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I did it.
Thanks to everyone for their training advice over the past few months. My time for the 5K was 35:30, which is almost ten minutes faster than last year! I didn’t feel like I was going very fast, but I didn’t have to walk much and I only had one sip of water along the course. I also hit on a new strategy halfway through the race: pick someone ahead of you and make sure you beat them. In my case it was a short chubby girl with the endurance of a plow horse. I kept up with her the whole way and finally blew by her on the final turn. It felt wonderful. The Snook was there taking pictures and hopefully I’ll get some from the official photographer too. Thanks again to everyone who was mentally cheering me on. Next year – the 10K!   

Twelve hours til the race… I’m kinda dreading it.

I told you so!
Elbow licking mutants are among us, and my boyfriend’s one of them. His mother also confirmed on the phone tonight that he inherited the trait from her. In case you’re wondering, it’s not that they have freakishly long tongues so much as really bendy and double-jointed shoulders. Snookums can pull his arm right back behind his head! I have yet to determine what biological advantage such a trait gives in the larger scheme of evolution.

New Poll: Can you lick your own elbow? Most folks would say it’s impossible. I certainly can’t do it; my elbow is miles from my tiny tongue. And yet… last night I personally watched someone achieve this feat! (Photographic evidence is forthcoming.) Clearly this person is a mutant with powers the average person can only dream of. We can only hope he’ll turn out to be a nice cuddly Patrick Stewart-type instead of an evil campy Ian McKellan mastermind.

(As you’ve probably guessed, I’m talking about the Snook.)

We had some crazy fog in Sydney this morning. Check out the pictures. Anzac Bridge is decidedly spooky when you can’t see anything but the other cars. (I also thought it was pretty funny that even though it’s been eight years since I was in high school, my first thought when I looked outside was “Fog delay!”)

Tracey has organized her latest mass photographic “happening”: 26 Things. It’s sorta like a scavenger hunt. I signed up, which should be interesting seeing as how we’ll be on holiday for most of it.

Grammar Nerds: I’ve recently noticed yet another Australian linguistic quirk. Many people, when cheering for their favorite sports team, add a “the” in there. For example, last weekend I heard lots of folks say “Go the Wallabies!” See, doesn’t that sound weird? I kept trying to explain the weirdness to the Snook by, like, diagramming the sentence. “Go” obviously makes it an imperative statement, so “the Wallabies” should be who the command is directed at. But you never use a definite article when you’re talking to someone, do you? I can’t imagine a Yank saying “Come over here, the team!” or “Silence, the cadets!” or even “Come on the Cubs!”. I don’t remember ever hearing such a thing in England either. Like I said, it’s just weird.

The Herald is running a rather annoying article about efforts to catalogue Roald Dahl’s papers before the opening of his new museum in the UK next year. Oh, I think the archive is a good idea, but I have serious misgivings about the inevitable whitewashing of history that will occur. Towards the end of his life Dahl increasingly relied on editors to shape his best-selling plots, and as the article seems to gloss over this in favor of the “great genius of literature” angle, I’m sure these guys will go unrecognized yet again.

Last summer Indiana had the West Nile virus; this year… monkeypox?? No way.