run on sentences

Yesterday on May 30th, Memorial Day 2011, I awoke to "powdered Sugar" snow coating the back yard.  I went running anyway and my friend Craig and I did 14 miles - the tough Devonshire run.  It was cold enough to have long sleeves, a jacket, and light gloves on.  But I was damned if I was going to wear tights on May 30th.  It was a great run and it was a great day - but not as good as this day was.  Just to show that there was really snow out there Today was one of those rare days of clarity. I think I actually stayed in the "now" (Just read "The Power of Now).  I got up at 630, read the paper, did laundry and hung sheets and towels on the line.  Jack and I went for four mile run even though my legs were a little whiney from yesterday's hills.  Still the sun was shining, it was 45 degrees or so and we had to go.  We saw our friend Teton (the dog) and his human whose name is either Lori or Linda - I can never remember.  I always rememb...

Oprah said it on her last show:  "Everyone has some sort of talent.  Your job right now is to figure out what yours is and to work on getting out there and making it happen (or something like that)".  I have also read this in some form or another in the many self help books I have read over the years.  Many of these books suggest that you making a list of your talents - here's my view of my talents.  I am sure I have more talents - funny that it is so easy to write down your bad characteristics but talents?  I came up with 10. 1.  Being nice - sometimes too nice. 2.  Good with babies and old people (and most in between) 3.  Good at encouraging others and giving advice that I don't often take myself. 4.  Mentoring people to do things they don't think they can (sort of related to encouragement). 5.  Writing 6.  Disciplined - in staying healthy and a hell of a good runner for my age (about 35 marathons). 6.  Sense of...

One of my friends, mixing her metaphors while trying to comfort me said, "When a door closes, a window opens".   I knew what she meant anyway...but couldn't help but think "Gee does that mean I have to climb through a window instead of just walking through another door that might open up for me on it's own?  Why does stuff have to be so hard?  What if the window is stuck because someone painted it shut,  or it's a tiny window and I won't fit through it?  Another friend sometimes will text me in the evening, about running the next day, saying "Should we try to run in the morning?  We might just get the window."  What she means is that it is supposed to rain/snow in the am but maybe we can get out there just before it happens - and get the window of opportunity before the day or at least the weather, goes to hell.  Most of the time, we do get the window.  And because of this,  the day never goes to hell because we ran. It rained m...

It has rained here for the past four days.  Pouring rain.  I don't mind it even though it is May and on Tuesday the rain turned into snow for a few hours.  I had the fireplace on and me, Jack and the two grand dogs enjoyed the warmth and atmosphere created by the gas fireplace.  I don't have to go to work and I have no place that I have to be so rain is okay and home is great.  However, the rain "dampens" my morning running.  And a fireplace where you just have to flip a switch to turn on would cause my father, a woodsman his entire life, to roll over in his grave - or maybe make his ashes stir up and rearrange themselves - bumping into my mother's ashes and she will say "Jesus Christ Ray, stay on your own side".  I am not a "fair weather" runner only.  However, part of running for me - a big part- is the enjoyment in doing it.  If it is work, then it is not fun.   I don't care if it rains once I am out there and my shoes get squishy a...

All of the hype about the world ending next Saturday the 21st doesn't have me worried at all.  I had a great 14 mile run today.  One of my friends who ran with me will do a marathon next week and we talked about how he might come back to SLC and find that it is gone - a smoking mess of destruction (or is it mass?).  Everything will be gone, except of course, the LDS Temple.  The rest of us heathens will burn and we will rue the day when we didn't invite those missionaries into our house and start taking lessons.  I used to invite missionaries in but only to offer them my telephone to call their moms.  Missionaries can only call their mom's on Mother's day and Christmas and I felt sorry for those moms.  Besides, I promised them I would never tell anyone and the moms would secretly thank me.  So embedded is their training that not one of them has ever taken  me up on my offer.  And if they did, I am sure Brigham Young would come back from ...

I woke up at 4:40 am and couldn't go back to sleep.   I wondered why I had tears on my face and then remembered the dream that woke me up.  I was at work and had purchased three big arrangements of flowers for my friend Mary Alice.  But when I went to get them from my office all the flowers had been taken and only the green leafy parts of the arrangements were left.  Everything that made the arrangement pretty was gone. I was angry and went out to the desk to ask about my flowers.  "We needed them for patients" I was told. "They were for the kids".  Someone from another department even took some for another employee telling me "You can just get reimbursed".   No one seemed to think it was a big deal that I had bought them to make someone else happy. "They were for Mary Alice" I kept saying.  But no one listened. Why was this such a disturbing dream - I guess because for me it offered an epiphany.  I had to look up the definiti...

On this mother's day I was looking through and old autograph book that was my mother's - Georgetta Maxfield.  Autograph books were very popular in those days.   Her book is dated 1940 although there were entries up to 1946.   There's a lot of sentiments from many of her friends then - some are still living and some, like her, are gone.   Some of the writing, in pencil and in perfect cursive writing, is faded and barely legible - maybe like the people who wrote them.  Below is the first page of the book. It's fun to think of my mom in 1940 at a time when the second world war was about to start - a turbulent time for sure.  She was 12 years old then.  I don't really have a picture of her that I know for sure was taken then, but the one below is one of my favorites.  She told me she made the dress she was wearing.  I figure she was maybe somewhere between 14-16.  I think she was beautiful and I wish this was in color.  I a...

My sister and Siggie, over the years, have had many many cats - TNTC (too numerous to count, as they used to say on lab reports to indicate large numbers of white cells, red cells, or bacteria usually in urine).  All of them have had interesting names, one of which isn't Georgetta legs.  Currently though they only have four.  And two dogs - Hanna and Willi. "Georgetta Legs" is the nickname I have given to one of the cats who is formally known as Mama Meese.  Mama, like many of the other cats who have found my sister and Siggie,  just kept showing up at her house, until finally she lived there.  Barb has a magnet on her refrigerator that reads "there's a sucker born every minute, and stray cats know where we  all live".  Very true.  Many of their cats were either dropped off or got the word from the cat network that the food was good and the people were nice and they came from all over.  Over the years, my sister and Siggie must have g...