Work promises to be insane for most of July, so this weekend I took advantage of hanging out with friends and socializing, knowing full well that I won’t be able to for the next few weeks.

On Friday night, I went to a running friend’s birthday barbeque in the suburbs.  It was a beautiful night, and being out in the suburbs means you can see the stars.  I stared at the night sky and listened to my running coach’s funny/insane travel stories.  I got home later than I wanted to, but still managed to crawl out of bed at 5:45 the next morning to go run 7 miles with my marathon training group. I’m not going to lie, I was exhausted from my field adventures and so it wasn’t a breezy run.  I still think I did pretty well, though.  I hung out with some of the group members afterwards to scarf down some tacos.

After a delicious two-hour nap, I went to another birthday barbeque.  The birthday boy has a beautiful Macaw named Rajah. I used to have birds when I was little, so naturally I was seriously considering birdnapping.

After that, Conrad and I saw Bad Teacher – I’ve heard mixed reactions from both critics and friends who have seen it, but I thought it was hilarious, for what it’s worth.

Then today, I did something I have never done before – meet a fellow blogger!  I have been very fortunate to “meet” some really cool people from my days on Livejournal and Vox, but I haven’t been able to meet any of these people in person.  It turns out that one of my blogging buddies Christina lives in the same city I do, so we decided to meet up for a sushi lunch. I’ll admit I was a little nervous beforehand.  Not that I didn’t expect Christina to be who she was; I could determine from her Facebook that she is indeed a woman in her 20′s and not some creepy 55-year-old man living in his mom’s basement.   But she seemed really cool from her blog, and I was hoping that we would hit it off and not be totally awkward.

But I didn’t have anything to worry about, because not only is Christina as awesome as she is in her blog, but we didn’t run out of anything to talk about in our nearly 2.5 hour conversation.  We covered it all, from family to “taboo” topics like politics and religion.  I’m usually very guarded when I meet people, but I found myself opening up – I guess it helped that we had communicated through the blog.  Who would have thought I would end up meeting a great new friend through a blogging platform?

I hope you all had a great weekend as well.  I’m not ready for Monday, but who ever is?