Happy New Year – kristilynk

Happy New Year!

Hi! Are people still blogging in 2024? I am surprised at myself for not taking my question to Uncle Google.

I started my day 1, 2024, hang over free. Quite possibly for the first time in decades. 🫣

I feel great. . I have had a pretty great day too. Slept in until 7am, finished a book. “Fourth Wing” by Rebecca Yarros ~ kind of along the lines of Harry Potter and Hunger Games. Right up my alley so of course I had to get to Target to pick up the sequel, “Iron Flame”.

I got a 2.5 mile run in, took Mork for a walk around the neighborhood. Took down Christmas and did some laundry. Very ordinary nothing special day and I enjoyed it. ☺️

Here’s to the New Year

Looking forward to dry January.

Looking forward to training for my first 1/2 marathon!

2022, day 1

Done, in the books! It’s officially 2022. My day started out with a casual 4.5 wog (walk/jog) on the treadmill in my garage. I didn’t want to leave my house so I opted for home “gym” time.

Afterwards, I cleaned to prepare for friends and fam time, showered and complete just in the knick of time! It was a full house minus a few people (a couple down due to Covid and one down due to work emergency).

We had everything bacon! Jason made brisket, Shannon brought her world famous potato salad (with bacon), Danny made Mac n cheese topped..with bacon, Wyatt brought field peas, green beans mixed with… you guessed it… BACON! Me think I will be trying two days meat free this upcoming week.

We listened to records, watched movies, Shannon brought tarot cards, ate and of course there were adult bevy’s.

Hence the reason my activity numbers are so low today. 😅

The 3 minutes of exercise might be when I did some dishes. 😂 All in all it was a good first day of the new year. I was happy to spend it at home, with people I love.

I cannot end this post without a picture of the most excellent meat slab. You’re welcome 😇

I’m told the red ring is called the “smoke ring”

On the road to 2022

The end of 2021 is upon us. I know I am absolutely not going to make it to midnight to “ring in the new year” and I am 100% OK with that. Midnight, is not my gig. What I am excited about is tomorrow, New Years day. We have friends and family coming over, Jason is making brisket. The friends and fam are bringing sides and we will start 2022 out properly. There will be drinks, food and silly conversations.

I ended 2021 exactly how I wanted. Well, I did wake up a little earlier than I would have liked but it allowed me to enjoy more time. Jason and I has coffee, breakfast and then I hit the gym for a spin class. The gym session was followed by hours upon hours of couch surfing. After all, I am trying to finish out a ridiculous Netflix series..so embarrassed to say but..yes, I am on the last season of….”Riverdale”. It is dumb as..but, I am hooked. Who else has been lassoed into this this ridiculousness?

My European friends have already said hello to 2022. We, here in Arizona, have another 5 hours and 15 minutes!

I am thankful for so much. 2021 was good to me. It was NOT perfect, but what I did realize if you have people in your life who accept you for who you are at your worst and still reach out and love you…hold on to those people. Look inside yourself…what can you do to make them proud? What can you do to show them you are thankful for not giving up on you?

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you stay safe, healthy and on course. Your course. Whatever that may be.

Happy New Year!

It’s good to be back! Well, I think? I guess it depends on how well this post goes. I am extremely out of blogging/writing practice. I didn’t bother to check my page to see how long it has been since I’ve posted ANYTHING. I would venture to guess it’s been at least since the last NY.

In 2017, I denied you access to my stories and photos of travel, monotony, ups and downs. Quick summary ~ (based on memory so I’m sure more things happened but I can’t remember everything). My memories are all documented on my phone and I don’t know how to extract them to my laptop so here goes..2017 highlights! Mother/daughter trip to San Diego to visit friends, photo shoot road trips with the husbands band, lunch dates with the bestie, annual Backwoods Beerfest (camping with booze on the Mogollon Rim), trip to visit friends in North Carolina (love it there), Roger Waters concert, Mother/Daughter trip to Amsterdam and Spain, Great Christmas with family and friends.

Cut to:

The last day of 2017 was spent with the husband and our friend visiting from Switzerland. Where do you take a guy from the cold mountains of Switzerland when he visits Arizona?

Flagstaff, AZ. of course 😉 We jumped in my car and headed north.

First stop was lunch at SnowBowl. The lunch was subpar but the views and the company were supreme.

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Sadly, Arizona has had zero snow..look at how dry the trees and their surroundings are

All the snow behind us, for the skiers, was man-made. After lunch we decided to venture off to a place neither Jason nor I had ever been. The Lava River Cave. It is located about 18 miles west of Snow Bowl so it took us no time to get there. It is off a dirt road, so I did worry we were headed in the wrong direction, but it turned out to be an OK drive even with my little Volkswagen.

The cave entrance is only a short jaunt, through the pines, from the parking lot.

I am claustrophobic and we only had cell phones to light our path so I didn’t think we were going to get out of there alive. As per usual, my worries were unwarranted, walking over the rocks down into the cave was cake and super open, not like a spelunking cave at all. 🙂 P.S. don’t ever ask me to go spelunking…not doin’ it!

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VICTORIUS!

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We made it about half way through and my cell phone died leaving me with no light source, I had to walk up all in Jasons business to follow his light. A few times, I couldn’t keep up and had to stop dead in my tracks and cry, “Help me, I’m stuck”.

We made it out alive! 🙂

If you’re ever in the area, you should check it out. It’s pretty amazing this tube, just under a mile long, was formed around 700,000 years ago from melted rocks..

You can read more about it here: Lava River Cave

Daylight was fading fast so we decided to head south, made a pit stop in Sedona so our Swiss friend could absorb the spiritual vortex mojo of this great locale. We did arrive just in time for him to see the great red rocks of the area but the sun quickly disappeared. Grabbed a cappuccino to go and head for home.

All in all it was a great way to end 2017.

With that, I will end this post with a visual of how my day one 2018 was spent. Perfectly.

The Plan

A couple of months ago the plan was to bring in the new year with our closest friends and family in the desert..camping. It all sounded great until a few days ago when the plan started to sound…let’s say…mentally challenged.

Winter decided to make an appearance in Arizona! We haven’t seen any snow in the suburbs outside of Phoenix but it rained all day yesterday and it was less than 30 Fahrenheit for the low. We would have died in our sleep. No doubt about it.

Jason and I thought it would be a better idea to have the celebration at our place. Have a nice cozy fire in the backyard (yep, on a NO BURN DAY, we would’ve totally done it) with our friends and our dogs and our drinks. That plan was perfect and the best thing about it? We wouldn’t have to drive anywhere…

For the most part, everyone was all in but…there’s always a but…they all have children under twelve. Of course the children would have been welcome BUT.. we have nothing entertaining at all for children to do in our house. They would have been bored to crazy.

Plan C…get our daughter to drive us to our friends house and then we could take a taxi home! Brilliant! 🙂 But…she left and went up north with her friends AND..that would mean we would be leaving our fur babies at home..alone…scared..to deal with the loud firecracker noises.

In the end, we decided to stay home with our fur babies and power through episode after episode of Orange is the New Black season two. In between we ate a delicious Jager Schnitzel with hunter sauce, beets and mashed potatoes courtesy of chef Jason. There was also whiskey and wine..of course.

Happy New Year people! In my heart of hearts I wish nothing but peace, love and prosperity to er’yone! 🙂

Happy New Year Y’all!!

Happy New Year Everyone! 2013 is here and I have no idea what it will bring.

I don’t usually make “new year resolutions” but this year I have too many. So many, I may be setting myself up for failure. Make no mistake, I plan and would love to follow through with all of my resolutions but…I am not oblivious to the fact that I am well known for making tons of plans, setting goals, dreaming big and then…not doing any of them. My intentions and thoughts are always genuine, I am a pretty passionate person…about a lot of things at any given moment.
For example…I watched the movie “Big Miracle” the other day. Great movie, based on a true story set in 1988 about a mommy, daddy and baby whale who got stuck in a a section of rapidly closing ice holes in the sea off of Barrow, Alaska. Greenpeace, the U.S Military, the entire community nearest Barrow, AK., the nation were involved in the rescue of these whales. By the end of the movie, I wanted to become a part of Greenpeace and save our oceans critters…Now, I know that will never happen but I like to think I about “if only I could”.

Maybe, one day, far off into the future this thought will come back to me and I will do my part. For now, I will stick to some little things I can might be able to actually follow through.

Here goes…I will walk my dogs every night. I’ve been reading Cesar Milans book, “Cesars Way” — Do you know that man exercises his dogs for eight hours a day? This is not possible for me or anyone else living in my house so, the mutts will get their morning play of catch with the husband and in the evening I will come home and take them straight away on a run.
We have three so it’s a little difficult. I have to take little Fat Larry out first – I will run him around the neighborhood, bring him home and come back for the other two. Larry is a good walker, he’s little, easy to control. The other two? HA! They are terrible walkers! While walking them together, if one dog gets in front of the other they viciously attack each other. It’s quite embarrassing. If a person walks by…they bark at them…if a person walks by with a dog??? They bark and pull HARD on their leashes like they are going in for a kill. I have to add here that my dogs are the biggest chicken dogs of all time. I don’t know if they would even know what to do if I…say…let their leashes go. Needless to say..I have no control. I will continue to read “Cesars Way” and try to apply the advice to our daily walking/running routine. So far…three days of walk/running.

Do you want to hear something pathetic?

The day after our first walk, of maybe mile, my quads were sore, my shin muscles were sore..do you know even my ANKLE muscles were sore?? My ankle muscles have never hurt before. This was a sad sad realization I was slapped with. I am seriously out of shape! I must continue 🙂 My chub will go away, dogs chub will go away and we will all be happier!! Wish me luck here!

When I started tonights blog…I had full intention of babbling on and on about the oh so many resolutions I have for 2013.

I changed my mind. Let’s see how I feel tomorrow. If I still see reason for more resolution..I will let you know 🙂 For now, in this moment, I am perfectly content with my walking/running nightly goal!

Here are a few pictures of my running partners!!

This here is (for now) Fat Larry!

Above: We have Bollie

Above: This is Ollie

Best wishes to all of you for 2013!!!