14th In The Nation!!!

I am sad to report that Storming the Castle didn't win the Great Urban Race National Championships. :( I know you all assumed that we would. Sorry to let you down.

However, we did come in 14th out of 90 of the best teams in America! Woo hoo!! Only 22 of the 90 teams finished by the 3 hour race cut off time. We finished in 2 hours and 37 minutes. This put us 7 minutes out of making the finals. We are little bit disappointed (well, I am, anyway. I don't think Christy is as much) because we (meaning me) made an error that cost us about 10 minutes, but we are still proud of our fairly decent result. And we are hooked on urban adventure races!! SO FUN!

The race took us from the French Quarter in New Orleans to Tulane University (about 5 miles away) with various stops in between. We caught a streetcar towards Tulane while our super-stellar internet support, Kiri and NFBF, were busy looking up clues for us. Our mistake was getting off the streetcar when other people did, even though we hadn't finished mapping our points. We decided after getting off that we didn't really want to follow those people. We made decent use of our mistake time by going into a tavern to buy $20 worth of ones. One of our clues said we needed to donate $10 to St. Jude, but the donation needed to be in singles that had the letter F in the serial number. Donating the money:A lot of people skipped this one because they thought it would be too hard to trade people money. When we told other teams that we did it at a bar, they felt kind of silly. :)

We got back on the streetcar and saw a team from Austin - the notorious collaborating teams who rock this race. The boys got off so we did, too. We couldn't keep up with them running, but we caught up at the clue that led us to Mystic Signs:
They got way ahead of us again (cuz they actually are runners!) but we caught up to them again at the streetcar stop. They were having a bit of a meltdown - arguing if they should run for a 30 minutes to Tulane or wait 15 minutes for the streetcar. This was a no-brainer for me and Christy. Run? To Tulane?? Yeah, right. The Austin boys took off running and 20 minutes later ended up getting on our same streetcar, all out of breath. Hee.

At Tulane we had to find a triangle puzzle written in chalk somewhere on campus. Wow - that could take forever. Luckily we saw people gathered around, so we didn't have to search too long.
The task was to count how many triangles were in the clue. IMPOSSIBLE. Some of the intended triangles were actually trapezoids. And the pink lines were smudged and you couldn't tell if they were supposed to be on top of or separate from the blue lines. We knew that all we could do was guess. Many of the teams were all aflutter about how unfair this clue was. Also at Tulane, we had to solve a ridiculous math clue (thanks to both Christy and NFBF for not making me do this!) to find out what room in a certain building to go to. In that room (201), we had to do a word search puzzle. We rocked this and gained some time on some other teams.

A random clue on the list was a dark and fuzzy picture of a bell. You needed to find the bell and take your picture touching it. No one could find the bell. All the locals we asked didn't know where it was. Google was no help. I talked to several teams afterwards and none of their internet supporters could find it. Yeah, well they don't have internet support like mine!! Kiri found it (after looking thru 300 pictures of bells on Flickr!!). She's a super-star!! At about the same time, we happened upon it on Tulane's campus as we were running by.
We then took a streetcar halfway back to the French Quarter to a juice bar clue. We had to make juice by squeezing oranges by hand. Mmmm, citrus smells good! Running after drinking a glass full of fresh OJ is a little uncomfortable though. One good part of the OJ stop was that we showed one of the volunteers there how unfair the triangle clue was. She realized that the clue had been sabotaged (dang Tulane pranksters!) and called it in to the race headquarters.

At this point, time was getting short and we still had 5 clues to go. We debated whether to take the triangles as our skip or the cruisers. The cruisers were these really cool 2 person moped things (I borrowed this photo from another blog, thanks Vignette!):
You had to drive them around a mapped out course through the city. We figured t was going to take us 10 minutes to get there, 10 minutes to drive them and 10 minutes to get to our next clue. If we skipped it, we'd save 30 minutes. But....if we got the triangles answer wrong, we'd get a 30 minute penalty. We decided to take our chances on the triangles guess, hoping that due to the sabotage, they would accept any answer. (Turns out that the bottom two lines and all the pink were added by the pranksters!) So, as fun as the cruisers looked, we passed them up.

We raced back to the French Quarter to the St. Louis hotel. We found the conference room indicated and inside the conference room we saw...LIVE 6 foot ALLIGATORS! We had to pick up the alligator and carry him around the room. Now, this alligator was pissed! His mouth was banded shut, but he was hissing and trying to snap. I felt really bad for him and didn't know if this was the most humane task to do...but I was still pretty excited to get to carry a real live alligator!!

We had to take a picture of our team with a cathedral, a clock and a man on a horse...all in the picture:
We knew where this was from our previous day's 9 mile walk around the French Quarter and nearby areas. Preparation finally paid off!

We had to take our picture with Martha - A Market Customer (location found by NFBF and Kiri):
The threes indicate the last digit of the year she was sculpted. The last task was nearby Martha. We had to go on the stage at the French Market and complete a Charade. I got to do the acting. My phrase was Queen of Hearts. Heart was no problem, but I couldn't get Christy to get Queen. She got girl with a hat, but never made the leap to girl with a crown. :) I changed tasks and did sounds like "lean" and we got it in no time.

RUN RUN RUN back to the finish line. I hate running. Seriously.

We knew right away that we didn't make the top 8. The photo checkers estimated we were around 17-18th. Our photos and clues were checked - our triangles answer was accepted like we hoped - a good gamble! We hung around and watched the other teams come in. We beat the Arguing Austin boys!! That was cool!!

Since we weren't a part of the finals race, we spent the afternoon exploring more of New Orleans. I mapped it and we walked an additional 6 miles - after the race!

Christy drinking a well-deserved beer at Ignatius:
We can't wait til next year! We're going all-out to make the championships again!!

Going Away

I am going away...and I couldn't be happier!

Christy and I are off to New Orleans to compete in the Great Urban Race Championships. Woo hoo! Wish us luck.

Bye!

Teemu Selanne Thinks I'm Hot

On Halloween night, Pat and I went to the Phoenix Coyotes game. Before the game, we went down to the glass seats to watch the visiting team warm up.

Teemu Selanne skated by and looked right at me. Huh. He must think I'm hot. WOO HOO! Whatcha doin' after the game, big boy?? ;)

He skated by a second time and looked right at me again. Teemu Selanne - looking at me!! I'm feelin' pretty darn pleased with myself...

Oh, wait! He doesn't think I'm hot. He's just confused. Confused because I am a big white blob. A big white blob with horns. Wtf? Oh hold on a second...the big white blob is an...egg? An egg with horns?

On his third skate-by, he gave me a big huge smile. Ah....deviled egg! Get it? I think Teemu has a thing for deviled eggs.


No one gave Pat a second glance. Hockey? check. Mullets in the building? check.

The deviled egg costume was a huge hit. Whenever I was walking the concourse, people would stare and just as I passed by them, they would get it. I could hear them start laughing and saying Deviled Egg! A-ha-ha-ha-ha!! One guy had to come up and ask:

Him: The egg costume is really cute! I just don't get those horns...
Me: I'm a deviled egg.
Him: OH!! I AM SO STUPID!!! A-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!

I got to be part of the intermission costume parade. I think Howler thought I was a child and that is why he is patting me on the head.
The game went into overtime and the Coyotes won in a shoot out. AWWWOOOO!

Halloween Costume Parties

I love it when Halloween falls on a Saturday, because then you get two nights of parties. Two nights of parties means two nights of wearing costumes! I love costumes!

This year I put very little effort into my costume, unlike last year when I spent hours and hours on ebay acquiring all the right pieces for our Ferris Bueller group costume. It was Pat who went all out this year, buying the necessary pieces, applying sequins, spending hours on makeup application, etc:
This year I spent about 15 minutes online ordering a Snow White costume and a black wig. Snow White with Jamie: (Oh, sorry...he's Yanni, damn it)
Nicole, the lovely hostess of the Friday night costume party, is a housewife a la Mad Men.
The lovely hostess made these lovely cookies. Mmmm....cookies! I think I ate about 13 of them!
Josh also spent some time putting together a clever homemade costume:This lasted about 10 minutes before his arms (legs?) got too tired and he turned it all around and became a farmer.

Irene came as dirty laundry. Brian didn't want to be a household chore, so he took the easy way out with the doctor costume.
But the best costume of the night, in my opinion, was this guy, who came as "NFBF - that blurry faced guy from that really cool blog". Ah, genius.

The next night we went to a party hosted by one of our soccer friends. I needed to get my money's worth from the Snow White costume so I wore it again. Jamie didn't have the necessary pieces to be Andre Agassi: The Meth Years so he brought Yanni, damn it, back again. Pat went home and went to bed. (We went to the Coyotes game first - blog post coming, and we had to be up at 5:30 for a work event/5K- blog post coming).

Different night, same costumes. With Louie, our host:
with Uriel from soccer:
Another super-fun night. I love Halloween and I especially love Halloween weekends!

An Exhausting Saturday...a 3-Part Post

Part I - The Wiffleball Tournament

Yep, you read that right. Little Tom from work plays in wiffleball tournaments. Before I met him, I didn't really know there were such things....but there are! There was one this weekend run by City of Glendale Parks and Rec. And since I'm such a joiner, I just had to sign up, too...despite the fact that I cannot hit, throw or catch a ball. I got together some athletic guy friends and put in a team. Pat named us the Holey Balls. Get it?

My team - Ian, Jamie, me, Pat:
Little Tom was a bit worried for us because, he says, a wiffleball takes a little while to get used to. He was right. It took us awhile to figure how to pitch. After the first game (which we had to forfeit after 2 innings because of a 10 run rule), Jamie figured out how to throw strikes and things were looking up.
Alas, we never really figured out how to hit the ball. Eventually I did get a base hit. It was quite exciting!
Fielding also was difficult. Well, it wasn't difficult for me, but that's because I only played one inning in the field and I didn't have to touch the ball once. Ian's wife, Emilie, joined us after the first game. I believe her flip flops/bare feet really showed the other teams how dead-serious we were about wiffleball.
The tournament format was four games for everyone, then single elimination playoffs. We played our four games. We lost our four games. No playoffs for us. We did score a run or two though (could have been caused by opposing team generosity). Little Tom's team didn't make the playoffs either and they are good at wiffleball, so we didn't feel too bad.

Part II - The Hockey Game
We got home from the wiffleball tournament at 3:00. At 5:00 we left to go back to Glendale for the Coyotes/Kings game. NFBF joined us for the fun. I like going to hockey games with my boys. I guess I should have made them wear wigs, though, because the Coyotes lost. Bummer! But the intermission was Mascot Hockey...so it wasn't a total waste.

Part III - Dancing and The High School Flashback

After five hours in the sun and the hockey game, I have to admit I was pretty tired and was feeling sort of sun-sick. But I had already told some of the co-ed book club girls that I would go dancing with them and since we rarely get to go, I didn't want to cancel. So I took some advil, put on my goin'-out clothes and went to Scottsdale.
We went to Devil's Martini again. The music was decent, there were lots of people there, overall it was pretty good. The staff were dressed for pre-Halloween. I have an ongoing joke with a friend about mechanics, so I had to take a picture of this waiter/mechanic. He thought I was crazy and he avoided me the rest of the night.
I was exceptionally tired so I wanted to call it a night around 12:00, but I ended up reliving my high school days instead. One of the girls we were with was drunk...really, really drunk. Shortly after I got to the bar, she disappeared. I didn't feel right leaving the other two girls to be responsible, so I stayed. The three of us took turns every half hour or so to make a trip around the bar checking the tables, the patio, the bathrooms. Eventually we expanded our search to the parking lot and the outside of the bar. We had been calling her name in the bathroom, but no one ever answered. The bathroom attendant said our missing friend was not in there. Finally, two hours later, I ignored the bathroom attendant and stationed myself in the bathroom and watched all 11 stall doors to see if there were any with no traffic. Three doors remained shut for the 15 minutes I stood there. I called out her name again a few times, but no answer. I went back a half hour later when I felt that I could not possibly stay awake another second, and two of those doors were still shut. I started pounding on the doors and one opened a crack and there she was...huddled on the floor. After two and a half hours of puking/being passed out, she was still drunk. I took her home, stopping once along the way for her to puke (this was the most vivid of the high school flashbacks) and when I finally got home it was almost 3:00 am.

Exhausted!

I Live in Mayberry.

The other day my car window broke. The glass didn't break, it was the electronic roll-down thingy that broke. Pat and his dad were kind enough to take my door panel off and stick a screwdriver in the door to hold up the glass until I was able to take it in to get it fixed. They are nice like that, cuz they live in Mayberry.

I called Mayberry Honda and found out that electronic roll-down thingies are covered by my warranty. Wtf? Warranties usually cover everything except what you need fixed. Not so in Mayberry! Hurray!

I took my car in early on Friday morning and I brought my bike so I could ride the rest of the way to work. I wasn't really sure how I was going to handle the 1.5 mile stretch of Camelback Road before I reached my super-safe 3rd Avenue complete with my super-wide bike lane. But in Mayberry, there is no traffic turning right on Camelback during morning rush-hour so I was able to ride my bike safely on the sidewalk. Hurray! You know what else happens in Mayberry? There are pedestrians that say hi as they pass and people who smile at you and friendly police officers on motorcycles who challenge you to a race when you are stopped at a red light next to them.

It was a Mayberry morning. Hurray! Unfortunately, I don't work in Mayberry...so let's skip to the afternoon commute back to the car dealership.

I was pretty nervous about taking Camelback for the 1.5 miles back. I was pretty lucky that morning...no one was turning north because all traffic was heading south to downtown and no one was turning into parking lots because shops and restaurants weren't open yet. But in the afternoon, traffic goes all directions. Camelback is a hugely busy street with zillions of businesses and restaurants. There are driveways literally every 15 feet. It was dusk. Riding like a moron on the sidewalk (because I'm too scared to ride on a street without a bike lane) was not really a smart thing to do. But I did it anyway.

And it was okay... because I live in Mayberry. First, I rode past a bus stop. A bunch of people were on the sidewalk waiting for the bus. Uh oh! But no problem...they saw me coming and they all got out the way. With smiles on their faces. Seriously. They were ALL smiling at me. One guy even said "Enjoy your ride!" as I passed and he wasn't being sarcastic. A few yards later, a car was waiting in a parking lot driveway to pull out on to Camelback. Uh oh...gonna get killed now. But no, he saw me coming and he backed up to give me room to pass. Then a car was stopped at a stop sign on a side street. I started to wait for him, but he backed up and waved me by. This was getting weird. Another car was trying to leave a parking lot. She backed up for me, too. And she smiled and said hi to me from her open window. Huh? And then a car was going to turn into a parking lot but stopped and waited for me to pass. I glanced in as I rode past and the driver didn't give me the dirty look I deserved for being an idiot riding on the sidewalk....the driver smiled at me instead. One more car waiting in a parking lot driveway...one more driver who backed up for me to pass. As I was nearing the dealership, two people were walking toward me on the sidewalk. They stepped off the sidewalk to let me by and one said "Sure is a nice evening to be out a bike, isn't it?" Again, no sarcasm.

This was one of the weirdest 15 minutes of my life.

I kind of like Mayberry. I think I was just voted Mayor.

Wigs: Not Just For Halloween

Wigs aren't just for Halloween. No way! Wigs are great anytime! Wigs are especially great for when you get your three favorite boys together to eat sushi and watch hockey. See?




Btw, the Coyotes won this game, so wigs and sushi might have to be our new superstitious tradition. And isn't Pat super-pretty with long hair?

Sisters

The set is complete:

Anne's Wedding

Wedding day started out with pictures. After days and days of rain, Springfield finally had a sunny day...Yippee!! The leaves were just starting to turn colors and the park was beautiful! Most of the group shots were taken on this bridge. The girls - Amy, me, Anne and Anne's best friend from college, Heather:Closeup:
Anne with the boys - Jon (Kevin's friend from college), Kevin, Anne, Terry (Kevin's friend since grade school) and Gerald (Kevin's stepdad):
Kevin and the girls:
It was a nice sunny day, but don't be fooled. It was FREEZING! This is a more accurate depiction of the day:

Eventually we were so cold that we couldn't even take our wraps off for the pictures anymore. (Speaking of wraps... aren't they cute? And they match perfectly! Amy and I found them at TJ Maxx that morning.)
Anne and Pat:

Finally I get to see my cute brother, Brett! Here he is with his cute wife and family:

The venue all finished and ready to go:
They use this building as a day care during the day! Weird.

Somehow I managed to take no pictures of the buffet or the food (I know! I always take pictures of the food!!) but I never would miss a picture of a cake! Mmmm, cake:

Eventually we were able to corral the whole Diamond clan for a group shot. Too bad the settings on my dad's camera were off, thus a blurry shot of the whole Diamond clan (with the tall spouses on the ends):

The ceremony:The kiss:
The food:
(seriously why don't I have a picture of the food? It was really yummy and the buffet was so pretty!)

The cake-cutting. (Mmmm, cake!):

Pat made a new BFF at the wedding. Kevin's college friend, Jon, is a hockey player and a youth hockey coach. He's a Blues fan but he lives in Kansas City so he doesn't get to see NHL games much. He and Pat talked hockey all night. Until they talked phones - we all have the same phone:

The final event of the night - clean up time! Bride and Maid of Honor tearing down the bar:

It was a beautiful wedding! Everything went perfectly, all the guests had a good time and Anne and Kevin were radiant. Congratulations, guys!

Wedding Prep

I'm going to do two separate posts for Anne's wedding, because I've got lots of pictures. Eventually, when the real pictures from the real photographer get to me, I'll do a third post. But for now you'll have to settle for what I got from my crappy camera.

Pat and I flew to Springfield on Thursday. Friday was all about Wedding Prep. The girls all got pedicures and went to lunch. I have no pictures of the day. It was so cold and rainy that I couldn't find the motivation to get my camera out. Cold weather makes me tired.

That evening, the wedding party met at the venue, the pavilion at Lincoln Park, to set up and decorate. All the groomsmen, bridesmaids and family pitched in. Groomsmen and Anne setting up the votives:
Kevin's daughter, Rachel, and I setting the tables:
There was a brief rehearsal and a run-through of the music. Pat was the DJ and he was using the brand new iPod I bought and loaded for Anne and Kevin's wedding gift. They bought themselves a fancy iPod dock and speaker system as their own wedding gift. After the rehearsal, we could have done a million more little things around the place, but we called it a night before Anne stressed too much.

After a rehearsal, you get the best part - the rehearsal dinner. We didn't know how many people would be there or what time we'd be done decorating, so no formal plans had been made for dinner. No formalities usually means pizza (mmm, pizza!) so we headed to Coz's.

We only had to wait for a little bit for our table. My cute sisters:My cute mom:
My cute dad:I have a cute brother, too, but he was home with all his kids so I didn't get to see him til the next day.

Kevin and his family and friends:
Anne and Kevin are smart and chose not to have bachelor or bachelorette parties the night before the wedding so we all called it an early night. At my mom's house, the only warm place is in front of the fire: