Toasted

So, do you think it's a bad omen when this is what happens to your morning breakfast? When I was a kid, I read some article or book about Spontaneous Human Combustion and was terrified for at least a year or two that I might suddenly burst into flames. Especially since my feet have always been very hot, so hot that I went barefoot for most of my childhood (a fact that my mom attributes to me having been born in Oklahoma, but that I think has more to do with an efficient heart or fast metabolism or something a bit more scientific.) So this morning, I look over at my toaster and flames are shooting out of the middle of my toast, like a model of Spontaneous Bread Combustion, resembling something from an episode of Mythbusters. Couple that with the fact that my cat barfed all over my bed last night, necessitating a midnight duvet and pillowcase changeover, and the fact that I turned my ankle stepping out of the chicken coop, and I'm beginning to think (as the Mary Chapin Carpenter song goes) "the stars are stacked against you girl, get back in bed".

I didn't, and the day has gone relatively smoothly ever since, so I hold out hope that I'm not going to have another terrible workout when I go to swim this evening. I actually had a very nice run yesterday, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, it was only marred by the fact that I loaned my backup MP3 player to my mom and before doing so I took all the good music (read: music my mom would not listen to in a million years) off of it: Bye bye Eminem, X, Social Distortion, Fort Minor, Green Day. But I had forgotten this fact when I realized my iPod was out of juice and I grabbed my old MP3 player and headed out the door for my run, only to find that there was only violin music on the dang thing. At first, I thought I was somehow stuck in replay of one album, so I pushed buttons and selected menus for the first 8 or 10 minutes of my run. Then it sunk in that I had actually removed all of my rockin running tunes, and this is what I was left with. For my long run. And now I was too far to go back to the house, and my iPod had no battery left anyways.

But other than that, I had a nice run. Actually, looking on the bright side, the mellower music helped me keep from over-amping my long run and I ended up with a nice mellow 9:40 pace. Sometimes if you just roll with the rhythm of the day, it all comes out just fine. That's what I'm hoping anyways, since my breakfast went up in flames, my cat is giving me the evil eye for being out all night, and my ankle feels like mischievous elves with small mallets have been working it over. Oh well, onwards.