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.