Got this email from Katie McCollow late last night;


  "Hi everyone, happy fourth.  I'm sitting here gassed beyond belief; in a good way.  Got up at the crack this morning and went out to Excelsior to pass out race brochures at the Fourth of July Firecracker 10k, and figgered as long as I was out there, might as well run, right?

So I paid my regsitration fee and hopped into the fray, and of course the first person I see is one of my store employees who just happens to be a track and cross country star at the Uof M.  So, we chitty chatted for a while and then she took off like a rocket.  I contemplated making it a goal just to keep her in my sights but that idea only lasted for a few seconds since running that fast made my kidneys scream.  I did fine.  I actually dispute my official time since the race was chip-timed but there was no mat at the start, so it wasn't accurate and I'm giving myself a full minute. 

Shut up, I am too right.

My five mile split was 40 minutes and change and I crossed the pad at 49:59, and aint no way that last 1.2 took me ten minutes.  In fact, I'm giving myself two minutes.  Yay, personal best!  No, but there was a ninety year old sprinter in front of me and my only real goal was to beat her.

Anyway, I then went over to Mom and Dad's house to say "hi", since they live pretty close to the race.  They asked me if I'd seen the show "Mad Men".

"No, but I heard it's really good.  I can't wait to rent it," I say.

"It's just awful," they tell me.  "The acting is horrible, the writing is horrible, it's horrible in every way."

"Wow, I'm super surprised to hear that." I say.  I truly am.

"After one episode we packaged it up, returned it to Netflix and cancelled the whole season we had ordered."

"What about The Wire, have you seen The Wire?" Dad askes.

"No, but I heard that was good, too."

"We had it on our Netflix list but Mad Men was so bad we cancelled that, too."

Wait, what?

"You cancelled The Wire because you didn't like Mad Men?  That makes no sense, why would you punish one show for the sins of another?"
 
"Screw The Wire," he says.  That's his whole answer.

Then I tell them my plans to go to the beach with my family in the afternoon, and that I'm considering bringing my paints.

"Oooh, you could paint a sailboat on my big sweatshirt," my Mom says.  That's not really what I had in mind, but I do tell her to give me the sweatshirt and I'd be happy to paint a sailboat on it, just not today.

She goes back into her cavernous closet and hands me a giant, tattered, filthy old white sweatshirt that looks like it would fit three of her.  It's the type of item that most people would go ahead and throw away.

"You want me to paint a sailboat on it...where, exactly?"  There are large orange grease stains climbing up the front of the shirt and down one sleeve.  I resist the urge to quote the line "let us forget for a moment that it's a rag..." from Overboard.

"Maybe some balloons or something.  Some hot air balloons."

"Mom, you can't wear this any more.  Not even if I transform these giant, greasy stains into hot air balloons."

Dad starts doing his silent, shaky laugh where his head turns purple and he loses oxygen to his brain.  Mom looks a little crestfallen so I change my tune and assure her that wait, maybe I can, and I take the sweatshirt home with me.  I am wearing it as I write this.

So we all go back out to Excelsior, stop in to say hi to Matt and Tina, who are having a lunch party, then go on to the beach for a lovely afternoon of swimming and wiffle ball and tennis.  I did pull out my paint...please keep in mind that I haven't painted anything in ten years, and the things I was doing by the time I went on sabbatical were terrible.  I had a stretch when I wasn't too terrible, but it's almost funny how you can see as I have more kids and they become toddlers and whatnot, I get more and more sucky.  But not as sucky as I was today.  Wow.  The beautiful day and very same scenery which inspired me to come out of retirement very quickly turned into my enemy, so much so that by the time I was done, I wanted to burn all the boats, kill all the people, tie a boulder to my ankle and let the waves take me to a place where the hurt couldn't find me anymore.  To add insult to injury, I went into the bathroom to clean out my brushes and there was a large streak of ketchup on my nose.  Nice.

Time for tennis.  At least we know there is something I am worse at than painting.  Played a rousing game of doubles with Molly as my partner, who, every time the ball came near her would spasmodically flinch and whip her raquet into the air, where more often than not it would actually connect to the ball and send it careening over the fence.  Then she would shriek about how much she hated tennis.  The other day her dad took her to the putting green, where she would lay donw on the grass next to her nifty new pink putter after every failed attempt to get the ball in the hole and deliver a soliloquy on how much she hates golf.  It would seem the country club life is not for Molly.  I'm not surprised; the kid has NASCAR written all over her.

I have to admit my style of tennis play is not much different from hers, and though we lost our match today, we did irritate our opponents quite a bit, so I count it as a victory.

Home, dinner, all the usualy yummy summer type foods, then our friends left because they have to get up at the crack to go to Cape Cod for two weeks (!!!) and Muzz and Kent came over and we all went to fireworks together.

I am exhausted.

Happy day.

 

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