Monthly Archives: April 2016

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Hitching a ride

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Yesterday I had the house to myself as Kayla was at work and Brian and Allyson were at the property hunting turkey. So what better thing to do than catch up on Fear Thy Neighbor on DVR. The episode that stuck out the most was the guy that moved in next to a crazy cat lady. She did a lot of cat rescue and had actually purchased a house down the street for the cats only. The feud builds and builds and the guy buys pit bulls that are mean as heck and leaves them chained up outside making them even meaner. She always got up at 4 to go to the other house to feed her cats and one morning he let his dogs out and they trapped her between the houses. She screamed for twenty minutes right outside his window until they finally killed her. It was horrific so I decided I better walk my killer dog to keep her calm. I usually manage to walk her once a week because she annoys the heck out of me. She attempts to pee everywhere and sniff and I just want to walk and get it finished. So I take her on a new route and a mile away from the house she stops and starts eating grass.

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She wouldn’t move and kept on eating grass and then puked and ate more grass. I had to call Brian to see if he and Allyson were on their way home from the property because there was no way I was going to get her to walk back. Yep I thought about carrying her but fifty pounds for a mile is too much like a biggest loser challenge and I wasn’t making enough money. He said he was about fifteen minutes away so I sat and waited for him. While she kept up with the eating the grass. He arrived and told me it was too hot for her black self to be walking. I said oh nice try, we are in the shade and its a nice breeze. He took us both home and then I left again to run two miles straight without walking before I killed the dog.

Mole moral~Pay someone to walk the killer fat fry who doesn’t mind stopping every twenty seconds and taking at least thirty minutes to walk a mile!

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Once again, the word never bites me!

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It was exactly 11 years ago today that I did my very first half marathon. At the end of January that year the nurses strike was coming to an end and my friend Laura asked me if I wanted to sign up with her and do it through Team in Training. We had to agree to raise fifteen hundred dollars for leukemia and we were given a coach, training plans, and group long runs. I had never ran a day in my life and was smoking at the time so my goal was to walk the entire thing. I did a lot of my training at Seckman High School track. This was before the days of iPods and iPhones so I would walk with a portable CD player. Often the kids would be out for walking class gym but there never was much fast walking going on. My friend soon became pregnant and had to drop out because of morning sickness. I however stayed in and did my very first race all by myself and smoked a cigarette before and after the race. I will always remember my sisters best friend Laura showing up at the end and taking my picture. That meant more to me than she ever knew.

It would be another four years before I would do another race. By this time I had quit smoking, so when my coworker Erin (who is now my boss) asked Jen and I if we wanted to do the Lewis and Clark half marathon I said sure. Erin ended up not being able to do it because she was heavily involved with computer charting go live and couldn’t train. Jen and I however completed that one together. Erin was able to do the Go run with us the following spring. After this my addiction was in full swing.

The following year I did the Go relay with the girls from work. I ran a section of Forest Park and said I would never do a full. This year they changed the course and said it was flatter. I originally planned to run Christie Clinic at the end of April but that is the same weekend Emily receives her white coat for physical therapy school. I liken it to the old days of when a nurse received her nursing cap. About three weeks ago I decided I would do the full today since it was the eleventh year anniversary of my first half marathon and only with thirteen weeks of official training.

The run started out great. I walked a lot the first thirteen miles so I wouldn’t blow out my legs and drop dead at mile twenty-two. My longest run was twenty-two miles and this made me nervous. It poured rain around mile eighteen till mile twenty. At mile twenty I ran into Rich Simpson. He was the one who blew the lid off of the corruption in the Fox School District as well as had horrible things posted on Topix about him by the former superintendent. His lawsuit over that was recently settled. He’s not allowed to discuss but I did tell him no amount of money could compensate for what was said but at least he had acknowledgement. We finished the marathon together. Somewhere between mile twenty-two and twenty-three my left quad started locking up and his calf was a mess. We managed to gimp across the finish line. One other fun fact, I had a huge crush on him in high school.

At the end of this torture I said I have no intentions of ever doing the Go full again. I know better than to say I’m NEVER doing it again because then next year I’d be right back running if. I now have three full marathons in the book. If I could only get my brain to agree that’s plenty.

 

Mole moral~ If anyone would have told me I would run the last six miles of a marathon with Rich, I would have laughed my head off and ask them what drugs they were on. It’s funny how life turns out!

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Our visit to Missouri State

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Last night Kayla and I headed to Springfield to attend a campus visit at Missouri State. Neither one of us is a morning person so it was best to go down the night before rather than leaving at 5:30 in the morning. When I visited Rockhurst with Emily the entire thing was structured with scheduled activities. This was laid back. It started with me parking in the wrong spot but I didn’t get a ticket. Next up Kayla wasn’t on the expected list even though she received the reminder email. I thought here we go typical Mole craziness. After that things went smoothly. We started by taking a campus tour on a bus. That was a little overwhelming and at first we thought the campus was huge. We quickly discovered its a big square easily walkable. We then went on the dorm tours. The normal freshman dorm rooms with the community showers were way bigger than the Rockhurst rooms. We then visited the six person suite. It has three separate bedrooms each with a door and a lock. It also has a community living room and a small fridge. We visited the four person suites and liked it the best. It had two different rooms with locked doors, a bathroom and a kitchen with a full-sized fridge and microwave. Amazingly we did not pick the most expensive place to live. The four person suites are located by the dining hall and one doesn’t have to even go outside to eat. I told Kayla forget the freshman fifteen she will gain the sophomore seventy! Each dorm has its own laundry room and the laundry is FREE. As in no quarters are needed. I told Kayla there is no reason to bring her laundry home for me to do! You can also check on-line to see which washers are in use and if yours are finished. I would have never imagined such high-tech all those years ago when I went to nursing school.

The school also has buses that not only drive you around campus, but will also take you downtown and back. Kayla liked this feature and said she could save her gas for coming home from time to time. We went to admission, housing and financial aid lecture. When they posted that it was 16,000 a YEAR to attend, I almost fell out of my chair. This included housing and 19 meals a week. After all a girl has to eat!  Rockhurst was 16,000 a SEMESTER.

It was 12:30 and Kayla and I were ready to leave. We weren’t even a mile from school when she realized she forgot to have me take her picture with the bear. So we turned around and went back and snapped a photo. It was a great campus and if she decides to go there I will be thrilled. After all it’s where I wanted to go. She still wants to visit University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg and then decide for sure. However we are going to set up her portal and schedule the time for her classes and apply to the dorm. She has to go get a meningitis shot and finish up her hep a shot series on Monday. She said to me but I had meningitis. I said that was viral meningitis and the shot is for bacterial. As soon as she found out she would receive it in her arm she was fine with it. She has yet to get over the steroid shot in her butt when she had a major asthma attack.

 

Mole moral~One more campus visit and then Kayla is that much closer to going away to college and some freedom from her old Mole parents! We are both excited for her future.

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Breaking one of the ten commandments

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I am not sure if I actually broke Exodus 20:17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” However I can say that I have wanted this medal

for four years but in my defense I don’t know anyone personally who has one.

I am pretty sure I first saw the Lincoln Presidential Half Marathon race on Facebook four years ago. It is ran in Springfield IL through the town, including the cemetery where he is buried. The first year I had just had Dr. Veronikis surgery and all that left-sided pain so it wasn’t happening. The next year I had taken the spring off to heal my patellar tendonitis from falling the previous August and recover from plantar wart surgery. The next year I was battling plantar fasciitis in my right foot and the next my left. So finally today I got to run it and receive the most awesome medal. It’s almost better than my Disney medals. It’s a really close second.

This will most likely be the one and only time I run this even if next year the medal is a five dollar bill because we ran on cobblestone, loose gravel and gum balls from trees. It was a tripping hazard that high fall risk girl should probably not attempt again. It was freezing this am and I of course only packed a short-sleeved shirt but by mile 3 I was fairly warm. It was cool seeing the capitol building and then running through the cemetery. It’s hard to take pictures with the brightness turned down but here they are anyway.

I made sure I put in my phone where I parked so I could find my car afterwards. Of course I had no clue and had to ask a cop. Then I picked the wrong direction to find the cross street. By this time it was so windy, I thought I was going to be blown into the middle of an intersection and ran over. I finally found my car fifteen minutes later and probably another thousand steps. It’s so hard having zero GPS skills.

 

Mole Moral~Good things come to those who wait, even if it is a coveted medal that will probably send them straight to hell! Hahahahah