Weekend Update

There wasn’t too much planned for this past weekend. Friday night I stopped by my sister’s house and put her son, Jared, through his work out. He starts tackle football in a week or two. I have been stopping by when I can to make sure he is doing his training and running to get in shape for the first practice. I stayed at my brother, Jon’s, house as I usually do. I had stopped at my parent’s house on the way, and they ordered a fish fry that looked pretty good so I decided to do the same. On the trip to pick up the food, I crossed a milestone that I had been looking forward to for a while now. My truck turned 200,000 miles. But being the idiot that I am, I was so excited for this fish fry that I left without my camera. How fitting was this, my truck turned 200,000 just as I pulled into the parking lot of the bar. And there I was without my camera. Then again, if you know me, you shouldn’t be shocked that I would screw something like that up. I was so disheartened that I didn't even do the required Chinese fire drill around my truck.
Saturday morning I woke up and hit the pavement for a run. 13 miles. Not exactly my idea of fun. But nonetheless still my idea. I have slowly come to realize that what I will take away from this whole marathon experience will be more negative than positive. Unless there is an incredible exhilarating feeling of achievement, which not even words can describe, when the race is finally over with, I can say without much doubt that this will be my first and last marathon. However, I will say that with in minutes of finishing my run, I felt fine. I got my haircut Saturday afternoon. Thank you Rebecca. I have come to the understanding that the further back your hairline gets, the shorter your hair needs to be.
After my haircut, I picked up all of my nieces and nephews except for the youngest nephew, Joey, and took them to the high school to launch some rockets. My nephew, Josh, had his birthday party this past week and I wasn’t able to make it. Last year I got him some rockets, so I decided that I would take him to launch those rockets this weekend. I invited all of the kids to see if they wanted to go, and amazingly they were all available and wanted to go. I piled all 9 kids into my mom’s minivan and off we went. After the rockets, we stopped at the gas station where I gave them 1 minute to pick out something to drink and some candy. That is quite a site, 9 kids running around with one adult (me) by the check out yelling out, "30 seconds!!!........20 seconds!!!!!..." We then hit the Wales Park circuit, hitting 3 different parks. They were still hungry after that, so off to McDonalds for ice cream. After 13 miles of running in the morning and 4 hours with 9 kids, I was actually pretty beat. I went back to my brother’s house, and I decided that I could use a relaxing dip in the pool. I dove in and caught my little finger on the filter on the bottom of the pool. This resulted in the part of my finger past the last knuckle sticking straight up in the wrong direction. Again, I screwed up by not getting a picture of that. I cracked it twice to get it back into place and decided that I might as well just call it a day. I was in bed by 8:00 that night. Sunday I woke up rather sore. I decided with not much happening on Sunday to just head back up to Appleton. I got to my condo around 10:30 in the morning. I started falling asleep on the couch once the Brewer game started. This got me to thinking that maybe I should just go back to bed, so I listened to the remainder of the game while in bed. I was suppose to have 2 soccer games Sunday night, one at 5:30 and one at 7:00, but they both got cancelled due to weather. Of course they didn’t get cancelled until I drove the 25 miles to the field and not until after I had taped up my foot and got all of my gear on. That just about sums up my weekend.
Here is my odometer 2 miles too late.

Just like the clowns at the circus.

Here are just a bunch of group shots of my nieces and nephews. I am pretty sure I can hold these pictures ransom for big money from their parents and grandparents.To add to my misery, not that I am looking for sympathy, nor do I think I will get any, but last weekend while camping, somehow I got poison ivy on the bottom of my foot.