Stumbling Through Adulthood

Start line and Finish line are NOT at the same place. They are 1.5 miles apart. There are no shuttle and no Metro bus.

REALLY?

I guess we'll either take two cars with Perry and us and shuffle, or see if Anne-Chloe is willing to meet us at the finish and take us to a car. I'm sorry, I'm not sure I will want to walk another 1.5 mile after the half and Perry will not want to take an extra step after a full.

1. Because the Dems caved, looks like Perry is headed down to California! So one thing good about the #$%($$(%!!!! fuckers caving to Trump and the fucking Rs. I just can't. I am so angry. My two senators are solid nos but I called them this morning to say thanks for the no vote, and please get fucking Schumer and Durbin out of leadership now because what they did was unconscionable.

2. As part of our half-marathon prep, we walked 10 miles on Saturday, after a few hours of work cleaning at the boathouse (yearly clean-up day). We finished, but much more tired that I'd have liked. And my new same brand shoes are not as comfortable as my old shoes were, but since they don't make the old shoes any longer, I had to get a new model, sigh.

3. I have to sit down and get Thanksgiving menus and plans sorted out. Note that my dining room table is still covered with my MIL's stuff, sigh. I've dealt with some of it, but a lot of what is there needs to be done by dh, imo, not me. We'll get to it, though it's annoying that I can't sit at my table to make my plans like I usually do! 🤣

OK, fine. 4 things.

4. This weekend my mom's move was on, then off, then on, then off, then on. At least I think it's currently on. Looks like it's happening this week. Dh has an MD appointment that I want to be around for (don't know if I'd go with him but I want to be immediately available in case things don't go well) so I can't get down this week. So sister and BIL have to deal with the move, with Larry's family helping, I guess. He does have a really big family so at least they.

1. Dh and Anne-Chloe are going to Reading PA for a weekend in February, to go on a ride on a train being pulled by a steam locomotive on the main line. This is a major deal, LOL. I'm so happy Anne-Chloe was willing and able to go with him: I'd have gone, of course, and probably had a great time, but I don't really-really want to go. They should have a great time!

2. I need a new bra (or two) but I don't want to go bra shopping, sigh. But I have to. I think I'll take light rail or a bus from work to dt Seattle and then get a bus back to dt Redmond. It's stupid that I can get from the uni to dt Bellevue, but not easily the 4 miles from dt Bellevue to dt Redmond. Can't wait for the light rail to go all the way there, rather than stopping at Microsoft.

3. My shoes, after spending almost a month going back and forth over the Tampa Bay bridge were finally returned to me, 2.5 months after I mailed them out. Since it was for a warranty claim, I'm going to try to see if the gal I've been chatting with on twitter will help me out. Because at this point, it looks like I had the shoes for five months and am complaining that they're trashed, but no, they were dead within three months! I just really have no idea why, at some point, in Redmond, they covered up the "to" address and shipping the package diagonally across the country. Make that make sense, USPS!

I wrote about how my shoes got trashed waaay too soon for shoes that expensive. They were outside the amazon return window, so I decided to return them to the company (the rep on twitter suggested it), even though they might not replace or refund, because eh, otherwise they were hitting the trash and after two months, I at least wanted to try to get some money back, LOL.

The company is in San Diego.

I bought the postage online on 19 October and dropped them in the package bin inside the post office the next afternoon.

A week later when I checked on them, the USPS had no record of them.

Now it's pretty hard to file a claim when a package hasn't been scanned into the system at all. As in, there is no easy way of doing it. I went to the post office, no dice, they pretty much blew me off. I sent an email through the grievance part of the site and got back a message in such broken English I am still not sure what it was supposed to mean. So I did some more research.

On 6 November, I initiated a "missing mail" claim on the package, figuring that would at least force the post office to look for it.

A few weeks go by. Nothing.

Then, miracle! Package has been located, it seems, in the "Unclaimed/Being Returned to Sender" bin in Redmond? Is victory mine? Hint: no.

The next day, it's in Seattle. OK, maybe it's going to leave from there, headed south to San Diego.

Nope. Spokane. On the east side of the state... almost Idaho. WTF?

It only gets worse from there. After Spokane, my shoes spend a few days "In Transit to Next Facility" before resurfacing in... Indianapolis. Now even someone terrible at geography can tell just by looking at a map that San Diego and Indianapolis are... not in the same direction.

A few days later they're in.... Ybor City, Florida. Yeah, Indiana wasn't so bad, I guess. For the past 10 days, they've been bouncing back and forth from Ybor City and Seminole, Florida. I'm pretty sure that's a toll bridge. I'm glad I'm not paying their tolls.

What the ever-loving hell is going on?

Full details of the journey, if you read from the bottom up!





Dear USPS, please admit you've lost my shoes, and send me a check for $97.91, what I paid for the shoes, and $9.20. Total of $107.11, and you can toss them in Tampa Bay (really, though, don't) and stop paying the tolls to transport them back and forth and back and....

It's cold out, about 10+ degrees colder than we usually walk. I've hiked in these temps before, but this feels different. I added -bad move, from STP experience, changing something day of- a base layer because, well, it's cold. Hopefully it won't be a bad move. Being cold feels... daunting. I feel a bit sausaged and my bottoms are harder to adjust to comfort but I really really don't want to be cold.

Eating some milk rusks. Have gummi bears. Will walk.

OMFG, WHY?

Two days before our half: my hip is hurting. This has not happened in, well, months. Or longer. I can't remember the last time my hip hurt, absent actual injury.

And one of my big toes has something going on around the nail. I've had ingrown toenails before. Fingers crossed it's not that, sigh.

Going to pick up our race packets this afternoon, in just a little while.

Today was our last long training walk for the half marathon next Sunday: 12 miles. Which we did on the trail. It was long.

My heels continue to hurt, sigh. Aside from that, I feel pretty ok during the walk and just need a brief rest to feel ok again.

Dh hurt his foot today, no idea why, hopefully nothing serious, just a freaking looooooong walk.

Weather was good.

I ate waaaay too many gummi bears and Swedish fish, LOL.

Plan for the week is 3 milers on Tuesday and early Thursday (or maybe we'll find a Turkey trot!) and then the half on Sunday.

This week's long walk was supposed to be 9 miles. Ooof.

We decided to have dh come into Seattle and we could walk from the university, over the 520 floating bridge, back to the Eastside, all the way to MS.

Which is kinda what we did. We walked. It was long. The weather gods, however, were kind and the rain held off.

We ended up being over 9 miles with about 1.5 miles to go, so we decided that the other end of the MS campus was fine and got the light rail for the additional bit. We still did a total of 10 miles and change, and since I'd had a full day of running around at work before then, I got over 30k steps. I'm tired, LOL.

A few photos....

On the eastern high rise with the bridge and Seattle behind us.



From Strava. The steps there are dh's, he carries my phone when we've been walking (I didn't have pockets the first few times so...)



My Fitbit data!


We texted those to our large family chat (with my sibs etc). My comment was that I was going to eat lots of pizza! But Anne-Chloe's response just cracked me up!



Over 10 miles, officially. Next week we were planning on stopping to do a hike on our way down to Bend, but we were going to have to double back a bit on it, since it was only 9 miles, but I might just take it and call this our 10 miler, LOL.

I have three pairs of new sneakers arriving in the next few days to try on (thanks Amazon!). It's hard to find wide sizes in store, so.

What really gets me? So many of these sneakers are hideous and so fucking many are colors like "ecru" and "oatmeal" and "silver" and other euphemisms for white-and-will-be-filthy-after-the-first-rain. WTF, people?

Taking about rain. That I could find nobody does waterproof sneakers in wide sizes. 😪

I hope one of those pairs fit because my beloved low hikers on pavement is not ideal and we have an 8 mile walk on Saturday that I'm going to have to do in them, having had to do a 7 miler in 'em last week, and it's not great.

Second 6 mile walk of our training. Not like we haven't done that distance before, but now is where it gets real: next week is 7, and it goes up a mile a week until OMG, the half marathon. WTF was I thinking?

We went to my wildland park to do our 6 miles. Yeah, we could have gone on paved trail, but it feels so good to be in the woods etc. We're a bit slower, but there are more ups and downs.

For 7, I was thinking about doing the Skyline Trail at Mt Rainier, it's about 5.5 miles, but there are numerous side trails. The problem? Everyone else is heading up to Rainier these days too! There are apparently 5+ mile lines to get in, and parking is impossible to find.

Over the summer, they did timed entry. While it fucked us over (the date we wanted to go was wet and raining, so we skipped, and I wasn't able to get a campsite or a timed entry any other time I looked) I think it's going to be inevitable.

So yeah. That's where we're at. Still have to figure out how we deal with food/water and clothing during the race. I hope it doesn't rain.