Balloons and other tidbits

A few items to report as I settle back into life in St. Paul after a week away:

1) For my readers who have been on the edge of their seats ever since I revealed tentative plans last month to finally join a running club: I did it!  I went to my first ClubRun workout last night, the first meeting for the group's fall marathon training session.  The group meets near Lake of the Isles three times per week for workouts and long runs.  I got there a little bit early and ran through part of the Kenwood neighborhood that I had never seen before, and it was a very fun way to stretch out some of the vacation running excitement I felt on the routes I covered in Washington. Part of my motivation for joining the club, besides the obvious social and training aspects, is to mix up my routes, which currently tilt too heavily toward Summit Avenue and the river road. These workouts will definitely accomplish that--it seems like I'll be doing lots of miles around the lakes and also Theodore Wirth trails. It's a great location.

Yesterday's run was a series of pickups around Lake Calhoun, and the group covered Lake of the Isles for the warmup and cooldown on either side of three miles' worth of alternating two minutes of pick-up (roughly at half-marathon race pace) and one minute of recovery jog.  By the end of the repeats on the other side of the lake, I was feeling it. A side benefit to the evening workouts, I suspect, is that my aptitude for running in hotter temperatures (last night, in the low 80s) will improve. But judging from my red, red, sweaty, sweaty face after the run, there's work to be done in that area. Anyway, I had a blast meeting some new people and chatting with them on the run, and I'm really looking forward to the rest of the training sessions.

2) My sister is home!  She spent the semester studying abroad in Rwanda and just followed up her program with a month of traveling around Germany. My family is thrilled to have her back in Minnesota, and I can't wait to hear more stories from her about her time abroad.  She flew in last Friday and came home to her bedroom filled with balloons by my mother. (I suppose that's a story for later.) Over the weekend, my kooky sister strung all of the balloons together and decorated the yard with them.

I wasn't even there to witness it first-hand, but I loved the pictures my mom sent me. I thought it was simply because of the aesthetic appeal and the whimsy of the whole scene, but today I realized it sort of reminded me of another beloved children's book about what would happen if everyone threw Earth a birthday party.  I think such a party would definitely involve a long string of balloons.

I googled and googled but couldn't find or remember the title of that book.  Along my search, using phrases like "birthday party for the world," I did come across Happy Birthday, Rotten Ralph, which cracks me up. Ralph is such a punk. Along the way, Amazon also thought I might be interested in How to Plan a Kick-ass Funeral. (I didn't click on that link.) Something in the algorithm got busted, I think.