Thank you, readers!

I just wanted to give a shout out to my faithful blog readers. Thanks for stopping by!!

Today is a notably slow "Dog Days of Summer" day. Nothing going on here, like many recent days. Move along. But I'm surprised to see that I'm still getting something like 150 hits per day, which astounds me!

What have we done today?

• Slept late. Once school starts we're looking at pre-6:00 wakeups for me and perhaps 6:30 for the girls, so we're enjoying the slack time now.
• Walked to the track with the girls to do one lap. I'm trying to get them accustomed to walking a little more since they'll be walking to and from school in another couple weeks (I hope). We're logging quarter miles on one of the great printouts from the kidsrunning.com website to accumulate 25 laps for a 10K.
• Accepted a UPS delivery for exactly ONE pastel packed in a big box which they didn't have for my shipment last week.
• Called the school YET AGAIN to find out if Catherine actually has been admitted to the preK program which starts in two weeks. (Elisabeth is more or less automatically admitted due to her apraxia). The preK program that we had to apply for FIVE MONTHS AGO. Apparently they still don't know if she is admitted, and may not know until AFTER SCHOOL STARTS. OK, we give you 5 months lead time and you give us. . . . none? Bah.
• Worked on painting the kitchen that I'm doing in small batches since there's lots of complicated taping and cutting-in to be done around the cabinets. And it was badly painted before - they basically skipped all the places behind the fridge and stove and anywhere hard to reach and left it bare sheetrock. Nice.
• Had a nutritious lunch consisting of watermelon and goldfish crackers because it's too hard to actually make anything with all the counters and cabinets in disarray for painting.
• Now I'm waiting for the paint to dry so I can remove the tape. Catherine is walking around in her princess Hallowe'en costume from last year, with her arm by her face, saying "Whirr! Whirr!" When I ask, "Are you an elephant?" She says, "No, I'm pretending!" Oh, sorry, I mistook you for an actual elephant wearing a purple dress in my kitchen.
• Worked on changing over my home page to iGoogle after over a decade of loyalty to my Yahoo home page. I'm feeling some pangs here, folks, be sympathetic - this is a revolutionary step I'm taking - but Google is doing a great job with all the widgets they offer and their ease of adding components.
• Workouts? Nahhhh. . . . I was thinking of taking the girls over to the local small-town Y branch (basically a little strip mall store-front with treadmills and weight machines) but I may not be that ambitious. Emailed the babysitter to see if she can come over any time in the next 3 days before my husband comes back from his business trip to the wilds of Newfoundland.
• I think I've worked out my fueling plan for the Marine Corps Marathon: one Clif Blok (33 calories per block) per mile marker, plus one per water stop, will give me about 200 calories per hour. Add in electrolyte capsules because the Powerade they're going to use on course is worthless for either energy or electrolytes. I have to pack about 30 Clif Bloks in my waist pack to make it through - I hope they fit. I also have to test-drive that feeding level to see if it agrees with my digestion over 3 or 4 hours. Right now that's just the plan on paper, haven't tested it yet. I've been reviewing my training plan, but any way you cut it, I'm behind the game on running mileage.
• I'm wondering if one has to have a "fire in the belly" and have some great score to settle or something to prove in order to do triathlon well, or if it's sufficient to simply enjoy it and be perpetually back-of-the-pack or midpack and being mediocre is enough. I'm fairly contentedly in the latter group these days. I suppose the sport is big enough to include all of us.
• That is all.

So thanks for stopping by! I don't have any huge emotional upheavals for you or dramatic earth-shattering life-changing triathlon conquests or even any fun eBay purchases to show off. I'm not even sorry. It's summer. Life is good.