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Welcome back to the Warrior Dash recap. When we last left our hero, he was running the race. Let’s see where he is now…

The Obstacles

I’ll just list each obstacle and what I thought of it. And I have listed some helpful tips and hints for how to handle these Warrior Dash obstacles. After I realized that the obstacles were prime locations for passing people, my goal was to pass people in the obstacles. Note: the term “cargo net” means ropes connected together to make a grid of one-foot square sections.
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Since I know most of you weren’t there with me at the Warrior Dash, here is my recap of the day:

Background

Warrior Dash is a 3.1-mile race with about a dozen obstacles, most of which require climbing or crawling plus mud.

In my preparation for the half marathon in September, I wanted to do a 5k in July and a 10k in August. There were some 5k races in July around here, but this was the most appealing. If I want to run 3.1 miles, I can do that just about anywhere. A 5k obstacle course, however, doesn’t come along every day.
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I haven’t seen the new Smurfs movie, nor do I intend to see it. Some reviews say it’s okay, some say it’s bad, but I don’t know of anyone who thinks it’s a great movie. Maybe if you have a couple hours to kill and some money to burn… But even then I could think of a lot of other things to do instead.

Regardless of what you think of the movie, you might be interested to know that I was talking with Gargamel and got an old family recipe from him. In the spirit of sharingness, here it is.

Recipe for Smorfs

1 graham cracker
1/2 chocolate bar
1 Smurf

Roast the Smurf lightly over an open flame, being careful not to let him catch on fire. Break the graham cracker in half. Place the chocolate on one piece of the graham cracker. Then place the Smurf on the chocolate. Finally, cover the Smurf with the remaining piece of graham cracker. Enjoy with a glass of milk.

Some of you may have ignored this post when you saw that the title contains the word flowchart. But that would mean that you’re not reading this, so why am I bothering to explain that?

Here are two flowcharts that document how we possibly handle things here in our family. “Things” being the two most commonly-asked questions at dinner: May I be excused? and Can I have dessert?
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Warning: vacation recap ahead.

Visit last year’s recap of our trip to Maranatha for a refresher course, or to see how similar trips to Maranatha are. We want them to be similar, because kids need traditions.

Here’s a tip: if you like attention, take a 3-week-old baby to a place full of families. Everybody loves to see a newborn. I think Delta was the youngest one there, although I heard there was a 1-week-old there the next week.
That would be crazy – check out of the hospital, take a day to unpack, a day to settle in, a day to pack, and then leave on vacation.

The kids liked their programs (morning and evening each day). Beta wanted to go, but he had a fever the first two days, so he missed some of the sessions.
My wife took him to the nearby clinic, where they diagnosed a sinus infection and put him on antibiotics. Then he was good to go.

I tried a couple of new (new to me, at least) ice cream flavors at the sweet shop: Cake Batter and Royal Coconut. Cake Batter was okay, but I probably woudn’t get it again. Cake batter is inferior to cookie dough both in the baking and in ice cream. Royal Coconut, however, was delicious. It tasted like an Almond Joy (or Mounds) candy bar. I highly recommend it, unless you dislike coconut.

Now on to the photos:
Like all good vacation spots with kids’ programs, there was an opportunity for tie-dye T-shirts. Alpha was the only one of our children who wanted to participate.

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My wife’s laptop is slow and sometimes uncooperative. Somewhat like a toddler. It’s time for it to be replaced. The laptop, that is, not the toddler.

And the laptop is a little heavier than the current technology, so I got her one of them fancy notebooks
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Intro to Our Water Problems

Our water softener was hurting. It still worked, kind of. It was going through salt like normal, but the water was tasting worse and worse. Salty-ish, in fact.

My wife refused to drink the water, so we were going through dozens of cases of bottled water from Costco. It finally got to me too. When you have to spit out any water that gets in your mouth during your shower, you know something’s not right. So I talked to some people, and got referred to my local hardware store.

I filled up an empty water bottle (we had lots of those available) with our hose water (from before the softener) and took it to the store. The manager guy took it in the back to test it. It took him quite a while.

When he finally came back, he told me that he tested it twice because the numbers were off the chart and he didn’t believe the first test.

Fixing Our Water

For those who are interested: our water has an iron content of 3.5 and a hardness level of 67. I forget the units on those numbers, but I think the hardness involved grains.

The store manager said they had an iron filter that would help, but he wanted the water treatment specialist (and installer) guy to look at our system in person so he could make sure nothing else was wrong. Maybe he thought we connected the water softener backwards or something.

The water treatment guy came out and tested our water. He hadn’t believed the store manager’s results either. Sure enough, he got the same result. Our well was fine and the rest of our system was fine. It’s just the groundwater in our area is very hard. Based on his assessment, we got an iron filter from the store and he installed it.

It cost around $700, but it was well worth it.

Get it? Well worth it…

Ahem.
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