Farmers Market

I have been such a slacker since I got to Moscow. I've actually adjusted pretty decently to the time change...however, that's probably because I am sleeping about 11 hours each night! This leaves little time for me to get out and about before my shift starts at 1pm. However, the other day, I managed to drag myself out of bed at the early hour of ::ahem:: 9 am and meet up with one of my coworkers to go to the local farmers market. I wish the farmers markets in Houston looked like this - I would do most of my grocery shopping here...I didn't take any pictures because my hands were full of bags, but here are the fruits (and veggies) of my shopping trip. Yum.

Grandma

Grandma, Carter, and I on a post-dinner walk, laughing it up, the day before Easter

This is a long post. Because I need it to be.

As most of you know by now, my trip to Nebraska to attend my Grandpa's funeral didn't go as expected. We ended up having a joint funeral for both Grandpa and Grandma.

The memorial service for Grandpa was supposed to be on Easter Sunday. Grandma didn't come back from her walk. After several search parties, a police officer directed my uncle to the hospital, where a woman had been taken earlier that morning who matched Grandma's description. It was Grandma.

She had had a heart attack in the grocery store parking lot (she was planning on buying strawberries for our breakfast). Now, Grandma was insanely healthy - she hiked the Grand Canyon every year (and had a trip planned for this year) and rode her bike 5000-6000 miles every year (and she was 77...seriously...HEALTHY). There was nothing wrong with her heart...except she had just lost my Grandpa. Her heart literally broke. The attack was, in terms of heart attacks, a "minor" one, the doctors expected a full recovery. After some sad moments by Grandma's bedside as she expressed her desire to "be with Bob", she started rallying, talking, and joking...I chastised her for causing so much drama (don't worry, she laughed :) ). My siblings and I left the hospital shortly after 10pm on Easter to head back to our hotels. Each of us had had a conversation with Grandma, and told her goodnight. She and I shared some particularly sweet words.

At 1am, my phone rang. Grandma's pressures were dropping (she was DNR) and we needed to come to the hospital immediately. When I walked into her room, I wasn't sure I could stay there. She was hurting. The awesome nurses (really, incredibly kind and thoughtful staff) made her comfortable with some morphine, and we (my parents, siblings, aunt, uncles, and cousins) surrounded Grandma, holding her hands and patting her arms, telling her we loved her. And then she was gone. I've never seen someone die before.

Thus began a week of "someone pinch me because this can't be real".

It was pretty awful. Still is, truth be told.

I'm doing...okay. As my aunt put it, "we are all looking at what happened out of the corner of our eye...no one wants to stare it in the face". Well put. I am fully aware that I am in the whole pretending none of this happened, everything is still perfectly normal phase of grieving.

Still can't believe that the letter I received from them the day after Grandpa died is the last letter I will ever get from them (I've written them fairly regularly since I was 10 years old).

Words cannot sufficiently express how thankful I am that I had a good relationship with both Grandpa and Grandma. And that I got to spend the Saturday before Easter with her, laughing and talking. And that our last words together were so sweet.

• When I was little, I told Grandma I wanted to learn how to cook. She and Grandpa bought me The Joy of Cooking (yeah, a 700 page cooking book for an 8 year old :)...I still have and use it ). She then helped me plan a three course meal, helped me grocery shop for the ingredients, and then helped me prepare and serve it to my family and my Uncle Mike's family
  
• She taught me how to roll out the perfect pie crust
  
• I vividly recall her teaching me how to address an envelope
  
• She introduced me to the "The Pirates of Penzance" and organized plays for my cousins and I to act out for our families
• When I started learning Russian, she thought that was "cool" and learned along with me. We wrote letters to each other in Russian. It will be weird to go to Moscow this summer and not stop in a bookstore to buy some books to take back to her
• I showed up at their house three years ago during the Christmas holidays and asked her to teach me how to quilt. When I was at my uncle's house, I slept under the quilt that contained my first stitches ever quilted, stitched as she watched and instructed me
• Grandma and Grandpa loved to read. They volunteered at the local Book Barn in Tucson and would always have a pile of books to send home with me. Our letters were filled with different book recommendations
  

Grandma and I had a good thing between us and I am grateful to God for that...

Love you Grandma, and thank you for the memories.

Tri Girl Tri Super Sprint

Wahoo!!! I am back in the tri saddle and it feels GREAT!!!

Lisa, Erin W., Pooja, Erin S, and me at the start line...getting nervous

It's been a long road getting back here, and the journey probably isn't over. I just take one day at a time and today was a good day. Thankful to God for the work He has been doing in me, and the people He has put in my life to help encourage me and to help my body to heal (big shout out to Dr. Alice!).

I raced the Tri Girl Tri Super Sprint this morning (200yd swim, 8 mile bike, 2 mile run) with 5 of my friends (who also happen to be my coworkers as well). It was so much fun hanging out with these ladies and doing this race together!

My stats:
Swim 7:17
Transition 1: 2:18
Bike: 28:33 (16.8mph average!)
Transition 2: 1:16
Run: 20:20 (10:10 mile pace!)

Total: 59:46

My goal was to finish under an hour and I did! :)

Swim gear has been donned...almost go time!


Do you see me? Yeah I grinned like this through a LOT of the race! It felt so great to do this again!

My swim time wasn't what I had hoped for, but I did it. Time was 7 min, 17 sec. Open water is so different from the pool (for comparison, my pool time for this distance is 4:31). There's the people, the freak out factor, the choppiness of the water factor...it's a whole different world from the pool.

Coming in from the bike

I hadn't been on my bike in over two weeks, so I was a bit nervous about it, but kept a good pace, a lot of that due to the lack of wind :)

Finishing the run

The run went well, even sans Garmin ;-). I started out too fast as usual, but tried to really listen to my body, and got into a comfortable rhythm. It always amazes me how much faster I can run during tris (during my 5k a few weeks ago, I averaged a 11:10 pace, during the tri - 10:10)

Tri Girls!

I finished. And that is a huge milestone. But what makes it even better is that I finished well and with a bunch of my friends. Extra blessings just heaped on me. Wow.

Next tri? I'm looking online now for a good race :)

Grandpa

My Grandpa died this week.

I am sad.

He was a great man. When I went home to AZ for visits, I had lunch with him and my Grandma. Over coffee we talked about everything - religion, space exploration, politics, travel, and my favorite - his stories of my Dad, aunt, and uncles, growing up on a farm in Nebraska and his stories of him and his siblings growing up. He would laugh over the long-past antics of two generations of childhood to the point that tears would be streaming down his cheeks and he could barely finish the story for his laughter.

I still cannot believe he's gone and that we won't have another coffee time when I go home over Memorial Day weekend.

I am thankful that I knew him - knew about how he grew up and stories from his childhood. Knew how he raised he kids. Knew that he loved me very much. And that I loved him back.

Miss you Grandpa.

Preparing for Easter

My friend Jessica and I have been reading through this book over the past couple of weeks. It's a book that Nancy Guthrie compiled from various sermon excerpts, from pastors such as Augustine, Luther, Owen, Sproul, Mahaney, Edwards, and Keller, to name a few. The sermon excerpts focus on Easter and the work of Christ on the cross (Ms. Guthrie has a similar compilation in "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus- Readings for Advent" in preparation for Christmas- which is fantastic).

The book has 25 readings and we backed that out from Easter for when to begin reading one-a-day. This book has been amazing, convicting, renewing, and oh-so-focusing on what Easter really means. The other night, Jessica and I easily spent a half an hour going back and forth, each sharing a particular excerpt that was particularly encouraging/jaw dropping/convicting. Here are a couple of my favorites:

In the excerpt "The Silence of the Lamb" by Adrian Rogers, he addresses why Jesus was silent before Pilate and his accusers. Why didn't he defend himself?

"The Bible teaches us that when Jesus Christ took our sin, he took all of the punishment that goes with that sin. A part of that punishment is shame. Had Jesus defended himself and protested his innocence, he would have suffered no shame, and that would have left us guilty. Jesus could not prove himself innocent and then die in our place the shameful death that we deserve. Thank God that Jesus was willing to be counted a sinner before God, that we might be counted as righteous before God!"

In "Gethsemane" by R.Kent Hughes, he speaks on Jesus being arrested in Gethesemane and how that this wasn't a surprise to the Lord. He knew who was to betray Him, He knew that he was to be arrested. Gethesemane is in actuality a beautiful example of God's sovereignty and faithfulness (sorry for the long excerpt, but it is SOOO good!):

"The surroundings of Christ's final hour clearly display his sovereign control. The intensity of his agony and he sovereign resolve to bear it, his control over his captors, his protection of his own, his grace to the wounded, all proved he is an omniscient, all-powerful God. Christ was in control when life was falling in, when things looked the worst.

How does this related to us? Though Christ's Gethsemane was infinitely beyond human experience, Gethsemanes are part of believers' lives.

Gethsemane was not a tragedy, and neither are our Gethsemanes. This does not do away with the woulds of affliction in this life, but it is encouraging to see that behind human tragedy stands the benevolent and wise purpose of the Lord of human history. Life may be dark at times, tragedy may come, and at times the whole world may seem to be falling a part. The wheel may appear ready to crush us. But this is not the end. "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28), even in Gethsemane."

Wow.

I highly, HIGHLY recommend this book for those of you who want to focus your heart and mind on the Easter (or Advent) season from a Biblical perspective. So thankful for resources like this!

Garmin- FAIL...at least for now...

My superwoman watch is broken. ::pausing for cries of "oh no!":: Yes, yes it's true. My trusty Garmin 310XT has decided it does not want to be a GPS unit any more and only function as a stop watch. Gone are the days of it acquiring satellites...now it only mocks me with the status bar creeping towards 100%, only to jump back to the beginning and start over again. The Garmin customer service people have been great though- on the phone and via email. Unfortunately, all their ideas thus far have not panned out...Master reset?- fail. New software upload? - fail. I think I may have to send it in...one colleague at work quipped "looks like you have a master antenna failure" (note: this is a truly nerdy and hilarious NASA-esque comment, but I am not going to expound on what it means because 1) you all would fall asleep 2) you would not find it as hilarious as the group of us did when he said it and 3) explaining it will just make me more nerdier than I already am :) ).

Aww, see how excited I was a year ago about my new superwoman watch...when it was working perfectly? Ahh ::memories::

Now I must rely on ::gasp:: a regular stopwatch type watch and actually listen to my body whilst running rather than on my beloved gadget that could pretty much calculate every drop of sweat I sweated.

::disclaimer- yes, this is meant to be a lighthearted, self-deprecating post, spurred by my fleeting sense of loss and panic when it first died...and then the next thought of exasperation "oh good night Melissa, it's JUST a watch". Just in case you all thought I needed to be prayed over and spoken to about idols ;-) :: Oh technology.

5k!!!

I ran an entire 5k (3.1 miles) this morning!!! The furthest I had run since The Back was only a little over 2 miles...so I was definitely in unknown territory this morning! I did the Yuri's Night (Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space- the 50th anniversary of his flight was this past week) 5k. It was in a great park on both paved, grassy, and dirt paths. The grass was a little challenging for me- the bumpy terrain jarred my back quite a bit. There was a decent short hill and I had to walk/run the descent cause my feet were landing too hard and jarring me too much. I tried to pick up the pace during the last mile, but The Back wasn't having that, so I decided to just be thankful that I was going to be able to finish the entire distance. My friend Jessica happened to be doing the race too, and she's also overcoming an injury, so we ran together. It was a gorgeous cool morning for a run and the race vibe was laidback and fun. I would definitely like to do this race again next year.

This morning, when I woke up, I prayed "God, I am going to run as far as you will let me". And 3.1 miles and 34 minutes later, I crossed the finish line, having run the entire course :). Praise Him.

Post race shot with my running/training buddy Lisa (she finished in 29 minutes!)