Knittinggarden

This year Hanukkah came at the very first part of December, right after Thanksgiving.  No kids were home, I was in Vegas for part of the time, and we just couldn't arrange to get together for our family celebration.  DH and I lit candles the nights we were home, and I put up some decorations, but in my position as Queen of Everything, I rescheduled Hanukkah. The Princess and her devoted follower came home for a week, the filmmaker came home for a few days in advance of coming home permanently (!), and our gainfully employed son lives in town.  We rounded up a few more family members and enjoyed our traditional family Hanukkah on Christmas Eve. Despite the unfortunate burning of many of the latkes and the unusual runny-ness of the spinach casserole, we had an enjoyable and hilarious time.  Our group may be relatively small, but we're still noisy!  The hilarity and possibly the latke burning was probably due to the martinis and/or eggnog.  But whatever......

Registering for the Las Vegas Rock and Roll Marathon:   $145 Plane ticket to Las Vegas:   $250 Co-payments at doctor's offices and physical therapy for knee pain due to deciding to be a runner at age 57:   $250 Cool running gear: pants, shirts, jacket, hats, water bottles, waist packs, ipod shuffles, running watch:  Not quite sure but substantial $$ Hotel reservation at Mandalay Bay so we wouldn't have to walk too far to get to the race and, more importantly, back to the place to lie down with ice afterwards:   $350 Miscellaneous food and other shopping expenses:   $200? Spending the weekend with my girl and sharing an awesome experience: PRICELESS!!!

Thanks to my cheerleading, encouraging, energetic Princess, we made it the entire 13.1 miles and lived to tell about it.  We're anxiously awaiting official photos from the race website, but in the meantime, I'll share the couple of pictures we took of ourselves (set the camera up and run to pose). I arrived in Vegas Saturday afternoon and we had to go to the Runner's Expo to pick up our numbers, t-shirts, timing chips, etc.  The t-shirts are pretty cool; nice running shirts with the words and graphics forming the shape of a guitar. We had pasta for dinner on Saturday night and tried to go to bed early.  The race began at 7:00 am, but we were in a slower group, so we didn't get going until about 7:40.  The weather was good, a little cool, but clear.  We waited around with a bunch of other people until it was time for our group to start. There were over 19,000 people running the half marathon with us, and an additional 5000 more who ran the full marathon. ...

I had a great yoga class today, physical therapy on my IT band, visited a yarn shop (yeah!) and just ran my last two miles before the race.  I'm pleased that I can run up a gentle slope that used to have me out of breath when I walked up it, can run several miles without stopping to walk, and just generally have a much improved fitness level than I did a year ago.  Finishing a half marathon will be the icing on the cake. Thank you Kristi and A for your well-wishes.  And thanks to the anonymous commenter who recommended the viagra.  I'm sure he meant well. :)  I like to get comments, but there's a limit! In knitting news, I started my airplane knitting so I'm all set to mindlessly knit.  This is another ball of Vesper self-striping yarn.  I got it from a Ravelry destash just because I wanted to try self-striping, wouldn't have selected these colors if I had had a better choice, but quite like how they're looking knit up.  I think this is an old...