2015 Resolution #3 follow-up

I’m on a plane headed to DC for the week and this travel day has been quite an experience already. Between checking my bag and getting through security my flight was delayed by an hour and the gate changed. No big deal. I sat down for a leisurely breakfast and then wandered around the terminals to pass the time. (Today is the last day of Boeing on the Move 2015 and I wanted to rack up as many steps on my pedometer as possible before getting on the plane.) By the time I made it back to the second gate assignment it was in the process of changing again. And then as soon as people started lining up at that gate to board the plane, it changed again. I guess United decided to switch our flight to another plane since the original one was running late. I seriously contemplated sneaking on one of the three flights to Hawaii that were leaving from our terminal. In the end the flight to DC took off about two hours late. This kind of ruins my evening plans once we arrive, but I can be flexible. It should be an interesting week.

The purpose of this inflight blogging session wasn’t to share boring travel stories, though. Last night I was looking through all of my draft posts that I have been neglecting lately, and I realized a terrible trend. It’s one thing to have a backlog of fairly inconsequential posts waiting to be polished and published, but I’ve started a few on big and exciting events that I can’t believe I haven’t finished yet. Earlier this year I made a resolution to blog about events in a timely manner, but it’s a struggle for me. Finding the time and the motivation to write at the same time isn’t easy. I will continue to work on that going forward. The funny thing is, this post isn’t going to be about one of those big and exciting topics. Well, I guess it is a little bit, but only barely. I just want to make sure to tell this story before I completely forget about it.

On my way back from Hawaii I wrote about my bikini experience. Well, that was just half of the story. While getting ready for that trip I learned that by mid-June the bathing suit selection at most stores has dwindled down to almost nothing. Not only did this hinder my search for a bikini top that fit properly (as I documented in that post last month), but also for some bikini bottoms that would work with (or at least not clash with) whatever top I ultimately wound up with. Fortunately some of my old bikini bottoms still fit so I wasn’t quite as panicked about having something to wear with the black Rip Curl top that I was lucky enough to find. But on my last desperate trip to Aerie to complete my swimsuit collection for Maui I saw a purple bikini with white polka dots and little lobsters all over it. (See the photo above. Cute, right?) After discovering that Aerie bathing suit tops don’t fit my very well I didn’t even bother trying on the bandeau top, but the bottoms were just too adorable to pass up. And while they didn’t exactly match the black bikini top, it was still an acceptable combination and I loved wearing something whimsical on the beach in Hawaii. I was never one to follow fashion trends so why start now? I know this wasn’t the wrap up post that my amazing trip to Maui deserves, but I will work on that this week while I’m in DC. I promise!

Goodbye old friend

“This is my little Samsonite suitcase that I bought back in 1997 to take to Europe. It’s not readily identifiable as a Samsonite anymore because the badge got ripped off on one trip or another in the last couple of years so you’ll just have to trust me on the brand. … I took this picture on my way home from a business trip last August because I thought it might be my last trip with that suitcase and I wanted something to remember it by. Not that I have any reason to replace it at the moment, but I don’t think it will be too long before I do.”
01/21/14 webpage post

Well, one year after I posted this ode to my trusty little suitcase, I finally had to say goodbye. I bought it to go to Europe back in 1997 and it has served me well over the last eighteen years. After the Tinkerbell Half Marathon Weekend in May I discovered that one of the wheels had completely fallen off which made it difficult to maneuver. And noisy! However, I still tucked it back in my closet when I got home and forgot about its shortcomings. Then at the last minute I decided to take a carry-on size suitcase rather than my larger one to Hawaii last month. I had completely forgotten about the missing wheel. Oops. When I arrived at LAX for my flight it was far too late to pick a different piece of luggage for my trip, though. Luckily it held up just fine and I got back to Los Angeles without any additional pieces falling off. I decided that trip to Maui was my old suitcase’s swan song, though. And what better way to go out? I’ve taken that little guy all over the world! But now it’s time to find a new travel companion for future adventures (and not-so-exciting business trips). I hope I can find something that will last just as long!

Happy shoe accident

As I mentioned in a previous post, on my second day in Hawaii I drove the Road to Hana with some girlfriends. The above photo was taken during a rare rain-free moment that day. It seriously rained every time we pulled over to see any of the sights! Thanks to the rain and the inevitable mud that followed, my sneakers were filthy by the end of the day. I should have cleaned them off before I left Maui, but we were far too busy the whole time to do such mundane things! (Of course I did get up early every morning to clean up from the night before, unload and reload the dishwashers, and get everything ready for breakfast. There was no time for stuff like shoe cleaning!) So when I packed my suitcase to fly home that Sunday I threw my dirty sneakers into my suitcase (into a plastic bag) and didn’t give them a second thought. However, when I woke up in Los Angeles the next day I realized that I hadn’t packed my gym bag for spinning class that evening. And guess which shoes I usually wear for spinning? Yep, the muddy sneakers. In order to minimize the stress of my first day back from vacation I decided to skip my usual gym class and just go running that night. Crisis averted…for a week at least. Fast forward to this morning when I remembered that I still hadn’t done anything the soiled state of my sneakers. Since I didn’t want to skip another spin class (especially not for such a ridiculous reason) I put engineering brain to work to find another solution. After giving it some thought, I dragged out an old pair of my Nike Zoom Structure shoes that I no longer wear for running and threw them into my gym bag. I figured they wouldn’t be ideal for spinning, but they would work in a pinch. How did they do, you ask? Much to my surprise, they were perfect! It was a happy accident indeed that I decided to wear them to my class today. If I’d just cleaned off my other sneakers sometime this week I never would have discovered the superiority of the Nikes. Laziness wins for a change!

I lost my pedometer in Hawaii

The title of this post says it all. I lost my pedometer in Hawaii. The second day of my trip to Maui I drove the Road to Hana (see obligatory gorgeous photo above) with three other ladies and at some point my dinky little pedometer fell off the waistband of my shorts. I don’t know exactly where or when it happened, but by the time we stopped at Ohe’o Gulch (aka Seven Sacred Pools) to have lunch it was missing. Oops. I had to guess at my step counts for the rest of my trip. I estimated each day’s step count using my travel day as a benchmark. That day I walked all over the Los Angeles and Kahului airports as well as wandering around the rental house (it was a 15,000 square foot house!) and a trip to Costco on Maui. I was surprisingly active for spending about 6 hours on a plane! It was actually refreshing not having to wear that cheesy pedometer for most of my vacation, but I knew I had to find a replacement when I got home. Fortunately I still had last year’s pedometer tucked away in a drawer for just such an occurrence so I’m covered for the rest of Boeing on the Move 2015. I’ve been racking up the step counts since I got back to California too. I ran 5 miles on Monday night and then last night I took a 4 mile walk in the evening. We are already past the halfway point of Boeing on the Move and I want to make the best showing possible before the end!

P.S. I uploaded a whole bunch of photos from my vacation to Flickr and they can be found in my PJJ Maui album.

2015 Resolution #3 completed

Thanks to inflight wifi, this post was written while on my flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles!

First of all, I’d like to say that while in Hawaii this past week I successfully completed my New Year’s resolution #3 to wear a bikini! Woohoo! It was a rocky road to get there, though. It’s hard for me to admit, but after I hurt my knee in January I put on a bit of weight while I wasn’t exercising. While I was pretty happy with how I looked at the beginning of the year, being inactive for about a month really damaged my body image. I knew I needed warm weather clothes for my vacation, but I didn’t really want to think about it while I was heavier. I kept hoping that once I started running again in March/April the weight would come off easily. Unfortunately it didn’t. For that reason I kept postponing trying on my old bathing suits to see which ones I wanted to take with me to Maui. Three weeks before my trip I finally felt courageous enough to pull them out of storage and actually put them on, but the results dashed any self esteem I had a tenuous grasp on. None of the bikinis I bought last year fit properly. The tops and the bottoms were all too small for me to even consider wearing out in public. It was so discouraging. But I absolutely needed bathing suits in Hawaii so I began an urgent search to figure out my options. I won’t bore you with all of the steps I took to find swimwear in a hurry, but the results ended up being a mixed bag. Today let’s just focus on the positive outcome of that emergency shopping situation.

The last time I was in Hawaii in 2011 I saw a surfer wearing a bikini top with straps that crossed in the back. I loved it and I decided that I had to have that swim suit! Historically I tend to favor halter bikini tops since they fit me well and seem to be flattering, but I find the ties at the back and neck to be fussy and very uncomfortable. Inevitably the tie in the back is too tight or too loose, and the tie at the top causes me neck pain after a while. So when I saw the cross back bikini top I went on a mission to get one for myself. It took some work (i.e., a lot of weird Google searches), but I discovered that particular style is made by Rip Curl (see the photos above). So last year I went to Endless Summer, a little clothing store in Seal Beach that always has tons of bikinis, and bought the coveted top and a pair of matching bottoms. I loved them! Unfortunately I never found or manufactured a reason to wear a bathing suit in the last year. Fast forward to now and that top is currently too small for me. Yikes. Less than a week before leaving for Maui, and after a largely unsuccessful search for other bikini options, I desperately went to the Rip Curl website and ordered the cross back top in a larger size with two-day rush shipping. And it was perfect! I only ended up swimming two days on my trip, but I wore the Rip Curl top both times. I have another story about the bikini bottoms I wore with them, but I’ll save that for another post. The moral of this story is that bathing suits inevitably cause major frustration, but there can be a happy ending! Thanks to online shopping and rush shipping I was able to be comfortable in a properly fitting bikini in Maui this past week. And I completed a New Year’s resolution too! Incredible.

I found this today

In preparation for my upcoming business trip I took my big suitcase out of the closet today to start packing and found this laundry bag from the Grand Wailea inside. Sigh. Dan and I had such a great time in Hawaii last November and I’d love to be back there again right now. We’ve talked about going back this fall, maybe to Kauai, but it’s much less likely than last year. But if I can earn the frequent flyer miles soon enough a 2012 Hawaiian vacation it’s definitely not off the table. I’ve got my fingers crossed!