Sunday, May 25, 2008

Mississippi 10 Miler, St. Paul Saints and Bad Luck

It's been one heck of a weekend. One thing about rough weekends is where to really start. The beginning is usually a good choice. Sometimes it's best to start with some good stuff to pad into it and then go from there. After all, it hasn't been an incredibly horrible weekend. It's been a good weekend with an abnormally large amount of monetary and emotional pain.

First off, it's Memorial Day weekend. Horray for that. That means a three-day weekend for me without any penalty to my PTO (Paid Time Off) from work. So, to start the long weekend I invited a friend of mine from Iowa to come up and spend some time. I agreed to chauffeur her around since I pretty much know where everything is and what's going down in the cities. What's important to remember at this point is I haven't driven my car in about a week. With gas pushing $4/gallon, I decided it was time to make some lifestyle adjustments.

Friday morning I walk out to the car and notice the driver's side rear tire is flat. To top that off, the gas tank is on "e" and I need an oil change. Sometimes I honestly have to question why I have a car in the first place.

Since there was no time to get this taken care of in the morning and get to work, I decided to ride my bike to work Friday morning and take the car to the shop during my lunch hour.

After a few hours pass, I get a call on my cell at work. It's the shop telling me they patched the tire and changed the oil and topped the fluids. In the mean time they tell me that a bearing is shot and the whole system needs to be replaced. Long story short, when I finally got my car back and had it filled with gas, I was $630 poorer than I was when the day began.

Understanding that this is dragging on, let me just highlight the rest.

My friend and I go downtown via the light rail and miss the last train. So we have to hop a cab who (a) make NYC cab drivers look like cautious and wonderful drivers and (b) has the English vocab equivalent of a 10-year old. So not only am I 4+ hours past my bed time but now spent more on the night than I anticipated.

Because I stayed out so late I wound up missing my duathlon on Saturday morning. This isn't all bad because I didn't plan on going anyway but it still would have been nice to make it. The rest of Saturday pretty much goes as planned without much more hassle. I get to bed at a reasonable hour and get ready for the 10 miler on Sunday.

Sunday's 10 miler (below) we fun. The rain held off and we were able to get it done in dry (and humid) conditions. Jenny and I both run the race and it was pretty close to a tie for us. The course is beautiful. If you ever get around to running on East River Road, you won't be disappointed.

The crap started to fall again when I tried to make tea. The pot was on the stove and I decided to take a little nap. Needless to say, I know now that kettles cannot take an infinite amount of heat and heating pots on the stove with nothing in them is insanely dangerous. So after coming close to burning the place down I give up on the day and call it quits.

That's when another friend of mine called me up to see the Saint Paul Saints play. For $4, who can pass that up? I go to the Saints game and have an absolute blast. They won and had a great fireworks display afterword. I'm very glad I made the drive to St. Paul.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll wake up and this streak of horribleness will be over.


1 comment:

SteveQ said...

Wow, what a bad day! Glad it ended on a good note.