Losing It

For some reason, I have lately started forgetting stuff, mostly where I put things. Today I forgot where I left my travel mug (at home in the dishwasher). I also forgot why I left my cube once (I think it was to goto the bathroom). Tuesday, I lost a document I had just copied (never did find it) and I left my lunchbox at work. I'd blame it all on getting old, but over the same three days I also managed to remember my grocery list, to bring in some medication samples for a co-worker's kid and to turn off the humidifier. It's amusing to me that I'm able to remember the stuff I normally forget, but can't remember the things I normally do remember.

On a similar note, I managed to shed some size and weight while on vacation. This was somewhat surprising, given how much I ate. I wouldn't have thought that walking 2-3 miles a day at an amusement park would have made up for that. I'll definitely be working to keep up the positive changes on that front. I shall also work on paying attention to just how much food I am eating. Tonight's decision to eat two small bean burritoes was not one of my better decisions. One burrito would have been plenty. On the other hand, I did eat only 1/2 of my entree at lunch yesterday, so that was good.

Back to Working Out
I've avoided the gym so far this week. I did put in a decent weight circuit this evening, so that's a good start. I didn't expect to workout on Monday and was willing to play Tuesday morning by ear. This morning I was all ready to go workout, but once I got dressed and ready to go, I was suddenly taken over by a cloud of tiredness. So I had breakfast, took a 10 minute nap and got ready for work. Perhaps tomorrow morning will be a bit better.

Although I don't have a race to train for, I am going to continue working on the 5K training program I found a while back. I think I'll start at week 1 and see how I do at the end of the program. Then I'll pick a 10K program or something longer. One of the questions I got from my family after finishing the 5K was if I was going to do the half marathon next year (it is probably going to be on my birthday too). I think that will depend more on my finances and vacation time, rather than my training/fitness.

Vacation Summary
So, here's what we did. Sis spilled coffee on herself on day one, then snerked it out of her nose on day two. I didn't have anything to do with the coffee spill, but did cause the snerking. All I did was innocently read out loud a sign I spied along the road to Disney World that said:
Passenger Drop-Off
Kennel
The trick was that I strung it all together into one phrase: passenger drop-off kennel. For some bizarre reason, this was utterly hilarious to my sister, who had, by chance, just taken a swig of coffee. Once we got past the first two days, neither of us spilled or spewed anything else. I did, however, have a day where I kept flinging coins across the car whenever I pulled something out of my pocket.

We spent a whole day at Kennedy Space Center and saw part of a solid rocket booster inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. We also saw the payload canister sitting outside the ISS Processing Building, awaiting a trip to the building where it would be flipped to be vertically oriented in anticipation of loading into the orbiter cargo bay. Other sights at KSC included alligators, armadillos, a turtle and a bald eagle.

The rest of the week we spent in the four main Disney theme parks, mostly riding rides. One day was interrupted by rain, but we had planned for that and went to lunch off-site at a Panera Bread with wi-fi. My sister teleconferenced her family and I caught up on e-mail. Once the rain passed and we dried out, we headed back to a park for the rest of the day. At Disney's Hollywood Studios, we learned how to draw Mickey Mouse and Tinkerbell, which was cool. My Tinkerbell is a bit of a mutant, but the Mickey turned out pretty well. We watched fireworks on site and from the window of our condo. I even managed to take some good photos of fireworks with Cinderella's castle on Saturday. Saturday was also the night of the full moon, which made for more spectacular photos.

At amusement parks, my sister and I have an unspoken "agreement" where we tend to grab or poke each other during suspenseful moments of scary rides, just to make each other scream like little girls. There were two rides where we didn't quite get that done. One was during Everest Expedition, which made Sis very motion sick and was on the verge of making me nauseous too. I don't mind twisty roller coasters, but twisty roller coasters going backwards in the dark was a bit much. The second ride we didn't poke each other in was the Tower of Terror. We were laughing and screaming too much to poke each other. We laughed ourselves silly on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad too. It would seem that the park staff polished the seats just prior to our arrival. At the first hard turn, we both slid across the seat and squished into the outside of the car. Fortunately the ride turns in both directions so one of us didn't bear the brunt of the squishing alone.

The flights out and back were uneventful for both of us. I took a lot of photos of clouds out windows of the planes and spent a lot of time searching for landmarks on the ground, like I always do when I fly. It had never occurred to me that there might be multiple layers of clouds, so that it might be possible to fly between an upper and lower layer of clouds. For a while, it looked like cloud islands or mountains were rising up out of a sea of smoother white clouds.

Some knitting was accomplished on one or two evenings at the condo, but I got exactly no knitting done on either of the travel days. I had picked up a small book called The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill. It was quite engrossing once I started reading it. It's a suspenseful ghost story which was well written, albeit somewhat predictable. The ending wasn't quite what I expected though which was a nice surprise. If you're looking for a fairly quick read that's just a bit creepy, this is a good choice.

Now we need to figure out what we're going to do for my sister's next birthday that ends in zero. We've got four years to plan and save for it. Right now we're thinking California or Hawaii. We'll definitely be getting another convertible and we'll probably spend a whole week together again. Running a race may be optional. I think for my next zero birthday I'm going to aim for some place in Europe.

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