Overdue for a lightening round

Lately I've been feeling a lot of thank-you-note-feelings toward blogging. The kind of feeling that you get when you haven't done something for so long, and you know you should (in the case of thank you notes) or want to (in the case of blogging) but you've put it off for so long that you feel like you need some really compelling opening line to kick it all off again.

Eh- I have no opening line. But I did send off about 14 thank you notes yesterday, so I'm feeling quite excellent about THAT.

Life has been fast in the last year. Strangely, wonderfully, horribly fast. I've learned that time flies when you're having fun. And equally fast when you're not. I don't remember what its like to have time move slowly. (I take that back. Time spent jogging and riding my bike on its trainer in my living room is slow time. Minutes are twice as long in these situations. I refer to this as 'treadmill time'.) My hair is getting grayer faster. The skin on my face, especially under my eyes, is getting thinner and more paper-like. It's happening so fast that I can I see it changing.

So here are some thoughts n' things that have been going on in-between the objetos de la vida mas grande:

• I've always thought it would be fun to be the kind of person who makes up phrases in foreign languages, then uses them in italics.
  
  
• My husband told me the other night that he’s breaking up with the dog. He maintains that they’re in a fight. Not growing up with pets, I think he’s having a hard time accepting the fact that she only *really* loves him (or me for that matter) for what he can give her (scraps and walks!) and not who he is as a person. Until now, she’s done a stand-up job of convincing him that she, as a dog, is capable of human-like emotion, reasoning and compassion. The good news is, we both still enjoy playing pranks and practical jokes on her. I figure that since she isn't a human child, it's fine to have fun at her expense. Right?
  
  
• My sister and my aunt came to visit last weekend and it was GREAT. Fabulous trips to the White House and dining (oy! and wining!) at the Willard didn’t hurt, but we would have had a nice time regardless.
  
  
• I’m noticing an extremely reduced ability to tolerate annoying restaurant servers. Seriously. I should be required to wear some sort of badge, tag or other identifiable warning device..
  
  
• I found a great indoor pool which is on my way home from work. And FREE for DC residents (a community recreation center) Good-BYE 5:30 AM groups swims in Georgetown! We still try to make it, but just knowing that I could just as easily hit the pool at a civilized hour later in the day makes Monday nights (and Tuesday Mornings) much more friendly. The most outstanding part of the pool- every time I’ve been between the hours of around 6-8 PM there have been at least two lanes totally open. It’s a ghost town during what I would think would be peak use hours. Hopefully there isn’t something wrong with the pool there that everyone but me knows about... Oh crap, now I’m nervous.
  
  
• For fun, I recommend peppering your day-to-day conversations with "oh crap..." spoken with a slight twinge of Minnesota-nice a la Kristen Dunst in Drop Dead Gorgeous.
  
  
• If you feel like laughing at someone rich and famous, and Lindsey Lohan just won't do the trick, head to your nearest Starbucks and check out the Paul McCartney CD. I guess when you get to a certain point in your career, you can override any sensible publicist’s veto of an album photo, but seriously Paul, if I thought you had bad judgment a few years ago for not getting a pre-nup with Heather, this just proves to me that you’re in fact, a total spaz. When I look at this photo, the first thing that I hear in my mind’s eat is “ ‘ello Govna’!” in a excruciatingly Tiny Tim-like cockney accent. What do you hear?
  
  
• I think that a lady who lives a few houses down from us instantly wrote us off as worthless yuppie gentrifiers who’d be the death of all things community oriented and fabulous through her eyes (of an aging hippie wannabe save the world greener type—which is what I wrote HER off as) as soon as we mentioned, in passing, that we were training for a triathlon. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I could SEE in her eyes that her mind was saying “Grand. Just what we need. More of YOU types….” Now every time I see her I want to run up to her, tell her I’m a do-gooder type too AND from Seattle, and that aught to get me SOME sort of blue-state street ‘cred. But I haven't.