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Hello, can you hear me...
I'm in California dreaming about who we used to be...

Ok Ok enough of the Adele jokes, but seriously...HELLO! I've been meaning to write for awhile and every time I sit down to do it something else pops up or I'm just so tired all I want to do is veg out! So we've been back in SoCal for 3 months now and we are loving life.  Brandon is settled in at work, loving his crew and the work.  He is doing transmission with distribution underbuld and really liking it.  100+ foot poles and he drives a 100 ft bucket truck on these crazy interstates down here every day! I'm settled in with being a mom to two kids, doing my weekly grocery shopping, cooking dinner, nursing around the clock, laundry, cleaning, oh and working out! We struggled a little bit to find the right fit of a gym for Bashlyn but we found a great kids care now and they love her and she loves going, which is good since we're there at least an hour a day 4-5 days a week.

For christmas Brandon bought me a bunch of different Gu, sport jelly beans, bonker bars, ect for my stocking stuffer (how cute is he?!).  Well he went to this triathlon shop called Tri-Zone and they had a flyer for a free 8 week "give it a try" program they were putting on.  We had been shopping around for a coach for swimming because Brandon and I needed some serious help and then he happened upon this, it was a true sign! We signed up and went to our first Saturday meeting 6 weeks ago and have been loving it since.  Its so incredibly awesome to be surrounded by so many athletic and health conscious people all the time.  We bike and run as a group on Saturdays, swim on Mondays and bike on Wednesdays.  On Saturday there is a presentation about something, running form, stretching correctly, transitions, swimming technique, ect.  The program is put on by Coach Diego with Triathlon Training Team.  We were texting a few weeks back and I was telling him that we were doing the Ironman CDA 70.3 and he politely asks "is this going to be a self coached venture?" haha gotta admit I laughed out loud.  I responded with "well.....it was going to be...." Anyway we decided to hire him to coach Brandon and I for the big race.  We want to be able to not only survive the race but do our absolute best.  Signing up for the half ironman has changed our lives.  We are FINALLY living the healthy active lifestyle we have always wanted to be living.  Today its gorgeous out.  We went to our give it a try meeting this morning with the kids, then I went on a 1.5 hour ride followed by a  25 minute run and now Brandon is out on a 1.5 hour ride and a 25 minute run.  Its so awesome and we are absolutely in LOVE with this sport! 

With all that said Brandon and I have been talking about our future a lot lately.  We are both getting more and more antsy to settle into a routine of some kind.  We want community, we miss it so much.  What we realized though, is without even trying we have created community in Southern California and North Idaho.  We have amazing friends down here, Bash and Coleman have great friends, we have routine, we have our places we love to go to get a great bite to eat, our favorite beaches, our favorite places to run, bike, swim, we are meeting like minded people, we are developing a life.  Brandon loves the work and is damn good at it.  We are so lucky that we (obviously) have an amazing community in Idaho and we get to spend the WHOLE summer there every year!  We've talked a lot about what the next 5 years should look like.  Should we buy a house down here, should we check out Northern Cali, should we go to Hawaii, should we go somewhere else in the country, should we move home and Brandon go utility?! We know we are not really ready to settle down 100% yet.  There will come a time that we just CAN'T travel like this and we don't want to cut ourselves short.  We also don't want to pigeon hole ourselves to North Long Beach, CA and never check out anything else but at the same time what if we did.  What if we love it, what if we have friends, what if we have a lifestyle and community and it works for us, would it really be so bad to just go from SoCal to North Idaho twice a year for the duration of our tramping days? We do know that we REALLY want to go check out Hawaii so maybe we'll do a couple more rotations down here and then go to Hawaii and then go home, or maybe we'll be headed to Hawaii this fall, who knows, we sure don't! haha stay tuned to see where this crazy life takes us :)