Our office has a Sense of Humor

I came in this morning to find this on one of my white boards...

This is my response.

Happy Banned Books Week

This week is National Banned Books Week. Here is my list of books from the official LIST of Contested and Banned books this year that I have decided to read in honor of the week.

......................

The Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Betrayed by P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz

Why I love Pinterest

Look at the board these were placed in for both of these images. A hot guy was placed in "Little reminders for the soul". I die.

ESPN on Ragnar

Ragnar Round 2

Here we go again. My dad & I survived our second Ragnar Relay, this time in Napa. We flew up to San Francisco on thursday night. We spent the night in a retro looking hotel right out side of the scary red light district. We survived the night, and made our way across the Golden Gate Bridge to Exchange 6 where we waited for Van 1.

I was runner #8, so Heather left the Major Exchange with the baton after which she handed it off to me. My first leg was up what we came to call "The Hill of Death" (pictured below)

I will just say that the experience was joyful, and that there were ambulances waiting at the top and bottom of the HoD. :) Melissa was up next, and ran through some of the most beautiful forest I have ever seen. I would give a lot to live in a place with trees like that. After Melissa, my Dad ran. (yes he got to be a runner this time, not just a driver and this was all he talked about at dinner for months leading up to the race... not an exaggeration.) Parker (our secret weapon) took over after Dad. A quick side-note, Parker is a crazy fast runner. He runs an average pace of 6-7 min/mile, and can keep this up for a while. During our race, he was not feeling well so only ran an 8min mile, all the while his left arm was in a sling. Crazy? Yes. Parker while on his run passed all of the runners who had passed us earlier on the corse. Danny our illustrious captian for SoCal was runner 12. After Danny finished up, we handed off to Van 1 and found a Subway for a quick dinner and made our way to the next major exchange to try and get some sleep.

It is crazy how well a person can sleep in the middle of a major exchange if that person is tired enough. I swear, once you can finally fall asleep, it is some of the deepest sleep of your life. After 1.5/2 hours of sleep we woke up to start our second round. The night legs are usually fairly short and we ran them pretty fast. On our way to our last major exchange we found a great little cafe in Napa. By this point we were pretty punch drunk and breakfast was funny. We found our exchange and plopped down in a random field to nap.

Sometime during the night Heather (runner 6) came down with a stomach bug. She struggled through her last leg like a champ. I lucked out, and ran my last leg thought beautiful vineyards near Napa. It was hard to resist the temptation to hop into one of the fields and "sample" some grapes. The last 4 legs of the race (Melissa, Dad, Parker & Danny) were up these rolling steep hills, but they ran up them like the pros they are.We finished up our 200 miles in the little and picturesque town of Calistoga.

Getting to the finish line and receiving our two metals (one for Napa, one for running both California races) was amazing. We drove all of the way back to San Francisco (the straight drive took about 1.5 hours) where we all showered and headed out for a quick dinner at a Hamburger place Nick raved about called "Bots". Everyone had given up soda and red meat for the month leading up to the race, so the hamburger joint was a delight.

Amazingly enough, our total race time was faster then SoCal (our first race) and yet, the general consensus was that we were a lot less sore than the first time even though most of us felt like we trained less. The rest of the team started their 9+ hour drive home in the morning after a quick breakfast. My Dad and I didn't fly out until 6pm sunday night, so we were able to hang out in the city for the day. Dad and I got to ride on the outside of a cable car, wandered around the pier, watched street performers and wandered around the city. We caught our flight home and unpacked. I basically dumped my duffle bag straight into the washing machine, added 2x the amount of soap and washed the whole load twice and even then I wasn't sure if it was all of the way clean!

We took a week off and then started training for our Las Vegas Ragnar... let the fun begin.

Pottermore!

I'm In! I got my email yesterday, and have basically spent every moment sense then thinking about or playing on Pottermore. Its amazing.