For those of you that know us, and many that don’t, Mike and I enjoy firearms. Our house is full of them (carefully kept away from little fingers!!). When Mike was contacted by a long time friend, asking if we wanted to attend the Green Mountain Boys Shooting Club’s 2012 Summer Shootout (say THAT 10 times fast!) we jumped at the chance.
What a great way to start off the weekend. We got up early Friday morning, loaded Shannon in the car, and off we went to meet up with two other recruiters and Mike’s friend John. What a great experience!
I’ve been around guns, but the line up that they had at this event was like nothing that I’ve ever seen before. Mini-cannons, a tank, .50 Caliber Sniper Rifle (holy boom Batman!), and so many more. I realized why exactly they called the line ‘hot’ about 2 seconds after the opening shot. It’s a feeling like none other!
Enjoy these videos…but realize that they don’t even come close to what it felt like to be there.
We thought that Shannon was going to have a hard time with all the noise, and don’t worry, we decked her out in her own pair of tiny ear muffs! She was a trooper though, and slept through the whole thing in her front pack.
I hope that we can be here for it next year, as it was incredible! Everybody participating was friendly, talkative, and enamored with Shannon in her little ear muffs! I got a shirt to commemorate the whole experience (I would find clothes shopping at a machine gun shoot, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere Vermont!) and I can’t thank John enough for inviting us!
Note the smoke coming out of the barrel of the gun being fired by the man in full camouflage!
Sadly, I didn’t get any video of the .50 Sniper Rifle being fired. It was right in front of where we were standing, and the BOOM was so loud that my ear plugs actually jumped out of my ears.
Compared to Friday’s events, the rest of the weekend was pretty uneventful.
Saturday, I got to snag some Q-T with my favorite bay mare, who is now allowed to go outside in a small paddock! I gave her a good scrubbing with my grooming kit, and she looked good as new.
I also brought home a huge pile of leather to clean. Alas, I still haven’t gotten around to that!
We’ve also been adventuring more into the land of baby food with Shannon, as it’s getting pretty hard to hold her off. She’s so ready to be a big girl. I’m so not! We had some sweet potatoes on Sunday night, and it seems to me that they were a huge hit!
We’ve also started giving her an ounce or so of water in her sippy cup with her meals. She mostly just throws it all over the place, but she seems to be getting the hang of it.
I also discovered a few amazing apps on iPhone over the weekend, that I just have to share.
The first is the C25K or Couch to 5k. They have a line of apps, designed to help new runners be successful at the distance of their choice, from 5k’s all the way to a full marathon. The C25K free version that I downloaded gave me a great workout last night when I tried it out. It’s easy to use, and you can play your music of choice in the background. It gives you voice directions when you start walking/jogging. You do 5 minute warm-up, then run 8 sets of 60 seconds jogging, 90 seconds walking, finish out with a 5 minute cool down. It’s 8 week program will get you in shape if you follow it three times a week. I’m not new to running, but after having a baby and dealing with my knee issues I think that this app will be perfect!
I used C25K in conjunction with my Nike+ Running app, which uses a GPS to track the speed and distance of your run. It also tells you the amount of calories burned based on your height and weight, which you put into the phone. You can sync it to your Facebook account, and your friends can actually send you ‘Cheers’ during your run! It saves all your runs so you can see improvement. If you have to pause your run, your music pauses as well. Pretty neat, and free!
The third app that I took for a test run, is the Simply Yoga app. They offer 20, 40, and 60 minute yoga workouts from 2 different routines. They show you a picture of the pose so that you can follow right along and have 16 different poses for you to pick from, and you can either start from the beginning, or you can choose a different pose to start from. I think that it can be a great app for when you travel and can’t get wi-fi or bring a laptop, but it’s hard to follow a yoga routine on my small phone screen all the time. I prefer Netflix or a DVD.
Finally, I downloaded an App called Songza. I’m still getting used to navigating it, but it proved to be pretty useful on my run yesterday. Instead of just selecting a genre of music (like Rock or Country) you select the activity that you’re currently taking part in. They even had a playlist for singing in the shower (much to Mike’s dismay). The playlists are created by other users, so sometimes it doesn’t play exactly what your looking for, but you can discover a lot of new stuff. Yesterday on my run, it selected a band called Skrillex. I’d heard of them, but never were my forte. Turns out they are exactly what I needed to power through the uphill part of my run! I’m all for new things.
Now I just need an app that helps Dixie keep up! You would think that the dog would have the energy to keep up, but after the first interval I had to hand her off to Mike, who was supposed to be jogging with me, but the stroller’s front wheel came loose and it wasn’t safe for him to be running with Shannon in it.
I’m off to go watch some Gigglebellies with the half-pint, while we wait for Dad to get home!
Ciao
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