A very long post - Being a artist and many other things

I have been training to run a 5K since the start of the year and finally the day came that I accomplished that. This last Saturday the race day finally came and I was excited and nervous. Why nervous you ask? Well.. I have been dealing with terrible shin splints in my left leg for almost two months. I replaced my shoes about a month ago but the damn shin splint came back in full force. I didn't run for almost two weeks before the event. I was worried I wasn't going to do well but hoped that all the cross training (swimming/biking etc.) helped. My time was 30 minutes for 3.1 miles, not bad.

A very proud look.

I wore a Zza's shirt to advertise them due to the fact the run was in front of their restaurant. My bud Hollyce wore one too and we ran the race together.. I'm super proud of her too.

Hollyce says that I inspire her not only as an artist but as an athlete. She wasn't able to make the registration cut off for the run but she did it anyway and wore this hat.

I felt very honored by the compliments and the hat.

Sunday was the full marathon and I'm lucky enough to live on the course. I was outside at 8:30 in the morning waiting to see the elite runners come by. My house was on mile marker 12. It was awesome to see the elite runners with their 5 minute mile average speeding by way ahead of everyone else.

This is a patch of runners way behind the elite athletes but not bad.

I cheered them on for a good hour or so and probably pissed off my neighbors but I don't care. The best thing when I was running was listening to people cheering us on. It was so motivating and the energy was fantastic.

In other sporty news.. I got a new bike this weekend.. but will write about this in a separate post.

Art:
I have slowly maintained doing art. Things in my life have been hectic and are slowly starting to fall into place.

This is one of the many collaboration pieces. I did the drawing and Hollyce did the coloring and fabric, yes.. there is fabric in this picture. Can you guess where the fabric is?

I feel like every other word in this post is about Hollyce. Well that is due to Hollyce really helping me through a lot of things and being a great supporting friend.


Here is another Mosaic shadow box I'm working on and hope to finish before I go to Utah.


Yep.. I'm heading to Utah next Friday. My mom had a major surgery and I have to go and help her during her recovery process. I'm sure I'll be posting like mad when I'm there.

Did I mention that I have a new housemate? See.. I told you a lot was going on in my life. We have been doing many, many repairs on the place since he moved in. One big project we took on is stripping the fireplace back to its art deco brilliance.
This job has taken two weekends to complete.

This is last Sunday:

There were layers and layers of cosmic paint colors over the tile work. We tried to strip the wood framing on top but the wood was so porous and fragile that we decided it wasn't worth the work. We ended up pulling the top wood part off the stone work and to our surprise we found gobs of newspaper from the 1920's under it. Most of the paper was smoke and fire damaged but it was so cool to check it out. I kept a piece but I think my roomie may have thrown it out.. I don't know? It was so cool to be the first person to see those papers since they were used as shims in the 20's.

Yesterday we finished the stripping and this is the end result:

Not bad eh? It still needs a little touch up work but I think it looks great. Why would you paint over this??

Phew.... that was a long post.