Silver Liningness Sunday

Whoo, this week was pretty heavy on the silver and light on the clouds!

First of all, Magnum and I are officially an Old Married Couple.  We made the 25-year mark on Tuesday, according to our marriage certificate.  My how time flies, I remember when we were just a young stupid couple.  Now we're older...
We're planning to go out for a celebratory meal later today.  After 25 years, waiting a few days to celebrate is nuthin'.

Also this week, I got some more free bike stuff.  Lookie!

All this and the bag it came in!

The bicycling app I use promotes challenges every now and then which usually result in getting various "badges" added to user profiles.  I recently signed up for this SRAM Mariposa Challenge, and shortly afterward, I got an email directing me to go to the local bike shop sponsor and pick up my gift bag.  What?  Gift bag??

As a bonus, this particular shop is the one I adopted Bella from so many years ago.  They've moved three times since then, and their current location offers a very pleasant bike ride to get to. So I had fun just getting there, let alone picking up my loot!

In other challenges, a shout out to Wolfgang for doing the Pikes Peak Ascent yesterday.  It's a 13.32 mile foot race to the summit of Pikes Peak.  

Earlier this year, he and 3 friends decided to do it together.  Two of them had done it before, and it was the maiden voyage for Wolfgang and another.  Recall that Wolfgang first thought of doing it last summer, but missed the qualifying race after a nasty longboarding crash and resulting road rash.  

This year, he was more organized, and they signed up for the Triple Crown of Running, which is  a series of three races culminating with the Ascent.    And today is the Marathon, which is up to the summit and then back down.  Some crazies do both races!

They all made it in fine fashion.  Online results were updated every five minutes or so, so I was down here in the lowlands in Mom mode refreshing the page until all four of them had crossed the finish.  The last three miles of the race are above timberline, where Wolfgang reports that, "Not stopping is the hardest part".

I will say that the four friends didn't train all that hard.  They'd go running for about an hour every few days or so.  They did go run on the mountain for a couple of hours one Saturday, but other than that, they just signed up, did the races, then ran up the mountain yesterday and finished with enviable times.  Ah, to be young again!

And while Wolfgang was getting himself back down to where the oxygen is, Magnum, Meego, and I decided to beat the heat at a reptile show.

"Just looking!", I stressed before we walked into the place.  And it was quite fun to look at all the slimy creepy crawlies.

Stacks of Pythons - not your typical Tupperware party!

  

*Scarface mode*

"Seh Hello to my turtle fren!"

There's a really fat Chameleon in there.  See it?

I'm happy to report that we did manage to get in and out without purchasing anything other than our admission.  It was at this very show a few years ago that we got the still MIA Reese.  His breeder has been at all the shows we've attended since, and he was also at yesterday's expo.  Usually, we go visit with him and his fresh crop of king snakes and update on how Reese is doing.

We avoided stopping by his table yesterday... *sniff*

But all in all, it was a fun show, and I'm glad we didn't give in to temptation.  The Solcata Tortoises were definitely calling to us, but at $200 a pop, fuggedaboudit!  The $20 PacMan frog was a bigger threat to my resolve.  What would I do with a PacMan frog, anyway??

...Other than love him and squeeze him and name him "George".

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