and a beautiful day it is, sunny, warm, perfect. life is good.
if you live here in spfld, have you listened to the NEW 93.9 fm, ABE RADIO? i think the call letters are wabz. right now they’re playing TEN THOUSAND SONGS IN A ROW, commercial free. every time i turn on the radio and they say that, i try to figure just how many days of programming that would be, but it’s too much math for my brain. a lot of days, that’s what i’m guessing.
anyway, i like to listen to this station sometimes, because i actually know many of the songs. it surprises me to realize how many songs i know, when i thought i only knew maybe 10. their slogan is WE PLAY ANYTHING. or maybe it’s WE PLAY EVERYTHING, i can’t remember. sometimes they say retarded things like “abe would want to play EVERYTHING,” some lame correlation about lincoln and freedom and all of that.
but like i said, no commercials, and lots of good music. maybe it’s 80’s music? i don’t know, all i know is that i like it.
i’m about to go take my flyers around. it’s all about lincoln and the upcoming HOOPLA. i saw the chairs set up in the park across from the museum this morning. there are supposedly 1,400 chairs. i wanted to stop and put a little “reserved” sign on a couple of chairs, so i won’t have to get there quite so early on tuesday morning. but i figured it would blow away.
i bet, though, if i came back with some big piece of bunting, or rope, and a great big reserved sign, something that looks official, that would confuse people, and nobody else would sit in it and the workers wouldn’t throw it away.
but that’s too much trouble on a sunny afternoon, and besides, i have no rope or bunting in my car.
i do have a massage chair in the trunk, but i bet they won’t let me carry that onto the grounds.
on the other hand, massage chairs weren’t listed in the list of things you are FORBIDDEN TO BRING WITH YOU. the list includes weapons of all sorts, food, umbrellas, and a bunch of other stuff. backpacks. you just can’t take a backpack anywhere these days, can you? but there’s no mention of no massage chairs. if i brought it with me, i could set it up and give people massages, i bet i could make a tidy profit while waiting hours and hours for the event to start.
i’m going to run in a 5k race tomorrow morning. last night i decided i WAS NOT going to run in the race, but this morning i thought, why not? i called my brother-in-law jim and asked him if he’d like to do it with me, and he said yes. i was surprised about this, because although he used to do all kinds of races, he was a race addicts, running, triathlons, everything, he hasn’t been doing that anymore.
but he was enthusiastic, and that’s good for me because now i won’t be able to back out at the last minute, when i wake up too many times tonight and can’t get back to sleep and obsess about how i’m not going to get my required 8-9 hours of sleep. it does sound fun, actually – for one thing, 5k is only 3.1 miles, which is almost nothing, and for another thing, the course is all around downtown, which should be entertaining and different.
jim told me that once, a while ago, he won SECOND OVERALL in this race. he ran sub-6 miles. that’s running ONE MILE in LESS THAN SIX MINUTES, in case you’re not race-knowledgeable.
yeah, fast. jim bemoaned the fact that he’s not that fast anymore. i told him that i’m really really trying to emphathize with him, but it’s difficult for me. i mean, at this point i won’t even admit that i’m actually a “runner.” i mean, i do jog around a lot, but i certainly don’t look like a REAL runner, those skinny, legs of steel people, long and lean. and my goal is never to beat anybody, it’s just mostly not to pass out while running.
i have to admit that in the few races i’ve done, i have felt competitive all of a sudden, mostly because of all the old crippled one-legged people who passed me by, and this makes me run faster than i normally do (very slowly), and then i’m totally tired at the end. the last time this happened was at the jingle bell run last december, in which i didn’t get any homemade chocolate chip cookies at the end because i was too tired from the running. crazy.
anyway, tomorrow morning should be fun. afterwards, there will many many activities all over the place, and i’m sure it will be good.
i’m not going to run barefoot, by the way. last night there was a story on NPR about a barefoot runner from Huntington Beach, CA who is going to run in the Boston Marathon. He’s run something like either 12,000 or 20,000 miles already without shoes. he said that yeah, you do get rocks and stuff and GLASS in your feet, but it’s not bad, really.
GLASS IN YOUR FEET IS BAD.
that’s just my opinion.
then they interviewed a podiatrist who said that he wouldn’t recommend that any of his patients run barefoot. maybe because of GLASS. not to mention POTHOLES. etc.
he said, basically, that we’re too fat to go shoeless. they did point out that people used to run around without shoes, which is true. but they didn’t have shoe stores back then, either, so they were much harder to procure. plus now that we definitely have shoe stores FILLED with shoes, it makes sense to put them on your feet. that’s all i’m saying. i mean, that logic is like saying that well, we didn’t have FIRE a long time ago, so we might as well eat raw food all the time. cauze our ancestors lived without it. yeah, but they only lived to be about sixteen, too.
there was also a report about a bad thing you can get if you drink too much water from running. i wrote down the term for the malady, but i seem to have misplaced the scrap of paper that it was on. it’s something like hyponeutrinia, except that’s not it. the gist of it is that if you drink too much water when you run, your body loses too much salt, and this is bad for your kidneys and maybe your liver, various organs, and especially your brain, which you don’t want to start going bad on you.
they said elite runners don’t usually have this problem because they don’t have enough time for drinks of water, but us slowpokes have plenty of time, waddling along, to stop and sip every few feet.
whew, so much information in one day. i must go outside in the fresh air and sunshine now.
ok then,
grace always informative.