CONGRATULATIONS again, to jerri and brendan and their new baby girl, Lucy Gallileo.
they sent me a photo, and she is very small and babylike. two eyes, a nose, a mouth, everything seemed to be in order. whew.
so, the Bix 7 – seven miles, starting with a big uphill climb…here’s the funny thing – i could have run faster! it took me 65 minutes, considerably shorter than last year, but most of the time i felt i was holding back, because last year i had to walk a lot of the time because of the great deal of leg pain. but this year it went by so quickly…
i’ve been running a lot since last year, and i think that makes a big difference. also, this year, for the very first time, B. (Bonjovi) ran with me the entire time! this was slightly unsettling, actually; i kept glancing over at him, expecting him to sprint away, and being quite fine with that, since he always sprinted away, and ikept wondering why he stayed at my pace. I worried that he was just doing it to be nice, since he’s a much, much faster runner than me, and that made me feel guilty, and worried that he was going to ruin his own racing experience, but then i decided that he is an adult, after all, at least age-wise, and if he wanted to hang back and run with me, well, that was a good thing, and i shouldn’t worry. easy in theory but never so simple in practice.
it was really nice, i have to admit. we chatted sometimes, and like i said, the whole thing went by so quickly, so that suddenly when we turned the corner to make our final run, we’d passed a stretch that last year was intermitable, and i’d had to walk most of it, cursing and snarling the whole way.
i’m not sure if i’d want to do the Bix again. this year there were 21,000 people! too many people. as i ran up a hill, there was this huge swarming mass of humanity in front of me, which was certainly interesting to look at, and to think that i was a part of it. but the real-life reality, there in the mass of people, is that my personal space was invaded constantly, with people bumping and jockeying to get ahead. and it wasn’t so easy to pass anybody, because there were just too many sweaty running bodies.
when it was all over, we ate our twinkies, which were delicious, but then wandered around looking for popsicles, and notice a few very, very long lines…these were lines for BEER. at NINE IN THE MORNING! who’d want a beer at nine in the morning? especially after running all that way? even if i liked beer, and i hate it, i wouldn’t want one at nine a.m.
actually, i drank an entire beer, all by myself, the night before the race. we found a deliciously authentic german restaurant that had a huge list of beer, and i got a dark one, couldn’t tell you the name of it, just that it’s nothing i’ve had before, and i drank the whole thing. it was kind of good, actually, and maybe i’ll have another one someday.
we also camped, on sunday. a pretty darn busy weekend, and i felt incredibly, incredibly surly this morning about going back to reality. i still haven’t figured out how to camp for a living, but i’m working on it. i hated the thought of going out and driving in the traffic, and all of that. and of course the traffic in spfld. is nothing compared to that in a big city.
have you read anything by bill bryson? he writes interesting, funny accounts of his travels. one is “a walk in the woods,” about hiking the appalachian trail. another is “in a sunburned country,” about australia. i highly recommend his stuff. anyway, yesterday while taking a long hike in the woods, i thought about him and his books, and decided that i need to start taking notes on my camping experiences, because i’d like to write a camping book. i know i mentioned this before, but i didn’t think about seriously, actually doing it.
but also, if i was going to write a book about camping, i’d have to do a lot more of it. it’s probably too early to start writing right now. but soon, as soon as i’ve gone more places.
we camped at siloam springs state park, which a couple of people had said is really beautiful. clearly, these people haven’t gotten out much. i mean, it was pretty nice, but the camping situation was less than ideal. we like camping where there aren’t other people around, which is why the last couple of times we stayed at primitive campsites (that really weren’t that primitive, but were fairly devoid of people for the most part). but this time you had to hike into the primitive sites, and we have way way too much stuff for that, so we stayed at a regular site.
they didn’t have many of them without electricity, i guess so you can blow dry your hair inside the tent, or maybe it was to plug in a portable tv. so we pulled up onto a rocky driveway at an RV site and started setting out tent up in the grass. we’d gotten it halfway put up, when the campground “host” roared up on his scooter and told us we couldn’t put our tent up in the grass. why not, i ask you? is that not retarded? yes, it is. very retarded. rules.
so, we set the tent up in the gravel driveway. SUNDAY NIGHT WE SLEPT IN THE DRIVEWAY. not so great. it was actually ok, because we had an air mattress, but of course we couldn’t pound the stakes into the driveway because it was too hard. the tent stayed up because of its high-tech technological construction, but still, it was annoying. The host (B. started calling him “scooter”) buzzed by soon after we got the tent up, i’m sure to make sure we hadn’t put it back in the grass.
the driveway was connected to a little road that led to a picnic table a little farther down the way, and every once in a while, a car would slowly cruise past. this, too, was irksome. why were they driving by? one came by at three in the morning, but i’m pretty sure it was somebody official connected to the park, maybe Scooter, but what was he doing up at three, anyway? are there lots of scalliwags who camp there, who go around breaking rules (like putting the tent in the grass), so they have to be vigilant about rule-enforcement?
perhaps they were patrolling for raccoons. as we sat in the dark by the campfire, i heard a noise, and B. shined his flashlight on a couple of cute little raccoons in a tree, lurking around, waiting for us to go to sleep so they could rummage around in our food. we put everything in the van, and threw some stuff in the trash can across the road. soon, there was a lot of BANGing and CRASHing as the raccoons threw themselves into the garbage can again and again, foraging for stray scraps. in the morning, B. found the can liner down the hill, with the (well-cleaned out) food containers strewn about.
the last time we camped, there were lots and lots of tics. this time, as we hiked i noticed a tiny little bug on my leg that looked like a teeny little baby tic – it was a DEER TIC, said B., who knows everything about almost everything, or at least that’s how it appears. deer tics are the things that give you LIME DISEASE, which is VERY VERY BAD. i killed the deer tic and we kept walking, and B. didn’t seem concerned about the possibility of lime disease, so i decided not to worry about it either, even though the deer tics seemed very tiny and easy to miss and the cause of bad disease.
we hiked past the primitive campsite, and it was very nice, certainly very primitive and peaceful, and we talked about hiking to it some time and staying there. i’m not entirely sold on the idea, though, because we couldn’t take the air mattress, and there would probably be many amenities we’d have to do without. but on the other hand, BOY would it be remote.
ok then. i must go do things now, including driving in my car and going around, but nothing too terribly taxing. i get to pick up my NEWLY FIXED COMPUTER, which i’m quite excited about. the computer guru said my pest patrol was competing with my norton anti-virus. he also said my computer batter is going bad, because it makes the computer so hot that he had to put it on as hotpad and was worried that it was going to CATCH FIRE while it re-charged overnight! a new computer battery, therefore, is at the top of my list.
the computer CATCHING FIRE, now there’s a worry that never would have occured to me.
i must go.
ok then,
grace going to get things done.
p.s. i’m already up to page 200 on Harry P. #6, and there are only six hundred and some pages, so i’m going to do my best to not read too much this week, plus my plan is to start reading the earlier ones again when i’ve finished this one. in order to continue to have something to look forward to.