Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

It happens every Christmas

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Every year, once Thanksgiving is past, a strange feeling comes over me. I’m filled with a desire for knowledge, a quest to expand my horizons, a need to expand my boundaries and improve my being, body and soul.

I speak, of course, of an extreme — and uncharacteristic — interest in fashion.

Every Christmas, man. Like clockwork I know this is coming. I page through Vogue at the supermarket. I pick up In Style and consider getting a subscription. I love it when my hairdresser is late for my appointment because that means I have that much more time to page through the catalogues and magazines laying around. I start watching What Not To Wear again and wish someone would give me $5000 for a wardrobe spree, dammit. I make lists of things I want to buy at some point, like leather boots (why in the hell would I buy knee-high leather boots?).

Why does this happen? I have no idea. The catalogues? Having to go to the mall to do some shopping and actually seeing what’s out there? Anticipation of spring and wanting a new beginning? I have a closet that is not at all filled with clothes; we dumped some ridiculous quantity of clothing on Out Of The Closet when we moved from LA and I’ve never gotten around to replacing it. I have an unfortunate uniform at the moment: jeans and some kind of over-the-head top. It used to be jeans and a t-shirt, until even I got tired of the way that looked, all shapeless and asexual.

And, of course, the other moms at kindergarten and preschool are snappy dressers. (I swear, the moms are thinner, blonder, and more fashionable here than they were in LA.) I feel so out of it being such a lump. I don’t want to be the Dowdy Mom.

We’ll see if anything comes of this — I’m one of these women that says, “When I lose weight,” and considering the amount of running I’m doing, that’s not an idle proposition. And given the amount of planning that’s going into my Christmas celebrations, buying new clothes is the last thing on my list! (Buying a rotisserie pan for the prime rib was number one, but I went and got that today.)

The War on Christmas

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Atrios points us to a deeply hilarious confrontation on CNN today:

SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it’s almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

PHILLIPS: Is it a war on Christmas, a war Christians, a war on over-political correctness or just a lot of people with way too much time on their hands?

SEDER: I would say probably, if I was to be serious about it, too much time on their hands, but I’d like to get back to the operational ties between Santa Claus and al Qaeda.

PHILLIPS: I don’t think that exists. Bob? Help me out here.

“Bob? Help me out here.” I think I’m going to be saying that one all day.

You can see the actual clip at Crooks and Liars or Think Progress.

The accidental half-marathon

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Nina and I had planned on doing 12 miles today. I don’t know how we came up with 12, except that it was 1 more than the last run we did together. (Which was before Thanksgiving. And our last run wasn’t 11 miles, it was 10. But I digress.) We filled up our Camelbaks and set off at 8:30 this morning.

It was still cold at 8:30. I wore my running gloves, which are gloves with mesh panels to allow sweat to wick away. I noticed I could feel my arms working as they pumped back and forth — I guess even the weight of these lightweight gloves really made a difference. Or I’ve been working the Gravitron too hard.

Normally we’ve been adding .5 mile to the mile markers on the trail, because we start from my house, so if we get to the 1 mile mark, we figure we’ve done 1.5 miles. So we aimed for the 5.5 mile mark. Then I said, “I’m not exactly sure it lines up exactly — I think we’ll be doing between 11 and 12.” So Nina said, “Let’s go to the 6 mark.” At least that way we’d be certain of doing 12!

When we got to the 6 mile mark — which turns out to be Campbell Park! — there was a kiosk with a map of the creek trail on it.

“Where do we start from?” Nina asked. I pointed to the spot on the map.

She added up the numbers from our start to where we were standing now. “It’s 6 miles from the very start of the trail to here.”

“It is?”

“How far is it from your house to the start of the trail?”

“About half a mile.”

“We really are doing 13 miles.”

Huh. You don’t say.

If the mental barrier of doing 12 was hard, doing 13 was even harder, because of the idea that it’s half a marathon. I said during the last mile, “This is officially the longest distance I’ve ever done.” Somehow Nina managed to run up the final hill toward my house with something approaching normal speed. I don’t know how she does that.

We did 13 miles in 2:30 (or thereabouts), meaning currently I’d do about a 5 hour marathon. Clearly I have a lot of work to do to get that time down before I actually do a marathon!

This afternoon I thought I should take a nap and Darin let me stay home to nap while he took the kids to the park. I don’t know whether I wasn’t tired enough or was just too tired, but I didn’t fall asleep. I just lay there a long time.

I can definitely feel the run in my, uh, gluteus maximus. Or as Nina said, “We’re going to have great butts.” I also have a sore spot where the heart rate monitor was rubbing my skin (ouch). Other than that and the blister on my toe, I’m relatively unscathed. I don’t hurt as much as I’d suspect I would after 13 miles, but as Darin said, “There’s always tomorrow.”

I see that on a marathon training schedule I at least have to work up to a 4 hour run. Tough to contemplate that, but I guess there are a lot of training runs ‘twixt now and then.