This morning Erin, Ash, and I met Christie and Henry for the Shamrock Run, which is an enormous event with something like a bajillion participants.
The little tykes ran-slash-were-carried for the 1K Leprechaun Lap, which they surprisingly enjoyed, given the wind and the rain and the loudspeaker and their adoring fans cheering from the course sidelines.
I kissed my ladies goodbye as they went for warmth and pancake-y sustenance, then I started the 45-minute wait for my 15k to begin. The rain was coming down so hard and so cold I had to queue up ol' reliable on the mental iPod just to keep myself psyched waiting for the race to start. Not a good sign to have to pull out my trump card even before I started running.
Even though Erin pulled her usual I'm-Erin-And-Psychic-And-I-Know-You-Have-A-Race-Tomorrow shtick of two hours crying in the middle of the night, I felt strong and finished 1:10:33. Seriously, this kid has powers -- the last time she was up at night and inconsolable was before the Hagg Lake run last month. I'm like, "Um, Erin, can we negotiate some other schedule? I'll trade you Sunday night for Saturday -- deal?"
The weather was pretty crazy. For about thirty minutes the rain was coming down sideways. I had to take off my hat so it didn't blow off my head -- I saw quite a few people running the wrong way on the course chasing after a hat (and one poor guy who somehow managed to lose his bib). The volunteers keeping cars off the course looked completely soaked. Sort of a heroic job to do on this particular day.
... Erin Beatrix ends up quite the fashion trendsetter.
* To be fair, this was a short-term "outside play" outfit on a cold day. Indeed, she got enjoyably muddy in a short time. But she stayed warm even amidst the hail/snow.
MissMVK posted this awesome link. In case you were really wondering who is the parent of your child, let the best in face-matching technology answer it.
Of course Ms. A is a total nerd, so she couldn't just stop at that. She had to do an experiment.
As a brand-spankin new freshie (1 hour old):
At 6 months:
At 16 months:
This made Ms. A suspicious. So she decided to try another route to test the fidelity and robustness of the system. Lo and behold:
Click here
to subscribe to the blog by email. This is by far the easiest way to subscribe. You'll be taken to the "RssFwd" site where you can sign up to recieve an email notification any time a new post is published. The site claims that it will not list or sell your email address.
Go here to subscribe to the blog using Brian's reader of choice, Google Reader. You'll need to create a free Google account if you don't already have one. Then you can add the Google Reader gadget to your Google homepage. This assumes, of course, that you'd like to help Google take over the world. For Microsoft, this was bad. For Google, this is good for some reason.
`