Missoula has been experiencing a rash of squirrel-death of late and, despite our healthy population of the little buggers, I wonder if come wintertime there will be any squirrels left. There are squirrels lying dead under trees on campus, squirrel bodies lining every street, squirrel pelts in the middle of the roads getting flatter and flatter with each car that drives over them. The other morning on the side of River Pines Road there was a... like, a, well, it had been raining, so the squirrel was wet, but it also kind of looked like it had been skinned. I'm sure it was very juicy and teeming with fauna. It smelled bad.
Want to hear the grossest story ever? Okay! A couple weeks ago at the mouth of a driveway I saw a squirrel whose back half had been squashed, you know, half of it was pancaked and stuck to the road. But the front part was still okay AND STILL ALIVE. THIS POOR LITTLE SQUIRREL. Still trying to push itself up with its poor little arms, all it could do was sit there in Modified Plank Pose and hope to be rescued by a kind-hearted veterinarian who would give it an ostomy pouching system and some little contraption for it to wheel its flattened half around on. However, unfortunately for the squirrel, there was a crow - THERE WAS A CROW - and the crow had decided to put the poor bastard squirrel out of its misery. The crow was all, "Yum, fresh!" and the squirrel was all, "Oh god." The crow knocked the squirrel's front living half over, the squirrel pushed itself back up. The poor bastard, there was nothing it could do except maybe try to punch the crow with one of its poor little fuzzy mammal arms. I drove on, heartlessly. (Who am I to play god!) It kind of made me want to barf.
Hey, anyway. The running season is practically over, basically. Oh sure there's still the big race and stuff, but the biggest training run is done and it's all downhill from here. On Sunday we did 15 miles, but it turned out to actually be 15.35 miles, which can and should be rounded up to 15.4 miles, which, after a feat of clever mathematics, is pretty much 20, which is just a 10K shy of a full marathon. It was fine. The training has been pretty easy for me this year except for those two months of being sick and all that falling. I mean that the training has been easy for me structurally. My feet just started hurting a couple weeks ago - last year they hurt the whole time - and on Sunday my left hip started hurting. My left hip has never hurt before so that's pretty exciting. Also my right shin/ankle started hurting on Sunday, and today my calves are still sore. But other than this, I've been fine this year. Oh, also I have a black toenail again. Last year, in addition to the black toenail, I was limping around for a month or two, my right hip hurt so bad it was audible, I had achilles tendonitis for a few weeks at the beginning of the season, and I felt tired and beat up all the time. This year is better because I've turned to performance enhancing drugs.
Weather: It is now the summertime. Yesterday was very cold, very very cold. I wished I had gloves when I rode my bike to work, and I wished I had gloves when I rode home after work. I walked to the drug store in the evening for more performance enhancements and the sun came out and shone hotly upon the land and I got all sweaty, even my legs were sweaty. Then I went to Dairy Queen for a nut whip and got really cold. Whenever I order a nut whip they look at me funny. Hey, I didn't make up the name, it's not my fault.
LATE-BREAKING NEWS: So I'm at lunch today, right? And there's this crow flying high overhead cawwing its head off and being annoying, right? And there are these crows having a cawfest in a tree, right? And so I get done with lunch and I'm walking on an innocent sidewalk and the cawfest gets louder and louder and suddenly this crow drops out of the tree and lands in a rumpled splat on the ground right next to the sidewalk. Scares the crap out of me. The crow stands up and looks around, mouth agape. I stop and stare to see if it's going to die or attack me or what. It hopped away. Hopped away to die under a bush? Freaky.
P.S. Speaking of the beasts, and myself, you know how I got a bunch of scars because I kept falling this spring? And you know how there have been so many mosquitoes in Missoula? Well the mosquitoes apparently like scar tissue. I don't know why, they're morons.
No comments:
Post a Comment