Where are my whereabouts? The good, the bad, the ugly

Thank you to faithful reader Rose for asking about my whereabouts, which I'm about to talk about.

1. Vacation ended. Vacation was very nice and is there a better way to end a vacation than spending two days with friends. These friends fed me two meals a day, drove me around town, let me nap on the couch and even let me have the last beer in the house.

2. The camper fell apart. This is not so groovy. The Lippert frame inside our camper...you know the one. It's made out of big, burly bars of steel and welded tightly together. Yea. It fell apart. Cracked in two pieces. The jury is still out. It was fixed and then it didn't do so well on the ride home. There's another plan afoot, but I am staying out of it until the final bell rings.

3. I lost my Garmin GPS watch between the last vacation stop (friend's house) and my house. I obsess about mileage, pace and heart rate. I keep track of this stuff. I am in a very sorry way over this development. Surely the watch has to be someplace nearby. Perhaps hidden and wishing I would find it. This is not the life it was made for. It was made to be strapped to my wrist fretting about my details. I'm hyperventilating over this situation. Srsly.

3.1. I have started training (probably left it late) for the Des Moines half marathon. Exciting!

4. It's hot outside. No, I mean it's really hot. My Garmin would be making sure my heart was still beating. I have taken to running in the morning, but this morning's run didn't happen because at 0530 it was 78 degrees and 94% humidity and the dew point was like 345,567% or something so that we had fog and at 0800 when I got in my car it was still dripping wet because the water couldn't evaporate.

5. It is raining. Does anyone remember the floods of 1993? Des Moines was particularly hard hit. It made the news. Maybe you recall. This year the floods are even worse than in 1993. Hard to believe, but it has rained 42 inches in Des Moines this year. That isn't even counting the never ending snowfall of the winter. What's different (besides the valuable precautions the city undertook many years ago) is that this isn't so much from the rivers rising. These are flash floods, so creeks are swelling and then disappearing quickly, waters rise like deadly magic tricks on the roadways and basements are floating in water. Sump pumps fail and stores are out of box fans. Thank goodness my basement is still dry, but who knows? It is supposed to rain again tomorrow.

6. Last week my computer crapped out at the same time our router died. Coincidence? I'm not sure. At any rate, the new router was installed last night and over the weekend I spent an hour making homemade pico de gallo and talking to a very nice HP employee whose name I didn't catch but I think it was Maxwell who was from West Africa. There's no country called West Africa. I asked him which country and he said "the English-speaking portion of West Africa." He apologized for being evasive, but said they were not allowed to go into details. You know why? I will bet you a dozen chocolate donuts that policy is in place because so many Americans are so incredibly rude about it. Most tech support people should be paid three times their salary just for putting up with ignorance. Yes, they were in the US. Every voice I heard in the background was without foreign accent. Oh, don't get me started! If it were a British, Australian or Irish accent, everyone would be delighted and clambering to talk to the person. Spare me. Have you ever tried to listen to someone with a deep Scottish accent? Impossible.

7. Yesterday afternoon I spoke to a Qwest tech support person who sounded like a older man. An American, check. An arrogant jerk, check. I was very tired from having run further than I am used to in heat I will never be used to and by late afternoon I was a little crabby. He enraged me and I was moments short of calling him out as a huge jerk. I took a breath and ended the call, but not before he was made aware of my contempt and dislike for his personality. And possibly his ancestors, but I didn't bring them up.

8. I am on the brink of a birthday that ends in a five. I sheepishly admit to being a little freaked out about it.

So life is good.

It may not sound like it, but life is good. On the plus side, I am apparently fit enough to run through water while breathing solid chunks of air and not dying. I am running distances (8 miles last Saturday!) I was heretofore incapable of. Gardens are producing goodness. I found a killer dress for an upcoming family wedding. It is the dress. It looks as though it was altered just for me. I can't wait to wear it!

And for now, I have to leave you. I will be back. Hopefully I will have found both my watch and something of interest to discuss with you all.