And right after I post this, I’m going to pour myself a Coke Zero, add something to make it into an adult beverage, and find something to watch on the tube.

Eddie: [just looks at me with that "Are you high?" look]

Me: And if they do have knees, what makes then so awesome anyway?

Eddie: If I had some poo right now, I’d fling it at you.

Fortunately, this past week wasn’t so terribly bad. It was a little busy at the beginning, and finished off with a super-slow Friday that resulted in me getting to leave 40 minutes early. I don’t think that we had anyone really messed up enough to write about, although FlakeyTech did tell me that the color of my hair made it look like the back of my head was on fire. We also found out that our district has been pretty much dissolved and new districts have been laid out, so we no longer have our awesome pharmacy district manager. On the plus side, we also lost our terrible loss prevention manager, and the front store is getting rid of their terrible DM.

I’m making a huge effort to run outside when I can. This week I did it twice, both nice three mile runs, one through the back roads and one along the main road. Both were pretty good and neither of them made me feel like I was dying at the end. I’m going to try to do at least 3.5 miles on each run while outside next week. I’m loving my Garmin because I can see how far I’ve gone without needing to try and plan out a route to get to a specific distance. I know that even though I have…. (checking Eddie’s site and its countdown)… nine months and 11 days to work my ass off and be able to run the race in Las Vegas, I also know that I’ve never been one to really push myself. If I don’t push myself, I’ll never make it to five miles, let alone the 13.1 I’ll need to complete the race.

And, speaking (writing?) of Vegas, while it feels awesome to know that I’m registered and the hotel and flight has been booked, I fear that I’m going to be dealing with nine months and 11 days worth of emails from Expedia telling me that something has changed with our flights. Last night I received an email telling me that some had changed, and the entire tone of the email was one of OMG YOU NEED TO CALL OR ELSE SHIT WILL GO DOWN. I called, and after 10 minutes of waiting for someone to pick up, I was told that yes, my original flight from Greene Airport to its layover in Minneapolis was canceled. This would be fine, but that flight had been changed the day after I booked the tickets and had already been switched to a layover in Detroit. So the girl I spoke to put me on hold for another 10 minutes and came back and told me that she’s switched us to a different flight. Unfortunately, my Expedia itinerary won’t reflect this, and I’ve got no confirmation that any of this has gone down except for an emailed itinerary forwarded from the airline’s site.

And, to make matters worse, an hour after this phone call was finished, I received another OMG CALL US NOW OR WE’LL TURN YOUR GRANDMOTHER INTO A VAMPIRE emails. This time Eddie called, and got someone who did the exact same thing, told him that there was no way to “confirm” anything, but gave us a reference number we could use to call back later and just verify things. Yeah, lovely. Just what we want to do is sit on hold for 20 minutes waiting for them to either pick up or confirm things with the airline. I just jumped over to Delta’s site and confirmed everything is fine.

And no, the kitten on the desk has nothing to do with this post at all.

Race Skirt

You see that big note on the product description that says “This skirt runs larger than our GymGirl and MarathonGirl Styles, please size down one full size for optimal performance“? They’re not kidding. I figured that since the skirts are made of a stretchy material, to keep it from being quite so butt-hugging I ordered it in what would be my regular size. I’d say that the skirt borders on being almost two sizes too big for me. I can wear it, but Eddie has to safety pin it to my shirt to keep it in place. I’m not entirely certain how much this sizing has to do with the two things that I don’t like about the skirt, namely the fact that the shorts are really loose and the skirt is very “swishy”. My other two skirts don’t blow around nearly as much as my red one does. I’ll probably buy one in the proper size at some point to see if that changes my opinions, because it’s not a bad skirt.

Marathon Girl Skirt

The only complaint that I have about either skirt is the velcro that holds the pockets closed. All three of my skirts have velcro closures on the pockets, and I hate them with a passion. The black skirt’s pocket is in the back, making it difficult to get the damned thing open in the first place. I either can’t run and separate the two bits of velcro at the same time, or, in the case of one skirt (not by this company), the velcro is so badly sewn on that it’s still on the skirt only because of the grace of God and the fact that I can’t put anything in there unless I want to rip the closure off to get it out. I’m aware that newer models of this company’s skirts feature zippers instead, but those weren’t such a fabulous deal on Black Friday.

We spent a couple of days just sitting at home. We had an early birthday lunch for me at Ted’s Montana Grill, where I ate a bison burger topped with mushrooms, Swiss cheese, and sour cream. It was like heaven exploded in my mouth.

That giant snowstorm we were supposed to get never happened, so I went out for a run on Wednesday morning while it was snowing out. I ran a mile from the house along the bike path, and then came back out onto the main road and then picked up a side street and ran through the back roads a bit before coming back out to the main road and then back to our street. When all was said and done and I was back at home, I’d been out for nearly an hour and covered almost 4 miles. Unfortunately I’d also made Eddie very worried because I told him I was only going to try and get in 5k (3.1 miles), so he met me in the drive way, all dressed and debating about going to look for me.

We spent Friday at the Boston Museum of Science, where we wandered around and played with shit, and took pictures of dioramas, and ate lunch with a well-behaved family of four. We checked out the Omni Theater, where I was thrilled beyond words to discover that the opening demonstration of the theater’s sound system still uses Leonard Nimoy asking “Who put the ‘bomp’ in the ‘bomp she-bomp she-bomp’?” just like it did the last time I was there with my Girl Scout troop over 20 years ago.

Since it was my birthday on Friday, and in our family you get to pick out whatever you want for dinner on your birthday, we feasted on my mother’s fantastic lasagna. Danielle came over, bringing with her a gift of a 4-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade in a flavor I hadn’t had yet: crantini. It was pretty damned good. She also gave me a new game for the Wii, the Wii Sports Resort game, which so far seems pretty fun.

Mom was devious this year, having bought my birthday gift over a week ago but continuing to ask me what I wanted. When I told her that I needed new running shoes, she told me that she couldn’t afford to buy me some, which made it all the more surprising when I unwrapped a Garmin Forerunner 305. Eventually I did manage to get the Garmin to talk to my computer, and now I no longer need to pay attention to where I’ve run; I only need to know whereabouts I need to get to.

Continuing with 2010 being the “Year of the Fitness Stuff”, Eddie took me out yesterday and bought me a new pair of kicks, a pair of gray and bright orange Nike Lunarglides, which I’ll probably review after I do a few more runs in them. This is in addition to actually registering for the Rock & Roll Las Vegas Half-Marathon, and buying our flight tickets out there and reserving our hotel room.

Look! I'm related to Harry Potter!

My Nana, my maternal great-grandmother, had made not one but two of those “our family history” books. One of them we can’t seem to find, and the other is barely filled in. I used some of that information to trace back on her side of the family, which was much easier because half of them came over from England in the 1500’s and could be considered VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE back in the day, and the other half came over in the 1800’s.

One of the fun things that I’ve discovered about tracing the tree back as far as I can go (which I haven’t yet, I’m still picking up other branches back to 1400’s England) is the “One World Tree”. Trace a family tree back far enough, and combine it with the thousands of other people’s family trees, and eventually there’s some overlap. This is what the One World Tree is. And one of the beta features of this is the ability to find famous family members on your own tree. For instance, I’ve discovered that I’m distantly related to Queen Elizabeth. Langston Hughes, and Mary Todd Lincoln, and less-distantly related to George Bush.

What I haven’t found? I’ve found absolutely nothing on the fabled Indian in our family tree. I’ve figured out where in the tree this person should be, but since I don’t have a maiden name for one of my great-great-great-grandmothers, I’m at a dead end. I’ll have to dig through some marriage records.

2. Go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3. Go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days”. The third picture will be your album cover.

(my apologies if the image doesn’t show up in the feed, rest assured it is visible on the home page)

We did have some excitement last week. On Monday we had wicked strong winds and rain, which could have been really much worse if it wasn’t almost 60F outside. The fun part was watching the wind blow the front doors off the store. The store has your typical drug-store entryway, all glass with an automatic door. The winds were so so strong that they were blowing apart the windows at their seams, so after a few calls to the DM and loss prevention, the supervisor on duty was told “call the store manager and get him to come fix it.”

Because when you have customers walking through a death trap, you want the store manager to jury-rig the very heavy, steel and glass doorway with a few 2×4s from the Home Depot down the road.

Which is exactly what happened. While he was jamming wood into place, the DM and loss prevention showed up, and then a “professional” showed up, who promptly told the DM that the store should have been closed down as soon as shit started coming apart, because it should have been obvious that someone could have been killed (which it was very obvious – we were told not to let anyone park in the “fall zone” but yet still let people go through the entryway).

We did our taxes over the weekend. We’re going to be using the federal refund to buy our tickets to Las Vegas this weekend. Eddie is sitting behind me looking through the menus of various places to eat while we’re there. At this point it looks like we’ll more than likely be staying at the Luxor, and I’ve managed to convince Eddie that I really, really need to upgrade the room to a spa suite, because I’m going to take an hour or five in that bubbly spa tub after the race.

Some of the state refund will be going towards fixing our windshield, fixing Mal, and our vacation next week.

Around Christmas I decided that to avoid having to do the same thing that I did last year around this time – trying to use up my vacation time before it expired by taking one day at a time off here and there – I’d take a whole week off at once. Eddie decided that he’d take the same week off, so we’ll be home all next week doing nothing at all that we don’t need to do. Which means that we’ll be hitting up the Olive Garden for their soup & salad lunch special, getting our hair cut, going to a burger place that we’ve been told is AMAZING, and the highlight, a trip to into Boston to visit the Boston Museum of Science, where we’ll check out the Harry Potter exhibit up there and the giant Imax theater. I’m wanting to go up to the Wrentham Outlets to pay a visit to the Nike outlet up there and try and weasel my way into a pair of new birthday running sneakers (did I neglect to mention that MY BIRTHDAY IS NEXT FRIDAY??), since the Garmin Forerunner that I’m covetting is too far out of my price range for something that would be classified as “gadget I want but will use 4 times a week for an hour or two.” There’s also going to be running every single morning we’re home, and hopefully that will get my ass back into the routine again.

First up, we’ve got Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which is the latest offering from Starz. Imagine, if you will, a basement full of 16 year old boys, who decide to remake Gladiator in the same visual style of 300. Russel Crowe gets to act in front of a green screen digital landscape where epic battles produce equally epic amounts of bloodshed. All of the battles feature the same jerky slow motion effect that was used in the oracle scene of 300 as well as copious amounts of Matrix-style bullet-time.

Now, imagine that among that group of boys, someone chimes decides “There’s too many half-naked men in this movie, people are going to think that we’re making gay porn! WE NEED BOOBS!!!!” Thus, every other scene involves a shot of nipple. And then you get to see some dude’s ass. And then when you expect more battles, you’re treated to a full-blown orgy. Oh, and there’s a string of plot, involving a warrior who needs to leave his wife behind to go do battle. Because that’s what happens to gladiators.

On BBC America we’ve picked up 2 new series, Demons and The Inbetweeners. Demons follows the life of the teenage boy who also happens to be the last of the Van Helsing family line. Imagine Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but British, and with a penis. Boy meets monster of the week, boy smites monster, boy deals with love and family. Not the greatest show around, but it’s good for when you want something that you don’t need to think about.

The Inbetweeners, however, we’re loving after just one episode. Awkward teens, hormones… so far, so good to us.

Happily, Eddie’s septum has decided to be happy. It took a post-dinner trek back into Providence on Wednesday night to make it happy, but since then it’s settled down and isn’t so angry anymore.

The low point of the work week was the fat woman who came up to the counter, lifted her shirt up (OMG I SAW UNDERBOOB!!!!!) and told me “See this rash? IT’S ALL OVER MY BODY AND YOU NEED TO GIVE ME SOMETHING TO FIX IT!” The high point of my week was telling her, “Hold on, let me get the pharmacist for you, she should be able to tell you just what you need” and seeing her repeat the whole underboob-revealing process for poor BossRPh. We’ve also decided that when Supertech leaves us in June (bitch is moving to FLORIDA because it has no snow or something like that), we’re all going to mouth off at patients as though it was the last day for all of us. Then, when people start complaining about it, by the time our district manager confronts us we can just say, “Oh, that must have been Supertech, we got so many complaints that we had to fire her.”

I ran 5k this morning. Pity that it wasn’t a race because it would have been a personal record for me. I’m really, really wanting to get outside more, but sometimes I just can’t get out the door. Once I’m out there, I’m fine, but the actual getting up and going is the hardest part of morning runs. It sucks because I really need to get out there and run if I’m going to do anything in Vegas this year.

Eddie bought me a small $20 mp3 player today. It’s got 256mb of space on it, but you can stick an SD card into it and get more space. I happy stuffed a 2gb card into it filled to the gills with Lady GaGa, Paul Oakenfold remixes, Girl Talk, and The Kleptones. Nothing like a monster beat to make running great.

I have 2 more weeks – that’s 10 more work days – before Eddie and I are on vacation. Any bloggers in the area want to meet up for lunch or something? I’m sure we’ll be bored out of our skulls by Tuesday afternoon.