We have discussed how I feel about Harry Potter, and I certainly don’t want to go overboard (like I’ve apparently done with Doctor Who, at least according to SOME members of my family who are quite clearly crazy), but I couldn’t not share this. Also, I love accents. I wish I could do accents. I must practice.
I made breakfast! Like, real breakfast. On a WEEKDAY. Because this particular weekday happens to be John’s birthday, and he happens to love breakfast sandwiches. I made him two bacon, egg, and cheese croissant-wiches. And coffee. Because I’m cool like that. And also because it’s his birthday. More because it’s his birthday.
Happy Birthday, John!
I wish I could unsee this. Seriously, I’m scared, so only follow this link if you are not easily freaked out. (You don’t have to read the comments – just click on the picture at the top.) Even John admitted it was pretty creepy. But, you know, I had to share. I can’t be the only person checking behind me every few seconds.
In not scary news, I know this guy! Kind of. He was a client at my last job. He moved to Vegas to play poker professionally. After winning a lot. Good for him. He was always nice to me.
I needed to scrub my brain after that eerie picture, so we watched an episode of Modern Family. I love that show. If you don’t watch it, you are missing out.
I had a dream my house was falling apart. But you don’t want to hear about that. Other people’s dreams aren’t interesting to anyone but the dreamer. And maybe the dreamer’s psychologist. I don’t have one of those, so I’m out of luck.
I do a lot of complaining and wishing some things were different (not most things, just some things). And yes, I’m working to change those things, but to some extent, I need to just handle them better.
I don’t want to talk about that, though.
An old man and I bonded over the too-green bananas in the produce section at Giant this evening. He tore two off of their bunch and said, “You don’t want to buy them when they’re too ripe because you have to eat them all at once or they’ll go bad.” My response, “I see your point, but if they’re too green, you have to wait a long time before they ripen. What if you wanted one with breakfast tomorrow?” We understood each other. But now I have too-green bananas.
When it’s sunny. I like the color of the sky. And the leaves. And we’ve had so much rain that the grass is still green everywhere. I should take a picture.
Taken from my car window on the way home from work. I could crop the road out, but you get the idea.
Enough with the pretty – prepare for meanness ahead.
Here’s a tip you’ve heard a million times, but it’s important: If you want a job, PROOFREAD YOUR RESUME. I read a pretty bad one recently. If you’re not very good with that sort of thing, find a friend who is. I don’t have high expectations for this person because she apparently can’t punctuate her way out of kindergarten. Oh, let’s be generous. Elementary school. Also, she listed “Blackberry (Curve)” as one of her skills. I don’t even know what that means. Maybe she can program for that platform? Impressive! Then say so. She’s not a programmer, though, unless she REALLY doesn’t know how to present herself in her resume, so I’m assuming she means she knows how to use a Blackberry. That’s not a skill. My 6-year-old niece can find her way around a smart phone.
I’m not trying to say that I punctuate everything correctly all the time. (For instance, is it resume, resumé, or résumé? Does the accent depend on something or are there just multiple acceptable forms?) I do, however, tailor my writing style to my audience, and my resumé (I like this one best) is flawless. (I know. Arrogant, much?) It might not get me hired, but it won’t get me dismissed out of hand. Grammar is important, people!
/rant
Now, watch me post this with some hugely embarrassing typo I didn’t notice.
Oh, peoples, I’m tired. And full. But happy. Good weekend.
Back to normal (eating, exercising, etc) tomorrow.
I am, I am! Tomorrow is Les Mis. YAY! Tonight, I pick Sparky up from the airport. Yay! Also, it’s Friday (yay!) so PRESUMABLY, I can sleep in a bit tomorrow. Got up before 5 this morning, people. (John is not pleased. I tried REALLY hard to have everything I needed in the guest room so I wouldn’t wake him while I got ready, but I needed one little thing and, of course, I needed it 15 minutes before his alarm was going to go off. Sorry, John.) We’re having a kick-off meeting this morning, and I was in charge of bringing bagels, and traffic has been HORRIBLE this week, so I figured I’d just get out the door earlier. Guess what? I over-corrected. I was up the elevator and in my little conference room by 7:20. Just a little bit earlier than necessary. A tad. Still, it’s better than the alternative.
Can someone please get Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” out of my head? I don’t like it. I keep trying to force it out, but it creeps its way back in every time I think I’ve won. Stupid little whistling part.
I don’t know what it is about this song, but every time I hear it, I cry, starting from the very first time I heard it. Like tears streaming down my face cry. Sometimes with sobs, sometimes not. I don’t get it. I mean, I like it. I like it very much. Maybe it hits me deep in the hillbilly roots I don’t really have.
There is not enough caffeine in the world to make me alert today. Roxy had a seizure last night (right on schedule – it’s been a week and a half), so we got to bed late, and then I got up at 5:15 and was out the door by 6:20 (for the third day in a row), which is clearly not early enough because I was trying to be in DC by 8 and it was 8:30 before I got there. Traffic sucks. And it was raining, which only makes traffic worse. I stopped at Starbucks before I got on the highway, and then the barista handed me my coffee, and then she got this horrified look on her face (seriously, like the world was about to end) and said, “Oh no! I put TWO shots in your coffee!” “How many are there normally?” “Just one.” “Don’t worry about it. It might help.” It didn’t. I still had to sing along to the radio at the top of my lungs to stay awake on the GW Parkway.
Also, I think I’m over my usual Starbucks order. It hasn’t come out right for weeks now. Disappointing because when it’s right, it’s SO good.
Roxy eats mud. I don’t know why, but she’s tearing up the lawn. I keep meaning to ask the vet about it. Or at least Dr. Google. Tonight, John suggested I try to deter her. He handed me a full water bowl. I went out on the deck, he pointed the flashlight, and I dumped half the bowl on her head. She hates that, but she came right back on the deck (she was ignoring me when I was calling her in because she couldn’t tear herself away from the mud). This might work. The spray bottle is probably a better tool than the water bowl, though.
I did it. I ran the Army Ten-Miler, and I did it 13 minutes faster than any of my workouts. And it hurt like hell. The day was just shy of perfect. The temperatures were low and it wasn’t raining, but the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A cloudy day would have kept us cooler AND probably not given me a sunburn. (I wore sunblock. On my face. I didn’t consider the back of my neck ’cause it’s usually covered with hair.) And speaking of hair, I had no hair disasters! Yay! Over the last few weeks, my braids have come out of the bun repeatedly, come loose altogether (the bottom hair bands lost forever) twice, and generally behaved like Houdini getting out of a straitjacket. This morning, though, my braid felt secure in its bun and it didn’t even jiggle. It came down when I took it down, approximately 8 hours after I put it up. Good bun. Good braid. Good me! Practice works! (I’ve been wearing my hair in a braid at every opportunity lately.)
So John and I got up at 5:15 yesterday morning, took care of the dogs, ate some toast, and headed to the Pentagon. We’d been debating the metro vs parking issue for weeks, but when I heard that there’s only bus service between two of the stations on the line nearest us and we’d have to drive most of the way in just to find a station with uninterrupted service to the Pentagon, I convinced John that parking at Pentagon City would be easier. Less stressful. He wasn’t hard to convince. We got to the parking garage right at 7, just as planned, and joined the mobs of runners trying to get to the port-a-potties near the starting line. 30,000-ish runners = long lines for the bathroom. EVERYone has to go. Almost everyone. I’ll come back to that.
John and I were in different starting waves, so we split up to wait in our own personal crowds. Eventually (couldn’t tell you if the race started on time, but I can tell you we waited and waited and waited and waited….), my crowd started shuffling towards the start we couldn’t see. We must have been half a mile away, and we were packed in. A guy behind me started mooing. He switched to baaing when we stopped laughing at the moos.
John ran this race 5 years ago with a goal of finishing in 1 hour, 40 minutes (10 10-minute miles). He said people were packed so close in at the beginning that his first mile took him 13 minutes or something crazy like that. He made up the time later on and finished EXACTLY when he’d planned. Magic. I wasn’t counting on magic, so the possibility of a really slow first mile was pretty scary to me. Luckily, my pack spread out pretty quickly once we finally got across the starting line, so it wasn’t really an issue. The main race clock (and the timers at the mile markers) were set to the actual race start (which was about 20 minutes before I started), so I relied on my own watch to track my time, starting the timer as I passed under the yellow and black balloons. (The Army needs to get better colors – yellow (or gold – whatever) and black make for some seriously ugly balloons.) Once I got past the first mile and realized I wasn’t going to have any crowd-related pacing problems, I let go of the what-if-I-don’t-make-it-through-five-miles-fast-enough-and-they-don’t-let-me-finish anxiety and concentrated on moving. On concentrating. On keeping my legs churning and my feet landing mid-foot or further forward (my right heel was giving me some trouble). And then I got the 3-mile mark and found I was averaging well under 11-minute miles. And then I got to five miles and saw that my average pace was 10:12. Too fast! So I slowed down for the last five miles, knowing I was going to be paying for the faster start later.
I did. I still am. But it’s a good hurt. I worked hard for this hurt. But I’d like it to stop now. The second half of the race is a blur of bright sunshine and cowbell. (LOTS of spectators had cowbells.) I remember thinking the 14th Street Bridge would never end. And I remember wondering whose bright idea it was to put three (four?) hills in the last two miles. And then I saw Amanda and Greg and Alex near the finish (thanks for cheering me on, guys!) and then I could see the finish and then I smiled and then it was over. And then we (John was waiting for me) came to almost a complete halt in a sea of people all struggling to get water (John had some for me because he’s wonderful. And fast.) and get out and sit down. For a while it hurt more to be standing still than it had when I was still running. And we were like a mile from the car. So we got our bananas and muffins and water and trudged all the way back to the mall parking garage. When we finally got home (after a ridiculous search for a breakfast place – we at Anthony’s in Falls Church. French toast! Exactly right.), we put aside all plans to actually get much thesis and calculus work done, showered, and collapsed on the couch for some well-deserved TV.
It was fun. No – it was painful and I was afraid it would never end. But I would do it again. I don’t want it to be so hard. If I keep doing it, it’ll get easier. If I keep repeating that, it might come true.
Moment of truth. I’m going to check the official results. Before I do, did I tell you that John finished a full 10 minutes faster than the last time he ran this race? Because he’s cool.
Okay – my official time was 1:48:47. (Only one second off what my watch said. Look at me! I know how to work a stopwatch!) I beat my 2-hour expectations by a substantial margin and only missed John’s first time by just under 9 minutes. Maybe next time. 🙂
Now I’m going to take more ibuprofen and go back to bed. Lots more ibuprofen.
Right, I said I’d come back to the bathroom thing (many moons and paragraphs ago). Yeah, the race had only barely started when, by the dozens, guys started hopping the guardrail on Route 110 and sprinting for the treeline to pee. It was hilarious and a little disconcerting. Was it planned? Is that the best place? Did they pass the word around? Are these the guys who didn’t want to wait in the long port-a-potty lines? Or just the ones who drank another liter of water while waiting for the race to start? I mean, I have to go practically once an hour, more when I’m drinking lots of water, and yet I managed to plan ahead so that my last chance before the race started was enough to get me all the way home, almost six hours later. Which, now that I think about it, pretty much means I was dehydrated. Or a crazy-efficient sweater. Sweat-er. One who sweats. Not the cable-knit kind.
That’s enough. Go to bed already.
I’m in the middle of a long post about today, but I’m too tired to finish it tonight. Tomorrow is a new day, with fewer aches and pains. I hope.
John and I drove back into DC today to pick up our race packets for tomorrow’s race. (The Army Ten-Miler is tomorrow, by the way. Have I mentioned that? Talked about it much? Nah, certainly not on those days I actually ran 10 miles. This is probably coming as a complete surprise to you guys. Because you know how much I don’t like to talk about what’s going on with me.) For some reason (to do with costs, I’m sure), they refuse to mail the packets out ahead of time (seriously, just charge us all an extra few bucks and mail them the week before – we’re paying a ton to register anyway), so everyone has to come into town on the Friday or Saturday before the race to check in and pick them up. It’s where we get our race bibs (and activate them) and our t-shirts, and it gives a ton of vendors the opportunity to sell lots of over-priced stuff (marked on sale, but not really) to over-excited runners. This year (maybe every year, but it’s my first year, so what do I know?), packet pick-up was at the DC Armory. Not an easy place to get to, unless you’re going by metro, but unless you live near the metro already or are staying in a hotel for the weekend, you’re probably not going by metro. Actually, it’s not that hard to get to, but for once in my life, I didn’t look at a map first. I relied on my phone’s Google navigation with GPS. So we went the long way around. Through not-great neighborhoods. Listening to my phone telling us to make impossible left turns and then re-route us through worse areas to correct the mistake I made of not turning left onto a road with three lanes of traffic that didn’t go in that direction. Silly me. Our way back out was MUCH easier and is how we should have gotten there in the first place. Thankfully, the race itself does not start at the DC Armory and does not require us to go anywhere near it, either by car or on foot.
If you’re local and you want to go into DC early tomorrow morning (it’s going to be a BEAUTIFUL day) and cheer on a shitload of runners while enjoying the monuments, well, that would be cool. 🙂 The course map is on the website (linked above) so you can find a good place to watch (there are restrictions on what you can bring to the finish area, but you don’t have to watch from there – anywhere along the mall on the Independence side would be a good spot) if you’re coming. I’ll be wearing blue shorts and a navy blue tank top if you want to keep an eye out. Purple race bib. I expect it to take me about two hours (because I am SLOW) and I’m in the third wave (starts at 8:15), so calculate accordingly if you’re looking for me at a certain mile-marker. I’m hoping adrenaline will help my pace, but I mostly just care about not getting directed straight to the finish line (and being unable to finish the race) if I don’t make it to the 5-mile mark by 9:35. I say I’m worried about that, but I’ve done it enough times now that I’m about as certain as I can be that I’ll beat that particular deadline by at least 20 minutes. The five miles after that will be the hard ones.
With that, I’m going to try not to think too hard about it anymore tonight. John and I are going to pick up dinner (spaghetti) and settle in and watch Chariots of Fire and go to bed early. Tomorrow morning is going to arrive WAY earlier than usual.
Um….it’s Friday night. Saw some old friends last night, had a good time. Had a busy day at work. Left with nothing to say right now. Which generally means I shouldn’t be here. Also, if I’m sticking to reasonable bed times so I’m rested for Sunday, well, I shouldn’t be here.
Tomorrow, babbling will ensue. Probably.
Tonight’s random hodge-podge of things I feel compelled to tell/show/say to you is brought to you by Dire Straits, who have gotten stuck between my ears. It’s mildly uncomfortable.
First, an apology to everyone who let me complain to them today: I’m so very very sorry. On the phone, in person, over email, I was all bitch, bitch, bitch, and moan, moan moan (with a little bit of whine, whine, whine here and there), and you know what? You didn’t need to hear that. No one deserves that. And it didn’t make me feel better, either, so who benefits? Exactly. I’m sorry.
Second, this video is cool (from The Daily What). 🙂 I love Disney (I can ignore all the evil corporate stuff because I love the movies), and I LOVE when they release stuff like this. My edition of Lady and the Tramp shows Peggy Lee singing “He’s a Tramp” (with the guys howling and barking as back-up) intercut with the animated footage. Fun to watch.
Last, yoga is HARD. (Yes, broken record, whatever.) There must be a name for the sequence we start with. That’s the hardest part, moving from one thing straight to another like that. If you know the name (I could ask the instructor, but how is that fun?), please tell me. We start in downward dog, then extend one leg up behind us, then bring it forward into a deep lunge and reach up with our arms (crescent, maybe?), stretch forward, then into a plank and down to the pose that sounds like chupacabra and looks like the down position of a push-up, and then up dog and back to downward dog. And all over again with the other leg, and we repeat more times that I can keep straight until I fall over. After I fall over, we move into things I can actually do (kind of) and that don’t hurt (much). Then we stretch. I love the stretching part. And the breathing part. And now I’m home and I just ate more rice pudding then I meant to and I need to go to bed because I have get up absurdly early again to go back downtown in the morning. So good night. I said good night!
This is not the week to get sick. It’s not the week to get blisters or bruises or terribly sore muscles. It’s definitely not the week to get any sort of running-related injury. It’s also not the week to lose sleep or be overtired. To that end, I promised myself that I would be in bed reading by 8:30 tonight. It sounds utterly ridiculous, but I have to get up super early to get downtown tomorrow, and I’m tired just thinking about it.
And so I leave you with the most awesomest thing ever: a flowchart that walks you through the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books, as listed by NPR a few weeks ago. Apparently, since the list is just that, with very little detail to guide readers new to the genre(s), the helpful people over at SF Signal created this flowchart (which is the most awesomely wonderful thing and I want a big poster of it). And now there’s an interactive version! I was directed here by this post of John Scalzi’s, and in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that my list of books to buy grew three sizes based on NPR’s list and the comments from John Scalzi’s readers in this post on his site. You know, in case you’re interested.
I have what seems to be a bottomless, self-refilling (Is that a thing? What was the adjective that described the wallet in The Black Cauldron The Book of Three? And can I just say that calling a bottomless thing that provides endless amounts of food a “wallet” confused the hell out of me when I was whatever age I was when I read that? So much so that it stuck with me. Where was I?) never-ending can of shaving cream. I’m not even kidding, you guys. (I can’t type that with a straight face.) No, really, it’s super-light, has been for weeks, feels totally empty when I shake it, but there’s always enough shaving cream for my legs. It’s amazing. I should take it on the road.
And I’m not talking about the weather. Sure, it’s cold, rainy, and gloomy, but I plan to stay inside most of the day, all cozy with the dogs. No, John and I got up and got ready to go out (he’s heading to his parents’, I was going to run a couple of quick errands), but before we could leave (thankfully, really), Roxy had a seizure. She’s been having them about one every week and a half or so, and I knew she was due for one this weekend. That was one of the reasons I had planned to stay home with her rather than go to PA in the first place. And maybe she did me a favor by getting it over with first thing – now I don’t have to worry about it every time I leave the house. Not for another week and a half, anyway. We (me and Roxy) spent about half an hour on the floor together, me holding her still, her drooling and panting on my right shoulder and arm. I certainly won’t be going out in the clothes I was wearing, and that sweater might be a goner.
She’s partway back to herself now (she’s eating). Once she recognizes her name, I’ll feel comfortable leaving.
It’s going to be okay, right? I mean, just because my boss decided that we’re going to commute downtown together three days a week starting next week for I don’t even know how long and that commute (plus some extra work travel) caused me to almost quit a year and a half ago and NO it’s not better having a commute buddy when that buddy is your BOSS –
That sentence got away from me. Let’s just say I’m not looking forward to it. Besides, she changes her plans for me on this project every other day (sometimes every day), so it’s possible that it a) won’t happen at all or 2) won’t last long. So I’m putting the frenzy away, locking it in a closet, and instead I’ll work on getting all those #%^# songs out of my head. Because THAT is a good use of my time.
My gym is the greatest gym ever. Six months ago (or so), I asked them if they could add a yoga class that’s held either before or after work. Early this week (maybe it was late last week – irrelevant), the owner came up to me to let me know that they found an instructor and a space in the schedule and the first class was this week. Tonight, in fact. Yay! And there was quite the turnout, so hopefully it won’t get cancelled due to lack of interest. There were 10 or 12 of us tonight. And it was hard. But I liked it. And I feel all noodlely. Noodly. Hang on while I check the authority on that particular spelling. Right, noodly appendage. (Link for those who need it.)