22. Weather and BIRD MURDER, hot topics (poo/fire), nothing about running (even though that's all I do now)

After my last post in this here blahg I was able to unjinx the weather, but whoever jinxed us must be a great wizard - my skillful and powerful writing fixed things for only a short time, and we soon lapsed back into coldness: snow! wind!

Here's what happened earlier this week: One day as I was walking home innocently enjoying the springiness and studying the neighborhood sidewalks (I am becoming kind of a huge expert on Missoula sidewalks ca. 1910s-1950s, and I may or may not in the near to distant future publish a pretty great coffee table book on the subject), suddenly in front of me a tiny black and red bird flew with a magpie in hot pursuit. The two birds experienced a midair collision orchestrated by the magpie. The tiny bird flew to a tree and the magpie followed. And then the tiny bird flew to flee and the magpie flew to strike. The tiny bird landed in a driveway and the magpie landed next to it and with its baneful beak struck a fatal blow to the neck of the tiny black and red bird. I thought maybe the tiny bird was playing dead or being submissive - the strike was so quick and seemed so innocuous. I started walking towards them to break it up, to scare the magpie away, but the tiny black and red bird was dead and the murderous magpie, Pica pica canibalis (or P. pica horribilis), took the tiny black and red bird's body in its beak and flew up to a rooftop to gloat and squawk. The incident was weird, kind of upsetting, and clearly meant more than you might think it meant. The murderous P. pica/winter dealt a death-blow to the tiny black and red bird/spring, and we have suffered ever since.

Lately I've been kind of downtrodden and/or extremely frustrated and I'm going to project that onto all of Missoula now. We Missoulians are kind of downtrodden and/or extremely frustrated these days and I think it's because of all the dog poo. There's dog poo everywhere - we don't know what to do. It's because of the dogs. We have so many dogs, and our dogs need to run and they need to poo, it's what dogs do. So what are we to do? Clean up after them? No! Keep our dogs on a leash? No! How will our dogs run really fast then, huh? But some people want our dogs kept on leashes so they won't eat other dogs or get in fights with deers or attack runners or poo all over. We are at loggerheads, we are very mad at each other, we post messages online calling each other bad names. I, for one, walk around kicking rocks and wishing I'd bought some freeking chocolate the last time I went to the store, which I never do (sometimes).

Furthermore, despite our best efforts, towns all across Montana keep burning up, and there seems to be no end to it. It's spreading like the flu. I guess it's only a matter of days before Missoula catches it. Maybe the only remedy to all this fighting and destruction and winter is to get revenge by killing some magpies so it will finally get warm, our towns will stop catching on fire, and the frozen dogpoo will get tracked around and dispersed.

Maybe we all need to take a vacation, get out of town. I don't want to take a vacation, though, I want to travel. The differences between vacationing and traveling are: duration, cleanliness, aesthetics, and notebook size. I want: long, dirty, ugly, and large. Blah blah.

I will probably plant basil soon.

21. Weather, running, consumption

Things are pretty tough in Missoula these days, let me tell you. There we were, enjoying a nice springy winter, getting excited about Dairy Queen and outdoor cinema and running around with no clothes on and all that, and then some jackass goes and jinxes the springtime and ruins everything. What a jerk! Whoever did it probably feels pretty stupid right now, pretty stupid and pretty cold. It was 10 degrees in my mailbox this morning, on Monday morning the windchill was seven below when I walked to work.

So instead of watching outdoor movies like I ought to be, I'm still going to indoor movie festivals. Dude, I've seen so many movies lately, dude. And films. The best one was about woodpeckers, but I missed the beginning and the end of that one. What I did see of it was super good and sometimes I dream about it (or so I'd like to have you believe). I've also seen movies and/or films about: twisting, easy riding, Wilco (♥), Italian virgins, animatronic restaurant bands, late '50s degenerate youth and the dangers of weak fathers and driving cars off cliffs, a house in Seattle, Frankenstein's monster's love life (so bad), and a barbershop.

In other news, I just discovered that I'm practically famous. True story! I'm in the slideshow of photos from 2008 on the Missoula Marathon website. I'm not the lady running across the Higgins Street bridge, I'm not the dude with the beard, I'm not the skinny guy winning the marathon, I'm not the people in the dark, I'm not the girl running by the river, I'm not running at all, actually. It's funny that I didn't discover this until eight months later - for two weeks after the race it was all I could think about and I kept going to the website and looking at the results, looking at pictures, writing about the race, talking about the race, thinking about the race, surreptitiously saving other people's photos onto my hard drive, etc. etc. etc. I saved the splits in my watch until, um, January, actually, when I had to clear the memory to make room for keeping track of all the dozens of laps I was doing in the rec center.

The training group has started! There are hundreds of us, it's fun. Problem: I can't breathe. I don't know what's going to happen.

QUARTERLY UPDATE, RESOLUTIONS (a few weeks early): Well done, I must say. For transparency I will report that I have imbibed of the drip coffee at work three (3) times, but those instances were minor, justified, and as follows: twice a small amount in my hot chocolate, and once a small amount to dilute my horrible horrible instant Cafe Au Crap (corn syrup solids so offend my delicate palate they make me want to brush my teeth, die, and barf).