Thanksgiving a Month Later

Finally things have calmed down just enough to catch up on some lost time! Unfortunately that means rewinding a whole month!! Jer and I spent Thanksgiving day with my family, but first we competed in the SARR Turkey Trot 4 Miler at McAllister park. It was a gorgeous day and luckily they had a HUGE turnout.

Jer trying to convince the kid it's not a good idea to be in the front

And we're off! Yep, I definitely took it out quicker than Jer.

I got to run with two speed demons pretty much the entire 4 miles, Dana Mecke and Emily Dunn. All three of us were coming from different places in our training, but fortunately we were all about the same level on race day. Dana was focusing on base training so she could be ready to kick some butt in the 800/1500 this spring, Miss Dunn was coming back from injury, and I was just coming back from some much needed time off of marathon training. I got second to Dana with a time of 23:29.

During the middle of the race, Dana and Emily are hiding.

 Jer was attempting to defend his title from last year, but ended up finishing 3rd to some pretty speedy dudes. He still ran 20:12, which was nearly 50 seconds faster than the previous year, so it's hard for me to feel too sorry for him. Especially considering the fact he ran a marathon just 11 days prior to the Trot de Turkey.  It was a really fun morning for both of us.

Blurry Jer

After wards we quickly showered and then headed to my parents house to celebrate Turkey day with the rest of the family. It was a lot of fun. Volleyball, food, football, and more food. It was delicious.

Just part of the awesome spread we had

Volleyball in the background and chit chat on the porch

The cousins on my Dad's side of the family. We're missing a couple too!

Later that evening my cousins decided that we needed some more quality family time so we headed to the bowling ally and got our bowl on!

Typical

Needless to say Thanksgiving day was full of fun and family time...and that wasn't it either! A couple days later we headed out to the farm to spend some time with Jer's family. It was a blast, we even found some old bones!! To be continued...  : )

It's a Big Weekend for Daum Photography!

So back in May I hit a little rough patch in my life. Solely because I had no idea what I was going to be doing for a job after May since my internship was ending and we didn't get approval for a new one. LAME. Or so I thought. The post I wrote...When One Door Closes...Break a Window went into detail what my plans were...picking up a camera and getting into the action photography a little more.

Luckily for me things are paying off! Trinity has been hiring me to shoot the majority of their games. I've also made my product available to parents, and other interested parties, on my website (www.daumphotography.com)  if they wanted to order prints or merchandise. It's been a really fun past couple of months to say the least.

This week I got some BIG news. D3soccer.com was looking around for a local photographer for all 6 games at the NCAA Men and Women's Championship Tournament and picked ME!!! Not only that, but a couple of schools are also interested in my services. I'm crazy nervous about tomorrow and Saturday, but I've gotten a lot of good opportunities to get practice in and am feeling a lot more comfortable knowing I'll have a second shooter helping me out. 100 billion thanks to Trinity's SID for putting my name out there too ; ) Let's hope I get some good shots!

Here's a little tribute to Trinity's men and women's soccer teams. They've had an amazing year and I'm definitely bummed I won't get to take any action shots of them tomorrow.

Rest and Relaxation

R&R is something all runners should take after a season of consistent training. Jer and I decided it’d be good to take a weekend to ourselves and get away from the city, the technology, the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day grind. We both took Friday off a couple weeks ago. We went out for a nice morning run, went grocery shopping for the weekend necessities, and stopped by Starbucks to make sure we were wide awake for the trip to the farm. The farm, or the cabin (it has a bunch of different names), is a piece of land on 40ish acres with a lovely little house on it that has all the basic needs. It faces a lovely little pond, which unfortunately was basically dried up when we were there.

Marzuki wondering when we're gonna get there

The 2.5hr trip went fairly well. After being on the road for a very short time I realized that I didn’t bring a single memory card for my camera!! What a dufus! I really wanted to spend some time getting more familiar with my camera, so we stopped by a Wal-Mart in La Grange, Texas and found one there. I’m so glad we did too! I had a good time messing around with different camera settings.

Dex showing his dad some love

One of the things Jer and I were really looking forward to was seeing how our two furry children would react to being unleashed in the “wild”. Would they run away and never come back? Would they be too scared and stay curled up by our side? If they saw a cow would they run in fear or try to play with it? Well, they had a blast to say the least. The first thing they did was sniff the cow poop that was scattered everywhere since the pond was completely dried up and there weren’t any barriers from keeping the cows away from the cabin. Marzuki and Dexter got a little adventurous, but they never went too far. They always came anytime we called for them. It was a very rare occurrence if they didn’t have smile plastered on their face when they were awake.

Happy Doogles to say the least

Jer and I spent time talking about life, sipping on coffee and mojitos on the porch, watching our doogles run their little hearts out, cooking delicious meals, playing multiple games of scrabble, starting camp fires, taking tons of pictures, going on mini-hikes, catching up on sleep, and just enjoying nature! It was great. We ended up staying Friday and Saturday night because we were having such a fun time. The one thing that we got from the weekend was realizing we definitely needed the break. It got us excited about the future and made us realize we love our dogs WAY TOO MUCH!! 

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the weekend : )

Dex ALWAYS took the short cut

Running through the trails

He's so fast

Dex chillin where the pond used to be

This photo makes me smile the most-he's such a goof!

The cows drinking what little water is left in the pond

Marzuki trying to get himself out of the mud he sunk into

And here we have him mid-shake attempting to get the mud off!