Wednesday Randoms!

• This is the time of year when I get to know the folks who come and clean the office in the evenings.  Sigh…  A busy week at work has made this a run-focused week since I don’t really have time to make it to the pool and had to miss spin class last night.  Oh well, that’s the way it goes!  Despite the extra hours I’m actually really enjoying work.  I have a great project I am working on that has me super excited.
• I got a 30 minute run in on Monday over lunch on my own.  Went not too badly!
• Got a 45 minute fartlek run in with Kelly today.  I think we both had reasons to bail on the run but we kept each other accountable and each got a great fartlek workout in.
• Ryan passed along the best idea ever – the nutella and orange marmalade sandwich.  It is like heaven between two slices of bread!
• Crate and Barrel has opened in Calgary!  I loved that store when I lived in the US.  I got the most awesome sushi plates from there today.  Plus they have some super cute Christmas ornaments.
• From Crate and Barrel it was on to Willow Park Wines – where I found out that they have Pike Brewing Co. beers in stock from Seattle.  Yum…

And to answer a few of your random questions:

• Is that a gong?  Why yes it is!  Direct from the gong factory in Bogor, Indonesia.  (This is an interesting article if you want to read about the place.)  I don’t seem to have my pictures here from my visit to the factory back in 1994, but my parents picked this gong up for me before they moved from Indonesia back to Canada a few years ago.  My friend Pam really wants to come over to my place to spin and gong the gong whenever we have to spin up.
• Have I ever bobbed for apples?  I think so…maybe??  I seem to remember a Halloween party when I was in Girl Scouts that involved bobbing for apples.
• No carving of pumpkins, but what about trick or treating?  Um yeah…I could probably count the number of times I’ve been trick or treating on one hand.  But with good reason.  I left Canada when I was three in lived in a bunch of places that didn’t really have trick or treating (or at least at the time) – Australia, the UK and Bogota, Colombia.  I do remember that my school in the UK organized a list of families that all lived nearby so the kids could go trick or treating.  And I remember my last Halloween in Colombia where we were living in an apartment tower complex full of expats.  We rode up and down the elevators of the different buildings trick or treating and managed a great haul…  I didn’t make it back to Canada until I was 15…well past the respectful age to trick or treat it seemed.
• Have I started training for Ironman yet?  I am decidedly not training for anything specific right now.  Just focusing on running and speed and working on my technique in the pool.  I suspect that things will get a little busier on the Ironman training front sometime in the spring, but I’m not trying to look that far ahead at this point in time.

This is post number 668!!  How did that happen?  All of your comments and support along the way mean a lot to me.  Thanks so much for reading!!!