Blog Color Run: CHECK!

**Note: I know I haven't been much of a blogger lately, but I swear to you, I can't figure out the picture posting and why things look so different when I publish than they do in the draft form!!! SO ANNOYING***

I am on day 13 of 16 days off of work. I had grand plans to do all the things that have been wasting away on my to-do list, but OH HEY, it turns out I've been a busy lady. Christmas was obviously a multi-day bonanza of events, but then I also went to Sacramento to see Team Guam while they were in town, went to a place called Twain Harte (aka, the wilderness) for a couple of days, went down to SLO for NYE and for a brisk dip in the Pacific Ocean on New Year's Day. I have a few relatively low-key days of my vacation left and I SWEAR TO YOU, I'm going to cross "iron curtains" off my list before I return to work on Monday.

There are three blogging-related to-dos on that list, and watch me check this one off:

Blog Color Run

So way back in like September (October?) I went to Portland and met up with Team Idaho so we could do the Color Run.


The Color Run, if you're not familiar, is a 5k "race" where everyone wears white and at each kilometer there's a gang of people with buckets of brightly colored cornstarch, which they then throw on you (and in your hair, your mucous membranes, etc) and then you run to the next station where they do it again, but with another color. At the end, you're a brightly colored (and sweaty) mess, but it's fun and there are tons of happy people there and all is well.

It took us a lonnnnng time to get past the start line because there were A LOT of other runners. This was the view of us walking on top of the race course so we could eventually get in the back of this long ass line:

Here's the before:

 Note: That was my first time ever in life wearing a sweatband. I remember it being tight -- like a seatbelt for my head.

After my first brush with color:

 And the after:

Kristy and I discovered that shaved ice is the BEST post-run, post-cornstarch inhalation treat:

I didn't realize this until today, but you can see Kristy enjoying her shaved ice in the reflection in Jason's glasses:



 The organizers tell you that they have special color blower-offers and they advise that you stand in them to get the excess color off of you before you get in your car, on public transportation, etc. Turns out, these very high tech color blower-offers are actually just volunteers holding leaf blowers.

BUT: If you've never stood four feet away from someone pointing a leaf blower at you, then you haven't lived. It's pretty entertaining and you can't help but laugh.

They were effective though because my colors were much more muted when we got back to the hotel:

And instead of looking like a color explosion, I ended up looking more like I needed a bath:

That post-race shower was an exercise in ensuring I'm a good bather in general. I had color all over me in places that the shirt doesn't represent. I thought of it like those pink pills they gave you in elementary school that you were supposed to chew to see where you weren't doing a good job brushing. I scrubbed what I thought was every inch of my body and when I got out of the shower I discovered that I must not do a good job of cleaning the left and right sides of the front of my stomach. I got the straight up from the belly button area, but I got out of the shower and still had a blue side-belly.

Tres glam.