First of all I want to say--Thank you Xanga for my Xanga friends!

On Wednesday, July 16 I met msteechur at the lake where she usually swims, plus two other swimmers--really nice gals.  Oh, also there was a cool, black shades guy in a kayak, a.k.a. msteechur's husband.  I was trying out my wetsuit for the first time.  I think it's OK for what I paid for it.  I did all four strokes: mostly crawl (or freestyle) and backstroke, a little breast stroke, and some butterfly.  Crawl and back felt the best.  The wetsuit hindered my knee movement on the breast stroke kick.  Butterfly--arm movement very slightly restricted, dolphin kick was just fine.

Wish I had been able to get some photos of the swim.  If there's another opportunity, maybe I'll ask cool kayak guy to take some pictures for me.  Otherwise, I had a great time!  What was really cool was during rest breaks, we'd float vertically in a circle in deep water--thanks to a wetsuit's buoyancy not having to tread water hardly at all--and chat away in the early evening sunshine.  Once I saw a jet gliding in the sky high overhead!  What wasn't cool was getting lost in the unclear water and bumping into another swimmer, which happened nearly everytime I put my head down and started sprinting away.  And the swimmer I bumped was always msteechur! (Sorry!)  One of the other gals bumped into me. Fortunately, the bumps were only minor  (It just goes with the territory, as they say!)  If there's another chance to get together and swim in the lake, I would definitely do it again!

P.S. Here's a photo of my wetsuit:

Looks like it's going to be a  cloudy 4th!  All that heat and humidity the past several days led up to thunderstorms Wednesday night (in the distance) and half of Thursday. Rain, rain, rain, rumble, rumble, rumble.  At 7:30 a.m. we lost our power.  I was imagining lightning had struck a substation somewhere or damaged powerlines, and that once the storm was over, the PUD would fix it.  It was a very dark day! Then around noon I found out that our next door neighbor (on our west side) where my youngest daughter had been visiting had power.  So I called the PUD and found out there were no widespread power outages at all!  So I reported the outage to a live person, and meanwhile, my husband having come home early from work, noticed outside that a fuse was just hanging from a power pole on the southeast side of our property.  So the neighbors on our east side going north would have lost their power, except for those right on the main road who are connected to those powerlines.  But we're on a branch from the main road, so PUD quickly came out and checked all of the poles, then came back a little later and made the repairs.  Meanwhile, my husband had started our generator, but it only ran about an hour before our power was restored.  So that was kind of an interesting little event...still have no idea why the fuse came loose on the power pole, but it seemed to be something very easy to fix, unlike the more serious damage that sometimes occurs from trees blown over in a wind storm.

We're trying to decide what to do today.   Suppose the Seafair Pirates are going to show up somewhere.  We enjoyed seeing them last Saturday evening at my husband's awards dinner, which was held at the Boeing Future of Flight Museum at Paine Field.  I did a blog post about it on my blogspot blog, http://lsrcmonson.blogspot.com/ on the 1st.  And on Wednesday afternoon, I was surprised to find a comment on my post from the Seafair Pirates themselves!  I'm going to post some of the photos on this site, too, because msteechur also took photos of them the very next day, the 29th, during the Seafair marathon!

Anyway, hope everyone has a nice of 4th of July!  It's still wonderful to live in the U.S. (despite everything!).

Today was cloudy, but last weekend, and especially Monday, was beautiful!  Highlights were going swimming for the first time in six and half weeks and then meeting Database Diva for lunch last Saturday.  After we negotiated the very busy Subway, we planned to go to a nearby park.  But it was full, because there was all this stuff like car seat checks and bicycle safety stuff going on. Bummer!  So had to go to another park, while my toasty chicken sandwich got cold.  At least the second park was basically deserted, except for a man with a beautiful, large dog (still a puppy, actually).  Database Diva guessed its breed correctly, a breed I'd never heard of!  We had a wonderful time talking, and I can hardly wait until she gets back from Alaska so we can get together again!  Oh, by the way, she has a really cool car...a Ford Thunderbird convertible.  I did some research on the T-bird, and from 2002 to 2005, Ford produced a "retro" Thunderbird, but then stopped making them, so that makes them kind of unique.  I wanted to ask her for a ride in it, but we were a little pressed for time.  I've never ridden in any make of convertible that I can remember. (So maybe sometime I'll ask her.)

Yesterday, my hubby and I went to Alderwood Mall, and he finally used up all of his remaining Community Transit gift cards on a set of trekking poles from REI.  He has agreed to let me use them for a while, as I think they'll be great to help rehab my injured right hip/groin.  We are going camping over by Leavenworth Wednesday, so hopefully, I can get some walks in with the trekking poles.

Today I went swimming again and my groin/leg hurt less than it did on Saturday.  I couldn't kick much Saturday, but could kick a little better today.  I even did two lengths of butterfly!

Summer officially starts on the 21st, so since I will be gone, I'll wish everyone happy summer! in advance.