Damn You Bacon Cheeseburger!

Morning weigh-in (Wednesday): 189#, 13.5% BF

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 187#, 13.5% BF

 

So Tuesday night was a pretty decent run along the towpath, maybe 2.7 miles plus a walk back up the hill (that was my reward), 3.5 miles in 39 minutes; I'll be back in running shape, and shapely enough to fit in my kilt, in time for the Halloween 5k. It totally caused me to overheat though, I didn't feel comfortable for several hours afterward. I kind of blew the fitness afterward too, with a bacon cheeseburger & fries at the Brew Works. I needed my comfort food though, and it was a nice night there: Anne and me, and Ben and his girlfriend Jaime who are in town for a few days, and Debbie, and Donna was there with Brian and Erin. A good night, especially with Ben and Jaime there, but still pretty somber.

 

The cheeseburger bit me back though, as can be seen in the Wednesday weigh-in. Last night was a short ride along the towpath with Anne -- I must have been tired, because according to the computer we weren't going all that fast but it sure felt like we were flying. We did about 14 miles, out to the boat club and back, in about an hour. Then home and shower, and we hit Black and Blue in Easton for dinner, just me and Anne, and Ben and Jaime, though we did see a few of the usual suspects. A quiet night, and I watched the old caloric intake, and I think I did a little better on the scale this morning.

 

Tonight is the gym again (just in time too, as the pain from Monday is starting to fade), then I'm heading over to Eskandalo for a haircut.

 

Listening: I've been into Death Cab For Cutie's "I Will Possess Your Heart" lately, really getting obsessive about it, listening over and over. Creepy and stalk-ey, and for some reason it reminds me of this incident (see more here and here), and I thought that would be a good video: a girl in an elevator, seen from outside, as a guy gets on the elevator. She turns and recognizes him, and not in a good way, just as the doors close on the scene. Scenes of those see-through elevators like they have in tacky-fancy hotels, doors closing and elevator descending, scenes of the guy getting on various elevators, over and over... I don't know, it works for me.

 

When It Rains Here, It Rains So Hard...

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 187.5#, 15% BF

...but never hard enough to wash away the sorrow. Goodbye Rob, I don't know if I'll ever be fully able to understand or accept what happened; all I know is I'm going to miss you.

The party's over: Musikfest ended Sunday night (we didn't go), and the summer is winding down. Time to start looking at those admittedly scary morning numbers once again... I'll be getting back to the gym, actually started last night after work, mostly arms and upper body for now. I dread what I'll find out about my diminished fitness over the next few days, but hey that's step one -- right now my chest and arms are awash in prostaglandins.

 

Watching: Anne read Barney's Version recently and really liked it, so she picked up the DVD when her friend Judy, who also loved the book, recommended the movie. (Usually people like one or the other, movie or book but not both, so this was a rarity.) We got a chance to watch it on Sunday afternoon. Verdict: not my type of movie, but good, and the ending was sad but pretty powerful -- sorry, no spoilers! I'm still on the fence whether I'll read the book or not.

 

After that we went over to Nazareth.  Sally's mom passed away last year, and Sally & Joe had a small memorial service/party at their house. It was nice, and their son Ben was there, and Judy, and Erika and Toby, and a bunch of other people plus members of the extended family, and tons of good food... I was doing well despite the presence of their dog, but we snuck out after about two hours; I took an antihistamine when we got home, just to be on the safe side, and we spent the rest of the evening with our feet up, reading. (Anne is almost done with Mason & Dixon, and I am totally engrossed in The Pale King.)

 

So yesterday I hit the gym, then when I get home Anne's out to dinner with some of her friends -- they get together every Monday -- but there's a note, placed strategically on my laptop, saying to call her as soon as I get home. So I do, and she tells me that Rob, a young friend of ours, had taken his own life that morning -- she didn't want me to find out on Facebook or email like some smack in the face.

 

I walked up to Brew Works and met Anne there, along with Donna and her daughter Erin -- Donna has a son and a daughter, and their ages bracketed Rob's, and she sometimes called Rob "her other son" -- and we just sort of hung out, gloomy but still too numb to really be distraught yet. Rob was a regular there, though Thursday was usually the night his crew got together; he lived on Main Street and worked for a company that had a Main Street presence, and there were some of his co-workers there as well last night -- it was an unusually subdued crowd. I guess we'll be finding out about arrangements over the next few days.

 

One More Nail

Another post, another rainy Sunday...

We were down at Musikfest yesterday and stayed, despite the rain, until the evening shows rolled around. (We visited Brew Works, bumped into Joe and Cindy, Eric and Kris, and Doug and Lori, and promised to meet them at Volksplatz later -- they were getting dinner.)

Down to Volksplatz where we'd been hiding from the rain earlier, and where we now caught up with Deb and Donna, and caught Marching Fourth, a crazy sort of marching band on stilts; we were in place, front and center, when Start Making Sense came on. Unfortunately, by that time it was pouring again, and with those guys already drawing a huge crowd of fans, and the tent swelled with people escaping the deluge, it was just too much of a crush -- Anne and I absconded to Emily's Kenyan food booth. We could see the show, and also the show of semi-inebriated kids dancing in the downpour. It was pretty cool, hanging out with Emily, and her crew, and Deb and Donna, but the rain kept getting worse, and our phones were beeping with flood warning alerts, and the Monocacy was an ominous presence right behind the midway...

We decided to beat it back to Brew Works, and got a fairly decent table, especially considering how crowded it was, and all our friends came in not long after: the creek jumped its bank and flooded the midway, and the venue tents were collapsing from the rain, and things came to an abrupt end when the cops made everyone evacuate. We hung out at Brew Works for quite a while; it turned into a pretty wild night. When Anne and I finally left the rain had stopped, and we could look down at the destruction in the Moravian Quarter as we crossed the Broad Street bridge. It was awesome and scary and depressing, and we were thinking about Emily's food stand and John's glass-blowing stuff, and a guy watching next to us said he was from Florida and his booth was under about four feet of water.

 This was the first year with venues on the Southside, and I think they were a mixed and limited success (read: bad idea made manifest), but I also think that the Fest cannot be split in two the way it was, and I am sure that the ArtsQuest guys will never back down on using their new space for Musikfest, so eventually the Northside part -- Main Street, the Colonial Industrial Quarter, the better, and more popular, and more local rather than corporate part -- will wither on the vine. A Southside-only Fest is just not viable though, and Musikfest will enter its graveyard spiral once the Northside venues get shut down. I give it five years, tops.

The stabbing on opening night might have pushed things in this direction, and last night's flood might have been the final straw for Musikfest in the Moravian quarter, and so maybe for Musikfest itself.