Go, you chicken fat, go away!

This morning Vickie and I went to hike the Pass Mountain Trail.  I had done this once before with my friend Paul Niccolls.  Vickie and I did a part of it with Herbie a couple of months ago.  We got up early and Emily was already up.  Oh brother.  We were afraid this would happen because we only have one other daughter at home right now to watch her.  But Emily is getting better at being self sufficient.  Anyway, we left and she was fine. 

The first thing we saw when we got there was a couple with some cages and a big red macaw.  They let the macaw loose and it flew in a big circle and landed back on the lady's arm.  Then they let two other birds out of their cages.  I don't know what kind of birds they were.  I think maybe a dove and a colorful pigeon.

We started hiking, and I had told Vickie that I wanted to push the pace.  So we did what we could.  We got passed twice.  We saw other hikers and some mountain bikers.  We stopped once at 4 miles to eat.  We both ran out of water by the time we were done.  So this hike was just about right.  It was warming up.  It's supposed to be over 110 again today.

Today was my first day running since our hike on Sunday.  It kinda wiped me out, and it's been sooo hot here lately.  The high today is supposed to be 115º.  I fell asleep real early last night.  In fact, I woke up at midnight thinking it was probably 4am.  So I went back to sleep and was woken up an hour later by Herbie barking and barking and barking.  He wouldn't shut up.  Finally I got up and saw that there were kittens in the street.  After that I couldn't get back to sleep until 4am.  Then I woke up at 5:30am. 

I wasn't sure I even wanted to run.  I've been keeping the boys busy all week with surveys.  Two days ago they were having trouble surveying a lot even though it was less than a quarter of a mile away from the one they did the day prior.  The problem was that it was surrounded by power lines.  They couldn't go outside of the power lines or the radio connection stopped working.  So they weren't able to go get the control points at the section corners.  I told them to just survey the lot and then we would come back out with the conventional equipment and make the adjustment as needed.  So I went out with them yesterday.  After a couple of hours of walking around, I was exhausted.  If I had been out there any longer, even though I was drinking water, I could've seen myself getting heat exhaustion.

Anyway, I've felt crummy all week, so I decided to just do one loop.  I saw Sis. Porter.  She was running, so I didn't think I'd catch up to her.  But then she stopped so I did catch up to her so that we could have an awkward conversation.  Me: Good morning.  Her:  Morning.  How's it going?  Me:  Oh, pretty good.  Her: giggle.  Me:  It's sooo warm!  The end.

Saturdays used to be reserved for my "long" runs.  Now it's just so hot and I'm so out of shape, that this is just about all I can do.