Vermont 50

Wow - sorry for being a delinquent blogger. The blog is the first thing to go when life gets busy apparently!

We had a wonderful weekend with Meg visiting and spending time at the lake (I took NO pictures...can you believe it?) plus a big event for Matt (I took lots of pics of this so I'm sharing about it for now). I have lots more to share about the house but I'll get there eventually :)

SO. The Vermont 50 is a benefit for Vermont Adaptive Ski and Sports. It's a 50 mile mountain bike/ultra run. Matt signed up with a friend and trained for weeks! 50 miles off road on a bike sounded like torture to me but he was excited :)

I have posted a bit about this, but we've had a pretty rainy year. The spring floods plus Hurricane Irene, plus lots of other rain recently (excluding weekend days for the most part thankfully) led to pretty muddy conditions on race day. The day itself was gorgeous and sunny - 78 degrees - warm for fall in Vermont!

The race was held at Ascutney Mountain Resort in southern Vermont and it was beautiful to see all the leaves starting to change.

What a great event - a beer tent and live band entertained bikers/runners/spectators at the finish line.

Matt is still waiting for his official race photo.

The end of the course...

Cousin joined me for the day of fun :)

We arrived pretty early because Matt wasn't sure how long it would take them to finish. It took 7 hours and 50 minutes. WOW. He was happy with that time. We picked a spot to wait and camped out for about an hour...

While we waited, we had a few false spottings. I knew Matt was wearing a yellow shirt and black pants and I knew he had a white helmet, but it was difficult to tell from a distance. I took pics of every potential Matt coming down just to be sure :) Here are a few of the mistakes...

Finally we spotted Matt and Ilsley...

Matt posed for a picture - that is not a thumbs down signal according to him - more of a fist raised in victory. I was relieved he was in such good spirits. I wasn't sure how he would come across the finish after 50 muddy miles on a mountain bike.

The proud bikers - they weren't clean :)

Matt is convinced he needs a new bike now. What else is new?

Luckily the race organizers thought of everything...

Dirt...

All I could think was oh my look at those WHITE FEET! Yikes! Haha.

Fun times! I'm so proud of these guys - what an accomplishment. A special thanks to cousin for joining me too :)

xoxo

Ice Cream!

I've mentioned before that my grandpa is the social director of our little community at the lake. It is a position that he has held for a long time so he really has it down pat. He recently decided that he was going to turn over one of the social events to my cousin and myself. We were given the "Ice Cream Social" and this was our first year flying solo! He equipped us with a detailed list (2 pages) of supplies needed and assisted with set-up, but left everything else up to us.

I'm proud to say we passed the test :)

Here are some pics from the day....

Setting up!

The co-chairs...eating on the job.

Eating...again.

A captive audience :)

Construction Week 3 + Weekend Update

Hello friends - hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend! It was great to have the house to ourselves for a few days.

They made a lot of progress last week. I didn't take picture of this but they finished putting the siding on the front of the house and exterior trim around all the new windows/door.

The floors were revealed and the first coat of paint is up.

I tried out the rug to be sure it fit - it does (or will once the new peninsula is finished)!

No cabinets yet. This color looks a bit dark right now, but most of the walls will be covered by cabinetry.

The backsplash will be one of the following. Any votes on which you like best?

The floor stain might be a bit lighter than this - it's going down tomorrow!

That's about it on house stuff. We gave the Weekend Eater the finger over the holiday and had some fun instead.

It rained on Saturday and Sunday. Are you surprised? I'm not. We slept in, took Will hiking, saw Hangover 2 (not nearly as funny as the first one), and did some more decision making on our living room decor.

Sunday was Marathon Day! Yipee! We ran the marathon as a relay team of 5 with cousin and some friends.

I stole these pics from cousin :)

The day started out rainy. Note that we're the only crazy nuts with an umbrella (hey I can embrace the rain but that doesn't mean I'm willing to get more wet than necessary).



I ran the third leg, which was the longest and ended going straight up this hill (can you tell how steep/long it was?). I couldn't complain - those running the full marathon had 11 miles to go after this! (Note - I'm not in any of these pics so don't try to find me - we took them after I finished...)



These awesome drummers kept everyone motivated starting at the bottom until about halfway up.



I lost a bit of motivation after that so can you blame me for missing this sign?



Apparently I was really concentrating on making it up the hill or maybe I wasn't looking very hard because I went the "marathon" route and missed the pass off to Rebecca. She was pretty confused when I ran in from the wrong direction. Oops.

Our team finished in 4 hours - a pretty good time considering my mishap. It was sunny by the finish and our VIP wristbands (a very exciting thing - we scored free drinks and a private porta potty) allowed us to sit by the lake in the sun and watch the finishers.



Monday was sunny and in the 80s - finally finally finally!! We spent the entire day enjoying it.



Plus we had our first creemees of the season. Yum!



More progress pics hopefully after this week. I did learn that the cabinets won't go in until next week. The lake level is still up so we continue to be stuck here in the construction zone. At least it's still moving along....

xoxo

Weekend Update

Happy Sunday everyone! Did you spend a lot of time this weekend watching the Masters? I can't help but think about how different it looks there than it does outside my window. Oh well. We'll get there. It was a gorgeous weekend here in Vermont. The temps FINALLY topped 50 degrees, climbing to 62 today! We had plenty of sunshine as well. After spending a weekend moving, Matt and I were itching to get out and enjoy the weather.

Saturday we did some skiing.

You know it's sunny when you see something like this waiting in the lift line :)

We climbed to the top of the fire tower (at the top of the resort) to check out the views.

I hesitated a bit looking at the ladder and thinking about climbing in my ski boots.

It was worth it - the views were spectacular. We counted at least 6 other ski resorts in view! Wow.

Saturday night cousin and some other friends came over for cocktail hour to see the house. We got a good glimpse of how the house would feel with a 4 year old wandering around - we'll have to figure something out with all these stairs :) Wish I had a video!

Sunday we switched gears (hehe...literally) to spring and went for a bike ride. There's an awesome bike path less than half a mile from our new house so we wanted to check it out.

We also did some (desperately needed) work in our new yard :) It has three things in abundance.

Trees. There are 20 in the backyard alone. I can only imagine what fall will be like.

When you have 20 trees in your backyard, you also get acorns. We filled 6 large trash bags with acorns and leaves and finished about half the yard.

Sticks. Again, there are 20 trees.

One thing it doesn't have (yet) is grass....Hm. We'll have to wait and see.

We did manage to uncover some early signs of spring :)

xo!