a note on jeans

that'd be denim. i have a few pairs of jeans. i have my favorite pair, my feeling-a-little fat pair, going out pair, etc. last night i wore the favorite pair (explanation: comfy but not ugly) to dinner. it is now 10 am and i have to head out for some errands and such and i pull favorite pair off the floor where i dropped them last night b/c i figure i can definitely get another wear. however, slight glitch...they smell like dinner! i was sitting here checking the email and kept smelling food reminiscent of last night. apparently i like to block out the fact that i'm wearing slightly worn favorite pair and choose to believe they are clean out of the wash. so i sniffed my hair, my sweater, the shirt underneath my sweater, the chair...and then realized...favorite pair smells...like food! see, to me that's a little gross. they aren't dirty per say, just smell like i AM a restaurant. so, is this when i pull out the bottle of febreeze??? i think so.

what up

Christmas came and it went. I think I gained 8 lbs. in one day alone, that'd be on Wednesday, but today my sis and I ran a 5k. We were slow, but still beat 117 people. I think there were 300 and something people so you can do the math. 1 of the 117 was a really loud breather. I wanted to stop her and say, "If you wouldn't exhale with such force you would probably save 3.5% energy." But, I just didn't have it in me.They had fresh pineapple at the end which made me happy. And the weirdest thing ever....boxes and boxes of Papa John's pizza. Gross. After running? No thanks.

Other than that, no major events. A lot of wii playing. We now own Guitar Hero. It's funny. You have to hold your mouth just right to get all the notes. And last night was a major bowling/tennis/boxing tournament. It's been some intense training I tell you.

In other news...I ordered a gift on amazon. I love amazon. I ordered it on Dec. 6. Estimated delivery was Dec. 28. A little slow, don't you think? It is now Dec. 29 and it's still not here. I don't love amazon so much anymore. It was actually ordered from the amazon marketplace and it was a steal. Now I realize that actually the seller is a steal-er. He now has stolen 42 dollars from me and I'm mad. I emailed him...I'll be sure to keep you updated. I know you're on the edge of your seat.

HD upgrade

will & I have come into the modern age. we can now watch tv in high definition on a shiny new screen. i had no idea until now that celebrities had pores. no idea. but they do and they're gross. you know how for years you watch people on tv and they are so blurrily pretty and you think, "i wish i could be that blurry, i mean pretty..." well truth is they have pores and yellow teeth and redness around their noses. sometimes while watching, i'll just cringe from the realness. crazy! i know. i never had such a reaction before and now i know it's not because they're so pretty. it's because i couldn't see them. this is uplifting, don't you think?

2013

i've just semi-finished another paper. it's due tues. including a presentation where i stand up in front of people and blab about my study on students' gendered talk during reading conferences, which will be followed by the downing of a few beers to wash away the memory. why the need for the beer? this is the first big one of about 100 more before the really really big one which must be finished by 2013, the year that denotes me finally being finished with school. and so because it's the first of all the rest before the big big one in 2013, i'm a wreck over it. i've been a wreck over it since september and so the actual paper might be a wreck too. but you know what? i've been working on this for 2 months, so here's to having a lot of pages and a lot of words and some conclusions that might not be nearly as sound as i'd hoped they'd be. but hey, it's written, i'll print it, i'll talk about it, life won't end.
here's to all of us finishing one more semester! yipee!

my mom is the toughest person i have ever known. ever.

nice

i'm amazed by university libraries. they have such a system going. i can pretty much get every reference i need sitting in my jammies at home. it's awesome. there's the interlibrary loan thingy which the nice people use to scan in articles that i need and then they just put them on their server til i get online and pick them up. then there's the gamecock search (i'm referring to the usc library obviously) and it searches what feels like a gazillion databases, tho i always end up using the jstor articles the most, but it's still nice to know that it searches these extraneous databases. then there's pascal delivers. when the library doesn't have a book, they'll just get it for you from another university site's library and you just do it all with the click of a button. i do have to drive to pick that one up, but still it was requested from home at least. and then there's chat with a librarian which sounds so nerdy but sometimes you need a librarian to answer a question and instead of driving over, you can just chat. i love it. when will they make up some button that writes the article for you? you know, you put all the data you've collected in, list your references, and then you get an email with your article within 3-5 days...nice.

on driving

in a previous life, dump trucks bothered me. they were always in my way on the road going slowly because their gears cannot shift quickly enough. well in my current life, the dump trucks have been replaced with all other cars. today on the way to work, i got behind a truck, one of those short sport trucks, pulling this huge trailer, the kind that's a ramp. it could have held 5 cars easily. of course a little truck with a big long trailer like that cannot turn corners promptly, instead taking the entire course of the green light to make a right hand turn onto a 2 lane back road which means that the truck and trailer can't drive the normal speed, which means that it took me 10 minutes to get down a road that normally takes about 2 minutes of my time. this is so annoying. once i finally escaped that truck and picked up my pace, a van, one of the vans with the ladders on top because it's a repair man, cable man, ac/heating man type of van, pulls out in front of me and proceeds to go the same speed as the original truck/trailer. 20 mph. this van gets to the light which is green, slows to a stop, and makes a right hand turn slower than my grandma, so by the time he's finally completed his turn and gotten out of my way, the light is red. i think he thought he would lose his ladders if he went too fast. then i get on the road that is actually the school road and end up behind yet another huge pickup truck that is also too big to make turns at a speed higher than 1 mph. in front of the pickup was by golly a dump truck and we know how i feel about dump trucks. so yea the modes of transportation in the area where i work and especially how the drivers drive them really got to me today. on the way home, i was stopped at a light behind a little car with tinted windows. i could see the silhouette of a bird sitting on the driver's shoulder. makes me wonder if the driver thinks he's a pirate and his car his ship.

and we're off...

sometimes i just want to sit down and cross my arms over my chest and shut my eyes and pretend that the person talking to me isn't there anymore.

work is driving me crazy. it's not really work it's like life. i have so many things to take care of (papers and reading and presentations on the reading and the research and teaching and trying to still breathe) before certain dates and it's all just so crazy that my little calendar can't handle the pressure and i really can't either which is why i want to act like a major child and just sit down and pretend the world out there isn't real which is how i access my alternaworld.

here are things that are not driving me crazy.
1. it finally feels like fall in cola, even if it is for only a couple more days.
2. my dogs are going to be wearing halloween costumes. lily will be princess laya ( i think i spelled that wrong, oh well) and daisy will be darth vader.
3. counting crows is putting out a NEW cd in november (new, not a re-release)
4.in october i'm going to see george carlin which will make me laugh
5. next week is premier week on tv. i have no time to watch any of it, but i do have dvr so that's good.
6. i can still run 3 miles or more
7. one day far far away i'll have another degree and maybe make a little more money

topic: nalgene

i want to do a poll. here's the question: how often do you wash your nalgene bottle?

there was a time when i never washed mine. never. i took it with me everywhere, let it sit in all kind of dirty places, roll around in the dirt, fall out of my bag into a puddle, and still never washed it. apparently i'm changing b/c now when i go to fill up my 2 nalgenes every morning for the trip to schoolio, i think, "ewww, i should wash this," nevermind the fact that it sat no where except my office and well it does go to the gym with me which is a disgusting place, but still i don't roll the mouth part around on the floor or anything. so now i'm constantly washing it out or cramming it in the dishwasher and i want to know...how often do you wash your nalgene? b/c am i weird, did i grow up to be a germ-a-phobe?

whatty-up kids?

so i've been back at work for 6 days. i'm tired. i dont even have my own class of students and i'm tired. i have 2 things i'm wondering about. 1. i don't have my own class. it's been a whole year without my own little people to teach. this year i'm co-teaching with a pal. i listen to her talk to the kids and then i talk to the kids and it's just so different. we started teaching at the same time so she's been in the classroom for 3 and i've been in for 2 and out for 1. so i'm wondering how would i talk to kids if i had had my own kids last year. this isn't an interesting wonder. sorry.

2. the AC in my office has to be turned down by a custodian every morning. custodians get busy especially at the beginning of the year. i was really hot today at work and when you're wearing work clothes and your hair was actually fixed before you entered your office, being really hot is obnoxious. i think we could grow some rare orchids or violets or something because the humidity in there is about 100%. or maybe if i had pneumonia it would get better. don't they put you in tents with moisture when you have pneumonia? so i'm considering working on my green thumb or finding an ill person and experimenting.

work is fun.

more on being weird

today while running and listening to my ipod i wanted to just stop and start dancing or keep running and dance at the same time. that would be like phoebe running from friends. you know how the perfect song comes on because the shuffle feature on the ipod is actually not sucking and is choosing the perfect wake up and run songs? and it just makes you run faster and smile at the same time? so it just makes you want to stop and pretend you're in an ipod commercial. am i the only one who has this occasional urge to be OK with looking like an idiot?

weepy weepy

am i the only person who gets a bit weepy over things that don't affect me at all? i was watching the today show this morning and they were showing footage of the Olympic preparation in Beijing. the 2008 Olympics are one year from today. so they were showing footage of the Athens Olympics. remember when paul hamm fell off the vault and dropped to 12th place and then came back on the bars to get the gold? they were showing footage, not even the real thing, and i almost lost it. who gets weepy over these athletes? seriously? they also showed the beach volleyball girls, i can't remember their names, but you know the really hot girls who won the gold in the beach volleyball? well they're preparing for Beijing and they showed footage from their gold medal win in Athens. again, i'm like on the edge of my seat about to cry for these girls who are tackling each other in the sand because they're so happy.

i'm so weird.

attempt #34 and #35 on being an adult

34. yesterday i used coupons i had cut from the sunday paper. i've never done this before because normally the coupon-worthy products are nothing i would ever buy. my rule is that i can only use a coupon for something that i already have in my house (or more accurately for something already in my house that is almost empty or used up). so i bought dishwasher soap and shampoo, both of which were already in my house and on the last squirts. i saved a total of 2.00 which seems dumb really, but it is 2.00.

35. this morning the stanley steamer (or is it steemer? do they spell it wrong?) are coming to clean the carpet at my house. this is major adult in my opinion. before i wouldn't have cared. but really this is the only place i've ever lived in that has carpet. everywhere else has been tile (cue the dorms at usc) and a couple rentals which had hardwoods. so they're coming to clean the carpet. i'm kind of excited. that's so majorly lame.


in completely unrelated other news, i determined yesterday that the gym is the funniest place EVER that i go. i apparently have enrolled at the senior citizen gym. i think i've told you all that before. yesterday was an upper body day for the weights (an aside on weight lifting: there are so many thousands of ways to go about lifting weights in a program sort of way. in school we were taught to do "push" groups and "pull" groups which works the whole body everyday pretty much if you do all the push stuff and all the pull stuff. then i devised my own system at some point of just upper and lower body on alternating days with back and abs everyday. then i met a friend who did muscle groups like chest and biceps, shoulders and triceps, legs, back and abs which seems to be the new trend but for me is crazy unless you are a body builder. it takes an entire week to hit your whole body. then there's the old people and women trend of circuit training.) so back to my story. i go to the gym and lift first. i start out on the bench and then go about a bunch of other stuff. when i'm about finished, this old couple comes over with their trainer and gets on the bench. my gym is very big on trainers but i don't want to pay for someone to count for me, you know? although i do wonder if they could make me stronger. so the old lady of the old couple gets on the bench and proceeds to lift 55 lbs which is what i lift. now granted, she stayed at 55 the whole time and i start at 50 and work up to 60 or 65, but still, a lady who was probably 65+ lifted the same amount that i do. i don't think i was the only one who was impressed b/c pretty much everyone was watching her. so then i go upstairs to do some cardio. during the summer heat in cola i have to run on the indoor track. i saw this old guy, probably 70 yrs old or so go up to the track. he wears a full track suit and pours sweat. i've been up there with him before and had lapped him 2 or 3 times during the run. so i let him come running by and i get on the track behind him. we run for a while and i finally catch up to him and think i'll be passing him soon. i get closer and closer and realize he has picked up his pace b/c i'm going to have to sprint to get by. so i run on his heels for about 5 or 6 laps (the track is way smaller than an outdoor). finally i get up the guts to go past him and think i'll just have to run this fast for a while and he'll back off. NOPE! he picked it up and was running right behind me. i could have elbowed him or stopped abruptly and he would have trampled me. so we run like this for 5 or 6 more laps and then finally i realize that either he or i would be having a heart attack soon so i slow up a little and let him get in front and then i proceed to trail him as he had just done me for that last 15 or so laps at which point i stop and go get on the elliptical for the rest of my cardio b/c it feels like my leg will be detaching at the knee from all the sprinting. so obviously he was pissed that a girl was passing him and i was pissed that an old man was passing me. i can only imagine what everyone else on the track was thinking as we went flying by them about 1000 times.
yesterday put things in major perspective.

i have some things to say

1. does anyone else fall victim to target? i go there and the money falls out of my pockets. i might as well just drive by and toss it in the door or around the parking lot. it's ridiculous. things don't cost that much but when you add them together, wow.

2. i had to get my dad to help me with a paper. this degree shmegree i'm working on has a cognate which i should have made like art history or something where i just memorize. instead it's this curriculum stuff which is of high importance to my job and my existence in public education but not interesting to me. at all. i like to read about how kids learn to read. that's not interesting to lots of people, right? remind me of that. so my dad had to help me with a paper. picture us on the phone and he's reading it out loud and we're fixing stuff as we go. we're reading and reading and he reads this sentence, For Giroux, in order for a person to be critical, she must have at some point acquired the language for what is achievable. I do not by any means think this is an exceptional sentence. at all. and he says, "is that a quote? that sounds like a quote. are you sure you didn't read that somewhere?" so this creates panic because do you ever wonder when you reread papers if you are the person who really wrote it? or is it just me? sometimes i write stuff and then forget i did it. it's like driving somewhere and not remembering how you got there. but again, i don't really think this sentence is that good and doesn't sound like i quoted it even. but instead i looked in all the books and articles just looking for the word achievable. that's not a hard word so i'm confused about why he thinks i might of plagiarized. but now i'm afraid that i did plagiarize and so i probably won't sleep good tonight.

3. will bought a 210 gallon fish tank. it's in my house. enough said.

college.

i went back to college today. i'm working on a paper and had to go do some "research at the library." i got to use my usc id from like 2002 to check out books and the same guy was sitting at the circulation desk. the SAME guy who was there in 2002. and those of you who've been to the library at usc, you know how you have to show the guy at the door the inside of your bag, even though you are walking through a thing that will beep if you happen to be stealing any books and how he has to look at every book in your stack to make sure you really did check them out? does anyone else think this is an unessecary position? and remember when they put a coffee shop IN the library and we were all like wow! a coffee shop in the library, but it wasn't ever very good. well, i don't think it's there anymore. i'll check again, but i have a feeling that was a flop. until they figure out a way to get the actual starbucks, it will not work out. i had fun, can you tell? now i just have to actually write the paper. ugh.

tonight at dinner, will said, "so you can check out as many books as you want, right?" apparently it's been a while since he's been to the library. i told him yes, and he said, "we should check out the whole library and if you're a professor you wouldn't ever have to return them." so i guess i should become a professor so that one day we can actually try to put this idea into action.

words words words

"the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice" MLK, Jr. I read that today and liked it. Not sure if that's an exact quote but close enough.

all i've done for the last few days is read...so many words.
i'm taking a course at the moment, curriculum development. it's basic but still so much reading that my highlighter is going to run dry soon. so in the off moments when i'm not reading the educational philosophy wordiness, i'm grabbing everything else. just finished newsweek with barack obama gracing the cover. i like him. that's where the quote came from. it's going to be an interesting Dem. primary. I think it will be more telling of America than the actual election. i also need to read his audacity of hope book. it's on the list. the list is too long.

in other reading i'm trying to become the pat conroy expert but have a ways to go and have to put that on hold because where's the time for that? i did find a cool new magazine today though. i have a secret obsession with magazines that i might of mentioned before. they're noncommittal and shiny. that is why i love them. i don't feel guilty putting them down like i do when i have to stop reading every word that someone writes like i'm doing with conroy. i could be reading conroy instead of writing this post couldn't i? ahh, details. so this magazine i found is called Good. i don't think it's brand spanking new or anything. i think i just realized it existed. it says it is a magazine "for people who give a damn." i want really badly to be a person who gives a damn. sometimes i fail at that because there's so much going on right in front of me and i seem to only give a damn about that, but this magazine is cool because it looks at all the hot topics of the time that we should be giving a damn about but are maybe not right in front of us or they are in front of us but we have our eyes closed to them. it's cool so you should check it out. it also has a weird picture of michael stipe in turquoise pants inside the front cover, which was shocking because that's an image i haven't seen before. it's an ad for something but i'm just stuck with stipe in green pants at the moment. i'll look again and figure that out.

what else what else?

my poor pup, lily, is losing her womanhood this week. friday is the big day. she has no idea and is bouncing around happily. i will have to break the news soon. normally Will would be around to assist in these matters but as he is a working man and i work in public ed and have the summer off it will be me doing the delivering of the puppy with woman parts and the picking up of the puppy without woman parts. this will be sad because i hate leaving the dogs anywhere because they are my pseudo children and so i will probably cry.

dreams are like movies...

not sure what i've been eating or drinking lately that has made the dreaming so vivid. i usually don't remember the details of dreams, but the last two nights have been extra real.

last night i dreamed that i was riding a tricycle (like the little kid kind) from my parents house to greenville. that would involve me pedaling on woodruff road. i only made it a little ways before my little tricycle fell apart. it was like that commercial where the guy is sitting in his car and hitting his dash because something's not working right, and then the whole car falls out from under him, except i just fell a few inches because tricycles sit pretty low to the ground. so i managed to get my wheels put back on and turned around to head back to woodruff where i would apparently make some repairs. i was supposed to be somewhere in greenville, a race maybe? there was a time limit, that's all i can figure because i was feeling extra panicked about my faulty tricycle. so i end up stopping at the eckerds in woodruff because i think i see my family there and there's this whole confusing part of the dream at this point involving band aids, my grandfather, not having enough money to pay for things, and some kids trying to steal my tricycle. so at some point i leave the drugstore and go down the street to find that my tricycle has been put in a yard sale. while rummaging around to dig it out of a pile of stuff, i have an eerie feeling that there's someone out there who doesn't want me to ride the tricycle or who wants me to be late to wherever i'm headed. once i find my tricycle and am about to elicit the help of the chorus teacher from my school because he is apparently really good at repairing tricycles, the custodian from my school, who's a really sweet lady, appears and has brought me lunch, in a cooler, all of these little containers of mashed potatoes and corn and beans. and she says she chose those foods because she saw me eating them once. but i wonder about that because i never eat like that at school. i eat sandwiches or salads, so i'm confused about the full course meal but i say thanks and am about to get back on my newly-repaired tricycle when it starts raining of course. but i'm determined to make it to greenville even if i do have to pedal in the rain and carry a cooler full of food. so i set out on my second journey down woodruff road, and then i promptly wake up. so all i want to know is where was i going? and why the tricycle? like most dreams, the retelling is dumb. sorry to put you through that if you stuck it out this far.

the dream from the night before was about Will wanting to buy my grandma's house in gaffney of all places. he had a plan that we would move there and fix it up and then sell it. but we would have to sell our current house and i couldn't convince him that i love our house and couldn't handle the idea of moving to gaffney where my grandma's house was surrounded by yellowed fields and one house in particular that looks like the location of a flea market. i can't remember much else of the dream, at some point i was trying to get to a cross country meet. not sure if i was running or coaching but i was late as usual in dreams and never made it. i woke up. why do you never make it to your destination in dreams?

one more note about the house that's by my grandma's house: at one point the people who live there were raising miniature ponies in the backyard. i say backYARD because the space behind their house isn't like a farm-sized field, it is simply a small plot of land. oh and they have a caboose from some train. it's red just like cabooses are supposed to be. now where do you think they got a caboose and why did they put it in the backyard? for a while i thought about the boxcar children, remember them? but i don't think these people know anything about those kids or their survival skills in the boxcar. i think they are just the type of people who collect trash in their yard and just mow the grass around it. it's sad and my grandma hates it.

ok enough for now.

seeing yellow

more on painting because it's all i've done for the last week and a half. yesterday i took the hallway/stairway from dull to BRIGHT. so bright you might need to pack sunglasses if you're coming for a visit. william picked the color, incorrectly titled PALE daffodil. it's not pale at all. it's bright yellow. i like yellow, usually in muted calm shades. the wall is so bright and yellow that whenever will climbs the stairs or walks out into its sunniness he immediately begins singing made up songs about yellow. like "yellow keeps falling on my head" or "it's a very yellow world." after working for an entire day on the yellowness, he tells me i can repaint it. seriously? no.
but if you're ever feeling blue, just come over to my house. i'll set you up in the hall and within minutes you'll be catapulted into the world of happiness and joy! i tried to snap a pic so that you could appreciate the yelllowness with me, but film just can't capture it. so here's a pic of lily looking cute. she doesn't even seem to notice the yellow, so i guess we're all good.

laaa dee dah!

summer time is here! spent last week at the beach among a couple friends for a couple days and then just with william for the rest of the week. there was plenty of doing nothing, though we did manage to make ourselves run a few times to work off the ridiculous amounts of food we ate. i also had plenty of time sitting on the beach, staring and staring at the ocean and reading dumb magazines and great books. you know how being from SC we all know that pat conroy is a great writer. most of us know this even if we haven't actually read any of his stuff. until this past week, i was one of those people. i've heard the guy speak a handful of times and i have read his cookbook, but i was a loser about reading his stuff. i don't know that i would have appreciated it before now anyway. so i read beach music and am quickly now about to devour everything else he has written. i love stuff that's set in the south and especially when someone can actually capture the part of the south that is beautiful and not dwell on the part that isn't so beautiful. he definitely can do this.

in other news there was major drama on the beach this year. in the past there has been the occassional situation of the beached jellies, the cannonball ones or something, the kind that won't hurt you. anybody else remember that a few years ago? you'd go to the beach and have to dodge the little guys because they were everywhere you tried to throw out your towel. well this year was the year of the ray. at first we thought sting ray, which meant that i wasn't getting anywhere near the rocky sea. but then after a little research discovered these were cow-nosed rays, not to be confused with caboose rays, which is something that is totally fabricated and made up by rob. so for days i watched little kids run around on the beach being completely misinformed, which often becomes little kids, yelling, "I saw 37 sting rays just now!" or "I just touched one of the sting rays." now obvoiously these aren't sting rays or one of those kids would have been regretting the whole touching of the sting ray. let us remember steve irwin. perhaps his daugter could enlighten us on the nature of the cow-nosed ray, who knows. even though these rays were as harmless as a caboose, i still was a bit wary. i know the sea is for the sea life, but i just don't like seeing the creatureyness of it all i guess. there was one little girl who captured my feelings. she was coming in from serious boogie boarding, stopped dead in her splashy tracks and let out a shriek like any 8 year old girl can do. a few dads, none of which were hers, went running for her thinking, "drowing child" or "shark attack" even though she was just standing in the ocean. this kid had just seen the rays go swimming by her little legs, so she stopped dead in her tracks and did what any fine girl would do, be completely still and scream at the top of her lungs, the high pitched scream i might add. even though she was a mess, i thought it was super cute. that'd of been me at age 8 too.

solutions

ever think about why people always want to give you a solution when all you want is to vent? there's this person in my life (and no it's not my husband or a family member or even a close friend), but this person is still a person in my life who is there a lot for some reason. i vent, she/he vents, we all vent. but when i vent, i don't want answers, unless of course i say, "what should i do?" or "what do you think?" or just plain "help!" but this person is relentless with the solution offering. and it's so matter of fact. like duh, you idiot. why are you talking about this, when the solution is so obvious? if it was a consoling solution, more like "hey, think about this" i might be more open, but instead i'm left with the duh/idiot look not having a solution or a comeback except to stare, which has been proven time and time again to be ineffective.
perhaps solutions are obvious, but it's not always about that. sometimes, it's just talking and conversation and making a point. no solution needed.

rebounding

I have officially bounced back from 12 years of making B's (and the occasional C) in math, that'd be all my schooling since 5th grade. I got an A in statistics, which is crazy. I ran all over the house. Will thought I was nuts, but it's just because he wasn't THERE when I couldn't do the math for the majority of my life. I know stats is no calculus and geometry and all that, but it's like word problem after word problem after ridiculous t-test and hypothesis test and whatnot, and I got an A. woohoo!

In other news, there's 14 days left of school. Then it's summer and beaches and travel and the GYM and playing with my dogs and reading actual books. By the way, Cormac McCarthy's latest, The Road, I recommend it. The ole "water runner" mentioned it to me and I checked it out. Well worth the eyeball to the page time.

another year, another bridge run

over the weekend, i completed my 11th cooper river bridge run. i think it's 11. the first one was in 9th grade. and there were a couple absences due to torn ligaments and lack of motivation. but none the less, i do think it was my 11th trip to charleston for the event. i went back and looked at results starting in 1996. apparently 1999 was my year to peak b/c i ran a 49: something. that's hilarious. b/c this past weekend i clocked a 1:16. i did manage to walk 2 miles this time rather than running the whole thing, so that adds a little time. it's just funny to think about how you used to be and how you are now. reality of aging...setting in. oh well. i still haven't conquered the half marathon like our buddies rob and amanda, but that's ok. i'm doing a 5 miler in a month. i'll run the whole thing this time and i won't die.

i need to recount ONE event from this weekend at the race tho. my sis and her husband, rob and i set out at 6:50 AM to head over to the race start. we park and start walking down to the starbucks to meet another pal who i would be running/walking with. once we find her, my sis and i head off for the habitual porta potty stop. why rob didn't have to go i have no idea. after being in the potty line for 2 min., i realized that this is indeed a dumb idea to waste key stretching/chatting time while waiting to wee. so my sis and i run off down a side road, find a nice looking building that turned out to be a law firm with a big tree in back, so we ran in back of the tree and shaved about 30 min. off the predicted porta potty time by just handling our business like we were out camping. no big deal. this whole process of running to the porta potties, finding a tree, and jogging back to the starbucks where we would meet up with everyone took no more than 5 minutes. we get back and i ask my brother in law, where's rob? the response, "oh, he left." really? i say, thinking this is an early april fool's. but no, what had actually happened is that the annoying announcer lady who we nicknamed BARB (or maybe sharon) b/c she sounded like she was from Minnes-OH-ta, had been saying, "runners, get in line! it's almost time" (we still had 30 minutes to spare). well apparently, rob panicked, thought momentarily, will they care if i go ahead?, decided that we wouldn't care, and ran off to get in a pack of some 40, 000 people to wait for 30 minutes before ever beginning the race. needless to say, i had a leisurely walk to the start, stretched, chatted and laughed at Barb with the other people around me, and then started right on time. granted, rob ran the whole thing and my game plan from the start was to walk some, so it REALLY didn't matter, but still, i find it funny. panicky rob.

update

the bathroom is blue. not the right shade of blue. it always looks different on the wall in large portions. it's not hideous, just not what we wanted. i will be working up the nerve to post a pic. it's pretty much done, just have to work on the cabinets. looks like we might be painting it ANOTHER shade of blue in the future. try number 2.

top 5 reasons

here's the top 5 reasons i had to go running today:

1. i made these cookies this morning (b/c we had a "weather day" which meant no school and also meant "must make cookies"). they're called mudslide cookies. they have real chocolate and eggs and cocoa and other good stuff. they're not out of a box. that means that they are good. the recipe came out of cooking light magazine, but still when you eat 3 of them, that means you had too many and should go run around to burn off at least 1 of them.
2. i'm supposed to run/walk/hobble across the cooper river bridge with 20,000+ other people in less than 2 weeks. i have one friend that i'm supposed to meet up with to do this. she wants to run, i want to meander. and rob is clearly going to beat me seeing as how he is now a half-marathoner.
3. i have to wear a bathing suit in may.
4. i strained my shoulder. apparently last week while i was couched with a stomach virus, i strained my shoulder. it's like the shoulder blade on my left side. i seriously strained it by doing nothing. who knew laziness and eating only crackers and gatorade could injure you? it can. i was all good during the run, but it hurt like hell after. the other thing is that right where the sports bra goes on my back, is where it hurts, this didn't feel that good either. hopefully being active will reverse the laziness-induced strain. i'll keep you posted.
5. the flowers in my neighborhood have bloomed and the wind was blowing a little and the sun was out and the sky was blue.

those are the top 5 reasons for running today. the run was great by the way.


in other news the bathroom is now without wallpaper. this means that tomorrow, after a LONG meeting that will most likely zap my brain and a statistics class, which will pretty much get whatever's left, i get to paint. this is good. and on another side note, my dog, lily, was just caught standing on the table trying to drink will's beer. she's had a rough day apparently.

it's taking over!

friday/yesterday/today i painted a room. it's blue, oh so blue. not quite the blue i wanted but it will have to be b/c i can't paint it again or i would lose my mind. now i'm waiting on this wallpaper steamer/remover thing to heat up so i can go hack at this gorgeous turquoise wallpaper that has little white shells all over it. yep, not my choice of wallpaper, and so it's comin' down! this is the bathroom, the bathroom whose renovations began a mole hill and turned into a mountain, mt. st. huge. but it looks like it will be ALMOST done by this coming weekend. my life this week will revolve around work and the walls of my bathroom (and my dogs and my husband too i guess, but mostly the walls). it's a simple life i lead. AND i'm very excited b/c V8 has a new juice flavor, blueberry pomegranate. that has GOT to be good for us!

this was a boring post. all the interesting things are not happening around here. my weekend:
friday: work (sat in meeting all day) & paint
sat: paint, sell tickets at a baseball game, statistics homework
sun: paint, paint, steam
mon: more of the same...see? i need to get out!

what up doc?

here's the news from barmount dr. will and i have just wrapped up renovation weekend 2007 Part I. i have a feeling there will be parts 2-100, but we have started. we could have been on one of those tlc tv shows. it was rockin'. i was the resident painter. the office and living room are pretty much done, with some great new colors. (the lady before us had everything, walls AND trim, the same color, kind of a baby puke beige. mmhmm!). i still have to touch up the ceiling in the living room from the paint that seemed to sneak up there from the walls (AMANDA! you know what i'm talking about??). someone blew that popcorn ceiling crap all over our house. why do people like that? anyway, little is to be done about that now. so you can picture me for the next three nights with a tiny little paint brush, covering the "not-supposed-to-be-there yellow" with the "supposed-to-be-there white." yep, that'll suck. i still have to do the trim in the LR too. painting the trim is like pulling your teeth (or your hair) out! at least that's how i feel about it right now. that's what's left before tackling the walls in one of the bathrooms. see while i was painting, will was knocking out tiles, cutting holes in dry wall, etc. (he does all the fancy stuff) and so now MY bathroom is on it's way to being the coolest room in the house. i'll take a pic when it's done. and another bonus, if you come to visit me, it will be YOUR bathroom. so if you want to have THAT experience, come on down!

that's pretty much it for the weekend, it was nonstop working on house stuff and i think we went to lowe's/home depot approximately 5 times. that's a lot in my opinion. now is a good time to buy stock in either of those stores if you were considering that you should buy some new stock(s). we will be keeping the in business for approximately forever.

rollin rollin rollin

get those doggies rollin, rawhide!

are those even the correct words?

the point of the song, right words or not, is that today is THE day, the day i make my exit from Cayce, SC. movin on up, to the east side...la la la (insert the Jefferson's theme song here. i can't remember all those words either).

my house is packed sort of and daisy and lily are anxiously awaiting their new backyard! the truck should be rollin in any minute and we are OUT!

hell is the pits

this week i was in my car a lot. i sometimes feel like i live in there. i keep plenty of coats, shoes, rain gear, and water. not because i'm afraid i'll get stranded on a mountain but because i never know what i'm going to get into or when i'll be thirsty.

so this week in my car i was driving through the lovely part of west columbia that i will happily be departing from in 1 week. i went by the local bi-lo and there was a lady standing in the parking lot entrance with a cart full of groceries. what she was attempting to do was cross a 4-lane highway with her cart full of food. bi-lo is on the right side of the street so i looked over to the left side because my first thought was, where exactly is she going? if i was her, how would i win this game of frogger? i noticed that directly across the street there is a house manufacturing place. one of those places where they have the model homes all set up in a parking lot and it's weird because it's like a mini subdivision. a play subdivision. so i think to myself that she's definitely not going there. i do notice a little dirt road that goes off into somewhere, who knows. i figure this is where she's going. so now she's going to cross the 4-lane highway with a full grocery cart and then struggle to push it down the dirt road. i'm sure that would be bumpy ride and i wonder about the eggs, if she bought eggs. i hope they didn't crack. so it was a weird site to see this woman and the GOOD thing would have been to pull in and load all her groceries in my car and drive her to wherever, right? i know. that's not what i did. don't make me feel guilty.

i do think it's weird though when i see people with carts from stores wheeling down the road. she wasn't the typical type of person who has a cart to hold all of his/her belongings. she was just grocery shopping. i wonder if she keeps the bi-lo cart at her house and then just takes it with her when she goes shopping. it's something to think about. it's like her version of a car. hmmm.

have you ever noticed how sometimes you'll be in the mall (and it has to be a mall where there's a bed bath and beyond or some big store like that attached) and you'll see someone pushing a cart from another store down the mall, like in the mall part NOT in the store. or if you're at a target shopping center (they always have bed bath and beyond or tj max) and you'll see someone wheel into target with a cart from another store. clearly their cart is blue or gray and everyone else's is red. the cart is the store's property right? if you take it, should you pay for it? i don't know. i always return my cart or go to my car to dump stuff in there before i hit the next store. am i the only one who sees this kind of stuff and thinks it's just not right? and am i also the only one who knows the cart color of so many stores? think about it. what color are the carts in publix, walmart, etc? this is a game that could last forever.

later in the week, after the grocery cart lady incident, i was driving through another unpleasant part of west columbia/lexington (a part i will not be able to avoid because i work there) and i passed a church and you know how church's are often very good at putting thought-provoking saying on their signs out front?? mmhmmmm, you know what i'm talking about. yea, so this church had just one line of letters and it read, Hell is the Pits.

well yea, i'm sure it is, but should that really be what people read as they drive by? shouldn't it read, come in! welcome! god is love! or something of that nature. this is apparently another thing i just don't understand.

Tastes like Chicken

I've been eating a lot of chicken lately. Trying to cut down on some carbs, not all carbs, just some. So today I go to the gym to run on the treadmill and come to find out the chicken was following me. I was standing at the end of the treadmill stretching, so picture me bent over double with my face really close to the back of the machine where there's always a lot of sand and dirt from people's shoes and stuff. I'm stretching, stretching and I notice that there's a piece of fried chicken on this little dirt-trapping part of the machine. Not like a BIG piece of fried chicken, just a little bit of the fried, breaded, heart-stopping stuff. (And by the way, the chicken I eat is NOT fried. gross.) So I don't think much of it, except, hmmm, fried chicken? I get on the treadmilll and get going. At some point I realize that I'm running and smiling a big goofy grin because all I can picture is somebody on the treadmill before me holding a chicken leg or a whole bucket of chicken maybe, walking and chewing, dropping little bits of chicken at their feet, which will just end up on the dirt-trapping part at the back, right?? So apparently I got a little excited because next thing I know they whole treadmill and my running legs come to a stop. First I got mad and thought the whole thing had shut down. Maybe it sensed me making fun of the person before me? Nope, I'd just gotten too close to the control panel and hit the stupid emergency stop thing, that is held in by a little magnet, with my hand, halting me to a complete stop. Not only do I look dumb in the gym because I'm grinning for no reason, but also because I was on a fast interval and came to a complete stop. I know it had to look funny. Gym reputations are hard to come by. I guess I'm the goofy treadmill girl.

the demons

they apparently got me. i remember being way back in grades 5-12 and never understanding math. SOMETIMES i could follow the steps, and occasionally the answers would turn out. however, i never understood why we were doing anything. i decided for some reason to go back to school. so i sit in a statistics class on tuesday nights from 4-7. in hell.
reason 1: i have no friends in this class b/c if i even take my eyes off of the professor to smile at someone, i'm lost and there's no hope. and when we get a break i run outside to walk around and eat some type of protein b/c i'm so bored that the cold air and food source are all that will get me til 7.
reason 2: my hand is going to get stuck in the shape of pencil holding b/c i write down every word he says, or at least i try to
reason 3: i still don't understand why we do anything we do. i feel like a 5th grader again, when everyone realized, i can't do math.

an epiphany though? i'm not going to fail this class by any means b/c i'm a big nerd. and i do think that i could actually take an algebra class again as a 25 yr old and make an A. i follow directions very well now, unlike back then. i still wouldn't understand the why behind it all, but perhaps i'm beginning to accept that there's no answer to that question. so there.

i have a test in this class on tuesday. today i tried to study. i isolated myself from all civilization and tried to make it all make sense. it doesn't. the stupid book has the answers to the odd questions, right??? i think i need to write a letter b/c number 1, people like me need all the answers to see if we get it or not and number 2, why can't they also provide a little explanation as to how they figured out the answers. that would help. am i seeming desperate? i'm exaggerating, sure! but in my most honest voice, i really do feel like i'm in high school again, hoping that the test questions will have some semblance of anything i do know how to do so far. arg.




In other news...
the cantaloupe posted pics of her new house. i finally got some pics of MY new house and she has motivated me to show off my new residence too. we haven't moved yet, but are at T-2 weeks. yay. congrats to ALL the new home owners!! i'll put some more pics up later!

communication

fizzles and messes up everything.

World Debut!

Some of you have already heard the news, but this is the official World Debut of the new Gillaspy pup, Lily! Isn't she cute??
Will and I thought that it would be wise to own 2 border collies. The older sister, Daisy, is a bit jealous in her neurotic way, but hopefully once Lily grows up a little, they'll be pals!

In other un-border-collie-related news, we have also made a huge decision in terms of a house. We've been on the house hunt for a couple months, and we've found the one! The closing date is fast approaching, so we're psyched to get ourselves up and out of Cayce, SC. No offense to the other Cayceites, but it's just that time! More on all of that later!