I'm Still Alive

I have two somewhat flimsy excuses to explain my absence from the blogosphere.

1. I've been on vacation. I don't mean, like, summer vacation, because duh. I mean I was in a car and traveled first to Traverse City and then to Wisconsin. I won't entertain you with the details. I realize this excuse kind of sucks because both places I stayed had better Internet access than I have at home. Nevertheless, it's not cool to go off and blog while on vacation. That, my friends, is dorky.

2. School is starting. I've been in my classroom on three occasions and I sat in on job interviews for an entire day. We've got a new math program that I've yet to sink my teeth into and I have to teach a couple of subjects that I haven't taught in a few years. This excuse is also poor because I haven't actually done any teeth sinking and I haven't looked much at the content expectations for the subjects I haven't taught. But I feel a little guilty blogging when I know I should be doing responsible things and so I haven't. This is the same reason I didn't read much in college. I just couldn't justify reading Stephen King when I'd already decided to neglect 100 pages of assigned text.

Apologies for not commenting on any of my faithful readers' blogs. It would be political of me to assure you that I have been reading them, really I have, but it would not be the truth. Haven't read a blog in weeks. I trust, though, that you're posting more frequently than I and that you haven't let the quality slide. So keep it up, everybody!

Oh, and this has nothing to do with anything, but a while back The Wife was reading off things other people had said on Facebook and my favorite, in response to this story, was "Way to go, Jesus!"

I have taken to saying this just because I think it's hilarious.

So, fellow bloggers, Way to go, Jesus!

Didn't See That One Coming

I started running over Spring Break and I've been really good about keeping at it all summer. And if you would have told me back in April that the biggest problem I'd have in August was painful nipples, I'd have given you the same look I gave the TV when I watched this.

Apparently, nipples are sensitive. Some of you may have already known this, but I've always had a strict policy regarding my own. Specifically, I like to pretend they're not there. Adhering to this policy has become difficult, though, because whenever I run five or more miles the suckers really hurt.

The Wife did some research (because, in accordance with the above stated policy, I was busy pretending the pain was a figment of my imagination) and learned that the problem is pretty much what you'd think. You sweat, the nipples get hard, they rub against the shirt, and the salt in the sweat acts like grains of sand, and there you have it, sore nips.

So now, before I run, I put Band-aids on them which I hate doing because 1. We don't have that many Band-aids in the house and I'd hate to actually need one and find them all gone because I used them on my stupid, shouldn't-be-there-in-the-first-place nipples, and 2. they don't work all that well because you put them on when the nipples are smushy and then when they turn unsmushy the Band-Aid is no longer flush and you've got the potential for chafing anyway and 3. the whole process forces me to spend way too much time thinking about, looking at, and tending to my nipples.

I have figured out a remedy, though. I've never once even thought about them while sitting on the couch eating ice cream.

Jim Jamo Lost

I'm pretty sure it's because the Lansing State Journal did not publish my letter to the editor. The Wife was unsurprised by this. (She's also unsurprised that Joe Biden has yet to reply to my chocolate milk question.) I'm not entirely sure how the LSJ decides which letters to print. Yes, mine was obnoxious and full of obvious falsehoods. It was not serious in any way. But who decided letters to the editor have to be serious or, you know, factual? Read through them some time. Most of the political ones are full of nonsense, and I find at least half of them obnoxious. I guess the difference is intent. The lesson is clear: if you want to make an ass out of yourself, don't be too obvious about it.

In other news I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because as a person living on the planet Earth in the year 2010 I believe it is required. The Wife warned me that there was a ton of backstory in the first 100 pages or whatever, so I was prepared for it and it didn't really bother me. Once it gets rolling it's hard to put down. I read all six hundred plus pages over three days.

Also read The London Eye Mystery and enjoyed it, especially the voice of the autistic main character. Really well done. It's not as good as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but there's no shame in that.

Closing in on the end of my novel. It looks like the first draft will be done by the start of school, which was the goal. I'll spend a couple of months smoothing out the story, fixing inconsistencies, dropping in details that didn't become necessary until later, etc., and then I'll be looking for readers to affirm my worst suspicions.

I'll be vacationing for most of the next two weeks, so basically nothing will change with respect to the blog. Feel free to reread this post over and over again or, even better, go back and read some old stuff from when I was funnier.