Calm before the Crazy

Looking at my phone I see that I have lots of photos of Oliver holding worms, so I guess it's blog-worthy. Above, he found a worm while hiking.

And here he found a worm in the garden. For Easter, we got the kids kiddie-sized garden tools. They were so excited they got right to business digging. 

San Diego! Scott had a radiology conference there, so Grandma Raymond flew to Boston to be with the kids so I could go with Scott! It was amazing! On the first day, we rented a car and drove to La Jolla. 

We stopped at a taco stand...

...and got the most amazing fish tacos ever. We ordered a few, ate them, then ordered more because they were so so good.

It is pupping season for the seals, so we watched them play in the waves and lay around on the beach. From there, we drove to Scott's uncle's house and went for a run on some nearby trails, then had dinner with family. 

On the second day, I went for my last long run: 23 miles from San Diego down through Chula Vista and Imperial Beach to the Silver Strand parkway up to Coronado - all around the bay. I had the run timed so that I would catch a ferry from Coronado Island back to downtown San Diego, so the last three miles I picked up the pace. I made the ferry by three minutes! The run was great and the view was amazing (at least after the first five miles of running between train tracks and navy yards!). 

This was the view from the ferry. Our hotel is the tall one on the left side of downtown.

This was the view from our room. Pretty much every morning I ate breakfast slowly while staring out the window. Because I could. I also indulged in luxuries like shopping by myself, sitting under palm trees for no good reason, sleeping continuously for 8+ hours, talking on the phone without interruption, taking long showers...

...and meeting up with a friend for lunch. This is one of my BYU cross country teammates, Tara Rohatinsky Northcutt. She is awesome - and not just at running. 

Scott had 6ish hours of lectures and stuff every day and then we would do something touristy together. We went to Old Town and the Mormon Battalion Museum one day. Another day we went with some co-residents to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. It is far out of town, so we had to rent cars to get there. The rental car place ran out of vans and didn't have many options for cars, so we drove away with two convertibles. When in Rome...

We got back to Boston on Friday night. I ran the Upton 15K on Saturday morning then hung out with Scott's sister, Nancy, and her family, who came to visit from Philadelphia. On Saturday night we took Scott's mom to the Figure Skating World Championships. She has always loved watching figure skating. I've always wanted to go to something like this too. Win, win.

We watched some amazing performances from the women's long program. By the end of the night, American Ashley Wagner was in second sandwiched by Russians on the podium.

The weather has been cold. It snowed a few inches last week. Now I'm obsessing about the weather because the Boston Marathon is only a few days away! Hopefully the weather will cooperate because my training has been great and I'm hoping to run a fast time.