Have I mentioned that I’m officially “in training” for my ultra season this year? Did a 10k two weeks ago which kicked off the start and have been ramping up mileage ever since. I hope to settle in around (and how crazy does this sound?!?) a pretty standard 50 miles a week. I’m at about 30 right now and adding about 10% to that each week. My next race is a 20k in March, then a 50k in May, another 50k in July and finally my “A” race which is the Dirk Collin’s 50-miler in October.

All the running has been great. I’ve got my new running kicks, a coupla track buddies at work (one of my partners and I do sprint workouts and plyo stuff between calls at work), interesting places around here to run, an awesome and supportive “crew” and overall things have been splendid.

One problemo: Now that I’m a Serious Runner, what happens to my little jog with the dog?

See, Old Courtney used to roll out of bed, laze around with Nerd, meander into her day, and then when she felt like it head out con woof on a leisurely and fun little 3 mile jog. I LOVE our little jogs together. I feel like Linus gets a good chunk of his daily exercise, we explore all the sites and sounds of the hood, he gets to socialize at two dog parks, and we chitchat with our neighbors. But, it’s NOT a speedy run. We stop, we chat, we sniff butts, we attempt to eat leftover McDonalds wrappers from potheads toking up in Buena Vista Park, we shamelessly pander for pets, treats, and attention. We also have fun trying to trip me up in the leash by employing a wide array of darting and wrapping techniques. All this doesn’t exactly jive with a “focused training run.” I can’t really do a “legit” training run with Buddy.

Linus will still be my faithful running partner for all “easy” runs, recovery jogs, BRICK runs, runs on the beach and of course trail running. He’s fine with keeping up on the mileage (not sure if you recall, but I took him on a 14mile trail run last year), and he’s okay on pacing, it’s just the deadly combo of the leash and distractions that make him hard to run with en la ciudad.

So… what to do. For example, tomorrow on the boards: I’ve got a 6-mile “regular” run at 60% effort, and then 2 miles of hill repeats later. What I need to figure out is, where does “jog with Linus around the neighborhood” fit into that?

One idea I’m chewing on- what about if I take Linus out with me for a “warm up” … say- 2 miles, easy around the hood, like normal, then come back, drop him off and head right back out the door solo to bag some REAL miles? I guess I could do the same with a cool down… though I bet I would tend to cheat on the tail end and cut it short. Hmm… hmm…. Any thoughts?

Heading out the door for an easy 4 mile recovery jog with con woofer.

Wearing this U Mad shirt which Earl snagged me when we visited his alma mater.

Wearing this shirt for a run really brings out the San Francisco peanut gallery. I never knew there was such Wisconsin pride around here until I sported this one day on a jog through Golden Gate Park.  I’d say I get about… at least 5 or 6 people shouting something out to me per run.
Back of the shirt sports the same deal (writing on hat reads “Girdwood, Alaska” which is NOT reversed, the U Mad image actually reads backwards, flippy mirror trick).

Comments range from:

• The obvious: “Go Wisconsin!”
• “Go Badgers!”
• “Yeah, BUCKY!!”
• “Hey, I went there!”
• “My boyfriend/girlfriend/mother/father went there.”
• “WISSSSSSSSSCOOOOOOOONNNNNNSIIIIIIINNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
• “I’d like to see YOUR badger.”  (Me: [thinking] “Doesn’t he mean beaver?”)
• “What is that?  A ferret?”
• “Are you from Wisconsin?”
• “YEAHHHH SCONNIE PRIDE DUDE!!!!!!!!!!”
• “Hey Wisconsin- How ya liking the California sunshine?”
• “Wow, that shirt is really red.”
• “Beersconsin!”
• “Go Pack”
• “whooo cheeseheads”
• etc, etc, etc.

Takeaway: If you are uncomfortable in the public eye, do NOT rock a University of Wisconsin t-shirt while running!

Mr. Drool Spot and I had an invigorating 2-hour jog along the ocean today. We found so many sand dollars! I just can’t run past those beauties, I have to stop and beachcomb a bit. Probably why it took two hours

As I wrote on Saturday, I threw an impromptu breakfast party Sunday morning for some of my long-lost ski friends who were staying with us and my friend Amy who came in from Stanford.  Amazingly, I pulled everything off (never cooked breakfast for that many people before) and it all came out well! Even Kevin, who claimed to “hate tomatoes” held good on his promise to at least try it, and he ended up liking it! (I thought this might be the case, as I “hate tomatoes” myself, yet love this dish).  I woke up at 7am to walk Linus to the market and get more food, then got started cooking… while three large guys caught Zzzz on the floor in my living room. As they woke up one by one I recruited them to help in the kitchen and put them to work peeling pomegranates and mashing basil for pesto.

I made the baked eggs in prosciutto-wrapped tomatoes recipe which I had cooked for Earl before, however as we had bacon in the house I subbed bacon for prosciutto. This worked out okay, though I did pre-cook the bacon on the Foreman beforehand and I think it could have been a little less cooked; it turned out pretty crunchy. Also, I think I liked the flavor of the prosciutto a tad more, however bacon tasted fine.

Ready to go in the oven- these are tomatoes hollowed out, then coated on the inside with a homemade pesto and wrapped in bacon.  Bake those for 10 minutes to roast the tomatoes a bit, then fill each with an egg and bake again for 10 more minutes.  Couldn’t be simpler!
Notice the pre-cooked bacon is not wrapping around the tomatoes very well. Another reason why not to pre-cook the bacon as much and also why prosciutto might work better- more supple. I also threw on some parm cheese into the tomatoes which you can see in the pic:

Your chef, with no makeup, messy hair, her glasses and rocking her pajamas and a hangover:

We are ready to eat!! Amy brought the OJ.

After 10 more minutes in the oven, here’s how they looked. This is for 10 minutes at 350*… if it were just Earl and I dining, I would go for 8 minutes as both of us like a runnier yolk… however with a bunch of people, tastes vary and I figured a harder yolk is safer… easier to err more towards “done” than “raw” when it comes to egg cooking times.

Plated! Served with a pomegranate seed and arugula simple salad. Turns out, 2/6 of my guests hated pomegranate seeds. Should have checked beforehand, I guess! What a waste of peeling effort

Linus got in on some tableside petting action.

Earl snapped a post-breakfast group shot. I love these people!! The last time we were all together was Straightline Ski Camp last Feb. We’re trying to plan another meet up soon- be it at Straightline Camp 2010, Argentina next summer (doubt I’ll have the $ to pull that one off) or even a long bike trip up the Lost Coast.

After breakfast, everyone packed up and Nick and I got ready to make the trek to Sacramento for the race. We went to the expo and got Nick registered, then had a pasta dinner at 5pm and went to bed pretty early. I did spend time making my Fan Extraordinaire sign (I actually love making signs to cheer people on, I think it’s a holdover from my days as a highschool cheerleader) while we watched bad cable before bed.

Here is Nick getting in “the zone” on the way to the Marathon Expo:

And here is a snap of the sign I made. It reads, “GO NICK, RUN FAST.” Simple enough instructions

Race morning, Nick left at 5am to catch the pre-race shuttle and I stumbled out of bed at 7am to go cheer. I planned to see him in three spots- mile 10, mile 18 and the finish. My plan worked and I did get to see him at each of those locations. We weren’t sure it would work because he wasn’t running with a phone or anything (he’s a Serious Runner… unlike me who races with cellphone in hand and tweeting the entire time… lol).
Nick during the race! He was literally running so fast it was hard to get a good pic! You can practically see the “zoom” lines coming from behind him.

Ninja on the course!

Nick was a bit bummed about his final time- 3:32. He’d been trying for Boston, which he needed 3:10 to get into. He went into this admittedly a bit undertrained (apparently he likes biking a lot more and has been mountain biking most weekends instead of doing long runs), and also the pretty cold temps (it was 32* at the start!) threw him off. Selfishly, I am a tad happy he didn’t get boston because it means he’ll be running a lot this next year and hopefully we can meet up for another marathon evil of me, I know.
Post-race shot. Don’t we look cold?! It was pretty freezing while cheering, and I was in a bulky fleece. The orange tree behind us is misleading!!

There was even a corgi spectator! This adorable guy was named Frodo Baggins. Such a great name for a corgi.

After the race we drove back to SF, stopping at a post-race nosh of In & Out. Then I dropped Nick off at the airport and headed directly to work. A shift had opened up which apparently they needed someone badly enough to offer DOUBLETIME THE ENTIRE SHIFT. Sweetness! I worked a 20-hour shift, from Sunday at 10pm to Monday at 6pm. I’m loving these open shifts at work, makes picking up a day really simple and earning some extra $$ pretty easy.

This week is super busy for us- tonight we have Earl’s company Christmas Party, tomorrow I picked up another shift at work from 6am-6pm, Thursday I’m doing a hike with my friend Andrea, and then I work Fri, Sat and Sunday 5am-5pm. Finally, on Sunday night we have our ambulance company Christmas Party, which I am ALSO psyched about! Also in the meantime I am trying to write a TON of Christmas cards and otherwise do errands for the upcoming holiday. I’m writing a tad over 50 cards this year, and I try to write a personal message on them all. I’ve been writing them between calls on the ambulance I normally crank out about 5 a shift.

May not look that great in the photo, but man o man does this SMELL SO GOOD.

Recipe found by E, courtesy of here. I am such a sucker for anything with rosemary in it (for that matter, anything with cheese in it!).

Sorry all I do lately is post about what we’re having for dinner. Frankly, it’s all I have the time (and inclination) to write about these days… classes rolling into finals, work, processing the new job, getting started at SFGH… I feel a tad overwrought. I do have about 12,000 photos to take off my camera and share with you, including a bunch from Halloween [yes Amy I am working on it!]. I’ll be happy when school is over (my last final is TOMORROW! woot!) after this weekend and I’ll have my Saturdays back again. I’ll also be happy when I have a set, predetermined, fleshed out schedule at my new job and know what my hours will be like. It’s hard for me when things are so up in the air. Working best on a set schedule, I tend to let everything go to pot when I can’t plan out my days.

In the meantime, I should just re-name this website whatwe’rehavingfordinner.com and call it a night.

Oh! Real quick- today I had a bunch of stuff to get done for my new job. I took a physical fitness test, agility test, drug test, auto-injector for nerve agent and organophosphate poisoning tutorial and exam, got fitted for and learned how to don and doff my PAPR suit with respirator, fitted for my N-95 mask and verified all of my immunizations.

After all that rigmarole (passed everything, phew), I took Linus on a nice little 4 mile trail run at Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve. The dog is now COVERED in TICKS!! He was wearing his tick collar and I also put flea and tick powder on him, but… to no avail. I’ve already taken SIX ticks off of him. Earl is going to kill me (he absolutely *hates* ticks). Hopefully smell of yummy soup will distract nerd from new tick infestation at our apartment.

Guess I should get Linus his own PAPR suit before I take him hiking. :-/

The PAPR I was fitted for looks just like this, only with bigger rubber gloves over the latex gloves and also in a very skin-tone flattering BRIGHT UGLY YELLOW:

You know, it was surprisingly hard to move around in it. I believe this was due to wearing shoes inside the big rubber boots and also having a double layer of latex gloves *inside* giant rubber gloves. Also, the chemtape was horrendously hard to manipulate without having it stick to your gloves. In the event of a HAZMAT incident I think you’d really need a partner to help each other get in and out of the suit.

The doctor did a test on me where he TURNED OFF MY RESPIRATOR while I was in the PAPR suit and let me stand there for a few minutes. This was to demonstrate how quickly 1.) the eye visor becomes steamed up and 2.) run out of oxygen in the case the respirator battery runs out of power or somehow gets disconnected. Basically, if that happens you must leave the scene because you’re of no use to any patient. Honestly at this point I am dubious how helpful I can be to any patient while wearing the freaking suit even if everything is hunky dory. It was *that* hard to maneuver in it. Well… I guess any time you’d be wearing a PAPR would probably be a load-and-go anyways, so all you really need to wear it for is to get in, get the patient, and GTFO; there wouldn’t be much need to dink around on scene in the suit…thankfully.

Frankly, if I was a patient and a bunch of EMS professionals showed up to help me donning PAPR suits I would be freaking terrified!! They should put flowers or peace signs on them or something.

Friday night I did something exciting. I was about three hours into a six-hour stretch of studying when, taking break to peruse the internet, I stumbled across this post. Inspiration hit- I had to make that bread! Dubbing it a “welcome home from work” present to Earl, I figured it would be nice to have fresh-baked bread smelling up the house when he walked in. Deep down, however, I was guilty of really making the bread for myself; *I* wanted the honeyspice bread, Earl be damned. Funny, the silly reasons you use to justify that which you desire.

I say “exciting” because I’ve never attempted to bake bread from scratch. It was a fun project which weaved nicely into my studying- make dough, let it rise for a couple hours while read another chapter, take a break to punch down and knead dough, do another chapter while letting it rise again. Then bake for an hour while finishing the reading. It was a wonderful incentive for me to power through the (tedious!) studying.

Kneading bread is harder than you’d think! The recipe I used calls for you to knead in increments of 5 and 10 minutes. Phew. I was tired after about 2 minutes! But, the results were stupendous- the bread was SOOO good. We had it with butter, more of it with cheese, I brought a bunch in to class on Saturday to share, and then this morning E and I killed off the last bit as toast with jam and butter for breakfast.

Waiting for the yeast to activate

the name of the bread is “honeyspice” … it has a lot of spices- cloves, coriander, ginger and cinnamon. I’ve never really cooked with coriander before, but man it smelled GOOD.

adding spices to the bread base

the dough:

knead, knead, knead

cover and let rise one hour (lol- just noticed my naked lady napkin here…haha… it’s from the Strip House in NYC… ah, days as a banker when I used to eat there all the time. heh. life is so different now!)

the chef is NOT above sampling the dough!

or, for that matter, licking the spoon (the chef is, apparently, above cleaning the mirrors)

after rising for 1 hour, you “punch” it down once. I don’t really get the point of this. Why do you need to punch it if you’re going to knead it again for another 5 minutes? :shrug: After delivering punch and more kneading, you let it rise again. I had the dough rising in the (turned off) oven because it was the warmest, un-breeziest place I could think of in the apartment

ta da! thar she is! while this was baking, the apartment smelled incredibly delicious. i don’t have a round baking pan, but this casserole dish did an adequate job. Bread came out a little funky shaped, but still edible.

we noshed it straight out of the oven with some butter… absolutely scrumptious

Leftover bread made for some yummy toast Monday morning

Monday am breakfast

Saturday I had class all day, then met Earl at the gym for lifting, after which we headed to Dolores Park to watch The Dark Knight under the stars with some friends. Because we got there late and due to the MASSIVE CROWD, we couldn’t find our friends. We set up a picnic with Linus, and were caught unawares when the sprinklers turned on. Aye!! Sadly, I spilled about half of my beer jumping away. This was not as bad, however, as the homeless guy near us who knocked over his ENTIRE CART filled with empty bottles and cans. They all rolled down the hill, making an enormous racket. I was somewhat surprised to see 20 people sitting around watching the movie get up and helped the homeless guy collect all his cans that had rolled away. Faith in humanity restored? Very nice gesture.

After the movie we grabbed more beer and hung out at our friend Matt’s house off the park. My tolerance must be low because of my diet and exercise kick, because man, I became kind of bombed after only a couple beers! We ended up staying out shooting the breeze until 2:00am, which was… not the smartest move because we had to wake up at 8am to head to the beach the following morning. Oof.

The crowd at the Dark Knight

The Dark Knight in Dolores Park

our little picnic… pre-sprinkler soaking

Linus getting comfy at Matt’s. Matt’s place could stand a woman’s touch some … decor :p

Sunday we headed to Gray Whale Cove with a two car loads of friends. I recruited two of them to come running with me up a mountain by the beach. Our “run” turned into more of a “hike” as it was basically straight up the mountain! I’d say we ran about… eh…. 30% of the time. Two hour hike, great views. Hanging out on the beach after the run was SO NICE. Fortunately, I wasn’t that hungover but I was enormously tired. I powered through some of my flashcards for school (about three chapters worth) and then pulled my Chugach Powder Guides hat down over my eyes and eagerly dove into a delectable two hour nap.

Something about falling asleep on a beach: plant the tired old dogs in the sand, listen to the waves crash, feel the caress of ocean breezes… so relaxing and indulgent. Easily one of my all-time favorite things. My nap was sadly disrupted when Earl woke me up with a scolding for not putting sunscreen on the back of my legs. Whaaaaa…? Huh?? I sleepily waved off his chiding, flopped over, and resumed snoring away. That is… until he decided to teach me a lesson by STUFFING ICE FROM THE COOLER DOWN MY SPORTS BRA aggggGGGgggghhhh

Kathleen and Julie check out the view on our run

Looking over to Montara State Beach from the mountain

we headed up, up, up to North Peak

Julie, looking out over towards Pacifica. It was so clear, we could see Sutro Tower all the back in San Francisco.

the three of us at the summit- we are sweaty and gross, but psyched! it took us just over an hour and a half to get to the top, and only half an hour to get back down

heading back down- a nice view of the trail we came up

there were so many wildflowers along the trail. these ones were as tall as us!

I have no idea how she did it, but when we got back to the beach, Julie still had enough energy to play frisbee AND smashball… whereas I opted to impersonate a log.

Kathleen caught up on her magazines

Linus, who did NOT come on the run/hike (I wasn’t all that sure about him handling the mileage- he hasn’t been running with me all that much lately other than short neighborhood jogs) did get plenty of exercise running around on the beach

we buried him in the sand! it’s so funny how he loves this

sand dog gets buried

look at this grin. Julie snapped this great shot

corgi smile

gee, being the center of all this attention sure makes me thirsty!

we also kept giving him ice chips as a snack and to help him stay cool

Linus LOVES the beach. Isn’t this a happy looking dog?

hugs at the beach

he kept digging in the sand trying to get his ball. so cute

dog vs. ball

i attempted to get artsy and take a self portrait in Earl’s sunglasses

Back in the city on Sunday night, still very gross from running and the beach (by this point I reeked and my hair had morphed into one giant dreadlock), we noshed at Big Mouth Burger which was FANtastic. Best burger place we’ve found in San Francisco, and TOTALLY worth getting off my diet for!

Scrumptious burger put the button on a great day

Big Mouth bacon blue-cheeseburger

Today I had my volunteer interview with another ER in San Francisco (I love the “little ER that could” where I currently volunteer, however it’s a very low-level trauma center and we do not have ER Technicians. As I’m hoping to become an ER Technician within the next year or so, I think it’s a good idea to gain some experience where I can work alongside them… and perhaps start making some contacts at a place where I will potentially be applying for a job). I passed my interview, which is a relief because I’ve heard it’s very competitive to get in there… and they are having a massive influx of volunteers- probably the economy and also everyone switching career paths into healthcare. Once my background check and TB Test results (again! agh… they wouldn’t accept my March TB Test results as it has to be within three months… blegh) come in I’ll be set to start.