CrossRoads Blog

Perspective…..

Kimberly and I ran in the Walk to End Domestic Violence 5K run today. Early this morning seems my mind was filled with thoughts like “we got up at 4:50 am and I barely slept”, “we have to make sure we get some carbs so the pancakes are great”, “let’s try to beat our best time”, “the sore on my toe feels half way okay”, etc., etc. Well… that changed at about 6:30 when we got to the event. One of the first things I see is two young ladies pulling hand held signs out of their car and one of them says “1 in 4 Girls/Women and 1 in 7 Boys”.

Wow… that’s right, we are here to run a 5K and have fun doing it, but the Race is all about Domestic Violence. One in Four! Ya’ know domestic violence is out there, we have heard the stories before when we looked to adopt so long ago, and of course with Kimberly doing mentoring, our personal experiences, but ONE IN FOUR! What the frick is wrong with people? Well, in any event, thoughts about having my Nano playlist all ready for the run seemed a little less relevant…

We did a little walking around the event, which does really good to support the cause here locally. I’m not sure of the totals but I know they set a goal to raise $400K, so if you got a couple bucks you know the skinny – lots of causes, but this surely qualifies. One of the ‘displays’ was silhouetted people that had the story of the woman it represented and how she passed. Most all were of course some piece of #$@& man who had brutally and continually abused her until she was no more. There was even one for a seven year old…geesh, seven.

In addition to the perspective gain we had a great time. We ran as part of team called “Call Centers Care”. The group is local folks in the industry, some of who we have known for years. We were over 100 strong I heard and the largest fund raising team there someone said – pretty cool stuff.

While not necessarily something to joke or make light of, we did have one moment of quite funny brevity when Kimberly commented that she needed to put her iPhone on airplane mode (she uses it as her music player when running and in that mode it will not ring as a phone). This was relevant because she was perhaps expecting a call from my Mother this morning – we both joked that if she got the call when running the race, and she tried to communicate something like “can’t talk now running-domestic violence”, that between the hard breadth that could come out a little different than intended

We both did really well and beat our goal times (and Kimberly did so having had Surgery less than 72 hours before!!). We seem to keep lowering our finish times every new event - nice but thing is, we are coming to expect it almost and sometime it is going to have to end. Well, until then, we will be here – me huffin’ and puffin’, Kimberly looking good in a running shirt.

As the weather warms up here in the desert our nearby hiking options are thinning out. Thinking this may be our last weekend to get a local hike without dealing with the 100 plus degree temperatures, we headed over the South Mountain Park here in Phoenix for a nice hike this last Sunday. For those not familiar, South Mountain is the ‘Worlds Largest City Park’ covering a whole lot of acres of land and a couple of nice size ranges. The Park also has a portion of the US National Trail in it. There are many hikes and trails within the park but we wanted something around 4 hours, with some nice elevation gains (get the heart working) and we also wanted to make sure we did at least of the National Trail, and ‘bagged’ another peak. So this left us with a loop hike that covered three trails. We did the full Alta Trail, a piece of the National Trail and finished on the Bajada Trail for a decent 10 mile or so loop hike back to the car. The weather was a little hot but not too drastic. Though we both did have a little redness to show for it even though we were done with the hike by early afternoon.

So this will be the last ‘Desert Hike’ for the coming months and we ill just have to head out a little earlier and drive a little farther. Looking forward to hikes in Sedona, Monument Valley, the NE Reservation lands, and down on Geronimo camp area this year (plus of course my Rim-to-Rim-to Rim hike with the buddies. Until next time, we will be here with our water bottles, protein bars and sun screen  SEE PICTURES HERE

By Kimberly

Saturday April 19th was Stephanie’s baby shower. Since she and Tim are having a baby girl I made the event as pink as possible. We had a nice lunch consisting of sandwiches on croissants, Texas coleslaw made by my good friend Shelley, fruit salad and chips. For dessert Stephanie wanted a white cake with strawberries in between the layers and a whipped cream frosting. I stressed over it turning out right but everyone really enjoyed it. Stephanie was very happy with it.

Everyone was very thoughtful and got her some great baby gifts. She got quite a few very cute outfits, a blanket, a piggy bank, rattle, booties, hat…..check out some of the pictures of the shower to see many of the gifts.

We played a couple of fun shower games. One was a kind of traditional game of memory of baby items but the other game was one I had never played. Shelley led this game as she came up with it. I had Stephanie away from all of the guest while Shelly had them each draw a picture of the baby the trick was that they had to draw the baby with the paper on top of their head. Everyone laughed and had fun.

8 more weeks and little Rachael Nicole Diana Pickering will make her way here to enjoy all of her great gifts. See PICTURES HERE

Also Pictures of Tim and Steph after shower can be seen HERE

Elizabeth (Lizzy) Strong gave birth to a beautiful baby boy Anthony Ryan Strong on March 26th 2008. Baby and Mom are doing very well and all is great. For those of you who don’t know Lizzy she is a young (I guess now) lady that Kimberly had mentored for awhile and still keeps up with regularly now. Kimberly had a chance to get up to the hospital to see Mom and young Anthony the day after his birth and take some pictures with Lizzy and her Mother as well. You can view the PICTURES HERE.

We love Lizzy and hope the best for her and the new baby. Lizzy is still a little one herself (least in our mind ) so please keep her in your thoughts and prayers as a young mother begins her new journey.

Seems like Kimberly and I have this growing list of ‘mini-traditions’. Attending the Glendale Blues & Jazz Festival is now one of them. I think this is about the 4th or 5th year we have gone, and the event gets better and bigger every year. It’s great because it’s fairly close – just down in old town Glendale, it’s free, and you can hang out all day. I really also like the fact that ‘my city’ puts on an event like this – in particular supporting Blues artists.

This year was much like last. We headed over fairly early in the day and spent some time walking around the booths and tracking down one of those stuffed pretzels (not as good as last year sadly). I also grabbed some Honey Bear BBQ (always good) before we settled in a great sitting spot at the main amphitheater. We setup our chairs, got in chill mode and watched some enjoyable Blues acts throughout the day and into the night.

This year featured Tommy Castro and his band. We really enjoy Tommy live and this was the second time in the last year we have been able to catch him. We saw him over at Rhythm Room late last year and had gotten a nice picture of him and Kimberly. We brought that picture along with us to the show and afterward got him to sign it. Kimberly when getting Tommy to sign it got him to turn a little red cheeked – a funny story we will leave off the Blog . A nice treat was also getting a chance to see and hear another favorite of our Rusty Zinn. Actually Rusty was playing guitar for the Mark Hummel Band. Mark is a great harp player, and most of the show was all his tracks. Not that we didn’t enjoy the set, but man was I hoping they would have done some Rusty tunes (in particular from his ‘The Chill’ album). We did sit for the local band Sistah Blue and it was nice, they are breaking up so seeing one of their last shows together was cool.

The weather was perfect, the company great and the Blues Live… again, does it get any better?

As you may know from some of our monthly news, Kimberly and I have been doing Tae Kwon Do A.I.M.M.A. classes going on about 6 months now. We have really been enjoying hitting the Dojang twice (sometimes 3 times) a week now. This past month before we headed to see M3 in Oklahoma we had our first testing for our new belts. We both passed (but of course) and are now officially Yellow Belts.

We really do enjoy the classes even though it’s tough sometimes to get motivated at night to head up there - every time we do we are more than glad we did. We go to Phoenix Cho’s Tae Kwon Do which is ran by our good friends Alan and Ena Croupe and their son Mark. I would recommend to anyone in the Phoenix area to come up and join us. Not only are Alan and Ena great folks, they are extremely talented at what they do, and truly excellent teachers. Young Mark is a very special talent and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you soon come to know his name even if you don’t come and join us. The rest of the group is great people and you would enjoy the team for sure.

So we are at in again, and looking forward to our next test for the Orange Belt. we will have some pictures of the event on the site soon, in the meantime, the Cho’s site has some as well.

This last weekend Kimberly and I traded in the weekend Hike for a local event at Lake Pleasant called the 3rd Annual “Dam Good Run Hike”. It turned out to be a really fun day, and we enjoyed the Lake Life vibe all morning and afternoon.

The ‘Good Dam Run Hike’ offered two tracks - one 4 mile and one 7 mile. Wanting to get a good workout in we opted for the 7 miler, and glad we did. The event is in it’s third year and while still smaller (maybe 100 people total for both runs), the group was a perfect mix of young and old and all nice people. The fees you paid went to support Lake Pleasant and they had a good group of sponsors, so entry included a T-Shirt, hat, snacks, and some other miscellaneous stuff. All in all a very well run event.

The seven mile track was about half trail and half road. This was good news for me, because I am still much more comfortable running on trails. Seeing the first 2.5 miles are so where all trails, I knew I could get a little head start on Kimberly and maybe hold on for the Road portion and beat my little gym rat - runner wife (not that we were being competitive or anything ). You start from a parking lot and quickly descend down into a wash riparian area. The trail follows the wash/creek for a couple miles before you head up and out. There were 4 creek crossings and several spots where you had to duck under the trees. Heading out of the creek, you climb up a service road that gains a thousand feet or so elevation in about a mile - a nice painful stretch for this old man. After the climb you head toward the New Wadell Dam (hence the name of the race). The Dam is an earthen Dam and what holds the Aguia Fria to make the lake. As far as I know this is the only day of the year us regular folks can be on the Damn. So pretty cool you get to cross it and then head back. After coming back on the Dam you have another mile or so of trail run.

Just for the purposes of documenting the day for future years… I have to say I did end up crossing in 1:09 which was enough to get there ahead of Mrs. Miller . Considering we had 7 miles and 1800 ft. net elevation gain, had some creek crossings, and had a wine and tequila night the night before with good buddy Shane - I think us old folks did pretty good.

After the race we found a nice little Ramada with a view of the lake, setup my trusty grill and had a great lunch. then we headed over to the Marina and partook of a glass of Vino and a cold one. Once again…. life is good!