Archive for July 14th, 2009

I’m on a roller coaster ride these days, like permanent PMS without the luxury of knowing it’ll be over in a few days.

The weekend started on Friday evening with Nick’s Dad’s birthday.  How do you celebrate a 92-year old’s birthday who’s feeling like pure crap from chemo & cancer?  The whole time you’re thinking that this is his last birthday party ever and you know he knows it, too.  And as Nick said to me, he’s not giving into the idea of death at all.  He’s depressed and weak but his brain is ticking along, fully cognizant of what the score is.  Anyway, he’s to be off the chemo for a week starting next week, so hopefully he’ll feel a bit better.

Saturday afternoon, we went to see Bruno, because I’ve been waiting for that movie for weeks.  I’m not a huge movie gal, but there are certain choice comedies that I anxiously await and this was one.  I’m positive a lot of you will not like this movie, so I’m not saying go see it, but go see it. :-)

Later that evening, we saw another surprisingly excellent comedy on Pay Per View, The Promotion – about two guys competing to be manager of a grocery store, great cast and very funny.  Plus it’s got John C. Reilly in it, who can do no wrong in my book.

Sunday morning was my long run.  I had planned on 14, but only got to 13 for a couple reasons.  The more mundane of the two was that there was a Tri going on and the finish line was about 1/4 mile from my half-way point.  With tons of cyclists in the way, I had to turn around early.

The rest of the lost mile was due to the IT strap I was wearing.  At one point, I got quite uncomfortable with it, but not from my IT band, it was my calf.  I guess the pressure of the band was affecting it, so after a couple stops to rearrange the strap, I gave up and took it off.  Felt better running without it in the end.  That night, I could feel my calf was still tight, which scared me because I wondered if it was somehow an extension of the IT band problem, snowballing into something worse.

So I took yesterday off, which was certainly reasonable since June 18th was my last rest day.  I was in a bleak mood all day, my imagination had me falling apart in pieces, singing my swan song to running.  Stupid imagination.

As these things go, I woke up today feeling great and my run reflected that – 9 solid, untweaky miles.  I started easy with 8:40s then eased into 8:12 to 8:03s for the rest.  How I love normalcy.

Other than that, I’m still knee-deep in t-shirt designs, but now I’m finally making the music section of Fish Pie its own shop, which I’ve been dreading because there are about 40 different instruments (figure 20 designs in each one… big job).  But now I’m on a production roll and enjoying adding new stuff along with the old, so while I’m currently drowning in Accordion designs (going alphabetically) it’s actually kind of fun.

I know, I’m basically repeating myself these days (IT band, t-shirts, IT band, t-shirts) but it’s summer and there’s not much else going on.  I’ll leave you with a cool song Baptized By Fire by Spinnerette, whose lead singer sounds amazingly like Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie & the Banshees.  Love the octave doubling on the chorus.  Stupid video as usual, but at least you get to hear the song in its entirety.