I woke up before my alarm this morning, which never happens, ready to tackle the morning. I haven’t been a morning person in years, and yet, today I feel like I could be. I wasn’t planning on blogging today, but I have a few things to share.

Wedding Related:
Last weekend, I was lucky to attend Weddings Inspired Northwest (WINW), at the Couer d’Alene Resort. First of all, I’m always amazed by how beautiful a place I live in. Second, I was so very grateful for this experience to grow as a wedding professional. The chance to hear from a variety of wonderful speakers and meet so many new people in our industry? It was energizing. I may write more about it later, but I had three big “take-away” points from three of the speakers.

Overall, the most important point of the conference was driven home by Misty of Cameo Events, who I think is one of the most “together” people I’ve met. She said that we teach others how to treat us by how we treat ourselves. If we don’t respect the boundaries between work and personal, neither will our clients or the other vendors we work with. The note I wrote to myself? Creating boundaries creates sanity. Which I can’t sum it up succiently, I really loved the talk from Linnyette Richardson, where she talked about charging what you’re worth. I am a huge proponent of quality over quantity. And Linnyette was too. Lastly, I could write a whole post about the things I loved in Alexis Jones’ talk, but the words I wrote down and underlined in my notes: why not you? why not now? So often, she pointed out, we are the reason we fail. It’s not the external circumstances, it’s the internal dialogue. And that hit something in me.

Bloomsday:
My mom and a group of her friends came to town to run Bloomsday. Can I just say how impressed I am by my mother? She’s in better shape than I am, and she’s out running races at least once a month, training all the time. She’ll deny that last bit, by the way, but almost every time I call, she’s off on a run or a bike ride. H also ran Bloomsday, posting a fantastic time for his first run of the season, and especially awesome considering two weeks ago he was out with a knee injury. I’ve already committed to doing Bloomsday next year, so I should probably start training now, right? After all, I can’t let my mom beat me 🙂

This was the first time I’ve made it down to Bloomsday, and I really enjoyed spending the time watching my friends and family cross the finish line. Such joy.

Here are a few snaps from the weekend. If you don’t get enough of me on the blog, I really suggest following me in Instagram. I’m more active there than anywhere else.

So glad that Alexis and I took this photo after she switched to flats. I am short!

This random guy is not one of my mom’s friends, he just happened to be wearing a green shirt too and was right next to her group! We didn’t even notice at first. Ah, Bloomsday.