No superlatives here, just a fun end-of-year meal at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. Pho and a super spicy marinated pork with rice.

Neil’s on-call this evening, so we are sharing a quiet night at home. I’m actually really looking forward to it, as we’ve got games and fun snacks planned, and plenty of new snow to enjoy

Have a safe and wonderful evening!

We spent a good part of this weekend saying goodbye to a friend from CrossFit. She has graduated and is off to Miami to start grad school and a new adventure. We’re so excited for her, but so sad to lose her all the same. She is truly one-of-a-kind, and if you ever hear the phrase “sunshine and rainbows,” it fits her perfectly, right down to her socks.
She’s the picture of adventure, optimism and how to magnify happiness in life’s little moments. I wish I’d known her in my early twenties, when I used to worry about every little thing enough for ten people.

We did a fun little WOD as a send-off. A 4-round “Fight Gone Bad” style workout with three stations. The first, cartwheel burpees, is not a legitimate CrossFit move, but something Kaitlan would totally have us do in one of her signature warm-ups. The second station was squat clean thrusters, a simple squat-clean from the ground into an overhead thruster.
The last was a move that our trainer said was legit, but it seemed a little too weird to be true at first. Inverted burpees. Starting on your back, you roll onto your feet, and then over against the wall into a head/handstand push-up. Weird right?


Needless to say, two of these stations left us a little dizzy and seeing rainbows ourselves. We take an awesome photo don’t we?
I feel so fortunate to have had some of the most amazing people come into my life this year in a time when I really needed a fresh new start, lots of inspiration and the reassurance that I’m worthwhile and valued. I hope to pay it all forward in a big way next year. More on that soon.

Family holiday photo outtake. I’m special…
It was so nice to relax and catch up with my Google Reader over the holiday break. It has been the unfortunate victim of my travel and work schedule, and has had the dismal “1000+” sitting next to my “All Entries” for far too long. Having around 500 RSS subscriptions probably doesn’t help, but I just can’t bring myself to un-subscribe from anyone.
Here are some fun links I came across:
Food
DIY
Other Reads
Have any big weekend/New Year’s plans? This weekend we have some client work to do before we jet off to Springfield for New Year’s Eve. Well, scratch that. As I was writing this post, Neil realized he was on-call and we’re now home for New Year’s. Any suggestions on fun ways to make a relatively quiet New Year’s at home special? I definitely think all his favorite foods will be on the menu. What a bummer!