Tuesday night adventures

ONE
While I’ve been diligent in keeping up my distance training for the Chicago Marathon (12 days away!), I haven’t done any sprinting this summer. And now that I’m tapering down from my 20-mile run a week ago, I decided to do some sprints last night and see how they felt.

So for three miles I alternated between As Fast As Humanly Possible and Pretty Damn Fast. The results? 1) It KICKED MY ASS—I felt even worse when I finished than I did after my 20-mile run. Who knew? 2) It was weird to dress and eat and stretch for a training run … and then be done in just 24 minutes. I broke a helluva sweat, but it all seemed hardly worth dirtying a pair of socks.

Unless, of course, it helps shave 36 minutes and 31 seconds off last year’s time. Then I’ll be a huge fan.

TWO
The dog has developed a dark spot on the end of his red rocket. It doesn’t seem to be bothering him, and we haven’t seen any blood in his urine, but we decided last night at 8:00 that we should probably take him to a 24-hour vet just to make sure everything was OK.

And after a not-too-long wait, we learned that everything was indeed OK—the vet dismissed the spot as a bit of pigmentation, but not before doing a few things involving his fingers and the dog that would probably be considered illegal if they were videotaped and sold for $23.95 on the Internets.

While we were waiting, we also witnessed the heartbreaking aftermath of a two-dog attack on a cocker spaniel and his slightly bloodied owner. The poor little dog survived, but it looked completely shell-shocked—not to mention shaved and bandaged and pink-tinged from all the blood—when we saw it in the waiting room.

THREE
Thinking our evening adventures were over, we crashed when we got home and quickly drifted off to sleep.

But we were slightly awakened by what sounded like a timid little knock on our door and a muffled “Hello?” at 1:30 in the morning. We figured it must be the neighbor’s door—or a dream—but it happened a second time. Then a third. Then our door OPENED—and our penis-pigmented guard dog BOLTED toward the door with barks a-blazing. It wasn’t until the door slammed shut that we were fully awake and aware that something was seriously up.

My guest found his clothes first and headed out to the hallway … where he was met by A WOMAN WITH A GUN. Unable to locate my own clothes—which were RIGHT BY THE BED—I cowered nakedly behind the half-open door while he figured out what was going on.

And that half-opened door was the key to the story. It seems that we never closed our door completely last night. And when my neighbor came home from her night shift as a police offer, she found her own door vandalized with ice cream (I think I’m not making that up, but I was still a little groggy when the story was being explained). She went exploring around our floor to see if there was anything else suspicious going on, found our door half-open, knocked … and the rest is history (herstory? our story?).

All of which cost us a bunch of sleep and actually made me late for work today because I couldn’t get my sprinted, vet-visited, neighbor-interrupted ass out of bed this morning.

But, thankfully, it made for a heck of a blog post.