Me?  Nada.  I didn’t even get the load of laundry I meant to do done (though there’s still time for that, I guess).  Best yet, I didn’t even pretend to work—instead, I laid around, read purely for fun, got caught up on Six Feet Under, talked on the phone, and made a lovely dinner.  That’s the entirety of my day.

The good news is that it was absolutely beautiful, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

The bad news is… where did it go?

And you?

Gave our work-study students a stack of four photocopied articles that I’ve used in coursepacks for the last few years, asking them to track down and photocopy the title and copyright pages for the texts that each came from, so that I can scan the whole thing into PDFs.  Several days later, work-study student #1 lets me know that she’s having trouble finding the editions I used for two of the articles, and asks whether another edition might suffice.  As I ponder a response, my eyes travel over my bookshelves—where those two editions sit, smugly waiting for me to figure it out.

The folks who are coming here looking for info on Matt Taibbi have led me to his most recent New York Press column, on the Ohio voting irregularities of 2004.  Provocative reading, if still depressing.  And the promise, in the end, of more to come.

I hit the treadmill yesterday for my second post-orthotic run, with much the same results as the first:  overall, the run felt good; no problems whatsoever with the left foot/ankle/leg; minor complaining from the right foot.  So far, so good.  I’m having to discipline myself a bit, though, to keep my mileage super-low, to stop well before I’m tired, and to take plentiful rest days, as I’ve been laid off for quite some time.  It would be awfully easy to add injury to insult right about now.

So I’m keeping myself amused and motivated by playing around with a series of running hacks, little tools designed to track your progress as a runner in different fashions.  Running lends itself quite well both to the obsessive in me (there are many records that can be kept and statistics that can be tracked) and to the part of me that’s always trying to escape obsession, to achieve a more zen-like calm in the midst of chaos, to still the mind and focus on the thump thump thump of the moment.

For the former, my two favorite hacks:  David Hays’s Running Log, a multi-sheet Excel workbook that calculates things that even I never thought of tracking.  This was originally recommended to me by Dave, just as I was beginning training for the LA Marathon, but for whatever reason, I didn’t fiddle with it much at that point.  Somehow it seemed overwhelming to me, almost too much information.  Perhaps the enforced restriction of my running now, however, has opened up space for me to test out what’s available here:  all of the expected distance and pace trackers, of course, but also a weight tracker, a comparison of actual running with planned running, a record of all your races with times and paces and personal bests, a slew of calculators for paces and times and heart rates and more, and charts and graphs galore.

The second, which Joe emailed me about after I posted about my first post-orthotic run, is a hack of Google Maps that creates a pedometer useful for both finding the mileage of completed runs and planning future runs.  From the linked page, click on the “click here if you don’t live in Hoboken” link (unless, of course, you live in Hoboken), use the usual Google Maps double-clicking, dragging, and zooming to zero in on your location, and then click “start recording.” Double-click to set your starting point, and then double-click again at each turn, to mark your course.  “Create permalink” or “tinyURL” will allow you to bookmark the results so that you can return to them or create new courses.

All of this of course has me itching to run—and contemplating future goals…

Because, for the moment, I’m tired of getting my stupid little heart broken every time the Democrats roll over and play dead.  I tell myself that I’m trying to conserve my energies for battles that we have some prayer of winning, but honestly, I’m just feeling demoralized and exhausted.  Defeated.  Perhaps if someone could give me a reasonable explanation for why, on the one hand, a president gets impeached for lying about the fact that he got a blowjob in his office, while, on the other, a senior political advisor who breaks a federal law by revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent to the press (even if he didn’t use her name) manages to escape repercussions, maybe then I’d feel better about the whole thing.  Until then, I’ve decided that this administration is not so much teflon- as Vaseline-coated, and that they’re going to continue slipping through our fingers at every turn, only leaving us feeling greasy in the process.

aqueduct
Originally uploaded by KF.

The photos are at last somewhat organized, and posted:  all the Rome you could possibly stand.  I went a bit camera-happy while I was there, in no small part because I was photographing for four—my sister didn’t bring her camera, my stepfather’s broke on our second day there, and my mother rarely remembered to grab one of her disposables as we headed out the door.

The images, however, are a lovely reminder of the week, a reminder I need, as the Claremont vortex has definitely kicked in.  Somehow, no matter how far away I go, or how long I’m there, within fifteen minutes of getting back to town it’s like I was never gone at all.  The pictures are a nice bit of proof, though, that I was there, and saw (and heard, and tasted, and smelled, and felt) all that.

So just after my last post, I headed out for my first run since getting my orthotics.  It went quite well, overall; I ran two miles of the 2.5 mile course I took, and my left foot (the one with the bad arch) was just ecstatic the whole time.  (The right foot remains a little uncertain about this whole plastic-in-the-shoe thing, but I think it’s adjusting.)

But as I was trekking up one of the main residential boulevards in town, a smallish one of these crossed my path, about twenty yards ahead.  It seemed a little more at home in the neighborhood than I’d have liked, quite frankly, cruising happily down the center of the road.

I did make it home yesterday, though not without a snippet of travel drama.  The flight was smooth, overall, though we got put into the fly-past-the-airport-and-land-from-the-west flight pattern that usually accompanies the Santa Anas here in SoCal, so I knew the weather was going to be a bit weird.  And indeed, the remnants of Emily were over the area yesterday, which even resulted in this bizarre phenomenon, in the middle of the afternoon, where water suddenly fell from the sky.  Strange, I tell you.  My cab driver, though, told me that there’d been hail in Riverside, so things could have been weirder.

In the airport, though, things hit a much higher level of strange.  As is the airport’s custom, three flights had arrived at roughly the same time, and so three airplanes full of people were milling around waiting to figure out which baggage claim carousel their luggage would arrive on.  I hung back between the two most likely alternatives, and just happened to catch my flight number as it flashed on the sign in front of one of them, about three seconds before the buzzer and siren announced the news to the crowd.  I used that three seconds to weave my way toward the belt, staking out my piece of carousel-front property.  As I did, I passed about four feet to the right of an older woman of perhaps 80, who had gotten a trolley and had her carry-on bags stacked on it, and her cane folded up and tucked into the basket.  Immediately after she passed from my peripheral vision, I heard an enormous thud, and turned just as a collective gasp went up from the crowd.  The woman was rigid, flat on her back, on the ground.  She hadn’t crumpled to the ground, as she would have if she’d passed out; she’d apparently gone down like a tree, and hit her head quite hard on the floor in the process.

I swear to you, my first thought was “oh my god, what did I do?” Even though I was four feet away, the timing of my passing her and her going down produced a sense of causality in my head that was quite hard to shake.

Several people went immediately to her aid, checking her pulse and calling for help.  TSA agents arrived within about a minute, followed a few minutes later by the airport police, followed quickly by two trucks full of the Ontario Fire Department.  The woman was breathing throughout, and was in fairly short order able to tell the police her name, and the family member she was being met by, so that they could find her sister and bring her over.  She was clearly in good hands.

And in the midst of this, folks are claiming their bags and heading for home.  As did I.

Little wonder, I guess, that the cloud cover outside and the news of hail in Riverside seemed a bit surreal.  Everything did, for the next several hours.

I’ve only got a minute before dashing for this morning’s flight, which will finally get me within spitting distance of home.  This delay was mostly planned-for, as my EWR to IAH flight got me in after the last flight for ONT had left.  I’d even planned ahead so far as to make a hotel reservation.  What wasn’t planned for was the complete collapse from exhaustion that I underwent somewhere between the insanity of the IAH baggage claim (where there were 10 working carousels, and no working monitors with information as to which carousel your bags might be on), the surreality of the underground inter-terminal tram at IAH (not the above-ground monorail, but an underground one that includes the airport hotel in its loop, and that reminds me too too much of an amusement park kiddy train), and the humiliation of falling halfway down an escalator because my too-big suitcase got caught on its edge.

I’ll admit:  there were tears, though not until I was safely in my room.

But.  A really solid night’s sleep, and I’m again on my way.  More substantive writing, I promise, and the pictures I know you’re all dying to see, once I get home.

First, I left Santa Maria Maggiore off the litany.  It should have come between the Catacombs and the Pantheon.

Second, there was no rest for the weary.  Yesterday included Santa Maria degli Angeli and Martyri, San Giovanni in Laterno, and, of course, the Via del Corso.

But now there is the Alitalia lounge, which has no wireless access (despite having what looks to me like a big router affixed to the wall) but does have two wired internet access stations.  So a quick post from here, and more much later from Newark.

It’s been a fabulous trip, and I’m very sorry to see it end.  The next month promises to be a sprint, however, so I’m looking forward to getting it underway.

More details when there’s better access and the leisure to use it.