Author: Matt

Rain, Rain, Stayed Away

We’ve had wonderful luck with the weather this vacation. We haven’t really had any rain directly on us any of the times we wanted to go outside. That is not to say the area is in a drought, it’s just that we have had extraordinary luck. I mean, check out the current radar (we are the lucky little orange triangle):sk_radar1.jpg

10k The Easy Way

Shannon and I ran the Peachtree Road Race this morning for the first time in our lives, and it couldn’t have been easier. The weather was perfect, the volunteers were awesome, and we both stayed mostly pain free for the whole race (10k = 6.2mi). The dreaded hills didn’t seem as bad as the ones around our house, which are some of the worst I’ve ever run on.

It’s hard to believe we’ve lived here our whole lives and haven’t participated before, but we can check this off the list.

Getting there was fun- the Chamblee MARTA station parking lot was nearly full and we parked in a rarely opened auxiliary lot. While walking into the station we overheard an announcement that trains were going to run every 10 minutes all day, good news! When we got to the platform there was a massive crowd that had clearly been waiting more than 10 minutes. We heard another garbled announcement that contained the phrase “sorry for the delay,” and the first train showed up almost 20 minutes later. We somehow managed to all fit on the train, although we were both in the middle of the car away from any handles or things like that. We got to the starting paddock with time to stretch, and then we were off.

The finish area was awesome, with a very well organized setup. They had huge balloons signifying the locations of water and different t-shirt sizes. There was a mysterious lack of port-a-potties at the end of the race, or at least we couldn’t find them. I’ll tell you what we did find, though: Blue Bell ice cream. They were giving some away, and it’s my new official post run snack.

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When It Rains It Pours

We just got word on the appraisal from the credit union, and the news is not good. Our house has lost about 10% of it’s value since we bought, which means we are nowhere near 80% equity and will have to pay mortgage insurance if we go ahead with the refinance. We are planning to cash out some of our retirement funds without penalty in order to pay off some of the loan and still maintain 80% equity, so I think we can still do it.

As if that wasn’t enough bad financial news, it looks like Northridge is going to have to lay off 8 more employees in order to stay afloat for the coming year. Some of the 8 include good friends of mine at the company.

All of this would be easier to deal with if Liam hadn’t decided to stop sleeping through the night. He now wakes up regularly around 2am and can only be soothed by watching television. We were hoping to make it until he was 2, but at least now I can catch up on SportsCenter.

Peachtree Road Race Here We Come

We totally forgot about setting an alarm so we could get up and try to register online at 7am this morning, so around 9am I remember and pull up ajc.com and try to register. Of course it says “registration volume higher than normal” and has some stuff on the landing page about how they are working on it. Gee, nobody could have possibly predicted this one. I mean, an extraordinarily popular race that always fills up instantly and has people that want to race but are just unlucky? All that was missing was the PDB delivered to the president.

I hope everyone that was up at 7am was able to register, otherwise I will feel kinda bad. Not bad enough to give up my spot, though.

Maybe we won’t get sick the day of the race this time!