I am very tired. I'd love nothing more to go close my office door, take the phone off the hook, and sleep until lunch while the world outside thinks I'm "taking a phone call".
Saturday was a banner day. I got up and ran 10 miles, my longest long run of the year. I plan to hang at about 10 miles until early summer, since 10 is enough when training for 5k races. I was still a bit sore from lifting on Thursday (squats, dead lift, leg presses). Then I caught up on some stuff around the house (damn dishes will be my undoing!). I hit the road about 2:30, headed for my parents house to help out with some stuff around their farm and hang out with my brother. As previously mentioned, my old college roommate, Jim Miller, is a UFC fighter, so we were planning to go to Applebee's to watch his fight.
But before that could happen, my parents needed some help with some roofing, and some work on the chicken coops, and some feed unloaded. My brother tore ligaments in his ankle earlier in the year, so his foot is in a cast and he's been benched for the first half of the year. Good thing I only live 2 hours away (yay, lucky me...). I busted my ass for about 4 hours (even though I'd already put in 10 miles that morning), and we got out the door just barely quick enough to make the prelim fights. It was a good event overall, the food was as good as Applebee's food can be, and the beer was cold. Somewhere along the line I've forgotten what it feels like to stay up late, and getting to bed at 1:30 doesn't sit too well with me.
Sunday, up at 7:30 to finish the last of the roofing work and a few other random tasks (one of which will get an entire paragraph in a minute), and eat a plate of breakfast that was absolutely unholy in size (4 hash browns, 5 scrambled eggs, 5 slices of bacon, and 2 big biscuits). I didn't get back on the road until 11, and once I did make it home I was too tired to actually accomplish anything else.
The aforementioned ridiculous random task can only be described as "shoveling pumpkin pie". Mom had gotten her hands on around a dozen or so leftover pumpkins after Halloween, with the intention of busting them up to feed to her chickens through the winter so that they'd get something besides the usual corn. They were sitting on a pile of hay in an old storage shed, and about 8 of them hadn't been touched since being put there. When the weather is cool, and they're kept out of the sun, I guess pumpkins can last a long time. But we've had several warm stretches so far this year, and several very wet stretches. The pumpkins had gone from round to kind of squished down ovals, with no hope of being picked up by hand. They really were like pumpkin pie surrounded by soft vegetable skin. So I had no choice but to shovel them into a wheelbarrow with a coal shovel. So if anyone ever asks you, "What do you know about West Virginia, what is it like?", you can tell them that it is a beautiful and scenic place where we shovel pumpkins for chickens.
I'm glad today was an easy run, because tomorrow will be a 4 mile tempo run, and I need at least another solid night of sleep before I can try to tackle that. Overall, it was a pretty good weekend - my buddy won his fight, my Hokies lost their game (out of the NIT in the second round), I enjoyed some food, family, and friends, and to top it all off, I shoveled some pumpkins.
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