I can’t believe the Spring Beer Fling was almost a month ago! I’ve fallen so away from writing (and running) lately that I never got around to writing a review of it, which is bad because it was great for so many reasons!

We didn’t stay until the beach ball drop because Walking Dead(!!!)  but we got there at 12 when they opened and stayed until almost 6.  I really didn’t expect to stay so long but it could not have been better weather to be out in all day and the bands were great.  Basically we rotated between standing in the grass in front of the stage, to the tables looking over the river to the tables in the (shaded) VIP section to the grass in front of the stage….

Since we got there at lunch time the first thing I wanted to do was eat.  OK, the first thing I always want to do is eat, but whatever.  There were quite a lot of really great food trucks and vendors but I ended up getting the WokStar Rainbow Noodles at I Wanna Wok . Excellent choice!  the people who took our order and made the food were super nice and any time I get to eat with chop sticks I’m pretty happy.  But better than all that – the food was amazing.

Oh, and there was beer.  I have to admit, I didn’t try much of it as I was the driver of the day but we were there plenty long enough for me to try the Deep Eddy Vodka Eddy Palmer.  Sweet tea vodka, club soda, lemonade and lemon?  Ya, I’ll have one+ of those.  My parents went with us and my (non-drinking) mom had more than one of them – that tells you they were amazing.

And of course there was music all day long.  The Pretty Girls, The Heavy Metals, the Intoxicators were all great.

Weren’t there?  Well, there’s always next year!  But if you don’t want to wait that long the same people who put on the Spring Beer Fling are having a Tampa Bay Margarita Festival May 24th!  I may have some tickets to give away for the festival soon, so keep an eye out if you’re interested. If I have a drink of choice it is beyond a doubt tequila so I can’t wait!

Living in Florida so rocks.  Especially being right outside of Tampa, they have SO many great things going on all of the time.  You need yet another example?  How about Taste of South Tampa coming up April 13th at Hyde Park Village?

It’s a chance to sample offerings from a variety of local restaurants, breweries and lots more.  Keely & Curley Winery is going to be there!  I love their blueberry wines. Actually I went to a tour there once and they have a lot more than just blueberry wines! There’s also going to be coffee brewers, beer brewers, pizzerias, grills, it sounds like a little bit of everything.

One place I’m excited to learn more about is The Florida Cane Distillery. They make micro-distilled vodkas entirely of Florida ingredients. How cool is that? Check out these Florida flavors!

I think you should go.  So do the folks at Taste of Tampa, they gave me 2 general admission tickets to give away!

Enter here to win, the winner will be announced April 2nd!   a Rafflecopter giveaway

You can follow Taste of South Tampa on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date on who all will be at the there, and you can get your tickets here. Tickets are $35 in advance with discounts if you are under 21, over 60, or in the military.

Oh, and if you’d like a little bit of good karma to go with your good times then you should know that a portion of this events profits are going to Metropolitan Ministries.

I received two tickets to the Taste of South Tampa 2014 in exchange for writing a review and this giveaway.  As always, my opinions are all mine.

Guess what’s coming to Tampa in just 2 weeks.  The Spring Beer Fling!  What the heck is that you ask?  How about a whole day of surf rock, games, and as much retro fun as you can handle?  Oh yeah, and beer. One choice will be Samuel Adam’s spring seasonal beer, Cold Snap.  I tried it at the pub this weekend; trust me, you should have a glass!

It sounds like a whole lot of fun, and for those who aren’t that into beer Twisted Tea, Deep Eddy Vodka, and Angry Orchard will be there as well. I’m a big Angry Orchard fan!

I’m really looking forward to the music; I LOVE surf rock. Seriously, how could you not?  Here’s one of the bunch of bands that will be there.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6xgMJpVrvo?rel=0]

To top it all off the night’s going to end with a ‘Beach Ball Drop Spectacular’.  There’s something you don’t see every day!

Want to come out and join the fun?  General admission tickets are $15 in advance or $25 day of and include entertainment, games, and activities including the beach ball drop.  You also have the choice of VIP tickets which include all of that and also access to their ‘retro lounge’, unlimited drinks, a meal ticket for one of their vendors, and a Spring Beer Fling pint glass.  How cool is that? The VIP tickets are $85 in advance or $100 day of.  They’re 75% sold out already though, so there may be none left the night of the bash!

I have 2 general admission tickets to give away, enter here to win! The winner will be announced March 24th.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Spring Beer Fling is Saturday, March 29th from 1:00pm – 11:00pm at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park. Come on out and join the fun! You can get your GA or VP tickets here.

I received two VIP tickets to Spring Beer Fling 2014 in exchange for writing a review and this giveaway. As always, my opinions are all mine.

I like running.  I do!  Not every run, but for the most part. I also like writing, or I never would have started writing here. So why haven’t I been writing much lately? Because somewhere along the line I must have subconsciously decided that I could only write about running here.

And, I have a slight problem with an odd cross between the squirrel syndrome and being obsessive. That combination can be better than it sounds, except for when it’s worst than it sounds.

Last year my squirrel was gardening.  One minute I was thinking about how my mom used to grow lettuce in the side yard, the next thing I know I had bought 2 raised gardens and was finding out more than I needed to know about what a too-rainy season in Florida could do to a garden.  Also, I now know what an assassin bug is.  Just as cool yet not at all cool as they sound.   I even started a new blog with my niece to keep track of the garden.  Here is where I started, take a look if you are feeling bad about how your yard looks and would like to realize just how great it really is.

Then everything died except the basil plant, then my dogs ate the basil plant, then gardening season was over.  On to the next adventure.

Until a few weeks ago when I was feeling a bit overwhelmed reading about all of the GMO veggies in the local grocers and remembered I already had a fence up, why not start another garden?  So I bought a bunch of non-gmo seeds from SeedsNow.com and Clear Creek Seeds. And of course since nothing other than radishes, a few cucumbers and the basil lived last year I decided to start bigger.

The 2 square shaped beds are the ones I bought at Sam’s club last year, and I built the L shaped bed in the back a few weeks ago using these directions.

Of course I had to fill the beds and I originally intended to partly use dirt from the yard mixed with other stuff.  Then came the next squirrel. The dirt in my yard was full of disgusting things that I found (thanks Google) out are slugs.  They live under ground and eat roots and kill all your plants.  Even vegetable plants.  And did I mention they’re gross?  It was a little bit like finding out evil little aliens lived out there.

So I spent the better part of the day Googling how to get rid of them.  Guess what?  Basically the entire internet laughed and said too bad, all you can do is HAND PICK THEM and drop them in soapy water.  Now I swear I’m not a total wimp but no.

As I continued to (desperately) read I found a single ray of hope.  My new squirrel.  Yep, and I’ll tell you all about them later. That’s right slugs, take THAT!

How about you, do you ever take an idea and start running with it before you know exactly where it is you’re running too?  If not I have to say, I highly recommend it.  🙂

Yes, I did it to myself AGAIN.  I was doing great with my running, I was up to 4 miles and keeping to a running schedule, running 3 or even 4 times a week.  Great, right? Right.

Then February hit and I just fell right off every wagon there is.  Stopped running, stopped blogging, stopped doing yoga, guess how great I feel about now?  Yep, not that great.  But all of that is just the start. Guess what I’m doing in the morning.  Less than 12 hours from now.

Mud Endeavor! Not just any mud run. This one is 5 or 6 miles, depending on how they decided to set up the course.  So not only is it the longest mud run and longest run I’ve done yet if I must be honest, it’s after taking an entire month off of doing anything even remotely healthy for me.

I really don’t hate me, but I CAN be my own worst enemy.  As a matter of fact, I excel at it!  Does it make it better or worst that I am super excited about the run tomorrow instead of dreading it like I think I probably should be?  Oh yeah, and I have a case of tennis elbow so bad I’ve been drinking my coffee with my left hand.

There won’t be any kicking ass tomorrow but I will still have a ton of fun!

So what exactly have I been doing with myself besides watching Netflix (I’m in the midst of a full on 4400 kick) and drinking hard cider? Gardening!

I cleared out the side yard (yet again), build a new raised garden, and planted the whole thing with non-gmo seeds.  I have lots of things sprouting and I’m planning to share pictures but at the moment it’s a wee bit too dark outside and I just wanted to share my insanity of the moment, my longest, most unprepared for mud run.

So with me luck since I’m going to need it, and come back later to see if I made it.  Ya, you can laugh.  Goodness knows that’s what I’ll be doing.

The other day I decided to go for a run.  My oldest was home and said he’d go with me, so of course the next thing I knew the younger 2 decided they wanted to run as well.  Well, this is going to be fun!

First try we all walked barefoot to the end of the driveway, realized it was oh-my-god Florida cold and all ran back in to get on some shoes.

Second try….  we all started jogging together at about the same speed.  It didn’t take long for the older two to start jetting ahead, skipping, jumping, boxing, and going in circles and the youngest to start lagging behind.  After a bit I told the older two to go back and get their brother since they weren’t running anyways, they were doing everything else.  Let the fun begin!

The rest of the run went something like this:

Want to box?  Hey! Mom, he/she hit me! You knocked me down!  (they all sprint past me like a pack of dogs hunting)  I bet you can’t do a back flip!  No back flips on cement!!! (me obviously)  I bet I can punch harder than you! ( my daughter, go figure) All of this is punctuated with frequent I’m getting tired, running is boring, I want a drink, blah blah blah.

So we get to the corner of our block and I tell the younger 2 they can head home.  But mom, we love running! We don’t want to go home!  Really????

Just one more way a parent can learn to completely zone out the circus created around them while still magically hearing the parts you have to in order to avoid a trip to the emergency room.  Seriously, who would think it’s a good idea to learn to flip in the middle of an asphalt road??

Do you ever run or do other exercise with your kids? Is it as much of an adventure as my family’s outings tend to be or is it just me and mine?

I’m not even going to tell you about how amazingly relaxing it is to do yoga with them.  (Is there a sarcasm font?)

First things first as always,  the winners for the Color Me Rad entries are Lori, Kaili, and Dylan Bukowczyk.  Email me at kindazennish.com and I will send you your codes, congrats!

I didn’t post for Meatless Monday this week because honestly I just ran out of time – I haven’t even done my weekend grocery shopping yet and it’s already Tuesday.  Ever have weekends so busy you feel like you need to recover from them?  Ya, next weekend I am doing NOTHING.

But food is on my mind, especially since I read this Tweet Monday morning.

Have any vegetarians out there done the #21daysugardetox?

— Kristen (@thismomruns) January 27, 2014

I’ve had the idea of trying a sugar detox for a while, but all of the information about it seems to be Paleo, which I think of as including lots of meat though I know I’ve read that there are vegetarians that follow it.  But it also cuts out the majority of grains.  I don’t see any reason to cut out whole grains because I think they’re healthy if you’re not gluten intolerant, which I’m not. The problem is I know perfectly well that I’m not a food expert so I keep thinking there must be some reason for it, although I couldn’t find anything on Google except for 1 person’s comment on an article (I already forgot which one) that grains eventually break down into sugar.

So I’m curious.  What’s wrong with including whole grains while trying to cut out sugar?  I’d like to try this with my own modified plan in the next few weeks and if there is a reason to eliminate grains then whatever, it’s temporary!  As long as that doesn’t include oatmeal.

Anybody have an opinion on this or know the reason?

Happy Tuesday!  First things first, the winner of The Color Run entry is Sadie B!  Sadie please email me at KindaZennish@gmail.com and I will give you your entry code.

Second things second, we’re more than half way through January, have you been working on any New Year’s resolutions or monthly goals?  I usually don’t set any goals for the whole year but you know this year I decided to try to run 500 miles by the end of the year.

I keep turning it around in my head trying to figure out a plan. Hmm…

•  250 miles per half year
• 125 miles per quarter
• 41.666 a month
• 9.6153 a week
• 1.369 a day

The further I break it down the easier it sounds. Heck. it’s only about .057 miles per hour this year!  Ya.  I haven’t actually run 9 miles a week, as a matter of fact I got off to a very slow start on the running front. But I’m already picking up the miles a bit and I figure if I can keep steadily increasing my mileage I shouldn’t have a problem catching 500 at the end of the year.

Granted right now I am only at 15 but, you know, I wanted plenty of room to improve.  🙂

How are you doing with your running goals?  Are you going to running this year?

I have been having a bit of a problem lately with headaches, neck aches, and sore shoulders at work.  While I’m sure that the stress of being a single mom to 3 during the holidays has added to it significantly I also think it has a lot to do with having a desk job.  Sitting at a computer 40 hours a day can’t be good for me!  So of course here I am at home sitting at a computer, but whatever….

I mentioned last week that I decided to join a ‘Just 1 Thing‘ challenge for this year, which asks you to chose one thing to work on for your health at a time.  My one thing for the moment is getting back to daily yoga.  Since tonight I came home with especially sore and stiff shoulders I decided to look for a practice that focused on this area.

I found this video on Do Yoga With Me’s YouTube channel  and it is wonderful for getting a good stretch throughout the neck and shoulders.  I had forgot how great it feels to do 30 minutes of yoga that just focuses on relaxation!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3lQQieptsI&w=560&h=315] If you work on a computer all day another thing you can do to help is to give yourself hourly reminders to stand up, roll your shoulders and shake out your hands, or just to sit up straighter.  I created an hourly pop up message reminding me to sit up straighter because it seems that as soon as I stop thinking about it I’m slouching in my chair again.

If you think that an hourly reminder would be helpful to you too it’s easy enough to add a reminder to your computer.  Here is an explanation on how to set it up.

Do you have a desk job?  If so how do you combat the effects of sitting 40 hours a week?

Last night’s run was a bit of an adventure.  Nothing at all happened, but still.

Here’s the thing.  You should know that I’m a huge horror story fan.  Zombies, werewolves, I love it all but real life horror stuff.  So you can see why I was disturbed when I moved from Arizona where it monsoons for like a week a year and is dry as can be the rest of the time to Florida where apparently this sort of thing is normal:

I mean come on! I can almost hear the balloons rubbing against each other and that damn clown’s eyes peaking out.  (If you haven’t read IT then get to it then come back and you’ll totally get it!) When I first started running at night here I would actually make a point of not looking at them.  Would you like to know the worst of it?  There’s never just one.  That’s right, where there’s one on one side of the street there is also one on the other side of the street.   So any self respecting person obviously has to run dead center down the road to avoid the evil things.

Also, when you run past a storm drain it seems that at least 70% of the time a frog/toad/who-knows-what has to jump down into the water just as you run past, scaring the living daylights out of you.

Anyways, back to my run last night. Obviously it involved storm drains.

So, I ran a bit and then I ran past a particular storm drain and dang if it didn’t sound like 3 men were talking down there.  Now I know perfectly well that it was a few toads or frogs down there, but that didn’t stop the creepiness one bit.  Knowledge is power and all, but so is superstition and watching too may scary movies.

On I ran, right down the middle of the street.  A little while further I was coming up on yet another storm drain and I started to hear a little dog barking.  A very hollow, echoing little dog bark.  I stopped in front of the drain and tried to look down it, wondering if that is what I really hear at the last drain  (brave, I know).  That wasn’t scary, that was a dog stuck down there!  So I stood in front of the drain and started dialing my dad’s number to have him come on over.  He is part of the neighborhood watch so he’s the perfect person to call. Why yes I am in my forty’s and why yes I did call him when I found roaches in my car.  I never claimed maturity you know.

As I was calling him I took a couple of steps back and realized something.  The hollow echoing dog barking was coming from the garage of the house behind the drain.

You have no idea how glad I am that I realized that before the phone started ringing!  The rest of my run was dead center down the road, in the direction of home, and very difficult due to the fact that I couldn’t stop laughing at myself.  This is what happens when I run without my headphones.  Never again!

Do you run at night?  If so do you find that every once in a blue moon it’s creepy even though most nights it’s great?   I do, tell me I’m not the only one!