Pickles & Dimes

About a month ago, I noticed a large robin had built a nest on top of one of our downspouts. Every morning I’d see her nestled in, chin tucked, sitting silently. Since we were about to replace our gutters, Jason said we should knock down the nest. I vetoed him, thinking the birds would be long gone by the time that happened. I was wrong.

The guys came to replace the gutters and downspouts, and when I came home to survey their handiwork, I was happy to see someone had carefully relocated the nest to a nearby lilac tree. Jason said, “The mom won’t come back now that the nest has been touched.”

And he was right. The mom never came back. After about a week, I noticed the nest was sliding off a branch, and painfully scrambled my way to the top of the lilac tree to carefully reposition it with a twig, just in case.

A few nights ago, I walked over to smell the last of the remaining lilacs, and I saw a flash of robin’s egg blue on the ground. My heart sank. It was the remains of one of the eggs, cracked open and empty. I investigated further and found part of the nest on the ground, upside down, and nestled underneath it, the other egg – intact.

I picked it up and held it carefully in my hand. The day was unnaturally bright and as I held up the egg, the sunlight illuminated it from behind and revealed that it was filled with fluid – and nothing else. No bird.

I’m sorry, birds.

So, I did it. I ran my first 5k! It went pretty well, considering that we thought we’d be running with all of Jason’s coworkers at 10:00, but when we got to Lake Phalen at 9:00, they told us to go ahead and start whenever we wanted because it was a “self-timed event.” We decided to wait until everyone else got there, and ended up doing the race with approximately 25 people; 1/3 who ran and 2/3 who walked with their kids or dogs.

It was overcast and chilly, so I was freezing before the race. One of the kids came up to me and asked in a concerned voice, “Are you cold, lady?” Hell, yes; I couldn’t wait to get started so I could warm up.

Eventually, at 10:00, they lined us up next to a giant race clock (we were responsible for logging our own finish time) and told us to start. A bunch of pre-teens took off like bats out of hell, while we jogged at a comfortable pace, well behind two other couples who were “serious” runners. (One guy was so serious he did the race twice.)

Immediately, Jason was treated to the following sound effect: “GALOOP, GLURG, GLOOP.”

Jason: What is that?

Me: Um, my stomach sloshing around.

[A minute passes.]

Jason: Are you going to be OK?

Me: God, I hope so.

Eventually, my stomach stopped acting like I chugged a gallon of Gatorade and we ran at a comfortable pace for awhile, until I felt we were almost at the halfway point. “What’s our time?” I huffed, breaking my unwritten rule of never talking while running (it wastes valuable oxygen).

“We’ve been doing this for eight minutes,” Jason answered.

“That’s IT?!?” I shrieked. I have to say, I swear to God it felt like I had been running a LOT longer than that. (And I am capable of running 1.5 to 2 miles in a row before needing to walk. Obviously, I am still a running wuss.)

Anyway, like every time I run, it took about a mile and half for my body to calm the hell down and my breathing to stabilize. I swear, even though I had to stop and walk a few times during mile 3, my breathing was 100 times better than in miles 1 and 2. Weird.

We passed a trio of pre-teen girls around mile 1 who were pretty gassed after sprinting at the start. Another pair of pre-teens looked like they might beat us at the end, but they also petered out. Our only other “competition” was a woman who kept leapfrogging us (we’d pass her, but then she’d pass us back, etc.), so I made it my goal to beat her.

Finally, I could see the finish line, which was at the top of a very steep, evil hill. The woman was ahead of us toward the end, but we ended up passing her for good. We crossed the finish line in 32:33, nearly two minutes faster than I’ve ever done it at home.

Jason hung back to run with me, which was incredibly awesome, and he pushed me harder than I ever would’ve myself. In a few weeks, when we run the Spud Run 5k at Tater Daze, we’re going to run separately. His goal is to beat his time of 29:59 from last year. My goal is to walk 1-2 times less (I walked 4 times) and try to finish around 30 minutes as well. I can’t wait.

1. I think the site is clean again from hackers – for now. I ended up deleting nearly 1,500 spam links that were uploaded into my site’s public HTML file. The nice people at Bluehost, my hosting company, found a few more instances of rogue code, helped me upgrade everything and installed my backup not once, but twice, after I called them in a blind panic after I had managed to overwrite some files and delete my site completely from the Internet. If anything looks funny or you get any weird messages when accessing the site, please let me know.

2. I bought a new swimsuit. It is a bikini. Oddly enough, I feel more confident about my body now than when I was 25. So now the only thing to worry about is blinding the masses with my winter-white, reflective skin. Also, newsflash: jogging makes your body smaller!

3. In related news, I am running my first 5k tomorrow with Jason. Consider this my last will and testament.

4. Activity I indulged in today that qualifies me as an adult: signing up for AAA.

5. We are going to a baseball game on Sunday. Our seats will be in the sun for the duration of the entire game. It is supposed to be 90 degrees out. Do you care to bet which body part I will miss with the sunscreen? Previous sunburn victims have included my kneecaps (twice), the back of my hands, and my left earlobe.

So, my site’s been hacked – again. Effing hackers. Do something productive with your time, like cure cancer or cancel V instead of FlashFoward or hack into my mortgage account to pay it off or something. Jerks.

Things might look weird around here for a bit until I upgrade my software and plugins and tinker with everything. Also, some comments got deleted because my latest backup was from last week, so don’t think I didn’t like what some of you had to say.