Weekend play-by-play

All I wanted to do yesterday was sit on the porch in my pajamas and drink a huge pot of coffee with Matt. That did not happen, so I woke up early today to drink coffee and bum to my heart's content before church. This is the best way to wake up.

Friday Matt and Stephen went to the Allman Brothers concert in Raleigh with Terry and Dan and some other people. Lauren G. and Amanda and I went to see "Man on Wire," a documentary about a French guy who snuck into the World Trade Center and tightrope-walked between the towers, at the Sunrise Theatre. Lauren and I had planned to have a drink afterward (Amanda had a paper to write besides being cut off from alcohol for the foreseeable future), but I had such a splitting headache that I had to go home and sleep.

Eleven hours did the trick and I felt good enough Saturday morning to join Kate for the AutumnFest 5K race. Somehow, I had never run that race before, despite its having been around for 30 years. I was glad she talked me into it, not only because I got to see her for the first time in a couple of weeks, but because both of us ran our best 5K times since college, maybe even high school. It was a great course -- flat first mile, uphill second mile, mostly downhill third mile -- and the weather was perfect. I think I ran a 21:21, a 6:52/mile pace, and she beat me by five seconds. We took second and third place in women's overall.

Afterward we walked around AutumnFest for a few minutes and each bought some books at a book sale. The race results still weren't posted an hour after the race, and the awards ceremony wasn't for another half-hour, but I had to leave to do last-minute yard work on our rental house because the new people were moving in around 1 p.m.

I called to check in with Matt, who was drinking a huge pot of coffee, probably in his pajamas, probably on the porch. I picked him up and we went to the house and sprayed weeds, trimmed some more bushes, bagged clippings and cut the grass. I volunteered to cut the grass because we had borrowed Terry and Dan's super-nice, surely expensive, self-propelled, gas mower for this outrageously overgrown yard (it would have taken a month and several stays at a mental institution to cut that grass with our free, quiet, manual mower). I figured it was just as well not to remind Matt what he's missing out on.

From there we met Stephen and Ron at one of Matt's family's rental houses that also just became vacant. There we did more yardwork until about 4:30 p.m. By that time I was seriously ready for a shower and a nap. But first Matt and Stephen and I rode out to Foxcroft and walked through Carrie and Jacob's and Stephen's houses. Jacob and Carrie will be moving in in two weeks, which is incredible.

When we finally got home Matt wanted to do yardwork at our house too, since we were already in the mode, and I told him he was welcome to but I needed to close my eyes. Thankfully, he decided it could wait until today. We were starving and ate an early dinner and then I fell asleep on the porch, then on the couch, and a couple of hours later Matt woke me up and we went to bed. Today I feel very rested.

P.S. I've been a sorry excuse for a blogger this week, but so much has been going on. Thanks for sticking with me.