Michael & Liz are Bloggable

To everyone anxiously awaiting an update from Las Vegas-

Everything is expensive in Vegas...including internet! Michael decided not to spend the $9.95 a day at the hotel to give you his updates, so you'll just have to wait until Wednesday night.

As for me, I have to get back to work!

So most everyone knows we are going to Las Vegas this weekend. For anyone who didn't know, Liz's company has a conference there and she has to work from Sunday through Thursday. So I am tagging along and going to be an ultra-tourist while we are there. We are flying out on Saturday and I will be back Wednesday night and Liz will be back Thursday night.

The last time I went to Las Vegas I was probably 12 years old. I have been there twice but Las Vegas to a 12 year old is not the same as Las Vegas to a 27 year old. A hotel is just a hotel to a 12 year old... but I think I will appreciate the beauty a lot more at my age.

Every time I have said to someone that I am going to Las Vegas they give me a nudge and say "NICE! You gonna gamble??! Liz has to work??!? Then what are you going to do?!?" Well that gave me a brilliant idea. Throw the "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" mantra out the window and I have declared this trip to be named "What happens in Vegas, goes on the Blog". There are some other mantra's I thought of using for naming this trip. Here are some examples:

Vegas on a Budget
Vegas without the Gambling
Vegas the Non-Creepy Guy Way
Vegas as Cheap as Possible
Fun Minus Craziness Minus Gambling = Our Vegas Trip

I used the word cheap and on a budget there. Since Liz is going for work, her company is paying for her flight, hotel and most travel expenses as well as food. So basically she is taking a free trip for work and I am going to be bumming off of her. Back in July I volunteered to fly to NY with the Belarussian kids to help them get on their flight to Kiev. My flight got cancelled and I ended up with a free flight. Not so free when you have to pay $150 to change the plans, but I am using that for the trip to Vegas. That means so far this trip has cost us a whopping total of $150. I am going to try and continuet that theme while we are there. I hear it's tough to do.

I may gamble at penny slot machines or dime blackjack or something cheap, but I am not about to gamble $50 away and laugh like it was fun and enjoyable. That's just not me.

So every day I am going to be blogging about what I did that day, with pictures and everything. Hopefully it should be awesome. I hope to have a TON of stories but at the very least I should be able to see some really cool hotels. I am mostly excited about seeing the classics like The Mirage, Treasure Island, Circus Circus, and Excalibur. I also can't wait to tour the hotels that have been built since I went there. That includes The Luxor, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, and I'm sure many many others.

So look for daily blog posts. We are super excited about the trip!!

I finished the deck this weekend... and the reason I say kinda is because I still have a few things left to do but I don't feel like waiting for those things to post this message. I still have to to put caps on the top of the posts, then power wash and stain the deck, and also install some reinforcing wood underneath the deck between the joists. But all those things won't happen for a little while because it's getting cold and it'll have to be put into the budget. Also a task for next summer is to install lattice below the deck and plant bushes around it. This will upset the dogs because they love running under the deck... but they can deal.

Here is a picture of what the deck looked like before (you're supposed to say "eewww ugly ewwww"). The paint was chipping, the railing was rotting, and you can't see it from this far away but the balusters weren't spaced evenly or leveled. And yes those are concrete stones in the yard, I have no idea what the previous owner was thinking. Needless to say the concrete is gone.



So here is a time line of the deck after the point where I flipped the floor boards (or replaced some floor boards) and started installing the railings:

Then the connectors or whatever they are called. I have not touched the stairs yet because that is the hardest part and I didn't feel like dealing with it yet:

I look like a bum, but at least I'm a tired bum:

Here's a zoom in of the sweetness:

Balusters in:

If you guessed the tennis racket you were right. There are two wasps nests around our house that I have been battling with. One day while working on the deck, and this is no exaggeration, I sent 11 wasps tumbling to their death in the yard... in fact I was 12 for 12 on swings (one wasp got the racket twice). I'm glad I was perfect on swings because otherwise I'm sure it would have been a lot more difficult of a match each time. Liz wasn't really enjoying hearing about the body count either... "HUN, THAT'S 7 WASPS TODAY! Can you believe that?!?!"... "yeah... great."

Not much of a transition here... here the posts and connectors are installed already, there is still one more post to go though in the middle of the stairs:


"dawdy, we cawn't sees any mawrs."


And... done... the difference between the last deck picture and this one is the middle post on the stairs, the balusters on the stairs, and the hand railing all the way around the deck. Check out the master piece:


Ta da!

Overall I am very pleased with the work and at the beginning I was very nervous about the stability of the railing but it turns out it's really solid. The only thing easy about it is once I figured out how to do something... it was monotonous to do it 87 times... like balusters. The hardest part? There's a slew of hardness about this project:

• Fitting the hand railings and connectors into and around the posts was difficult. They were very tricky cuts to make.
  
• The stairs was difficult because of all the angle cuts involved. I have no miter saw so you can imagine the difficulty in that.
  
• Measurements never work out... No matter how many times you measure, you're inevitably off by a small space here or there you'll notice it forever.
  

I am super excited to have our deck back and not have wood sitting on it. Hopefully we can enjoy the deck for years to come and it holds up to the test of time.

I started writing a political post tonight but decided to hold it back because I promised not to post political anymore. Instead I wanted to update everyone on the puppies.

Gryffin's pappiloma virus is just about gone. When I posted last, he basically had 3 large pappilomas on the right side of his mouth. They have all but disappeared. In the span of about a week, they started bleeding, they shredded apart, and started deflating in size. Now they are down to little tiny sores that continue to look better and better every day. He is still sensitive about us touching his mouth but I think that's more of a reaction from the past than anything else. It's tough to take a picture of them but we did our best tonight. Here is the best shot:

You can see the one near the front of his mouth and then two small bumps near the back. Soooo close to being gone. The other symptom of watering eyes has also disappeared. He gets a lot less poogies (snot in his eyes) these days. We are so thrilled about it. This means they will let him stay in the kennel over New Years when we go to Atlanta.

Doggy Freedom: Our old routine was when we came downstairs in the morning, Liz and I would each take a crate downstairs and they would stay in crates while we were at work. Then at night when going to bed, we'd carry both crates upstairs so they could sleep in our room in their crates. One day we just decided to start leaving them out of their crates to see how they do. We know they got along with each other but we don't know what havoc it might wreak on our couch or furniture. They have been awesome to say the least. They don't tear things up, and most of the time when I come home, I can go to the couch and feel around, and I will be able to tell where each of them was sleeping. That's all they do during the day is sleep so we like to let them be more comfortable by staying on the couch rather than crates.

We made a mistake last Saturday when we left a foam ball under the coffee table. This is the gloriousness Liz came home to:

Lesson learned on that one.

Last thing, we went to PetSmart the other day to get some dog food and we got Daisy and Gryffin a treat that we thought would be more funny than anything, but they are doing their best to tackle it... here's a picture:

Whenever they finish the bone I'll let you all know.

On our drive home the Monday after the marathon, we were driving down I-85 when all of a sudden a rock flies up from a truck on the highway and hits our windshield. I love how when I tell this story, EVERYONE's response is "Well you shouldn't have been tailgating." At which point I declare "I wasn't tailgating, it was dumb luck."

I believe it was a 3 or 4 lane highway at the time and we were going through Richmond. I was in the second lane over from the left and a truck was passing me in the far left lane. Stupid trucks. It gets about 30 or 40 yards ahead of me, a considerable distance. There were cars in front of me and cars behind it, so it's not like I was the only car on the road. All of a sudden from his lane, a rock comes flying across ours, and hits our windshield. I want to say it was about the size of a golf ball. You ever see something and take a picture of it in your head. Yeah, the picture in my head is golf ball size. It barely clips our windshield, hits the side metal that is holding the windshield in place and of course flies off.

The windshield dent is about a quarter in size and there were 4 cracks going off on either side. Liz was sleeping at the time so it was certailny a sudden awakening. We pulled off to check the damage and it looked manageable to me... manageable meaning I am not stopping in Richmond for this. As we go along we start seeing two cracks get bigger. Liz measures them and basically watches them grow about an inch per 20 miles. By the time we get home their almost a foot long.

Needless to say we got the windshield replaced for a pretty $400 penny. Insurance covers the damage but our deductible isn't low enough so... oh well. Here are some pictures of the damage:

I am putting this post on our main blog because I feel like this isn't just normal running talk. This information is stuff people would actually want to hear about because I finished the goal I was training for.

Before I start writing, you can check out all the pictures on the picture album linked above.

Last weekend we went to Washington D.C. for the Marine Corp Marathon. We had an awesome day in downtown D.C on Friday. We tried to do as much touristy stuff as possible because we realized there probably wasn't much time anywhere else in the weekend. We didn't realize how spread out everything was. They talk about how all the monuments are together and you can walk from one to the other but boy does it wear you out, especially when your goal is to remain somewhat lazy before running a marathon. We had to have walked a good 4 or 5 miles that day which doesn't sound like a lot but it was.

That night we headed to the Brody's house (Mike and Ashley) to stay with them for the weekend. In July they just had their first child, a baby girl named Sophia. For anyone who doesn't know, Mike and I were roommates for a semester in college and they were both in Liz and my fraternity when we pledged. We have remained good friends ever since. We spent all day there on Saturday catching up on their lives and spending time with their sweet girl. She is so curious and wide-eyed all the time. She doesn't cry much but only when the time is right (hunger or exhaustion). I think staying with them put a couple very separate emotions in both Liz and I:

1. It will be amazing to have children. Having known both Mike and Ashley for 6 years now as a couple without children, it's awesome to see this little girl that they have created. I can't really grasp the feeling we'll have when we have our own child but we both agree it's something to look forward to. It also got us thinking about what we'd name our children (granted it's a while away) so that was fun too.
2. Thank goodness for the sleeplessness training Daisy and Gryffin have put us through. A dog having diarrhea for 3 or 4 days straight probably doesn't compare at all but we feel like we got a good mini-crash course in having to wake up a few hours every night during that time. I don't know how they go about their lives with almost no full night sleeps but I have a ton of respect for them. Hopefully we can be just as patient and loving.

On Sunday morning we woke up at 5AM and took the metro into D.C for the race. We were a little stupid on the planning part and arrived at 6:15 for an 8 AM race. It was 45 degrees and we were just standing in the dark and cold in one of the corral areas.

I ran the race with Brandon Embery a friend from college who is also in our fraternity. It was really nice to run with him because we were both on the same page when it came to pace and speed. A steady 4 hour marathon pace was what we started out as and we kept with that up to about the 20 mile mark.

I always do this in marathons and I don't know why. I'll start out fantastic... I'll get to about mile 15 and still feel fantastic... but very quickly after that I will decline and by around mile 20 or 22 my muscles will start spasming and completely give out. This time around that spasming didn't occur until mile 24 so I guess there is something to be said for that. I was on a great pace to beat my best time (4:20). At mile 21, my time was 3:20 so all I had to do was run 5 miles in one hour, which for me is beyond easy compared to what I normally do. So with the spasming muscles my pace slowed to 15 minutes per mile and I finished the race in 4 hours and 32 minutes. That's directly between my two other marathons. Incidently Brandon left me around mile 20 and finished the race in 4:19, he is a beast.

I am pleased with my results but am not satisfied enough. I have decided I am going to run the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati in May. I am far too determined to beat the 4 hour mark and I truly believe I can do it. Between now and then to prepare, I am going to keep up a running regimen but not quite as intense as a training program. I am also going to lift weights in my legs and arms and get as strong as possible and I am hoping to lose about 15 pounds by then. If I don't lose weight, a sub 4 hour marathon is not possible. I can do it. I know I can.

Sunday we spent most of the rest of the day watching football of course and then we made the drive back on Monday. You'll read about the drive home in the next post.