Granted, most of this list is garbagey, minus the YA book Divergent and The Book Thief, but at least I’ve been trying, right?

I’ve been able to read these by forcing myself to take a lunch break every day and by reading every night before bed. This translated over to reading into the mornings before work too, just like I used to routinely anyway.

It felt good, let me tell you. I feel accomplished.

And and… I even started one more that will not be finished before month’s end… Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Found it on my Kindle. Pretty excited about it. Not bad so far (halfway done).

Sad.

Been reading a lot though. It’s one of my last places of refuge.

Back to it, then.

Last Saturday: Hike through the woods & make food over a fire through the rain.  Sleep through the cold.

Last Sunday: Recover and drive home. Do chores. Clean the apartment. Laundry.

Wednesday: Go climbing. Feel a little weak and grumpy, but figure the exercise will make me feel better. Work on a V2 most of the evening and then suddenly find myself on the ground, ankle now ballooning.  They get me ice and make me sign a form that says I won’t sue the gym, and I manage to hobble out of there while leaning heavily on my boyfriend. I go home in pain and take some ibuprofen and prop the foot and somehow manage to sleep.

Thursday: Go to the doctor and am told there’s probably nothing broken. Get an x-ray and a neat boot to bind up my foot with. Come away with 800mg of ibuprofen to take when I feel like it.  Eat lunch at Sweet Tomatoes. Work, then play games the rest of the night and sleep uncomfortably.

Friday: Am told the x-ray is normal. Work from home. In the middle of the day, go to Food Truck Fridays and grab a strawberries & creme pop (King of  Pops). See a dead bat. Have a tomato pie.

This weekend: Begin Diablo II. Go on a search for Coke Float pops. Sit out by the pool. Enjoy life.

Wake up. Eat breakfast, see what’s happening on the news. Check the weather. While tv is still on, brush teeth, put on makeup, take vitamins. Decide if going to the bathroom is imperative or if it can wait until work. Decide it can wait. Make lunch. Do last minute checks. Open curtains so the fish can see some daylight. Feed the fish. Open curtains in the living room for the plant. Lock the door. Drive to work while listening to the Bert Show or random music. Zone out for about thirty minutes and suddenly realize it’s been twenty miles and the drive is over. Look at the sun rising to the east and wonder if it’s possible to take a decent picture out of the top floor of the building.

Get in the elevator and ride it up to the sixth floor. Get to my office. Turn on lights and dock computer. Walk to the break room and grab some tea. Earl Gray, English breakfast tea, pumpkin spice, vanilla or regular chai, and barring all of those, lemon ginger. Walk back to desk to start the day. Check email. Open the following: Gmail, Grooveshark, three work-related tabs. Virtual machine. Excel, Word, Skype, OneNote, Notepad. Hope computer doesn’t crash and go about the rest of the day. If there are meetings, meet. Skip lunch and eat while working, or take a few minutes and get out the Kindle while shoveling down food. Spend the rest of the afternoon in and out of food coma. When 4:45 comes around, pick up the phone and chat for a while while driving home in traffic.

Upon arriving home, change and go for a run. Struggle. Come back, see who’s online. Stretch. Shower. Begin scrounging for food. Get enough cooked and gathered together to sit on the couch and watch a few shows on tv. Or play games and chat for a while. Feel unable to get up and move because the couch is comfortable, and feel bad for this. Watch time go by until it’s late and time to sleep. Crawl into bed and feel bad for wasting the evening.

This is very generally how my typical work week goes. In this way, life feels static and boring.  While generally happy these days, at the moment I feel a little discouraged by this.

A few factors contribute to this though.

• My commute, which is fairly long.  Mornings aren’t so bad (30 mins, tops). The evening commute is what kills the day for me. It’s always at least 30 minutes in traffic… usually about 45 on a good day. On a bad day it can stretch to over an hour and sometimes even beyond that. I lose at least an hour or two a day to this commute.
  Solution? Listening to music and talking to Homan or others if possible makes it more bearable. But it’d be much better if that hour was cut in half or less. Work from home? Possible, but not likely for every single day (yet). Move? Unlikely… lease doesn’t end until December. Get to work earlier and leave earlier? Possible. I already aim to be there around 7:45 every morning so I can leave around 4:45, but with meetings and everyone else working until 5 or 5:30, this isn’t always optimal. Perhaps a little stuck for now.
• My lethargy concerning working out.  Lately I’ve lost interest in going to the gym. I never get there in the evenings on time anymore to make going to class worthwhile. Most of them start at 5:45, which becomes impossible if I hit any traffic at all. All of my favorite instructors have left or live far away. Julie (RIP), Leeann (arrested). Shannon still teaches, but even she has expressed discontent about LA Fitness as a whole.
  Solution: I’ve actually been running a fair amount, so my interest in running is revived and I feel as though I’m keeping in shape. And I’ve taken up climbing and will probably make the leap to membership at Stone Summit next month when my bank account replenishes itself. The unfortunate side effect is that I’ll be dropping LA Fitness ($45 a month for Stone Summit and $35 for LA Fitness is just too much).
• My social life, which has dialed down a lot.  Some of this is my fault–I’ve been traveling back and forth to Maryland a lot to see my boyfriend. My need for social interaction is usually fulfilled there since we spend a decent amount of time with friends and family. But I miss my own friends here. It’s a little harder to get the people I want to see together during the week when I”m here, or sometimes I’m outright ditched (I’m looking at you, Cousin). There are others that I’ve purposely distanced myself with since the relationship is really no longer beneficial, whether they realize it or not.
  Solution: Perhaps some of this feeling is actually just my perception and not reality.  I’ve not been going to the gym at night anymore, instead choosing to run by myself. This may be why I feel like I see so few people.  And I do see people on the weekends. In fact, this past Friday, I got together with friends for a St. Patrick’s Day gathering (excellent food & company), then climbed on Saturday with Homan and another friend. So it may be my warped perception of things. I see people plenty. Barring this, maybe I need to make a lot more effort in not being lazy during the week. But some of what my friends do is a little out of my price range, which leads me to the next factor…
• My bank account, which I’ve been struggling with forever.  Let’s be honest. I’ve never had a lot of money.  I’ve had low paying jobs for the last five years, or no job, and medical and school loan debt, and I feel that some of this has kept me a little on the poor side of things. Things have been much better lately though; two years ago, I paid off my car, and I’ve held a job down since then at a regular rate.  Thanks to being unemployed twice in as many years, I learned a lot more control over my spending. That said, as I pay down more of my debt each month, I still feel a little asphyxiated at the end of each pay period at my current job (we only get paid on the 30th).
  Solution: I shouldn’t complain too much about this category. I need to invent cheaper things to do–with the summer quickly approaching, I can invite people over to hang out by the pool. I no longer go to movies (free or otherwise), so there’s a little cash saved in the budget. My travel expenses are fairly high though. My choices are visit less or … stop complaining. And I say I should just stop complaining because I actually just received a raise at work, so this should help offset the pain a little.

So verdict of all of this?

Quit complaining. Continue along with the changes that have been made so far and see what happens.

Right?

• Playing with my camera
• Reading
• Listening to new music
• Writing a letter to a friend
• Buying stamps (cherry blossom Forever stamps!)
• Going to Barnes & Noble to look for a Moleskine
• Running
• Lifting
• Watching Another Earth or Scrubs
• Playing one of several games (Skyrim or HoN)
• Helping Homan do stuff back at home

Unfortunately, I guess I need to pick just a few of these things that I can do tonight in the limited amount of time I’ll have. Sigh.

First, it poured for about six hours the night before. Homan and I had slept with the door open, the rain coming down just outside on the porch. Occasionally I woke to the bright flash of lightning and then the long, low roll of thunder as the storm raged outside. I woke feeling as though I hadn’t slept, even though it had been hours.

So we drove out there, all 95 miles east out on route 20. It got progressively more cloudy as we went, and when we pulled into the sports complex where the zombie signs were pointing, we were greeted by the sight of freezing people covered in mud from head to toe.

We found a parking space and started to walk, shoes already squelching through the mud. We passed large groups of people whose teeth were chattering. Some were happy, some were simply talking with their friends. Nearly everyone was muddy and wet. The sky got a little darker; we thought we felt a few raindrops.

We walked to registration. The entire area outside the registration tents was ankle-deep mud, but up until this point, we were semi-clean still. There was no avoiding it after this though. I checked in and received a bag with my timer, a t-shirt, and my race number.

There was a band playing near to the starting line, which had three lanes. Slow, medium, and fast, although it looked like it wouldn’t matter which lane we started in.

After tying the timers onto our shoes, we affixed our race numbers, and generally got ready to go. Homan took my free drink coupon and returned in a few minutes with a turkey leg wrapped in foil and laughably small beer, and then went off to spectate.

When we lined up in the chute, it was dark and the mud was so thick that if you stood in one place too long your shoes became cemented in place.

When the signal went off, we didn’t so much run as we did shuffle out. They released a cloud of sulfur-colored gas to obscure our vision, and we walked a ways in the mud. It might have been the first quarter mile before we came upon the first zombies, which were situated around a haystack.

We were with a big enough group that the single zombies were confused; I leapt over a haystack and continued on.  We kept running, around a corner, dodging a few more zombies. The mud made it hard to move; we slipped and slid around the zombies. One of us got a flag taken. Already we were tired.

I was out of breath and we began to walk at this point, until the next obstacle, which was a pit of water with logs across it. Over the first log, I slipped on the ledge under the water and fell hard to one side. One of the zombies stood in the water, freezing. She said she’d been there for three hours. We continued on after successfully evading them… continued our walk through the mud.

After this, I don’t remember much except the obstacles and the constant trudging through the mud. After about a mile, which seemed to take all afternoon, we were exhausted, our feet hurting from trying not to fall. The mud clung to us in huge clumps. Most of us had either fallen on our butts, slipped at least once, or gotten completely soaked in red, muddy water (like me).

I do remember there was a net obstacle where we had to climb up and then down the structure, and then about a fifty foot stretch across an lake on the complex which our team decided to swim through. By the end of the race, we were so exhausted, tired, and cold, it was hard to think straight.  The last stretch was a long slide on our butts down a muddy slope into muddy water, and then the end. Halfway through, most of us just wanted the race to be over.

I finished with one flag tucked under my shirt. I hadn’t intentionally hid it; it just ended up that way. So I ended up alive. Exhausted. Muddy. Done.

My thoughts on the race:

• The zombies were much more aggressive than I thought was necessary. They were supposed to go after your flags, yes, but I saw that a few actually pushed my friends down, or harassed the members of our group so much it was really not fun anymore.
• The obstacles were fine, although some were abandoned (in terms of zombies) because of the poor conditions of the track.
• Our teammates… weren’t really teammates. But teaming up seemed like the best strategy, and so the three of us ended up with a decent sized pack of people, walking together in the mud, empathizing with one another in our misery. Helping one another up when we slid. Grabbing one another’s hands when we got stuck in the mud and in pits of water.  By the end, those without flags were helping guard the ones that had life left by blocking the zombies that came at us.
• Which is another thing–the flags. In those conditions, it was next to impossible to dodge anyone. The zombies had an advantage; they just stood around until racers came by. But we’d been trudging through the mud for a long time and were already too tired to dodge. So it wasn’t fair when suddenly there was a clump of 5 of them together against us. And on an uphill, too. So occasionally people just grabbed flags off the ground, re-affixed them to their belts, and continued onward. I heard someone say that the chances of survival were supposed to be about 40%, but because of the weather, it was realistically about 5%. Lame.
• The mud. Oh god, the mud. I don’t mind getting dirty, but it was literally so muddy by 3:30 that it was impossible to run. Impossible. I thought it might be better when I stopped caring, but no. It wasn’t that I was squeamish about being dirty (even though I am), but that it was physically impossible to run without breaking something or sliding into someone. I wish they had either had a shorter course for these conditions or done a rain date so that at least it wasn’t so ridiculous. And by ridiculous, I mean it took us about two hours to complete 3.1 miles of mud. Most people can walk a comfortable 15 minute mile, so this should tell you how absurd this was.
• The price. For what we got… and what this was, I’m a little sad that my friend paid my registration fee. And that I had to pay $37 so my boyfriend could watch. Plus $10 to park. And they made me dump out my water. If half went to charity, that would be another story. But $67 each for the three of us?  That’s about $200 that they gathered and that went… somewhere. And by the time registration closed on February 17, it was $87 per person, I believe.  Doesn’t feel as good as it does when you know your money goes to a good cause.

Overall verdict?

Fun(ish)… once in a lifetime thing… but I won’t do it again. Not for any amount of money, and probably not even with the guarantee that it’ll be perfect conditions.

Good apocalypse preparation? Hardly. Because as soon as there’s word of an outbreak, you’d better believe that I won’t be traipsing through the mud while barely dressed. I’ll be as far away from a place like that as possible. Preferably in an area of low population, holed up somewhere safe with supplies. Yessir.

• Mistborn: The Hero of Ages – Brian Sanderson
• Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
• Skin Trade – Laurell K. Hamilton

So not great, but not awful either. At least I finished the books I set my mind to, this time. Even if the Heinlein book was a carryover from last month (shh).

Anyone have any suggestions of what to read next?

75 minutes of thunderstorms with the Jurassic Park Theme slowed down to 54 minutes long.

All to help you through.

Yours,

K

PS: What also never fails to cheer:

• Loving You Tonight by Andrew Allen
• Go Do by Jónsi
• Something Good Can Work (Ted & Francis Remix) by Two Door Cinema Club

Just saying.

After multiple goes with the eye drops this morning, I walked out with crystal clear eyes. And now apparently, a paltry six hours later, they’re back to cloudy and dull.

I lied and said it was tiredness, leftover from last week’s mystery “illness” (which consisted of me not having the willpower to leave my house for a full twenty-four hours). She said it made sense and told me to go home early and get some rest.

It’s not tiredness she’s seeing however. Just sadness, and the feeling that there’s no way back.  I’ve never wholly bothered hiding what I’ve been feeling, but this time, or at least this morning, I did put some effort into masking it as best I could. The one thing that I held onto was that at least tonight I can run it off and then get into bed and not get up again (for another twelve hours, until I have to come back to work). Rinse, repeat.

I’m sure it’ll pass eventually. But what will help it along? And how long will that take?