Father's Day Cookout

Jesse, me, Josh, Pam, and Joe

This past Sunday to celebrate Father's day we invited the fam for a cookout as we did last year. We made smoked chicken thighs with our smoker. We also had smoked white fish with greek yogurt dill sauce, hummus and baba ganoush with flatbread, spinach and feta spanakopitta, and greek olives (all brought to you by Costco).

Mediterranean Spread

After chowing down we spent lots of time chatting on the screen porch until I was able to drag everyone out for a rousing game of horseshoes. We called it a day once everyone had a sufficient number of bug bites.

Father in law Jim and my Daddy-o Joe

Jim and Christopher

Another work trip

I must travel for my job. Now, I love to travel to new places, but these aren't your typical conference/networking work trips where lots of downtime is anticipated. While Dallas in April turned out not to be as traumatizing and exhausting as my month long escapade to a particularly southern town last year, working eleven days straight plus overtime aint no walk in the park. 

Lake Caroline

It was pleasant at times though. I managed to scrape time together here and there to log 3 runs (go me!) This photo illustrates why it was easy to convince my sleepy body to lace up my running shoes.

Here is an example of how weird I am (don't worry, Chris thoroughly makes fun of me when I do this).

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

One thing that I can usually count on with these trips is that I will get to try some good local food. Well, no such luck in Dallas. Maybe I just wasn't going to the right places, but the best food I had was from Marriot's room service.

Some scary things happened while I was away that made me wish I could hug my family. The Boston marathon bombing for one, and then a few days later, the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. One was purposeful and one was seemingly an accident, both are awful for having occurred. It was scary how close the plant explosion was to where I was working, and it put everyone I was working with on edge because of the work that we do.

I did make time to meet up with some family that live nearby in Burleson; my husband's cousin Will and his wife Kristina, and cousin Rick and wife Wendy and their rambunctious children, Morgan, Miles, and Mia! Here is Mia bouncing around at dinner, she is hilarious.

Rick and Mia

Now you might think that when I returned home I would've put on my yoga pants, flopped on the couch, and started in on a Girls on HBO marathon. Well I didn't do that for two reasons. One, it would've been rude because I have a standing date with Kristina to watch Girls. And two, I wanted to go backpacking! So off we went to the George Washington National Forest!

More on that later...