Melange

I signed up for an online course on how to teach online courses. It started Thursday - I've finished the assignments through Tuesday, but there are plenty more to come, and I am required to spend time on the website every day - which means I'll probably be skimpy with my commenting over the next few weeks. It looks like an interesting and fun course, with lots of potential for the classes I teach, plus opens me up to teach a few others. Not that I want to - I'm pretty busy these days as is.

Last night Eric and I went up the street to a surprise retirement party for a neighbor. He has been with one of the big stores for 34 years (I'm not saying which store, because I don't want my blog popping up everytime someone searches on it). Anyway, at this store, the company uniform is red shirts and khaki pants - so every single person wore that to the party! It was hilarious. The only person there in regular clothes was the honoree. Plus, he had about 15 red shirts - all the same style/brand - so his wife passed those around the neighborhood to anyone who needed a red shirt to wear. It was so much fun!

And speaking of fun, our Lab, Sundae, had fun while we were out. She is a sweet, mild girl who never gets into trouble. But she does like to eat. Well, Riley had a plastic grocery bag (tied shut) on his bedroom floor with Halloween candy in it - he had about 15 tootsie pops, a few large tootsie rolls, a peanut butter cup and about 10 of those "fun" sized candy bars. Sundae wandered in there, got into the bag and ate it all. The funny thing was, the sticks and wrappers from the tootsie pops were all laying around - she carefully unwrapped them, and ate the candy but left the sticks. She apparently ate the wrappers as well as the candy for all the rest of it. When Riley discovered it, we decided she'd best spend the night in the garage in order to protect our floors. So what does she do? Digs into an old box of dog biscuts that I didn't even remember we had and ate a bunch of those. Plus, she nosed around in the garbage can full of dog food that we have. All of this, in one night, from a dog who's never done anything like it before (did I mention she's nine years old?). I guess she knows how to sieze an opportunity when she spots it! We are keeping a close eye on her for any ill effects...

I had a great run yesterday - 8.3 miles with Jenny and Melissa. We followed an undulating course that kind of wandered all over the area. All three of us felt fine after last week's marathon, including Melissa, the untrained, accidental marathoner. Today Melissa and I ran 5.5 miles. We lucked out - it was pouring buckets when we parked the cars, but by the time we went had slowed to a light rain. And fun for us - the prediction for every day this week is more rain! Puddyrat ran over from her house to join us on the trail - she's been a little too close to all the flooding in the last week. She's working on a post with pictures.

Final tally for the week was 23 miles - a nice recovery week. Still planning for winter - after reading Tom's comments about some of the local "Fat Ass" series, I've been looking at those. I'm not sure I'm quite that hardy of a trail runner yet, but we'll see...