Seattle vs. Memphis Vol. 3

Happy New Year y’all! To start off 2019 I thought I’d write another entry to point out some differences I’ve noticed whilst living here, versus my Northwest hometown. Although many of the examples in my previous posts more-or-less pointed out the obvious (but hopefully in a somewhat amusing way?), several of the following definitely surprised …

Running in Memphis: St. Jude Marathon

Here we go, I’ve finally gotten around to writing the recap of the St. Jude Marathon that we ran on Dec. 1st. This’ll be my last running entry on this blog… well, for awhile anyway (given my proclivity for running, I can’t make any long-term promises). This is the area’s biggest race; we had it …

Running in Memphis: interlude

Before jumping into the recap of my St. Jude marathon experience, I thought I’d take a moment to step back and talk about running in general. I find running to be a somewhat polarizing topic. In some respects it’s a universal human experience, we have all run at some point (even if it was only …

Running in Memphis: road race series

Running has been a consistent part of my life for the past dozen years or so. Since 2006 I’ve averaged running 3-5 times per week and participated in around a dozen marathons, about twice as many half marathons, numerous triathlons of all distances, and various other running-related events. Next entry I’ll explore how I got …

Seattle vs. Memphis: “subtle” differences, part deux

Having resided in the Mid-South here for a few more months I thought I’d add to my growing list of differences I’ve noticed between here and my hometown. I posted an initial entry in mid-July after only a few weeks of moving here. While those still apply (except thankfully we’ve moved past the miserable, hot, …

Volunteering at the Disney Character Breakfast

Several months ago I received an email from the Recreation Center at the Mid-South Navy Base asking for volunteers for their annual Disney character breakfast. Seeing as I don’t particularly like to act or play dress-up, and we don’t have any kids, I was about to delete it but then stopped and thought, this actually …

Reflection time: challenges and insights – Part 2

So here’s the continuation of my previous post. I get quite a bit more personal and contemplative here so if you’re looking for smiling photographs and travel stories then this entry might not be for you. If you want to know more about me and some things that I think about, then proceed… Narrow projection, …

Reflection time: challenges and insights – Part 1

It’s been about five months since leaving the Northwest and I thought I’d write about some of my reflections on our overall experience thus far. To this point I’ve mainly shared about our exciting new adventures or focused on humorous differences between our current and previous homes. While it’s fun to write about these things, …

While in Tennessee: Goat Days, the Zoo, and the Titans

As promised, I’ll lead off by discussing the much anticipated International Goat Days Festival. Okay, “much anticipated” may have overstated our enthusiasm a bit. I think we were more intrigued by the novelty of the festival. It turned out that it delivered about as much as could be reasonably expected. We skipped the kick-off parade …

Exploring the South, Part 2: Chattanooga

As promised, here’s an update about our time in Chattanooga. I’d like to start by informing y’all on how to pronounce it, because I certainly butchered it on my first dozen or so attempts. I was saying Shatt-uh-nooga, like you’d pronounce the ‘ch’ sound in Chicago. Jeff kept correcting me and then the next time …