Good news or bad news?

Jule is leaving us to go to Berlin to be a not-so-free journalistß. Well, I guess it's good news. You'll be missed, my dear, but we're happy they gave you the job. (Happy but not surprised, we know you're good. :)

Charles Bronson died yesterday. That's bad news, I reckon. He was quite old, though.

It's turned cold today. I was circling the block looking for a parking space while wondering where the summer had gone. It just seems like yesterday I was helping people to push their snowed-in cars out on the street / into a parking space and now I'll soon be doing that again...the year just slipped by. My, my. Soon it'll be time for November depression, I guess. A friend of mine used to say: "Wenn du denkst du sterbst, ist Herbst."

But today I'm in a better mood, actually. And I was introduced to this lovely musical gem today. The "Girl from Ipanema" made me laugh so much I almost fell off my step. (I was doing Cardio Step at the time, if you're wondering.)

Oh, and I bought a new Marathon book. Not because I don't like my old one, but because it said on the amazon page this book included mental tips on how to finish a marathon. And I've discovered on my long run that mental state IS rather important. If I start out in a bad mood and can't shake it off, everything goes downhill. So I figured this book couldn't hurt, the reviews were good, too.

But I don't really like it. Well, the mental instructions are OK, I guess, but the book just takes so long to get somewhere. First of all, it spends ages telling me why it's a good book. I don't like that - I bought the damn thing already, don't advertise it anymore! (Which was by the way why the Allan Carr Non-Smoking Book (TM) annoyed the crap out of me. I think it mentioned Allan Carr Non-Smoking Method (TM) about 500 times on the first page ALONE which made me want to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes in under a minute. But I digress.)

Anyway. It features all those "uplifting" stories about people who finished a marathon. Hm, maybe that's supposed to inspire me, but some of those stories are downright strange. None of those people seems just to have gone and run the darn thing, either they were crippled or handicapped or a big thunderstorm broke loose - it always ends with them finishing the marathon while everybody else has gone home for the day BUT THEY STILL KEEP RUNNING!! (INSPIRATION) Particularly the thunderstorm story did not really inspire me - I mean, if lightning strikes all around you, it's pouring rain, there's cars on the streets because the marathon was cancelled and everybody else has left - that's the instant I stop running and GO HOME and try another marathon, I mean there's plenty out there. I don't pray to God (which she starts doing on the second page, so I shouldn't really have expected anything else) and plod on. No, sirree Bob, not me. But that's probably why I need mental uplifting. And God on my side.

I'm just glad I found my marathon book which is short, precise and to the point and while it does feature some uplifting stories it actually reads like it's written for an intelligent reader and not somebody with the attention span of a four-year-old who doesn't notice the same story turns up in the book about three times and wants to make you say: "Yes, dear. Your mother was so happy you were running the marathon she arrived in the stadium TWO HOURS EARLY!! Please don't tell me again. Thank you."