Fleet Feet and Being Hip-Hop-ish

I finally got to break in the new shoes this morning. Either I was in a speedy mood or I was psychologically motivated by them or the Asics people really do make a good shoe ;-) but I shaved four minutes off my run time today (for those of you keeping track, I am now up to 2.25 miles, without stopping. Today I did that in 26 minutes. Okay, yes, I am running at senior citizen speed, but hey, at least I am out there jogging). My goal is still to do a 5k but I don't think I'll make it by October 14, which is the last 5k in my area (I think).

It's going to be 39 degrees tomorrow morning. Ugh. I may not be so motivated to jog. I noticed this morning that it wasn't as crowded on the streets as it had been last week. Every ten degree drop seems to drop down the number of people out there.

Writing wise, I am finally on the downward path of the book that has taken me the better part of the summer to write. I NEVER take that long to write a book and it's making me nuts. Thank you to the Migraine Fairy and her evil headache minions for dragging this one out. (Witch -- I'd use a meaner word, but this is a nice blog, and my mom raised me to be a nice girl).

Today, my eldest has a two-hour ortho appointment, poor kid, so I'll have lots of waiting room time to write. I hope to get the bulk of the ending scenes nailed down so that I can polish it up over the next few weeks and get it off my desk before the end of the month (and the Migraine Fairy can just go visit someone else).

Oh, and here's an ortho memory to bring back for all those who missed the picture of me with my braces, courtesy of my littlest one. He drew this of me after I got my braces on (those lovely things are now gone, so I have provided the before and after. I am, as you can see, much improved ;-).




















In the meantime, with a teenager in the house, I am working on expanding my hip vocabulary (much to the embarrassment of said teenager). My new word (thank you to the nice folks at Urban Word of the Day (uh...NC-17 warning on that site, so no kiddos over there) and the other nice folks at BuzzWhack's Word of the Day) is Hanger Appeal. Meaning something looks good on the hanger and bad on you (or vice versa). Here, for the teen-challenged readers in my audience, is a sentence: "Dude, that shirt had great hanger appeal but it looks awful on your rack." (translation into adult English: looked good on the rack in Macy's, looks awful on your chest).

This foray into hipness has been brought about by my teen daughter's occasional slip into calling me "Dude" instead of "Mom." So I started out by calling her "Dude," in a real 50-Cent (the rap singer) kind of voice (dragging it out "dooooooode"). She dies of embarrassment, right there on the spot. It's great.

Then I started adding in words to my daily convo. Like "Huggy Bear" (means everything's just great) and "standard" (means just like always. Example: Her: Mom, are you going to pick me up after school? Me: Standard, dude.)

She in turn is totally flummoxed by my usage of phrases like "dot your i's and cross your t's" and "mind your p's and q's" and the big one "Der." (am I the only 80s kid around here that still uses the word Der? And the only East Coaster that still has "Wicked" in her daily vocabulary?).

Sigh.

I am SO OLD.

But at least I can still crawl this ancient body out of bed in the morning, strap some sneakers onto these decrepit feet and run my aged, non-hip mom body around the block a few dozen times, Dude. :-)

Shirley