The Athena Diaries

Dear Diary,

13.  Skinny jeans and thongs do not go well together when you're past 40.  Don't ask.

12.  I'm planning my drop bags for Saturday, which may be rainy and muddy.  It will be my first rainy muddy event.  I'm stoked!  I'm also packing lots of vaseline for my feet, a rain jacket, and some sort of protection for my iPod.

12.  Okay, not so stoked a few days later.  It's either going to be A) very cold, or B) very wet, or C) both. Bah.

11.  I feel bad for men who are sucked in by ads for Valentine's Day jewelry, because they're bullshit.  "Surround her with the strength of your love," indeed.
The best way anyone ever surrounded with the "strength of his love" was to provide me with a safety bubble of top-rate health and car insurance and AAA.  THAT is love.

10. Oh, but wait - I can totally be bought with candy.  Especially really high quality chocolate.  Not that Russel Stovers crap - that's for stocking my desk the day after Valentine's Day (I work across the street from a Walgreens.) NO, I'm talking about high quality, locally made truffles.  Surrounding me with love in the form of chocolate, well, that's okay.

I can be bought with these.  

9.  Tuesday we had a nasty snow day.  Thick, black ice covered with a fine powder of snow and the wind howled for more than 24 hours straight, gusting up to 40 mph.  I drove to work slowly, but by noon, things were getting worse so I drove home.   The key was patience, something I learned driving 10 miles per hour through white-outs when I attended college in South Dakota.

At the end of my commute, it rises 1000 feet, and the last 500 feet is in the last 2 or 3 miles, and the closer it was to my house the icier it was.  I crept along slowly up the main road towards my neighborhood, passing a BMW that was spinning slowly back down the street, (he had been in front of me but accelerated too quickly.  Idiot).  I passed an Audi that was staying place, spinning its wheels.  I passed an Infiniti, abandoned by the side of the road.  Further along, I passed a Jeep Grand Cherokee whose owner didn't know how to make it go up the hill.
Yes.  I've been bragging about this all week.  Me and my tiny modest Honda Fit - we crept up the hill in 2nd gear and went home.   At this point, my engine block is probably completely frozen.

8.  Wednesday, I called in cold.  I worked on cases from home and built a fire.

7.  I went outside briefly to take a picture of how snowy the house is and slipped--not a lot - just a couple inches.  Pain shot through my calf dammit, dammit, dammit!!  Hopefully, this will subside by Saturday morning.  On Wednesday, I put two compression calf sleeves on it and by the end of the next day, it was feeling stiff, but better.

6.  Wednesday night, I watched "Where the Wild Things Are." This was a book published the year I was born and which, unbeknownst to me, was apparently some movie producer's private Rorschach.  Baboo thought it was, "fascinating".  He hadn't really read the book.
The book was one that I learned to read by.  I read it to my children when they were little, and it was a lighthearted bit of whimsy about a child with an active imagination who had a dream.  But the movie.  Oh, the movie.  I was disturbingly reminded of "Labyrinth," another movie that gave me a bit of a queasy feeling.  I was also reminded of many kids whose cases I assess.  Only those kids don't sail away and become king of all wild things.  They get inpatient treatment.  And chemical restraints.

5.  Sweet Baboo having joined the National Guard recently, he has to do a 3+ week training in Texas at the end of March.  This will be the longest we've ever been apart.  I think the longest before this was about 3-4 days, and even that's been a long time ago.

4.  I am so totally loving Dove's new ad campaign.  Apparently, men don't have skin, they have MAN HIDE.  Why do I love this?  Well, because women have been cringing over stupid ad campaigns aimed at us for decades.  Time for guys to feel the pain.

3.  Why would anyone send ten pages of illegible, handwritten treatment notes as "information" about a client?  Seriously.  Who thinks this is appropriate?  Stupid, stupid stupid.  Here's a hint: if you can't read it, then I can't read it.

2.  I am so happy that they are making frozen sweet potato fries now. 15 minutes in my little toaster oven, and those babies are MINE.  Oh, and Sweet Baboo's.  Meanwhile, I realize that I can't ever, ever, work from home.  I lack the self-regulation needed to avoid eating constantly.  I ate a lot on Wednesday when I was home all day.  Too much.  Thank goodness I'm running 50 miles on Saturday.

1.  FYI, my goal for Saturday is to beat the 100-mile course record running the 50-miler.  The female course record for the 100-miler is about 14 hours.  I'm hoping to beat that time running *50* miles.

In other words, I want to be able to run at least half as fast as a top female runner.

Everybody has to have a goal; this is mine.

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