The first thing that we did was to go to a Postsecret event held at USF. If you haven't heard of Postsecret before, it is a community project started by a guy called Frank Warren. He started to have strangers send him postcards with their secrets on it, secrets they have never told anyone. That was years ago and now he gets hundreds of secrets delivered to his mailbox everyday. He puts the best ones together into a collection and publishes them as well as travels around the country to give lectures. It was really interesting to hear him talk about the power in letting go of a secret, whether it is a secret you are keeping from yourself or from other people. Here is an example of the types of postcards he gets (I really like the happy ones):
It was fun to hear him speak and to see some of the secrets he wasn't allowed to put in the book because of copyright issues, etc...A few days later, it was my 24th birthday!! Yea for birthdays!!! We didn't have anything big planned but it turned out really good. My coworkers got me some really thoughtful gifts and a delicious cookie cake (my fave!), Anthony got me a new memory foam pillow, chocolate, and flowers. Plus, Ant and I met my mom in Orlando to have dinner with her. It was so nice to have the time driving there and back to catch up with Anthony and to have the time during dinner to catch up with my mom. The only sad part of the day was when I had to go to bed and realized that the day was over :(
A few days after that (last Saturday in fact) I ran in my second 5k! I hadn't been training at all for it but I signed up because a few of my friends were going. Plus, it was such a big race that I figured that I had to go at least to experience it :) The race itself was called "Gasparilla" and it has a long history in Tampa. It is similar to Mardi Gras, they have beads and a parade and all sorts of partying but it is all in celebration of a Spanish pirate that operated in Southwest florida. The race was reallly fun, the 5K alone had over 8,000 participants! Here is the official pirate ship that stays docked for the festivies:
So, the actual race was pretty miserable. It was cold and rainy and windy. I seriously wondered how many participants they would have had if they had a refund policy. I know I definitely had in the back of my mind "I paid $30 to run in this race, I better go!" even though the weather wasn't ideal. There were so many participants that they had to stage us in front of the start line according to how serious we were about running it. The fast people got to go first, followed by the not so fast runners, followed by the walkers. I started in the not-so-fast group. There was such a variety of runners! I saw little kids, older adults, and everything in between. I finished with a time of 33:49, which at least was better than the last one I did. I'm going to try to do another one in a few months and really speed it up!
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