Is This Weird?

Sometimes when I'm driving by myself in my car I, like most people, sing along to the radio.  What I also like to do is say the lyrics in a speaking voice and try to make it sounds like lines in a movie.  This doesn't work on all songs, of course.  Some lyrics are just too stupid to say.  One of my favorites is "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits.  Try it:

That ain't workin', that's the way you do it.
Play your gee-tar on the MTV.


That ain't workin' - that's the way you do it.
Money for nothin' and your chicks for free.

I like to create different characters and moods and make the words fit.  So...that's not weird, right?  If it is, I'm going to blame all those drama classes in high school.

Running Update

So I posted on February 28th that I was planning on running a half marathon.  I resisted saying anything prior to that because I didn't to jinx myself.  The universe has quiiiite a sense of humor, it seems.  The very next time I ran after going public with my plans I noticed a little tightness in one ankle.  I didn't think much of it but I did cut the run short at 3 miles.  After a few days of increasing discomfort, I decided to see a medical professional.  I was really rooting for a nice prescription, maybe some therapeutic massage.  I could totally get better if I had some therapeutic massage and pills that make me feel like I'm floating, I;m sure of it.  What I got instead was a diagnosis of a fibular stress fracture, a clumpy aircast boot, and no massage.

So.  This is my new announcement:  I do not want to be saddled with an iPad2.  They look hella stupid and not fun at all.  Also, m&m's are yucky and I hope I don't have any soon.

Maia Don't Be A Hero

Last November I decided to sign up for a half marathon.  I have two motivations for doing so:

1.  I wanted a fitness goal that I had a decent chance of not achieving without putting in a lot of work.  This is because in the last few years I've discovered that I can pretty much do very little training and still improve my times for the sprint triathlons I have been doing.  Make no mistake - I am not bragging here.  My triathlon times are extremely slow, they're just slightly less slow than they were before.  I have honestly been passed by people who are walking when I am running.  So, I figured I'd work on running because I suck at it the most.

2.  I exercise:  I take taekwondo, I work out once a week with a trainer, and I go to the gym.  I also try to watch what I eat.  I log what I eat and my trainer and a dietician at the local hospital have both come to the conclusion that my biggest problem is that I don't eat enough most of the time.  Nevertheless, I have gained weight steadily for the last several years.  Thus, I decided to try to literally run my ass off.

So far, running is working.  I am able to run a lot farther than when I started and I've lost almost 25 pounds since November.  There's plenty left to go but Huppy (she's trying to run her ass off too) and I decided that when we both had lost 20 pounds we'd book massages at a local spa.  Sadly, we both hit that benchmark in early February which meant every masseuse with a job was booked solid for a week on either side of Valentine's Day.

Today was the day!  Recall one of my previous trips to the spa involved a masseuse that accidentally cut the fromage while she was working on me.  Nothing like that happened this time, thankfully.  What did happen, though, was this:

My advice to you, Gentle Reader, is that when they tell you to let them know if the stones under your back are too warm and they are you should really just say something.  I can confirm that they do not have a special medal that they give out to those of us who are so very tough that we would rather get first degree burns than speak up.  But if there was a medal, I'd totally have gotten it.

On the upside, it looks kind of like a bunny.  Easter is just around the corner.

The Sins of the Mothers

I won't even begin to explain why it's been so long since I posted.  Not because there is a long, convoluted explanation, but because I am a lazy sack.

Anywho...

My mom is visiting for a couple of weeks.  Let me tell you about my mom.  She was born in Norway and moved here when she was 11, got sent back to Norway to live with her sister as a teen (I suspect discipline problems), and moved back here again a few years later.  Much of what she's accomplished, she's done on her own so I know she's functional.  She's had a career, bought and sold a few houses, raised two kids, and after she retired she became and EMT and a lab tech.  But.  She also has a tendency to end up in the restaurant kitchen when she means to go into the restroom (it's happened more than once), she once drove us through two or three darker than the darkest dark thing mountain tunnels with no lights because (we found out later) she thought the defroster button was the headlight switch, and she hit herself in the head with a hammer so hard that she had to call an ambulance for herself.  Another thing she does is mixes her idioms.  Some examples:  "I know you like a glove." and "She's a real piece of cake."  She claims that it's because English is not her first language but I'm somewhat skeptical since English has been her daily language for, oh, 50 years or so.

Anyone who has met my mom makes a comment about how similar we are.  That's fine since so far I've never gotten lost on my way to the bathroom I figure I must have inherited some of her other qualities instead.  Yeah.

Today I had to make some phone calls to track down a pond warmer because, as I told the person on the other end in all seriousness, my old pond warmer "kicked the dust".  Noooooooooooo!

Me, My Big Mouth, and I

Last week I only had class on Monday since I don't have Tuesday classes and the rest of the week was Thanksgiving Break.  Yes, it was pretty sweet.  Some of the the students in my last class of the day were debating whether they would attend their Tuesday classes or just head home for the break instead.  I pointed out that the vacation portion of the week didn't actually start until Wednesday and they run the risk of missing something relevant or at least graded.  Just call me Professor Buzzkill.  The students said that they wished their professors would just cancel classes which would let them off the hook.  I told them that doing this was kind of unprofessional.  As a bonus bit of wisdom, I gave them the advice that calling in sick after a long weekend looks pretty sketchy and should be avoided.

Not to sound arrogant or anything but I'm pretty sure the universe listens to me and thinks it's funny to mess with me.

Having said that, it should come as no surprise that at about 7 p.m. on the Sunday of Thanksgiving break I started to become sick.  So, eating my own words (and little else) I called in sick for Monday.

So, I'm going to try something:  I want you all to know that winning the lottery is really sketchy and should be avoided.

Reason #47 To Get LASIK

I wear glasses.  I wear them for every waking minute of my life.  I own contact lenses but only wear them when I am swimming or something similarly fraught with danger.  Glasses are a big part of what I look like when I imagine myself.  If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a fan.  Sure, there are downsides:  they slide down my nose at the first hint of perspiration (this translates as anywhere from 20 to 100 times a day depending on the season), they fog up when I come in from the cold, they get smudged even though I'm sure I'm not touching them, and then there's the haircut problem.

The first thing that happens when I sit down in the spinny chair to get a haircut is that they put a superhero cape on me but backwards.  That part is cool.  Then they make me take off my glasses.  This means that I never, ever get to see anything other than the Before and the After.  So, I must trust the person wielding the scissors completely - I have no chance of knowing after I've told them what I want if they've gone rogue.

Today I discovered a new reason why I wish I wasn't a Spectacled-American on haircut day.  I've been going to the same two people for haircuts for the last several years.  One of them is a hairdresser with an in-house chair massage person who is 2 hours away from my house and the other is a no-frills barber a mere 2 minutes away from my house.  I went to the barber today for probably the 10th time.  Thanks to this no-glasses-during-haircuts thing, it took until the 10th visit to realize that my barber is missing an entire finger.  Damn you, nearsightedness!  All this time I had a mental image of what was transpiring around my head and it was only 90% correct.

I might have to add haircuts to the list of contact-lens-necessary activities.  For all I know my other hairdresser might have an eye patch.  Or only one ear.  Or a mime performing in the background.  ANYTHING could be happening during my haircuts.

It's Elementary, Right? Right?

They are showing a new series on PBS called "Sherlock".  It's a re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes stories that takes place in modern day London.  Sherlock is a self-admitted high-functioning sociopath and Dr. Watson is a veteran of Afghanistan with a psychosomatic limp.

Based on hearing good things about the show, I set up a series recording on the DVR.  The HD channel, of course.  When we started to watch the first episode, we noticed that the show had a weird feature in the form of a narrator.  Narration is not itself strange but this woman was thorough.  She told us everything that was going on to an exhaustive level of detail.  I thought it was a little annoying but, hey, I figured it was their schtick.  Huppy, on the other hand, couldn't stand it and stopped watching.  I started looking on message boards to see if anyone else found the narration to be a little overwhelming.  Apparently not because there was no mention of it anywhere.  I found this to be puzzling since anyone who has spent any time on the interwebs knows that everything is mentioned at least once.  Everything.  Since we definitely weren't hallucinating her, I realized that she must be a service provided for the visually impaired.  OK, cool.  I'm sure it was just a mixup but I recorded the next episode on both channels (HD and SD) just in case.  The narrator was present again when we started the show but when we switched to the SD version she was gone.  The episode was much easier to watch without all the extra nattering.

Now, I'm glad they have these services for the visually impaired, I really am.  But am I a total jerk to think maybe it's not necessary to for them to do so on the high definition version?