On Sunday November 30th, I completed something I never thought I would even attempt:  a full marathon (26.2 miles running race).  It all started earlier this year when my running partner (at the time) Angela and I were discussing our next race and decided we wanted to do the Space Coast Half Marathon.  This race is very popular because they are doing a 5 year series where each year’s medal is of a different space shuttle (2013 Columbia, 2014 Challenger, 2015 discover, 2016 Endeavour & 2017 Atlantis).  If you do three out of the five years you get an additional medal and if you do all five years (half or full or a mix) then you get yet another medal.  Since the series is so popular, the half marathon sold out in less than a day and we missed our chance to register for it.  We pondered back and forth for weeks and the full marathon started to fill up too.  Finally, we agreed that now is probably the best time to do it since neither of us have kids, both of us had a normal work schedule and we had a committed running partner to make the long runs go easier.  So we bit the bullet and signed up for our first FULL marathon.

Did everyone have a nice Thanksgiving?  I know we sure did!  My dad, stepmom and brother flew in from Texas on Wednesday.  We got everyone settled and ran a few last minute errands before the Thanksgiving feast.  This year I picked up a smoked turkey from Broken Barrel Tavern (a local favorite) and it was so nice not to have to stress about whether it would come out right or not!

I can't believe I didn't blog about the Battle of the Bridges Triathlon! On Sunday September 28th, 2014, I completed my first Olympic distance triathlon.  I had done numerous sprint distance triathlons before and I had done the Battle of the Bridges sprint distance in 2011.  But I had never done an olympic distance.  This race was 1500m swim, 23km bike and 10k (6.2mi) run.  There were only 30 female participants in the olympic distance!

This year I have really been focused on getting us eating better.  Sometimes we slip back into our old ways but for the most part, we are eating WAY better than we used to.  We rarely ever get McDonalds or other fast food (except Panda Express which actually has a few healthy-ish options), we go to sit-down restaurants less, we get pizza less than once a month now (compared to almost once a week before) and the foods that I cook for us have fresher ingredients and fewer calories and carbs.  It can be a struggle to find meals that are healthy, easy to prepare and taste good so I’ve spent a lot of time scouring Pinterest.  The problem with that is that it’s easy to get overwhelmed…and it’s easy to get on the wrong track and end up looking at 50 different peanut butter pie recipes…Then I stumbled across a recipe from a website called Dashing Dish.  The more of these recipes I tried, the more I liked and I decided I’ve tried enough of them to do a review now.

When my husband and I first bought our house, the home inspector pointed out several little things that we were able to ignore but there was a damaged valley on the roof that would need to be repaired.  We asked them to fix it but the countered with an offer to give us back some cash instead so we could get it fixed after the sale.  We agreed…but I wish we hadn’t, we’ve been in the house for 5 years and are just now getting around to fixing it.

For Labor Day weekend, Ryan and I had plans to go to a wedding in Ohio for some of our friends.  We debated whether to drive or fly but the flights were kind of expensive and we certainly hadn’t budgeted for this weekend trip.  So we decided to drive up to Ohio for Labor Day weekend – and I’m so glad we did!  We would have missed out on some pretty fun things if we had flown in and just stayed near the hotel.