Whoops!

I've fallen woefully behind on updating this blog. Life has been rather busy since my last post, with travel for Thanksgiving and Christmas and lots of year-end projects and events at work.

Now, I can postpone no longer, so it seems time for a year-end wrap-up.

Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was marked by a redeye flight to Baltimore and immediate vows to never take such a flight again. Holy cow. Who knew how many parents would opt to take their screaming babies on a plane at 11:30 at night? Don't get me wrong, I feel for the babies ... and the parents might not have had many options, but that was the loudest flight I've ever been on. Long story short, after 15 grueling hours of travel we finally made it to my parents' house. Food, movies, Sean's birthday, more food, more movies. Thanksgiving day was marked by watching the Macy's parade after 4 hours of sleep, preparing my favorite foods with Mom (baked corn!), and Mike killing us all at the family tradition of stating what you're thankful for. He had the poor fortune to go first after never hearing of this tradition before (I forgot about it) and subsequently whipped out a tear-jerking speech.

On Friday, we saw the new Harry Potter movie, then went to the inappropriately-named "Christmas Tree Store", which only had 3 Christmas trees and was a bit like an over-sized Walgreens with a holiday-themed sign. Weird.

Saturday, we drove out to Philadelphia for Thanksgivingston. This is the second year that I've been able to attend the annual event, and the first time that Mike has gotten to join. It was pretty relaxing, full of games, wonderful home-cooked meal, ridiculous conversation, and generally was a great time. PS drove us back to the airport in the morning, where a TSA agent laughed at my luggage and we made it home without a hitch. We rather expected some hitches given the new security measures - we were completely prepared to opt out of the carcinogenic scanners at BWI, which they have but apparently don't use. We faced no long security lines and it seemed like a pretty normal travel day.

Christmas

Well, before we get right into Christmas, let me tell you about work. I had three alumni events in 5 days, the final of which ended at 10pm the night before our flight to Chicago. They all went rather well but I was exhausted from the extra hours and from fighting off a cold for the two weeks leading up to Christmas. We flew in to Chicago on Wednesday morning, hung out with Nate and Dana for an evening and went to Wauconda in the morning. Present wrapping, copious amounts of Rock Band 3 with the entire Armstrong family, dogs, food, Christmas lights, Christmas Eve church service and carols. Fresh "noodles" (the Armstrong traditional holiday dish), containers and containers of sugar cookies. Excellent presents and stocking stuffers. Naps. Hanging out with Mike's childhood friends, who are awesome. I think the only thing that wasn't great was that I got slammed with a head cold on Christmas night. I had planned to go ice skating with Mike but stayed home to sleep instead. The next day I attempted to swallow a Dayquil pill, not realizing how swollen my throat was. Turns out, Mike's pretty good with the Heimlich maneuver. We switched to liquid Dayquil and Nyquil after that.

When it came time to fly back home, we ended up standing in line outside Midway for an hour in line for curbside check-in. The line inside was phenomenally long thanks to the East Coast weather aftermath. Our plane into Denver was delayed an hour and we missed our connection to Portland. The next flight didn't leave for another 7 hours, so we ended up getting home at 11:30pm instead of 2:30pm.

New Year's

I was still sick by the time New Year's Eve rolled around, so we just stayed in, watched movies, made our traditional milkshakes and toasted with some sparkling apple juice at midnight. On Sunday we managed to get out of the apartment and go ice skating at the Lloyd Center.

All-in-all, a rather eventful series of holidays. Now it's back to the daily grind, peppered by such exciting events as a visit from Mom and Mike's graduate school applications. We're also looking to move into a bigger apartment sometime in February or March.

With any luck, I'll be posting more frequently ... call it a New Year resolution, if you will. But if you don't, I won't be as embarrassed if I fail.

Running

I've always hated running just for running's sake. I can trace this hatred back to the first form of

organized sports I ever played. I have vivid memories of practicing with my 8-year-old AYSO soccer team - we ran from the sideline of the field, down a long hill to a pile of grass (seriously, it was just a huge stack of dead grass next to a poorly-seeded soccer field) and back up again. I was always dead last and couldn't breathe for the rest of practice.

Fast forward all the way to early high school years, when I was training for my black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Part of the week-long blackbelt test included running 3 miles. I practiced for months to run the requisite number of laps around the parking lot. Most of the time, my stomach would make these weird noises after my training sessions, as if it wanted to collapse on itself. I believe I listened to a lot of Linkin Park and/or Blink-182 to get me through it.

Leap ahead again to 11th grade at Mercersburg. Tennis preseason, my first days as a student at the school, trying to make new friends. 3 laps around the soccer field in 90-degree weather. Let's just say that the entire team regretted my decision to have pasta with red sauce for lunch that day. Later that year, I tried lacrosse and broke my foot when we ran 7 miles over a mountain.

When I got to college and played Ultimate Frisbee, I mostly avoided the distance-running thing. Many of my teammates were doing it for conditioning, but I found the prospect of running laps utterly boring (not to mention possibly embarrassing, as I've been told both that I run like the Terminator and like a gazelle, neither of which were meant in a terribly positive light). Now, give me a disc to run after and I would chase it down with what some have referred to as "freakish" speed for someone of my height. I sort of love sprinting. But I could do that four or five times in a row before I started having flashbacks to that 11th grade tennis incident, because I wasn't conditioning myself for endurance. I considered it a few times but determined that the only way I could get motivated to run would be to have a very convincing recording of a buzzing chainsaw and someone growling "you can run, but you can't hide!" Teammates were on the lookout to snatch the headphones from my ears and tell me that everything was okay.

So with all of this bodily betrayal and public humiliation behind me, why am I suddenly jogging? To be honest, I'm not really sure. I spent my first year out of college doing next to nothing physically, and I suppose that scared me a little. Mike and I have determined to work together to stay (relatively) in shape, and jogging has always been the most obvious option for lack of gym membership. So I tried doing a mile a few weeks ago when Mike was out, just to see how much wind I'd be sucking when it was over. And it wasn't so bad... aside from the two guys who whistled at me as I was on the home stretch. Now Mike and I have jogged together two weeks in a row and are slowly increasing our distance. The prospect of seeing more interesting parts of the city on our jogs is a great incentive to build up endurance. So far we've done 1.2 miles max, hoping to hit 2.5 by the end of December.

And we're avoiding the pasta with red sauce on running days.

Mommy and Daddy!

I'm not a two-year-old. Since the age of about 12 I have called my parents "Mom and Dad." But seeing my parents for the first time in four months was reminiscent of the anxiety separation I experienced as a toddler: intensely anticipating the arrival of Mommy and Daddy.

My parents visited us Sunday through Thursday of this week. I had no idea how much I had missed them until about a week before their arrival, when my phone calls with Mom started to end with "see you soon." The days leading up to Sunday were filled with anxious hours of cleaning the apartment (even dusting the blades on the ceiling fan), scoping out restaurants and tourist sites to visit, plotting our route to the airport, sending Mom last-minute emails about what clothes she should pack and how she must remember not to pump her own gas or use the cell phone while driving in Oregon. Everything we could think of to make their visit an enjoyable one and, most importantly, to leave them with a positive impression of Portland.

But the second we saw them passing the security checkpoint in PDX, my nerves started to dissipate and everything felt natural again with them. Mom and I were giggling, Dad almost fell over at the end of the moving walkway ... everything was normal. We spent the week together sightseeing around town, trying new restaurants and old favorites like VooDoo Donut. While I was at work and Mike was studying for a midterm, they did some exploring of their own and have now seen more of Oregon than Mike and I have!

At Portland Meadows, the local racetrack, we caught a fabulous glimpse of Mount Hood. Although it didn't come out in any of my pictures, it would have been just to the right of the sign in the one below. Nevertheless, it's a cute picture.

Of course, the week ended much too soon. But we get to see them again in about three weeks for Thanksgiving! I can't believe the holidays are almost here, but I say that every year.

'til next time!

Say what now?

Thursday evening, I returned from what felt like a week-long absence from home. After surviving Reunion Weekend, I had immediately flown to Chicago for 5 days to attend the aforementioned conference and spend time with my wonderful in-laws.

Returning home to my husband after a long and tiring absence was an amazing feeling: reminiscent of our airport reunions in college, when we would see each other once every 60 days... yet also an infinitely happier feeling.

Returning to Portland was a decidedly different feeling. Relieved to be back to the comforts of home, to be back to a city that I'm far more familiar with than Chicago. Mike and I rode the train out to Clackamas yesterday for an interview and to see Clackamas for the first time. It's wonderfully easy to get there, and it's a nice feeling to master the public transit system and travel with confidence. But just when you think you know how everything works out, a guy reeking of acetone (or some other alcohol-smelling chemical not meant to be imbibed) steps on the train and tells you that you look like Sonny and Cher, King and Queen, and Elvis all in one breath.

Yup. Sonny and Cher.

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