Month: November 2015

From now on, I’ll just pretend I’m invisible when I run

2 Comments

I didn’t need to know this about myself, but now I do, and I’m going to share it with all of you.  When I’m running, and I think I’m going all out and looking smooth and streamlined and super-fast, I am not.  I am not any of those things in that moment.  I got to the end of yesterday’s race and revved up for my final kick across the finish line, and yeah, I picked up speed.  I was going faster than I had been, and I passed a few people.  But I do NOT look smooth.  I do NOT look all head-down, speeding bullet-like.  I do NOT look like a cheetah.

I look like a robot.  I look like a robot on springs.  Who thinks she’s a gazelle.  Seriously, I catch air.  And my arms!  What the hell am I doing with my arms?  I’m pretty sure when I run normally, they stay pretty close to my sides.  But here…man, here my elbows are flapping, and my hands are out – am I trying to grab hold of the air and pull myself along?

On the plus side (I guess?), I have very good posture.

I would show you the actual video, but I can’t figure out how to download it.  Wait – here’s the link.  I’m in the center of the screen by about 4 seconds in, wearing sunglasses and a pink jacket tied around my waist.  It’s probably just as well I can’t embed it.  And I don’t know how long the site will keep it up.  So, you know, if you’re going to watch it and make fun, better do it fast.  I’m not going to tell you how many times I’ve watched it.  John looks normal, and Jess looks cool.  I look like a crazy person.

I don’t need to do that again

Leave a Comment

Whoops, I missed a day.  Well, it was a busy day.  A busy weekend, really.  We spent Saturday morning cleaning up, both because it was necessary and because Sean and Emily were coming to visit, and we spent the rest of Saturday hanging out with them.  I made the worst decisions in terms of food and alcohol – let’s have salad and fish and hey, some raw oysters, and then follow it up with cream-based alcoholic beverages!  Sounds like a plan!  That combination is never a great idea, but it’s especially stupid when you have a race the next day. I woke up this morning at 6:15 seriously wondering if I would be able to run.  I could, and I did, but I wasn’t sure I’d feel well enough until I actually started running.  (I feel much better now.)

Today was the Across the Bay 10K, the race where about 30,000 runners cross the Chesapeake Bay, taking over one of the two spans of the Bay Bridge.  It’s nuts.  We were afraid it would be windy and chilly, but it was sunny and warm-ish, so yay for that.  The logistics were a nightmare: park at the stadium (we jogged there, since it’s only a little over a mile from our place), wait in line to get on a school bus to get to the start line. Run the race, finish on the eastern shore, and get on another school bus to bring us back to the stadium.  Since the eastbound span of the bridge is closed (until 2pm), the westbound span is handling two-way traffic, and it took forever to get back over the bay.  We got off the bus at the stadium and still had to walk over a mile to get back home.

We stopped for brunch at the Irish pub (John had corned beef hash, I had the andouille quiche), and we just got home, and I really want to take a shower.  So, you know, there I go.

Falling down laughing

Leave a Comment

I follow The Bloggess on Twitter (@thebloggess) and I have never been happier that I do than this week.  It started on Sunday, as we were traveling back from Oregon.  You may have heard about it – this showed up on Buzzfeed AND in the New York Times.  I’ll let The Bloggess tell you about it, but I’ve been reading these tweets since Sunday (and re-reading some of them over the last day or two).  I was giggling in the airport, chuckling while the plane was on the tarmac, laughing in the next airport, and I stayed up way too late after we got back (which was late to begin with) practically crying while reading them in bed.  Some of them were so funny I couldn’t read them out loud to John through the laughter.  I think they have a cumulative effect – they get funnier the more you read at one time.

A couple bunch of my favorites (that I actually favorited on Twitter so I could read them again):

funny tweet2 funny tweet1 funny tweets funny tweet3

Then there was one that I thought I favorited in Twitter, but I can’t find it, so I’ll paraphrase.  “My brother called me in a panic because he couldn’t find his phone.  I said, what did you call me on?  He hung up.”

Anyway, The Bloggess has two posts about them, and she reposted a TON of them, so you can enjoy them, too!

Post 1 and Post 2

I HAVE to remember to take pictures

Leave a Comment

This morning, I saw a guy running across the bridge with his dog.  Not unusual.  His dog was carrying a stick.  Not unusual.  The stick was as long as I am tall, and the dog was carrying it sideways on a narrow sidewalk.  Unusual.  And hilarious.  And John was right in front of me and DIDN’T NOTICE.  He needs to look around more.

Later, I was walking back from coffee with Jess, and I noticed a guy smoking.  I mean, HE was smoking.  No, I mean, smoke was BILLOWING out of his mouth and hovering in a big white cloud behind him.  I’m sure there was a cigarette (or a giant torch) or something involved (there must have been, right?  He’s not a chimney.), but he was at the far end of the block and I couldn’t see it.  Just the smoke.  Coming out of his mouth.  Oh my god – he’s a dragon.  I missed my opportunity to meet a dragon!  Damn it.

The dark is rising

3 Comments

My least favorite part about winter is already here: the dark.  The sun is still coming up at a reasonable hour (for now), but it gets dark so early in the evening!  It’s barely 6pm, and I feel like I should be going to bed.  (I am not a night owl.)  I think I need a sun lamp.

Ooh, speaking of the sun (or brightness, at least), I got the picture I was hoping to get.  A few weeks ago, I noticed a view of St. Mary’s I really liked (from the drawbridge over the creek), but all the trees were still so green (I say it like it’s a bad thing – it’s not!  I love it when the trees are all green.).  I thought it might be a nice picture to get once the leaves started to turn.  Then we planned our trip to Oregon, and I was sure I was going to miss it, that by the time we got back, all the leaves would be gone.  Not so!

IMG_20151104_123020

Then I took a wider shot – look at that sky!

IMG_20151104_123035

I love September and October skies.  (I know it’s November, but November doesn’t have skies like that.  Don’t tell anyone.)

Need more memory

3 Comments

One of the downsides to e-books is that there’s no cover.  You can’t read the blurbs from other others.  You can’t read the back cover of the book (or the inside flap of the dust jacket) to see what it’s about.  Where you bought it from (like Amazon or wherever) has a description, and I guess you could go back there to look at it, but I never do (or it’s not convenient when I think about it), and that doesn’t tell me everything I need to know about why I decided to buy it.

I don’t do a lot of impulse e-book buying.  I usually get a recommendation from somewhere (a tweet, comments on someone’s blog, an actual person talking to me in actual real life), and then I add it to my Amazon wish list.  My Amazon wish list is more of a reminder list for myself, and Amazon added a feature not too long ago that lets you add comments to individual items.  I can add a book to my list and add a note that says “from Bloggess commenters” or “saw in bookstore” or “tweet from Rainbow Rowell”, and when I go back to buy it, I have some context for how it ended up on my list, and I can make the decision about whether or not buy it based on some information.

I run into a problem when I see a tweet (or whatever) where someone is recommending a book and it’s on sale. Like, some crazy-low amount ($.99 or $1.99) that I can’t resist.  When that happens, I just buy it and download it to my Kindle app.  But I’m not reading many Kindle books lately, and even if I were, I’m usually in the middle of one, so I’m not going to read this new book right away, and now I don’t have any notes on it.  Who recommended it? What sounded interesting about it?  Do I even want to read this random book with the completely unfamiliar title by an author whose name doesn’t even ring a bell?  Months later (or some period of time that is long enough for me to forget those details (an hour)), I’ll go back to my Kindle and not recognize ANY of the titles on it.  What’s “Inertia” and why did I buy it?  What’s it about?  Who told me about it?  And when it’s not good (like that one – the writing is bad and the author (and editor) should feel bad), I would really like to know how I heard about it because just maybe I won’t trust that person’s recommendations anymore.  Unfortunately, that information (which existed only fleetingly in my brain to begin with) is gone forever.

This latest experience with that one book (and the sequel that I bought and read ANYWAY) might teach me to use on my many note/list apps and try to keep better track.  It’s (sadly) too late for the books that are sitting on my Kindle right now.

Home!

Leave a Comment

We are home again!  And contrary to my expectations, I don’t think I’m jet-lagged.  It was about 2am when I fell asleep, and I got up at 8 to start working.  I was tired this morning, but no more than the usual amount after being up so late.  And now I feel fine.  I’m sure you’ll sleep better tonight knowing that I’m not jet-lagged.  You’re welcome.

No excitement on the way home, which was nice.  I still had the middle seat of three on the flight from Portland to Chicago, but the guy on the aisle kept to himself, right up until the plane landed.  He looked over, shook my hand, and said, “It was nice chatting with you.”  Great guy.

Finally tried Dutch Bros. coffee on our way to the airport – that stuff is pretty good.  I’m not sure we did anything else particularly Oregonian…barely even dressed up for Halloween, not that that has anything to do with Oregon, although the people in Will and Christina’s town certainly went all out.  The guy who won the costume contest was dressed as Edward Scissorhands, and the runner-up was David the Gnome (or maybe she was the Travelocity gnome – I don’t think she told us).  There were some Day of the Dead zombies, a hippy, a guy wearing the big yellow construction thing Ripley wears as armor in Aliens, a viking, Thor, and a couple of swing-dancing steampunk fairies who made their very cool metal wings themselves.  John wore a Superman shirt with a cape, and I wore my new TARDIS hoodie.  Not all that Halloween-y, but who cares when you’re really there to see the band?

The band (the Elena Leona Project) played three nights in a row, including Halloween, and they are pretty darn good.  I have video, but I’ve given them to Elena to post on YouTube on her channel if she wants to.  (The sound from my phone is pretty terrible, so she might not.)  I’ll provide links if she does.  John had a great time (and I did, too, at all three gigs), but I think the Halloween one was the most fun.  People danced!  Yay the band!  Details later.  Different post.

Who needs normal? What IS normal?

Leave a Comment

I know that Portland is supposed to be weird (I’ve seen Portlandia), but I hadn’t really heard that about the rest of the state.  I suppose it stands to reason that everywhere else might be a bit quirky.  That was confirmed one of our first mornings here.  We went to Eugene for breakfast (Off the Waffle) and to check out the area, and on our walk from the car to the restaurant, we passed a street musician playing the recorder.  That’s a little weird (you don’t see a lot of recorder-players around DC), but not totally off the wall.  The guy had a little animal crate next to him and a double pet dish with food and water in front of his feet, and a CAT eating out of the dish.  No leash or anything.  Just a cat eating at the feet of a dude playing the recorder on the sidewalk in downtown Eugene.

I like Eugene.