a bunch of babble

it smells funky outside this morning. like wood smoke. only it's not coming from someone's fireplace, because it fills the air all over clear lake. i smelled it at gilruth this morning on my way to fitness class. i smelled it leaving my apartment after changing clothes. i smelled it walking in from the parking lot. and i may be imagining, but it seemed like it was more than fog all over the place. i dunno. something's weird.

i ran in the 5-mile jingle bell run downtown yesterday. i was really proud of myself for making it the whole way in...53:55. honestly, i think the course may have been just a tad long. i passed mile 1 in 10:32, mile 2 in 21:05 and mile 3 in 31:37. but didn't reach mile 4 until 43:30. and then finished at 53:55. now, count with me. miles 1, 2, 3 and 5 took about 10:30 each, and yet mile 4 randomly took me almost 12 minutes?? adding fuel to my fire is the fact that the course was a simple out and back course...which means that mile 3 and mile 2 should have been marked in the same place, just on opposite sides of the road. and they weren't.

anyway. i think the course was ~1/10 of a mile longer than advertised. but the run was fun. they gave us foam reindeer ears, which i wore of course, and jingle bells to tie on shoes, which i thought would be annoying, but turned out not to be.

there's a cnn story today about cell phones and driving that says the statistics quoted were based on an average cell phone user who uses 600 minutes a year. that's got to be a typo. i'd guess that the average cell phone user sucks up 600 minutes a month.

so it was really a very quiet weekend in my life. saturday i piddled around the apartment, watched my yellow jackets get trounced, talked on the phone, and did 2/3 of my online defensive driving course (that i have to finish by wednesday). yesterday i ran, ate, and did more defensive driving. i have one 40-minute lesson left. it is so annoying for three main reasons, 1) everything in the lessons is common sense, 2) the webpage requires you to spend a certain amount of time on each page and that amount of time is too long (i.e. i am required to spend a full minute on a page that contains 2 sentences, which leads to me sitting there twiddling my thumbs, because in order for the counter to work, my browser has to be the selected window, which means i can't even go check email or something), and 3) the questions are absurd. here's a sample question: "the speaker in the video was a a) woman, b) man, c) child." or "the color of the speaker's shirt was a) red, b) blue, c) black."

the sad thing is that i'm not even kidding. half the questions don't even cover defensive driving-related material; they just test you to make sure you watched the video. i missed one question because i was paying attention to the video and didn't remember whether the kid's name was a) jimmy, b) johnny, or c) joey. ugh. i'm so glad i only have 40 minutes left.

anyway. enough babbling.