Remember when I used to write about running here? It's definitely been a while, but the good news is that my hamstring issues finally have seemed to resolve themselves. 

I can't say when exactly it happened, but gradually over the summer the pain and tightness started to dissipate until it eventually wasn't there anymore. 

Since then I've been slowly rebuilding some of my endurance lengthening my runs and reintroducing weights to some of my lower body strength training. I'm still lifting lower weights than before the hamstring injury, but that's just more a precaution than anything at this point. 

I've been focusing on running about three times per week, with a couple of short runs during the week and a longer run on the weekend. 

I started my "long" runs around four miles several weeks ago and I've been slowly adding on the mileage since then. This past weekend my long run was up to six miles. 

I'm really excited that my running is slowly coming back, but man, this August DC humidity has been making it tough. 

It's hard enough to rebuild a running base, but trying to do it in the midst of this nasty humidity is brutal. My paces are so painfully slow, but I'm trying not to pay too much attention to that right now. I know at the end of the day these slow, summer runs will become much more comfortable runs in the fall. 

In light of all this, I'm excited to start doing some training. I have a couple races penciled in for my fall calendar because running races in-person again is really exciting. 

Of course, at the same time, as my hamstring heals, my IT band/outer hip is now super tight. It's always something! I'm spending some extra time stretching and foam rolling to help loosen things up.

So that's where things are with my running. Definitely in a better place than it was a few months ago and hopefully it will continue moving in the right direction. 

When we moved into our house in March 2020, there were two big projects that were at the top of our list to tackle -- converting our sunroom to an open air patio and re-doing our primary bathroom. 

We tackled the patio last September, and I'm excited to say our bathroom is officially done now too!

When we moved in, our main bathroom was functional, but it didn't look the best. 

The bathroom floor:

The vanity:

Since I knew we needed to save our pennies a bit for the big remodel, I tackled a few small projects myself. I refinished the vanity, added a mirror frame and removed the chipped paint from the floor tiles. 

Those changes were definitely helpful, but the bathroom -- especially the shower and the floor -- needed some major updating.

We got a quote for the work from our go-to contractor in March of this year, but he's an in-demand guy, and we couldn't start the work until July. While it was kind of frustrating to wait that long, it also gave us time to pick out all our tile, decide on paint colors, and ensure our new fixtures arrived on time. 

And when demolition began, I was one happy camper. 

So long ugly shower door, so long gross pink tile! I will not miss you!

As with every major project we do in this house, we find something strange during demolition. In the shower, we discovered that someone had built a new shower on top of previously existing, tiled shower walls. And they attached the new walls with globs and globs of some sort of glue. 

Turns out this glue was leaking out of walls into our shower. Ever since we moved in, we'd been trying to figure out why the caulk kept running, but turns out it wasn't the caulk! It was this glue seeping out from behind the walls. Gross!

After demolition, our contractor started rebuilding the structure of the shower and then waterproofing everything.

This work was all super important, but it wasn't so pretty to look at. I was eager to get to the tiling so I could see my vision for the bathroom come to life. 

The night after our contractor laid the tile on the shower floor, I think I just stood in the room staring at it for like 15 minutes. I was so happy with how it looked. 

After that, the tile on the shower walls went up, and I could really start to see the space coming together. 

We had a bit of a snafu with the tile for the bathroom floor. Our contractor ordered the tile, but when it arrived it was broken. When he returned it, they told him they would no longer be carrying that tile so we couldn't easily replace it. We scrambled to find another similar tile, but the night we were doing research, we lost power because of a storm and we ended up sending our contractor a new tile option that could only be used on walls not on a floor. 

So we went back to the drawing board again, and the third time was the charm. 

I love the way this marble tile ended up looking with the shower. 

New baseboard and a coat of cheerful, yellow paint were the finishing touches that really brightened up the room. 

I couldn't be any happier with the way our bathroom turned out. The shower feels so luxurious. It's like being at a fancy hotel every time I used it.  

After a slower month of reading in June, I can credit my beach vacation in July for helping me finish more books last month. There is nothing like sitting by the ocean relaxing with a good book. This month's books were an overall solid batch. There was one true standout, but several others that I'd highly recommend. 

Five Stars

Half Life by Jillian Cantor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book. It was really interesting and different, and it made you think about how the choices you make in life impact where you end up. This book tells the story of Marie Curie two different ways. In one version of her life, Marie is the woman we all know today, whose discovery of radium and polonium led to many of the advancements we have. That version of her life is a little bit fictionalized, but largely follows her true story. In the other version of her life, Marie never goes to France to study. Instead she marries and stays in Poland. This version is obviously completely fictional, but I love how the author pulls on threads from her real life to sprinkle through the fictionalized life. It's interesting to see how the two lives share similarities and where they were different. A good, thought-provoking book. Highly recommend.

Four Stars

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun and fast read that sucked me in from the first moment and left me wanting to find out what happened. When Hannah receives a cryptic note from her husband that says "protect her," she knows he's referring to his daughter. But he has disappeared and she's left to find answers on her own. The only reason I gave this four stars instead of five is that I thought some of the plot points were a bit too obvious or I saw them coming too soon. So while there wasn't really a big twist, this was still a really fun read.

Too Good to Be True by Carola Lovering
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The twist in this book got me, but I almost feel like it happened a little too early in the book. The first half of this book was excellent. You have three narrators telling you their stories. One man and his two two wives who seemingly know nothing about each other. But after the twist, there was a lot still being explained and I felt like we already knew what happened (and what would inevitably happen). This was still a good book, but I felt like the second half could have been shortened.

What You Wish For by Katherine Center
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book pretty much pulled me in from page one and I finished it in a day. Sam works as a school librarian at a liberal, family-run school. But when the beloved principal dies, the head of the school board hires his complete opposite, a man Sam worked with out a previous school. Sam remembers him as a fun, outgoing teacher, but that's not who he is anymore. As Sam and her colleagues grapple with the changes he's making to the school, she's also trying to rationalize the teacher she once knew with the man he is now. She sets out to try to help him remember his old self, in the hopes of saving the school she knows and loves.

Feels Like Falling by Kristy Woodson Harvey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun, easy breezy summer book -- perfect for reading at the beach. What I loved most about this book was the power of friendship, especially from unexpected places, to pull us up when it feels like the world just keeps knocking us down.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a really powerful look at the criminal justice system in the US, and the harsh sentences handed down to Black people. The only thing that was tough for me in this book was keeping track of some of the timelines and story lines. I think that was because I listened to the audiobook version instead of reading the physical copy.

Three Stars

The Summer of Lost and Found by Mary Alice Monroe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a great book to read while sitting at the beach, however, I don't think I was quite ready to read a fictional book set in covid times. It was just a little too real. I enjoyed the story between the characters, and how they coped with quarantine and other things with the pandemic. But maybe it was just a little bit too soon for something like this.

The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book looks at the immigrant experience from the point of view of a Korean mother and her American-born daughter. When Margot shows up at her mother's apartment and finds her dead, she doesn't accept the police's conclusion that her mother tripped and hit her head. She digs into her mother's past and learns a lot about what brought her mother to the U.S. and what she endured to hide her immigration status. Because this book was billed a bit as a mystery, I thought it would be a bit more fast-paced, but I found it a bit slow at times.

The Boyfriend Project by Farrah Rochon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I loved the way this book opened with three woman bonding over a scam artist who was trying to date all of them (and get them to pay for all the dates) at the same time. But I felt like the book pivoted too fast away from that to the newer romance story line, and I felt meh about that. One thing I did like though is that the ending of this book set up potential story lines for the other women characters, and that was one thing I really liked about the Playbook series. So even though I didn't love this book, I may read some of the others since I'm curious to see how the other women's stories will end.