New things I have done

Run a half marathon in under two hours. I finished the 13.1 Marathon—which we all know is just foo-foo gay marketingspeak for “half marathon’”—in 1:56:03 on Sunday morning in freakishly perfect running weather. And while I shaved a whopping 15 minutes off my previous best time and I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl with a squirrel in her panties to have broken through my 2:00 wall, I was still 4:04 too slow to get a qualifying time for a cool-people starting corral in the Chicago Marathon. Everyone in my running group has qualified for a starting corral but me. Which means unless I find another qualifying race to run in the next few months I’ll be starting the marathon with all the common folk and running it completely on my own in October. But! I seem to run faster on my own than with a group (I’m sure I could make some lucky therapist extremely wealthy trying to figure out why I cycle into an ever-slowing dejection loop the moment I fall behind in a training run). So even though I’m trying to position a spectacular new personal best as some kind of failure, it may actually turn out to be a good thing.

Demolished our guest bathroom. Technically, “demolish” is probably a bit misleading. Because all I did was remove the towel rods and mirrors and sinks and vanities and lights and anything else attached to the walls and then fill the gaps with spackle this weekend. But “demolish” sounds so rugged and masculine and destructive—just like me!—and I did make a bunch of dust in the process. Which is a common side effect of demolishment. So there’s that. And all this week I’ll be painting and wiring and installing a thousand dollars’ worth of cool new bathroom stuff assembled in the hope of creating a soothing spa-like oasis in the middle of our condominium. There’s even a backsplash of gray slate tiles! And expensive indirect lighting! And minimalist faucets! And a paint glaze that will look like grasscloth! I hope! And I took “before” pictures so I can create a dramatic before-and-after blog post sometime in the near future. Be excited!

Opened a Twitter account. I think.