Ho. Ly. Shit.

Summer in Chicago has come and gone, and my AIDS Marathon group got up at 6:30 yesterday morning to run eight miles in freezing* rain. In the middle of June.

*How cold was it? When my shoe came untied in mile six, I couldn't make my fingers work well enough to retie it. In fact, the useless stumps I used to call hands didn't start demonstrating rudimentary dexterity again until a good hour after I got home and crawled back into bed.

The freezing-rain-in-June thing was especially ironic because I saw An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore documentary about global warming (Global warming, my frozen-fingered ass. [Wait. That came out wrong.]), Friday night with David and Alex and Bob, the latter of whom has been woefully lax in keeping up with my blog. Frozen-fingered irony notwithstanding, the movie is pretty interesting ... for what is essentially an hour and a half of footage of Gore giving a PowerPoint seminar to a bunch of concerned citizens. (And all for the low, low ticket price of $9.50 plus dinner and parking!)

Anyway, cold and rain and sickness and a planned vacation by New Running Buddy shrunk our group to six (from what seems to be averaging out to a total of twelve) yesterday morning. But we got two new people we weren't expecting, so we were able to keep up appearances in front of the other running groups.

Here is a lovely picture of our forzen corpses, plucked fresh from the Titanic wreckage after our run:


Of course, the skies cleared and the sun came out just like that stupid little red-haired girl predicted (though the temperature never got above what you'd expect in maybe late March) soon after we all thawed ourselves. And even though nobody wanted to go to breakfast after our run (the pussies!), I was able to gorge myself on chicken kebabs with some friends at the Andersonville street fair yesterday afternoon and then cheesy enchiladas and sopapillas at a fabulous little Mexican restaurant (whose name totally escapes me at the moment) with my friend Patrick last night.

And any day that ends with sopapillas is a good day in my book. Even if I can't use my fingers to eat them.