30 Before 30: 1 year to go!!

Today is the day, my last birthday in my 20s.  I'm not nearly as freaked out by that fact as I am by the fact that I still have 15 items from my 30 Before 30 left to do (yikes!!).  I am in progress on at least 6 of them, but there are still a bunch that I have to figure out how I want to do them.  Here's a status update:

• attend a black-tie event (that’s not a wedding) and wear a floor length gown - I think I will just be the most over-dressed person at the MBA Formal next January!
• be able to do 10 push-ups - Ugh...still working at this one.  It's HARD.
• buy myself an expensive piece of jewelry - No idea what to get...suggestions?
• do a 30 before 30 list - Obviously in progress (ok, fine, this one is a cop-out)
• go to a top 40 pop concert - Detroit has a dearth of awesome concerts...checking Nikki Minaj's tour schedule now...
• host an awesome party - Hopefully this will be our welcome party when we move into a house next year!!
• pick and buy a stock (myself, not with my husband) - I have no excuse for not starting this yet..
• plant a garden - Does re-potting a single plant count?
• read the Bible all the way through - As of next week I will be 75% of the way done with this!! I'm doing it in a year and started on our second anniversary (October 24), so I will be done this October!
• read the top ten novels on a list (thinking this one) - Got bogged down with 1984...can I substitute The Hunger Games?? :)
• renovate something - I am going to interpret this liberally...a table, my wardrobe...not sure
• run a sub-1:50 half marathon - Detroit Half Marathon in October!!
• take a class in something that interests me - I'm giong to enroll in Tennis classes this fall!
• visit san francisco - Hopefully we will be going in September!
• ______(this space intentionally left blank for a miscellaneous adventure!) - I have an idea of what this might be, but I'm not telling yet :)

30 Before 30: Get a new hairdo!

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my sister's new home in St. Louis, MO.  She's busy taking the St. Louis hair style community by storm, so I took advantage of being there and asked her to give me a new hairdo!  She took about 4 inches off of my length, added a bunch more highlights, and cut me some side-swept bangs.  What do you think??

Before:

After:

I know it's nothing drastic, but it feels different to me and it's the perfect 'do for summer and swimming!

Thanks, T, I love it!!!

30 Before 30: Do a mud run or obstacle course race (this one was both!)

Time to check another one off the list!  We recently did a race called the Filthy 5K with Nashville. It counts as both a mud run AND an obstacle race! We chose the race beacuse they had a heat specifically for pups!  It was a very small group of about 20 dogs and maybe 30 owners and was the last heat in the race, so we got there after a lot of the fun had died down, but it was still a good time.

We warmed up before the race by taking Nash through some of the obstacles in the kids race (no children were present or harmed):

Up and over!

 Then we all lined up at the start:
  

Nash suddenly got REALLY interested
in the other pups!

And we're OFF!!!

  

First major obstacle...

This was before Nash really liked swimming,
so he's paddling pretty hard!  Not to mention
that guy in the crazy costume scared him!

The race didn't have a ton of photo worthy obstacles, but here are the photos that I stole off the photographer's web site (sorry photog friends...I didn't want to pay just to show pictures of me on my blog!).

After the race there was a lot of shaking paired with looks that said "WTF, Mom and Dad, that was weird!!"

Still confused, but happy to be done!

After the race, he literally was like, I will sit on you to make sure that doesn't happen again!"

And then I had some tired pups!

Wrap-up of Europe Trip

Alright, we've been back from Europe for almost 2 months and I'm finally trying to wrap things up.  I have 2 more to-dos:

1) Tell you about the amazing iPad apps we used while traveling - I was lucky enough to get an iPad from my work last fall, but it wasn't until our trip to Europe that I really ever felt like the thing was worth the price if I would have had to purchase it myself.  However, the value we got out of that silly piece of electronics was definitely enough to persuade me that it is worth it.  Do yourself a favor.  If you don't have an iPad and have a major trip coming up, budget the price of the iPad into your overall trip budget.  You will not regret it, it won't seem like such an outlay compared to flights, hotels, etc. and - BONUS! - you'll have an iPad when you get home so you can squirrel away the hours playing Bejeweled, Words with Friends or Draw Something with the rest of us.

So, let me tell you about Ulmon, my new best friend.

They make a series of apps for travel called ____Guide2Go.  The apps are $1.99 each, and they include a full suite of Wikipedia articles, Killer Maps that zoom to the Nth degree and truly help you get around, Points of Interest (for things like restaurants, libraries, police stations, churches, etc.), and some even have the full subway map (Paris, London, Rome and New York).  They even have something that I didn't realize existed -  passive GPS, which basically means you don't have to have 3G on your iPad, the app can use nearby wi-fi networks to locate you even when you are not connected to them!  Oh, and everything is available offline.

I cannot tell you how many times we used the iPad around Paris. Everything is integrated, so we could be looking at the map and see a Wikipedia article about a museum, decide we want to go there, use the map to find the nearest Metro stop, use the Metro map to figure out where to get off the metro, and use the passive GPS once we got off the Metro to figure out where we were and how to get to the museum.  PHENOMENAL.

They also have a lighter version for a ton more cities called CityMaps2Go.  It's one app you download and then for each city, you download that city map within the app.  Once you download it, it is fully offline, so you can use it on the run.  CityMaps2Go have all the POIs and also have even more detailed maps and the passive GPS.  You can zoom in almost to the building level, which was really helpful in Prague and Krakow where the streets can be very confusing.  I HIGHLY recommend these apps (and the iPad to go with them.  Think about how much you'll save on maps, not to mention your time and peace of mind.

2) Make the photo book - I am in the process of putting together my photo book.  And by in process I mean I have populated the online book with all of my photos and now need to start cutting and pruning the pages so that the book is not 116 pages and $125.51 (which it is at this point).

I will post a link to my preview once it's done!!
Carissa

What do you say I blog when I'm NOT doing my 30 before 30? Sound good?

Well, I actually will be doing 2 30 before 30 blogs this week because TURNS OUT, I'm 29 on Saturday!  And I figure I should be up-to-date at that point on what I have yet to accomplish in the final year.  So with that said, be on the lookout for blogs about 1) my new hairdo and 2) our mud run later this week.

But first, an un-related post about my pup.

So I've recently taken up Tennis (OMG, which gives me an idea, I'm TOTALLY making that my "take a class in something that interests me" item.  Sweet, note to self, register).  Anyway, so yes, I've taken up tennis, and by that I mean that Taylor has been kind enough to hit balls that I can easily return a few times in the last week.  It's been really fun!  It's also been fun for Nashville because we have all sorts of tennis balls around the house.  He's been destroying them with some consistency, so today I bought him some special "pet" tennis balls that are supposedly "TUFF" as in harder to destroy than a standard tennis ball.  

Which I guess Nashville took as a challenge.

Because here's what happened almost immediately:

Love that crazy pup!