarely) with a water bottle when they bark.  I told her that it hasn’t seemed to affect their barking while outside.  Saturday afternoon while they were away I thought I would try to make peace with the dogs so perhaps they didn’t feel the need to pollute the air with their ear piercing barks whenever someone is outside.

I went into their dog run area and was able to pick up the noisier of the two dogs.  I petted her and tried to convey that there was no reason to carry on as she does.  Both of the dogs were scared of my hand.  The other chihuahua retreated to the garage.  I interacted with the dog for a good 10 minutes.  On Sunday, it was right back to barking non-stop.  Oh well, I tried.  Something will need to change in the future, this can’t be the long term situation.

Saturday night we went out to dinner with Christy and Michelle for Michelle’s birthday.  We went to California Pizza Kitchen, a chain I never had been to before.  It was quite nice.  The menu was diverse and had a number of items that were Ali-friendly.  Before the meal we went to the Gap so Ali could spend a $50 gift card I got her for Valentine’s Day.  She made out like a bandit due to a 2-1 sale they had going on. For $20 out of pocket she wound up with 7 articles of clothing.

After that Ali made the mistake of taking me into lululemon, the latest place Ali has become obsessed with.  Ali has a pattern of over-consuming when she gets interested in a hobby.  If I pulled out all of her workout/running attire and took a picture of it you would be flabbergasted.   We already have sizable investments in Nike, Under Armour and Reebok gear, enough to clothe a couple classrooms.  Well now it’s on to lululemon.

Well if you know anything about lululemon, you know it is nice stuff but it is obscenely expensive.  I hadn’t known just how expensive until I walked into the store.  It seems like the starting price for anything is $50 and goes up from there.  I saw a pair of average running shorts for $75.  When I started doing some crude math in my head based on the double digit + amount of lululemon clothing Ali has I was taken back by the potential total.  I am going to slip a GPS tracker in Ali’s purse that sends me an alarm whenever she is in the vicinity of that store.

We rounded of our dinner with a stop at Hagen Daz for a small ice cream treat.  It was a nice way to cap the night.  Since I went napless I was running on fumes by the time we left around eight.

Sunday morning I met up with Ali at the water park after she ran 3 miles with the girls.  We did a bike/swim brick.  It was the first time Ali had been on her bike in ages.  We did a 12 + mile ride and averaged somewhere between 16 and 17 mph, which was a good start for her.

In the pool I upped my distance to 1200 meters and felt pretty good while doing so.  I can feel my swimming endurance is starting to come back.  After our swim we ate lunch (early to avoid the mobs) and then we hung out for a bit.  I mostly played Battleheart on Ali’s Ipad but it was pretty tough to do outdoors.  The Ipad is not a great device to use outdoors due to poor visibility.

When we got home we didn’t waste much time until we piled the dogs into the van and headed back out.  I told Ali it had been awhile since they got to go on a ride.  We stopped at Pinch-a-Penny and Home Depot.   At Home Depot I wanted to scout out possible materials for the parallel bars I want to build.  I was unsure if I wanted to build the bars out of cheaper schedule 40 pvc or iron pipe.

I grabbed a section of 2 inch sched 40 pvc pipe and applied some weight to it.  It quickly became apparent it would be a poor choice for supporting body weight due to the amount of flex in a longer section.  I went over to the iron pipe and grabbed the various diameter pipe to imagine what would feel most comfortable doing dips and other exercises on.  It is down to either the 1.5″ or 2″ diameter pipe.  The plan is to set four 4×4’s in concrete a little more than 5 feet high and 25 inches apart, drill holes through them for the pipe and secure the pipe with bolts.   Shouldn’t be too tough.  When it is done hopefully it will look something like this TT.    I am hoping to get the materials this week and get it in the ground this weekend.  The pipe will be the biggest expense of all.  I am hoping to get it built for less that $200.

While I was at Home Depot I had to take a peek at the garden plants.  I grabbed some Swiss Chard that supposedly has multicolor stalks, some red lettuce and another blueberry plant.

When we got home we relaxed most of our remaining time in the weekend.  Well I relaxed more than Ali did.  She made a nice pasta dinner that included a number of items from our garden.  It was good stuff.