January has been a great month. We started our goal of hiking 100 miles in 2012. We’ve been hiking three weekends in a row and twice since we received our new GPS. Last weekend, we learned that a little more research is required to find a geocache beyond just the coordinates. We tried again this weekend and found our first cache in 9 years. It was fun. Iris loves it. Even though we’ve been rained on the last two weekends, Iris loves running around the woods. We’ve been hiking on obscure trails in Forest Park and, since we’ve been alone much of the hikes, we’ve let Iris hike off-leash with us. She is a good hiker and pretty good at responding to us, and she really loves the freedom to run around.
Speaking of running, I’ve started a new training schedule for the Eugene Marathon in April. With Mike’s prompting, I bought a program that is designated for a sub-4 hour marathon. I’m about to start my third official week on the program but my fourth week of training and so far I’ve been following it fairly consistently. For the last two weekends, Iris and I ran 9 miles on Sunday. Last weekend, it snowed big, fat snowflakes on us. This weekend, we got really drenched by the heavy rain. Iris seemed excited to go with me on both runs and proud of herself when we returned. Of course, she looks forward to the down time in the afternoon.
And we’ve had some great down time. After seeing a preview that Star Wars is returning to the big screens, I decided I wanted to have a Star Wars marathon and watch all six movies. For the last few weekends, Iris and I have been celebrating our successful runs with a movie. We just watched Episode IV today and it was great! Watching them on Blueray makes a lot of difference. Mike has been sitting with us during some of the movies but Star Wars isn’t his thing.
Mike got his first professional 3D job in December and now a client too. He is excited about it. He also worked really hard and put together a Go-Bag for us in case of emergency. He is not completely finished yet; there is a small list of additional things we need. It’s great to have that contingency ready, just in case.
There is also a new name common in the Smith household – Breville. The juicer is fantastic and still working hard. In fact, Mike just made an excellent veggie drink for our afternoon snack. He bought me a toaster oven for Christmas. We are using it much more than our large oven now and love it. It heats up far faster. Last week, or so, we had a couple problems with the coffee maker. Mike had his eye on the Breville coffee pot. I tried to buy him one but the store was sold out and had a two week back order, so we order one online. We get it tomorrow and both of us, but especially Mike, are stoked for it to come.
Climbing has been good for Mike. He’s going to the gym three times a week and getting strong. He’s back to being one of the gym’s better climbers and brings home stories about on-siting hard routes. He’s loving it.
And finally, the little bit of bad news. We are very aware of the ginormous tax bill coming up for us in April. We are proud that we paid all of our quarterly taxes -the first year ever- but last year was a good year for us, a very good year, and we expect April will be tough. We are working on saving up for that bill…and then for a trailer.
