Vanessa and Zane hosted their third annual talent(less) night as their farewell (Veloma) party.    It was an amazing night.  Everyone had to present a talent to come.  The “talents” ranged from zumba to skits to lip-syncing to song writing.  It was completely silly and totally fun!  It was truly one of my most favorite nights here in Tana.  What an incredible crowd of people.  So sad to see more than half of them go this “summer”.

Warren has been working on a home brew for the first time.  It turned out really well, which is a good thing because it was featured at our house as the second stop on the home brew crawl.   All the home brewers in the neighborhood (7 that I know of) got together and planned a crawl to sample all of the brews of Ivandry.  They even made souvenir glasses for tasting.   All four homes featured a different food as well, so we had good old southern BBQ which was even more amazing than the beer – all Warren’s doing!  It was a fabulous night and made me happy to be a part of this awesome community!

Three weeks ago, on May 4,  I ran the UTOP.  It turned out to be 18.95 miles of intense trail running.  We were SO lucky because the weather was amazing.  It was breezy and mostly overcast.    It was the start of the cooler season here and it came just in time!  The race didn’t start until 8:30 but it was ok, because of the weather.   A HUGE group of us met in the neighborhood at 6:15 to make the hour plus drive to the start.

The starting line had awesome energy, like most races do.   We were all so excited and nervous too!   I started the race with Jim who helped me figure out how to bypass people on very tiny trails and stayed with him until about 4 miles and then he was just too fast for me.

I ran solo and happy.  I have no idea why, but I was just SO happy along this run.  It was breathtakingly beautiful and I was just so glad to be alive doing this run.  It was hard and hilly but I simply took my time, listened to my music, jumped over streams, avoided LOTS of cow patties, walked across a few logs (over streams), balanced on rice paddies, and took it all in.   4 hours, 30 minutes later I was done and I even felt like I could do more! It was the perfect first UTOP experience.  Fingers crossed for similar weather and experiences next year!

picking up race packets

neighborhood crew

We finished!!!!