Musings from the last week

Fall is here! Yipeeeee!! I love fall. It's my favorite season. Not just because it houses my birthday but just because of it's overall general awesomeness. I could write a whole blog post on all the reasons I love fall. It would include things about the crunchiness of leaves when you run and pumpkin flavored everything and warm jackets,fleece blankets, cuddling and bonfires. Stay tuned. Maybe I will write a full on list for you in the near future. For now though lets talk about this past week, because some pretty great things happened!

First off, on the topic of Fall, I carved my first pumpkin of the season!! Great start to the week.  You can't ever go wrong with carving pumpkins.  I have a love hate relationship with it because I always have this glorious image in my head of how I want my pumpkin to turn out, and then I start carving and its always a lot harder than I remember so then it turns out only being half as cool as I had originally planned. Still awesome none the less. Luckily its still early on in the month so there's plenty of time to carve more pumpkins. Thank you Brendan for that fun night. Totally made my day.

Second awesome thing I did this week was become a Tough Mudder. Yup, that's right, I offically own the title of  a Tough Mudder! Trent, Andrew and I took on the challenge on Saturday. 11 miles, 24 military style obstacles. Lots and lots and LOTS of mud. We crushed it.  Google Tough Mudder and watch a youtube video of it if you've never seen one. Then you will be really impressed. It takes a special person to spend 4 hours crawling through muddy tubes, over 10 foot walls, through freezing ice-filled water and getting shocked by hanging electrodes. We loved it so much we are thinking of going and doing the one in San Diego next month. Needless to say, we are pretty much addicted.

Third awesome thing that happened this weekend was General Conference! For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a semiannual gathering of the LDS church where we listen to our leaders speak. I love it. I look forward to it every April and October. Its always uplifting and full of thoughts I need to hear. Its a nice little kick in the pants to get my act together and be my best self. I could write for days on my thoughts about conference. I have pages and pages filled in my journal to prove it. One of my favorite quotes though was from President Uchtdorf. It was probably one of many people's favorites. He said, "First doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith". I have a habit of focusing on the negative, the things I'm not sure about, don't know and the things that are going wrong in life. Where that habit came from I'm not sure but its a crappy one if you ask me. The positive things in my life, the things I really know and am sure about and the things going right in my life, definitely outweigh the negative ones and if i'd just take a second to remember that, my quality of life would increase drastically. So from now on i'm going to focus on the things I know instead of putting so much stock in the things I don't know or I'm not quite sure about. Hold me to that people.

Other great things about the week. I also went on a beautiful run along the Seattle waterfront with a really great friend one day after work. We ended it with an absolutely delicious meal at Purple Cafe. Oh my gosh, so delicious. I mean why not run 4 miles and then eat a billion calories? A cute guy gave me flowers, which I forgot at his house but they were very, very pretty nonetheless. Sunday afternoon I was fed banana pancakes, instant happiness maker right there. I made friends with a cat, read a great book about a family in Afghanistan during war time, made some delicious homemade applesauce and played some soccer. Life is good. Tiring but absolutely wonderful.

Here's to hoping this next week is as awesome as the last.