Finding (Making) Time to Blog - January 2017 Recap

I technically started this post in September of this year!!! It is one of 12 drafts I have sitting out here waiting to be completed. Most of them are race recaps but there is one - from 2015 nonetheless - about our amazing trip to Paris. Le Sigh. Maybe I can conquer a recap of that on a Throwback Thursday one of these days. But I wouldn't hold your breath. 
My last blog post was the recap of the Nebraska Half Marathon which took place on October of 2016!!!! And prior to that it was a post about finishing my 100th lifetime half at the end of September in 2016.
Goodness gracious...I just don't even know where to start now. But I guess from now until the end of the year I'll try to briefly recap some of the things that happened in 2017.

January 2017: Looks like I only did ONE race in January which isn't that surprising since I live in Indiana and the weather is usually crappy. It was a 5K on New Year's Day. It was a new to me event and I wore some very sparkly pants for it.

We were fostering a dog and had every intention of adopting him. He'd been with us for over a week and everyone (he and our other two dogs) had been getting along fine. We started leaving them out for short periods of time while we were gone and there was nothing to report. One day my husband left them out together for three hours and all was well. But then, we left one night to grab some dinner, stopped and bought a new dog bed for our soon to be family member and came home to a bloody mess. We'll never know for sure what happened but sadly, we had to quickly find a new foster home for him. It broke my heart to give him back but we couldn't put our current family in jeopardy. Our poor guy Wrigley took the brunt of the battle. 😭

This won't stop us from fostering again - although we have been taking a break from it. You don't always know the background story of a rescue dog but often it isn't a good one. And now that our dogs are older (both of which were rescue dogs) and set in their ways, it has definitely been more difficult bringing in a foster. Next time we'll foster a much younger dog; maybe 6 months old or less so that they haven't had as much time to acquire baggage.

I signed up for a 5K at the end of the month but took a DNS on that one. Sadly this would become a little bit of a trend for me in 2017.

Not much else happened in January. Or at least nothing that I can remember nearly 12 months later (eye roll!). My job is still going really well and I still like it. I don't have the hardest job in the world and it isn't very "brain stimulating" I suppose but I've been there / done that with a career that was super demanding. It is refreshing that I can leave each night and nothing needs my attention after 5:00 PM. I don't have to keep checking my email while I'm at home. My evenings and weekends are free 99.5% of the time.

What has been taking my time - and every other weekend - is my Mom. Her health has continued to decline since she broke her hip back in October of 2016. She always needs her Rollator and struggles getting up and down from a seated position. My brother and I have been taking turns going to her apartment each weekend to do laundry, clean and go to the grocery store. This makes it difficult to plan much when it is "my" weekend and I've certainly been neglecting everything at my house as well. But we continue to press on and just make it work.