Fuel for champions.

"I'm gonna get you, suckas!" - Melissa

Aren't they adorable! This is Ben and Melissa on Whidbey Island. They just finished running 26.2 miles. Very quickly.

We were professional spectators, seeing them at the 1, 5, 13, 17, 19, 26 mile markers. The morning clouds burned off and it was a beautiful day for a run.

And the rumors are true. A bald eagle circled Melissa as she finished the race.

Quiz night. In your pjs.

I just found the coolest thing on my Ipod. Maybe you have already found it, you tech-savvy geek. Go under games. Click the music quiz. Tah-da! It plays a snippet of a song. Then you pick the title of that song from a short list. Play it on the bus or metro. When you get one correct, try not to cheer out loud.

I'm also hooked to ESPN Baseball Today podcast. 15-20 minutes of baseball highlights from the day. The beginning is pretty cheesy, with SportsCenter-ish sound effects. And they l-u-v A-Rod (groan). But overall, makes me look forward to my morning commute.

Melissa and Ben are coming!

Two of our friends from DC are visiting this weekend. They're running the Whidbey Island Marathon on Sunday. It's their first marathon and they've been training for months. They're awesomely fast- excellent 5K and 10K times. It should be a beautiful course and the forecast is for 52F/42F and partly cloudy .

Bring it on, Seattle. We'll show 'em the Space Needle, Linda's, Pike Place, and Volunteer Park. Yay!

Here are the glorious cherry blossoms at UW. I took this photo during break as the trees were coming to their peak. It was fun to see all the people taking photos, and when school started lots of people were hanging out and playing there. It was very crowded, imagine the scene above with 300 people. Anyway, I love the cherry blossoms, here they are! Brian

Alpacas are adorable.

They hum constantly to their young to keep them close and safe. Not loudly to create a racket but enough to hear them if you stand nearby. They can catch disease from humans so you can't pet them. They're expensive, $25,000 for a female. They live to be about 20. They're native to the Andes. They're raised for fiber, not food or milk.

I learned this all from a 10 year-old girl. She and her best friend (who were both dressed in matching fluorescent dresses) were in charge of handing out flyers and talking to tourists who stopped by the alpaca farm in Skagit County. I fed a pair of alpacas and bought some soft white yarn.

On Saturday I went up to Skagit County for the Annual Tulip Fest. Brian had to study so I he missed out on the country fun. It's about an hour north of Seattle along I-5. Skagit Valley a fertile valley with the Cascades to the east and the Puget Sound to the west. The Skagit river, one of the cleanest in the state, runs through the valley. I saw a bald eagle near the river while I was driving! There are fields and fields of flowers, not just tulips.

I drove around the countryside and stopped at one of the larger tulip farms. There are two main tulip farms and they're total tourist traps. But they have beautiful fields. And huge gift stores...

The local Kiwanis club does a salmon bake every day of the festival in a wooden lodge in the main city park. Awesome! Cannot recommend it enough. $11 for a huge piece of salmon, coleslaw, bread, potato, ice cream, lemonade, and coffee. All run by kind old men. They cook the salmon right outside the lodge on a grill with alderwood.

I stopped at a farm stand for veggies. I asked if they had eggs and the woman went back to the hen house to check. I got 7 still warm eggs. We had them for breakfast today and they were so orange and flavorful. Yummm.

Not much new to report. We're planning an Easter potluck at our place on Sat night. Brian took a belay class on Sunday and he'll come with me to the gym to belay for real on Friday. Um, what else?

Oh, I locked myself out of the house today. I haven't done that in a long time. See, I take my two house keys (outside door key and key to our apartment) off of my ginormous key chain when I go running. Then I put the two little keys in my pocket or on my shoelaces. And put them back on the key chain when I'm done.

You see where this is going.

This morning I gathered my stuff, grabbed my keys and walked out the door. As I left, I turned to close the deadbolt, only to realize that the key chain did not have the house keys on it. And the door had already locked behind me. Arrrgh...

Happily, Brian had remembered his keys and I met him on campus to get his keys.

Crazy day at UW today. I heard the helicopters from my office but didn't know what was going on until Brian called me.

UW staffer killed

Here's the photo of Brian's grey hat.