Back to Life.

Back to reality.

More specifically, back to the catastophies that me to begin this blog in the first place.

Last Sunday, we went on a bike ride with our friend Zach who was in town visiting Rice (Zach and Paige are moving to Houston - hooray!!). We were supposed to ride 65 miles, but since I cried for the first 30ish miles of the ride, the guys let me go home (secretely, I know they wanted to go home too). DUDE. The wind was TERRIBLE and it was soooo cold. I could barely control my bike because the crosswinds were insane, and if we weren't in cross wind, we were in a headwind that was about 20-25 mph with 30mpg gusts. DUDE. It was miserable. I seriously cried. The whole way. And then my tears froze on my face. So, our 65 mile bike ride turned into 40ish miles...and took us the same amount of time. Our average speed was 14mph...which on a good day is like a leisurely bike ride. Last Sunday however, I was busting some serious arse to get my bike to go faster than 2mph. I swear.

Anyway, after that wonderful and enjoyable ride, I threw my bike in my car and headed home. I ran over a giant piece of metal that tore a hole in the condensor of my AC (thereby rendering it useless), cracked my windshield and tore up my bumper. Awesome.

Tommy left for Amsterdam right when we got home from the bike ride, so I got to deal with with my car troubles by myself.

On Tuesday evening, I took my pooch for a run...I had already worked out that day so I was just gonna do a couple of miles so he could get some exercise. When I came home, the cops were outside my house checking the place out. Apparently in the 20 minutes I was gone, my house alarm when off. The cops walked through the house with me and everything looked fine. I think (hope) it was a false alarm. I didn't sleep so well that night.

On Wednesday, I took my car to the shop. Repairs were estimated at about $2000 so I filed a claim with insurance. Since insurance takes a long time, it was estimated that my car wouldn't be done till the end of this week...so I am driving a Nissan Versa for now. It's a magical POS.

I drove the Versa for 2 days, during which I noticed a clanking everytime I made a right turn. Turns out that there were empty Modelo beer bottles under the passenger seat. Apparently Enterprise doesn't believe in cleaning cars before renting them out. But the good news is that I left my garage door opener and my work badge in my car at the dealership, so I can't get into my garage at home or the parking garage at work.

On Thursday my phone stopped working. The buttons just stopped doing anything. The music player would turn on all by itself but then the buttons would stop working, so you couldn't turn the music off. I would have to take the battery out to make the music stop. Very bizarre. In the mornings, my alarm would go off, but I wouldn't be able to turn it off. TMobile is sending me a new phone that should be here within 4-10 business days. GREAT. Almost 2 weeks without a phone - yippee. I can be reached by email, thanks. That night, I met Janelle and Thomas and Francis for dinner at Collina's where I got sufficiently drunk and all was okay with the world. Then we went to Onion Creek to wish Robert a farewell.

So, at this point, I am without a car, without a phone and my house keeps getting broken into!

Tommy and I spent Friday afternoon evening sitting on our porch at home drinking wine and chatting, and then we went to Onion Creek to meet some friends for crawfish and beer...however at $6 a pound for crawfish, we opted out and eventually came home to make sushi for dinner.

On Saturday, we woke up at 1am to meet Thomas at his house so we could drive to Gonzales, Texas to begin the TEXAS INDEPENDENCE RELAY. It's a 203 mile relay that follows the trail of battles that led to the Texas' independence. We had an 11 person team and we each ran 3-4 legs of 4-6 miles each. I ran 23 miles over Sat/Sun and Tommy ran 24. It was a lot of fun and my knee did surprisingly well (maybe acupuncture works?). My knee started hurting a bit on my 4th leg, but all in all, it was MUCH better than I anticipated. Setting low expectations is sometimes a good thing. Ha.

On Saturday night, we got a call (on Tommy's phone of course, mine is still broken) from the alarm company saying that our alarm had gone off AGAIN! and the cops had gone over, but it didn't look like anything was wrong. The glass break detector went off so we were worried...we had some time on Sunday morning to stop by the house real quick to check it out. Luckily, a bunch of magnet had just falled off the fridge and set it off, but dear gawd, I was freaked out.

36 hours later, we crossed the finish line at the San Jacinto Monument, the magical place where Santa Anna was finally defeated and Texas' Independence was won!!

We finished off a catastrophic (yet fun)week with some beer at Shady Tavern and pizza sponsored by Froehlich. It was delicious.

At about 8:30, we crawled into bed and passed out. We slept till 6:30 and I am still tired.

Hopefully I will get a phone and a car this week...keep your fingers crossed!!