Household Hints, Lemons, and Cookies

When I was a kid, I had a strange obsession with reading household hints books.  This likely stemmed from perusing my grandma's library to find things that seemed intriguing to read.  I was reminded of my obsession last Thursday when we had a relief society activity all about the uses of lemons.  Surprisingly, the uses extend far beyond the expected cooking and cleaning functions.  For example, did you know that  Komori et al. did a study that suggested lemon odor has potential anti-depressant properties? Also supposedly Jean Valnet, MD researched antibactieral properties of vaporized lemon essential oil.  However, I can't find any real research to back this up--just claims on essential oil blogs.  Anyway, the church smelled nice and we got to eat a lot of tasty lemon foods.  Here is an easy lemon cookie recipe that I got from the activity:

Easy Chewy Lemon Cookies

Ingredients:
Supreme Lemon Cake Mix
1 tub of cool whip (I used light. At the activity they were made with cool whip free.)
1 egg

Combine ingredients with a spoon first, and then beaters.  (I struggled with the beaters.  The batter is really weird--it has the consistency of taffy, and it crawled up the beater posts in a bizarre way.)  Put some blobs down on a greased cookie sheet and bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes.  When cooled, drizzle with glaze.

Glaze:
1 cup powdered sugar
zest and juice of one lemon

I think perhaps my obsession with hints might mean that pinterest would be highly addictive for me.  Hence I have thus far resisted joining.

Canyonlands 2013 Recap

So, I kept saying that this year would be my last year doing Canyonlands Half Marathon.  Buuut I may change my mind.  After two years of awful, windy weather we had a beautiful race: not too cold at the start and not too hot at the finish. 

Here's the recap: earlier in the week I had food poisoning, and the morning of the race I felt somewhat sick to my stomach.  I managed to down a banana and peanut butter (and not the cereal I had brought). Fortunately, a gas station was readily available so I picked up some tums.  I was forced to do a call of the wild (wilderness pee) because we had to wait so long in the canyon after we got dropped off, and there was a huge line for the portos right near the start.  After doing my business I tried to secure my place in the pack, but idiotically all the pace signs were jammed up right near the front, so all the people were jammed up too.  People were almost sliding off the steep rocky slope off the side of the road--it was that packed.  I was right at the edge, and I think I got sand in my shoes.  Or maybe that was from the W.P.

So I decided to try running without my ipod which I used the past few years.  I wanted to try the run free experiment.  I soon was running freer than I had anticipated because apparently my gps was out of batteries.  Oops.  I had to ask random people with gpses how fast we were going. I knew I wasn't going to PR this year--I only ran once in the entire month of January due to the snowy weather and horrific air quality.  Then in February I was pretty lackadaisical.  So my goal was to not start out too fast like I always do, and to have a good strong race.  Mainly I wanted to break my tradition of running the race slower every year I've done it.  Success!  I finished at 1:49:54 chip time which is 8:22 pace, almost six minutes better than last year.  I placed 599/600 out of 3189 overall (top 18.7% which is better by over 2% from last year) and 39 out of 305 in my class (top 12.7% of my class, about 5% better than last year).  I was actually in better shape last year, but that dratted wind was awful.  Also, I started out too fast which was just demoralizing. So the beautiful weather and my more strategic start made for a pretty good race this year.  I still kinda died around the last mile or two, but that would be the lack of training.  Oops.

After the race I grabbed lunch at the diner then did some road biking for the first time ever in Potash Canyon.  Here are my road biking companions:


 

And a few scenic shots:

I saw some petroglyphs too, which was pretty sweet, even though the photos did not turn out well.

I hear Buckhorn Wash is the place to go for Petroglyphs.  There are a lot of places around Moab that I haven't seen yet, which is a motivating factor to go again.  For example, off of Potash we saw the trail head to Corona Arch, which is where this awesome video was made.

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to climb to the arch.  Maybe next year. :)