Could’ve done without that

It’s been a long week. My reader and my inbox consist of a lot more bolded entries than un-bolded ones, something that will be remedied soon by the ‘mark all items as read’ button. What a fantastic invention that was. My work days have been consumed by meetings and presentations to people who lack the capacity to think logically and my nights have been filling up with obligations too. What I’ve been needing is a long, hard run followed by a good night’s sleep. What I’ve had to settle for is short, quick one milers followed by equally short nights, so when the opportunity arose to get in a four mile run I was pretty excited. For the record I don’t consider a four mile run to be a ‘long, hard run’ but it was something other than the worthless one milers that I’d been squeezing in to my hectic schedule (which I pronounce shed-yool because it makes me sound better than you).

Just as I was about to head out the door, a light rain started to fall. I love running in the rain. More specifically, I love being seen running in the rain by my neighbors and motorists because it probably makes them think I’m hardcore... or an idiot, I’m not sure which. Actually, there’s a pretty good chance that they were thinking the latter because I was listening to The Moth Podcast, recommended to me by Amy Lawson, which unlike our podcast is laugh out loud funny. So there I was barreling down the street, in the rain, unable to suppress my laughter. I’m sure I made some motorist’s day. Things were looking up until I came across this:

Walk closed? This cannot be! This is my favorite trail to run on and now it’s closed, just like that. I’m pretty sure I didn’t authorize this! [Edit: Candis tells me I did authorize it because we got to vote on the new public swimming facility/rec center that is being built in the field to the right of the path, which is why the path is closed. Whatever. That vote is more suspect that the Iranian election.] How come no one consulted me before closing the path? That was my happy place! You can’t just go around closing people’s happy places without consulting them!

I was in shock. Judging by the construction going on to the right of the path, my running trail (yes, MY running trail) is going to be closed for quite some time. I just stood there in front of the walk closed sign, completely gob-smacked. I contemplated climbing the fence and going on about my business but decided that the last thing I needed was to rack myself on the top of the fence.

I eventually managed to pick up the broken pieces of my run and move on. I found a way around the construction and picked up the trail further down but this is going to be a major inconvenience and a source of much future whining. I just hope you guys are strong enough to put up with it.