Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

Thanks to those who wished me well yesterday, I appreciated that.

BC and I went out to Vegetate for a marvelous meal, after he shared a gift or two (the eyelash curlers were a particularly humorous touch, and set the right mood for the evening). Then we came back here and proceeded to polish off a bottle or two of really good wine from the bottom of the rack, cuddle, and watch Mars Attacks, which he’d not seen (he had accused me once again of not having movies with real stars in them – so of course I had to pull out the one movie I have that has pretty much nothing but major actors in it). All in all a wonderful way to end the evening.

Today we were completely lazy and slept in until noon or so, with more cuddling and general gentle treatment of the hangovers we both had from the good wine the evening before. Just back from a nice dinner down at Jenny’s where we were mildly creeped out at the number of spiders hanging out right outside our window. There were two beer signs in the window, attracting a lot of bugs, so the spiders were very active, and very distracting as you’d catch them out of the corner of your eye. Not a place for the arachnophobic. But the tofu dishes we shared were both just incredible (their fiery tofu is fantastic – I almost always order it when I go).

He’s on his way home now, but he’ll be out tomorrow at Cantina, so those who’ve not met him will have a chance to do so if you come out tomorrow evening. Should be a fun time, and hopefully the really, really bad 80s cover band that was playing there this evening won’t be there tomorrow. If they are, we’ll have something other than me to pick on.

One of the side effects of the ‘no exercise’ was a good chunk of not sleeping well (which then fed the lack of desire to exercise, in a lovely vicious circle). I thought, after two days of good workouts, that I’d be back to wanting to sleep at a decent hour, but it appears that this is not to be the case quite yet.

Thankfully the ‘net is always here to amuse when these mood strike.

There’s nothing like that mild soreness that comes from a good exercise session.

My brother has all the social skills of your average slug.

He’s doing okay, and is out of the in-patient thing, but I think he’s determined to be as much of a little shit as he possibly can to the rest of the family, especially his wife. His life to mess up, but it’s tempting to strangle him from this distance.

Went through some rough stuff there with it, mentally. Took a couple days off work, went in late once or twice. Work was very understanding, despite this being the end of the fiscal year. Am doing much better now, and thank you for the good wishes.

Trying to get back into a groove with exercise. After the half last month, well, I just sort of stopped. At least nothing normal or in any sort of pattern or habit. Been trying to decide what it is I want of the off-season, and what I want for next year. Mostly I think what I need is some fat loss (so much easier to run without extra dead weight) and some overall strength training for the joints, as well as some concentrated core training.

Which would be better if I was more into strength training and crunches/pilates, but you do what you have to do, especially when you need to train to your weaknesses. I’m also going to do a reduced season next year. I know there’s at least 2 runs I want to do in the spring, but I can’t think of any triathlons that are just screaming for me to do them at this point. I may do two shorter seasons next year, a spring and fall season, with a break in between to get my groove back. This year was just too long to keep up.

Did get in a run this evening. Heart rate was, well, disgusting, and my foot pod seems to hate me in the opposite direction now (before it was registering too far, now not far enough – it claimed my 4 mile run was 3 miles tonight; normally it claims it’s 4.5). But it felt good to get out there again.

I think the worst part about dealing with my brother this time around is how helpless I feel this time.

My parents are in Iowa, on the way back from South Dakota, but won’t get back for two more weeks, so they’re not there to help him. My sister-in-law has an injured leg from a car accident, plus my two youngest nieces (18 and 4 months old), and, well, she’s not the most mature 29 y/o I’ve ever met. I’d go down, but there’s nothing I can do as long as he’s in the institution, where we hope he’ll stay for a good 30 days this time. It’s an involuntary commitment this time, so we’re hopeful it’ll have more lasting effects.

I don’t have the closest relationship with my family, due partially to distance. But it’s still a mess to feel so helpless up here.

Happy hour started at 3 today.

Let’s recap this week:

• Didn’t sleep well from allergy issues.
• BC’s car window got smashed outside my co-op.
• iPhone locked up while running late to work so couldn’t call in to let them know.
• 2nd to last week of the federal fiscal year (my crunch time at work).
• Richard lost one of his best friends to cancer.
• My brother attempted, not for the first time, to kill himself Thursday morning, and is now institutionalized.
• A friend succumbed to leukemia yesterday, despite signs he was getting better.

This after my family lost another friend to breast cancer a couple weeks ago (again, after she was seeming to do better), and one of Mom’s close friends had to deal with a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment earlier this year. Mom herself is a breast cancer survivor, and might be facing some more surgery because of scar tissue related to her previous surgeries (no mastectomy, but some scarring from the lumpectomies).

I’m done, I’m just done this week.

Hadn’t seen BC all week. Our schedules hadn’t meshed at all, so we hadn’t gotten together until this afternoon. When he walked in I just held him for several minutes. Hadn’t realized how much I’d missed him (and vice versa).

After a short while we went to go see D-War: Dragon Wars.

Worst.
Movie.
Ever.

This is so getting added to the cannon of bad movies. Thank heavens the theater was in no way, shape or form crowded, because I kept leaning into BC’s ear to MST3K the thing (actress: “Don’t we have a plan?” me: “Honey, you don’t even have a plot, of course you don’t have a plan!”). Lawdy, what a mess. Sudden scene changes with no warning or transition, people suddenly knowing all about this obscure Korean fairy tale, the Tim Gunn lookalike bad guy, it was all just dreadful. It was very difficult not to dissolve into loud laughter, though we did giggle a lot over in our little section of the theater. A lot of so-so CGI was really wasted there.

Checked in on ‘s pussy, who thankfully was still alive and happy. Off to an amazing dinner at Vegetate after that, then home to get in some needed alone time. He had to zip home, but we have a date set for tomorrow. Which is good, since I just spotted his sunglasses on the dining room table.

Prior to his arrival I was feeling quite blah this morning, so I spent a good bit of time cleaning, my default reaction to feeling out of sorts. The bathroom looks much better for it, as do all the floors. BC and I are going to go on a charity run next weekend, so I’ll finally get rid of a bunch of stuff I need to donate, and make room for some folding chairs I have, and my two clothes drying racks when not in use. I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts in general at home, and now that race season is almost over (with the big effort races out of the way), I can actually focus on home stuff. The whole “entertainment” portion of the main room is a bit of a mess, moreso since my PC is now on its last leg (the CPU fan is making a most disagreeable noise). The two pieces there, the large desk and the big shelving unit, were bought for my last, large bedroom, and not for this space. They sort-of-work, but not really. A more proper entertainment center with media storage and perhaps a small desk and book shelf would work much better.

Not that any of that is happening any time soon, mind you. Debt reduction first, more decorating later. Paying off that loan this week cut a good year off the total time it’ll take to kill off all remaining loans with that company (just two more there). That’s the company with the highest interest rate, so with the greatest chance for savings on interest by paying them off early. It’s definitely been nice to see the payoff date change from several years in the future to just a year and a half (well, less than that, but that’s date if I continue the current payments with no more early payoffs) with the two sub-loans paid off these past couple months.

Time enough, despite the fact that I feel like I would make a hummingbird look patient when it comes to these things.

Fun little race this morning, the Sprint Four the Cure 5k, sponsored by the Four Seasons hotel here in DC (hence the cutesy name). I had signed up on a lark, really going to run it with a friend who, while he’s been running, had not done a race yet. I figured this was a nice, low-key introduction, and for your admission price they provided breakfast, which was a big plus.

Got there in plenty of time. As I suspected from the announcement about race conditions (“this is not a chip timed race”), there were no race numbers, just your shirt and a lottery drawing ticket. My friend Stephen was in town and staying with me at the last minute, but was amenable to the race, so he joined Michael and I. Found Michael quickly, got the shirt (which I ended up carrying through the race), got ourselves some water and set up at the start line at 29th and M, headed downhill.

Starting gun went off, and off we raced. Sort of. The field got going, then got to the bottom of the hill and hit the first bottleneck – the turn onto the C&O canal tow path (the 2nd time in a week I’ve run on a canal tow path, though this was a bit less warm). The first mile had a lot of shifting between running and walking as we had to narrow down to the small path, then open back up again, then narrow, then back, etc. First split was about 12.5 minutes accordingly.

Up and over one of the bridges before that, then out to the turn around. Kept a nice, conversational pace with Michael for the first half out, chatting with him off and on. The turn around was simply two young ladies standing with an umbrella, but everyone filed around the chalk mark on the ground and started on the way back.

I picked up the pace a little bit on the way back but didn’t push too hard, finally coming in at 35:17. Definitely not my fastest 5k, but overall a nice little race. There were more folks there than I expected, and the breakfast spread was pretty nice (though I indulged only in some fruit, preferring to save my stomach for later). Michael had a good run, and finished nicely in just under 38 minutes, which was about a minute faster than he expected. Good times, and a good way to start the day.

I paid off another (sub)loan from one of my student loan providers today. I called to get a payoff amount and they offered to take the payment over the phone at no charge, so I paid it off. Two down from them, two to go. Good stuff.

Combine that with the race Sunday and I was ready to drink with coworkers tonight at our regular work happy hour. So I did. And it was fun. And drink-full.

And I miss my BC. Should see him tomorrow, but it’s been almost a week.

5k race on Saturday. Don’t care a whit about it, but it’s the first race for a friend who’s been running but not racing, so going to be support. Should be an interesting experience. At least the organizers offer a good breakfast after the race for free. Good stuff.

Weight is still down from before the race. We’ll see if it keeps up.

Someone at work today called me lazy because I took the elevator down a floor to find a working bathroom, rather than taking the stairs. I laughed and declined to point out that I went 70.3 miles on Sunday. Lazy. Ha.

Firefox 2.00000000000000000whatever sucks donkey balls on the Mac. Not all the tabs fit on the screen, each one has its own “X” button rather than a single button that would close the one active tab so you have to keep moving the stupid mouse cursor to shut them, hitting apple-key-W won’t close the entire window if it’s the last tab, and the font for the bookmarks menu is too large to hold all of my delicately balanced bookmarks on one page, like it all used to do just fine under version 1.5. I am not amused. Additional features are not always improvements, folks.

I remembered some more vignettes from the race that I want to put to writing later this evening. Should’ve been in the initial race report, but I wanted to get it up sooner rather than later.

It’s the last month of the federal fiscal year and I’m again one of the most popular attorneys in our office, if not the most popular one. The next month is going to be b-u-s-y.

That light coming from yon burning orb in the sky? It’s fall light, not summer light. No humidity to futz it up, and much cooler out than it has been. Clearer, but different in hue and tone. Nice to see, nicer to know I can throw the windows open and not waste electricity on the AC. But so not ready for it to get darker earlier.