Footloose and fancy free!

What a glorious weekend!

Yesterday I field tripped to Odyssey Maritime Museum for a Gluten Intolerance Group event of GF beer and food. I had pizza and quesedillas made from teff tortillas, and these amazing chicken wraps. I also tried my first crab cake which confirmed my dislike of crab cakes. There was also brownies and pound cake. The pound cake was great... the brownies not as much. I also had 2 beers which prompted me to think that I may be a bit tipsy. :) One was actually a cider and that was yummy. The other was a GF beer and since it has been over 11 years since I last had a beer, clearly I don't remember what real beer tastes like. This was really bitter and I wasn't partial to it. It is cool to have an option though. I like the Odyssey museum. It is sad it may be closing due to money. But it is a cute little museum with fun and interesting activities. I think the bad part for them is that they don't have rotating exhibits and I think that's a problem for repeat business.

Today was The Big Climb for Leukemia and Lymphoma. Today is the day regular people do the climb up the 69 flights of stairs. They go up 788 vertical feet and it is 1,311 stairs. It was a good time, but I am EXHAUSTED. I left the apartment at 6:30 this morning and got home at 6:30 tonight. I was at the climb until 4:00 and then stopped into the library to study for an hour and a half. I picked up dinner on the way home and now I'm sitting here propping my feet up. I've been on them about 10 hours... they kind of hate me right now. :) A couple things that surprised me or touched me about this climb... 1 - there were a large number of kids doing the climb. It was awesome to see these little kids who RAN up the stairs. Similar to the firefighters, there were a lot of groups running or climbing for someone else. There was one team from Olympia that was HUGE. (Puyallup I think now that I think about it) They were all wearing blue t-shirts and had 3 ribbons pinned to their shirts. The ribbons represented 3 kids who had cancer. They also had a picture on their backs of a little baby. I asked one of the women walking about the child, and unfortunately s/he had passed away. I almost wanted to cry, it was so sad to think about this cute little baby (toddler technically) with bright blue eyes who died so young. I was kind of glad when that whole group ended up going back downstairs after they were done. The shirt made me sad. A coworker talked to me about maybe doing this next year. I think it could be a good thing. I don't know if I can train for it though. I'm not sure how the tendon will love this. Ooh also, I saw the two married guys we went to Long Beach with at the top of the climb. They ran up the stairs which is awesome! (There are two different ways to do the big clmib. There's one group that gets timed and for them it is all about the time. There's another group that just walks and they aren't timed. Well, walkers probably could do the timing thing if they wanted to. Really it is just timed vs not timed.)

Next weeekend is shaping up to be just as busy as this one. I can't wait until April, when I'll drop to sleep all weekend long. :)