The last few weeks have blurred right by. We’ve been busy! Karissa has been trying to get to work early and has been staying late – in an effort to get ahead.
The kids get taxied around town between Adelaide’s two schools each day and Emerson’s school two mornings a week. Despite the business, we’ve managed to squeeze in a bit of fun.
To kick it off, we got an electric bike. I saw the one we ordered on YouTube over the summer as a bunch of my favorite channels reviewed it. It’s called the Lectric XP. At the time, it was $899 on preorder (it’s now $999). That’s a pretty great deal for an e-bike, considering the largest player sells theirs for $1,499. It has 4″ fat tires, a hidden battery, throttle-only speed up to 20mph, and folds down small enough to be put into any vehicle.
I’ve been wanting one for a few years to be able to pull the kids in their bike trailer, zoom over to get donuts on a Saturday morning, and eliminate some of the shorter car trips. After a few rides, I realized it would also be great to carry the kids – so I took off the rear rack and added a child seat. We’ve been too busy to take a picture, apparently. But we’ve racked up about 50 miles in the first two weeks of ownership and had tons of fun so far!
We’ve had our RV in the driveway since coming back from Florida. The way it was positioned meant we could only have one vehicle in the driveway – the other had to be in the street. (Our garage is full of tools and project materials for the basement. We could get one car in there if we tried.) We’d wanted to store it at the lake house, but decided that was too far away. We looked into a local place on the edge of town – leaving a few voicemails – but never got a call back. Luckily, we found a small RV dealership about 30 minutes away that offers storage. I took it there this week. I’m a bit rusty on parking it, but after an excruciating 45 minutes managed to get it situated.
Our new Saturday routine is to have Adelaide play her basketball game. Karissa coaches. Then, we drop the kids off at Kids Zone inside the YMCA. Get a workout in for ourselves. And finish with all of us splashing in the pool for a while. We’ve been going to Panera afterwards for lunch. It’s a good routine that makes each of us feel good about our day.
Speaking of exercise, I’ve been exercising quite a bit. As it happens, Thursday (Emerson’s 2nd school day) falls on a rest day for my training plan. Rather than force a workout or do something unproductive, I’ve been bringing a laptop and doing stock research and trading during that time. It’s been a great use of time and lets me be in a different venue with a solid view.
Finally, Karissa and I ran the Corn Classic 10K with a few friends – the same ones we did the Soldier Field 10 Mile with. The Corn Classic is a race that celebrates the Lincoln Highway; DeKalb, Illinois; and Northern Illinois University. It was supposed to start downtown, run through an historic neighborhood, through campus, through the football stadium, and then back along the river. Due to rain and flooding on the course, the route was changed to a 4-mile route on race day. While we understand that flooding happens and adjustments need to be made, we were mad that the distance couldn’t have been maintained. Thankfully, the biggest highlight of the route was maintained – running through the football stadium…while the marching band played! It was a really neat experience. Also, along the route were many of the NIU athletics teams cheering on the runners. We had a blast, despite the change in distance. My friend from the old days won the whole thing!
I ran a little over a mile before and after the official race to still get in my full 10K distance of 6.2 miles.
We celebrated the end of our weekend by running a bubble machine in the house. It made quite the pile of bubbles!
