seeping

I thought I was going to sleep on the air mattress. I was ready to sleep on the air mattress. I laid down on the air mattress and attempted to sleep.

The air mattress was seeping air. 

I could hear it. 

Do you know how distracting it is to hear and feel the mattress beneath you losing air as you try to fall asleep?

I will give you a hint: I, for one, cannot sleep while that is happening. 

I tried anyway, and I managed to achieve that half-asleep stage where you cannot fully deal with the problem, but you are also not fully asleep.

Then the air mattress pretty much fully deflated. 

I don't know what time that was. I do know that I was really glad that I had already moved my sleeping pad for camping. 

I stumbled into the closet, grabbed the sleeping pad, stumbled back to the deflated air mattress, and sat on it, with my eyes closed, blowing into the valve.

I then slept approximately like one does while camping: badly.

Fortunately, my new roommate has been sleeping on one mattress atop another on the floor and was willing to loan me one of them, so I will be sleeping tonight on a blissful layer of coils and polyester.

one place

Moving is the worst. The worst ever.

I have moved, this year, ten times. I have gotten better at the logistics but there is no improving the emotions. The emotions only get stronger with too many transitions in too short a time. The human psyche was not intended to survive so many changes and so much uncertainty.

Although some people thrive on it. I don't get those people. I don't even like backpacking around Europe. I'm happy to travel, sure, but give me a place to leave my stuff. It works like this: get a hotel. Leave your stuff there. Go see the town. Come back to your stuff.

Similarly with travel in general: leave your stuff at home. Travel. Come back to your stuff. It's lovely that way.

I am sleeping on an air mattress tonight, but there is this: I have a year-long lease on this apartment. I signed a lease. 

That means that I have to come up with the rent every month. It also means that I don't have to move for a year. 

I've never been so happy to be tied to one place.

evening

People complain when the days are so hot, but I love the hot days, if only for the evenings, when the air is still warm and heat still radiates from concrete and the air smells like distant smoke. Even better if I can walk in the warmth, in the dark; still better on gravel that crunches under my feet. 

It feels like home. 

feets, pain

It hurts to walk right now, and it's my own fault. I neglected the necessary upkeep on my heels. You know, keeping them from getting dry and cracked? I have had an amazing foot scraper, but I haven't replaced it in years, and it needs to be replaced every now and then or it loses its texture, which it seems to have done. Thus, limping. 

Two days ago I broke down and bought one of those little grater things that they use on your feet when you get a pedicure, and I took that to my feet, to no avail.

Last night I asked if the K.s had any epsom salts, because my feet hurt more than ever. They did not, but D. offered me something called Bag Balm. Bag Balm was apparently developed for the udders of milk cows, to keep them from getting chapped. I am now drenching my heels in udder ointment multiple times a day. 

I am also wearing closed shoes in the 88 degree heat, which is fine. As I used to annoy people by saying, "It's cooler than South Sudan!" (It's always cooler here than South Sudan at its hottest.) I just cannot stand to think of all the filth that would get into the cracks in my foot if I were wearing sandals.

Is it just me, or does wearing rubber sandals make your feet extra dry? 

Walking hurts. 

I walk anyway. 

I happened upon a street fair today, just at random, so I meandered up and down the street, running into two sets of people I know (Gone West is smaller than you'd think). At one intersection, the organizers of the street fair had imported a large circle of grass, with benches, and people were lounging about. Above them, the traffic signal continued its cycle through green - amber - red - green - amber, signaling to no vehicles.

suitcase

I am becoming an expert at living out of a suitcase. I've been doing it for seven months, after all.

Each time I move, the number of clothing items that I consider essential drops. When I first got back from the Mitten, I had a big suitcase and two little ones that all contained vital items. Now it's down to the two little ones. The big one is in the K.s' barn, full of things that I don't need to see again until winter hits. (I still have a bunch of dresses on hangers, though, of course. I lurve dresses.)

Two and a half months ago, I moved into this little sanctuary of an apartment. I needed some space to myself so very badly, and I found it here in this cozy studio facing west. 

I love it here, but my time is up. The actual renter of this apartment is returning, and I'm moving back into the K.s' spare room, because I have nowhere else to go and no money to pay for it. I could barely afford this place. I managed it, somehow, but I didn't complete enough projects in August, and so I haven't gotten paid in almost a month. I may not get paid for another month. (It is not enough to do the work, the way I am paid right now. I have to finish a chunk of work, and then I can bill. I hate it.)

When first I got into my car and drove toward the Mitten in February, it was my goal to be back in Gone West by this weekend, for the wedding I attended last night. 

When I turned my car around and drove back to Gone West, also in February, I could not have imagined that I would still be homeless six months later. I really couldn't. I thought something would come together, and I would have a job and a little apartment by now.

One of the attorneys I work with keeps telling me that the economy is terrible for this. It isn't me, he keeps telling me, it's the economy.

That may be true, but it's wearing on me.

There are some really, really good things in my life right now, but they aren't enough to stave off the constant anxiety about the bills I cannot pay.

sick feeling

What happens every time I start attempting to write something here lately is that I want to talk about Ebola, and the sick feeling in my stomach when things are going badly in Liberia, a feeling that I felt most of my teenage years and only lost c. 2003 when the war ended.

The sick feeling is back.

Oh, Liberia, Liberia, Liberia. Why does Liberia seem to get the worst end of every tragedy?

That question is basically the reason why I studied community development in undergrad and why I went to law school. I still don't have an answer.

I am fighting the urge to up and go to Liberia and spend my days giving Ebola patients oral rehydration salts and maybe persuading them to try statins? (Have you read the stuff about statins and Ebola? I would try them if I got Ebola.)

It's very strange how life just goes on here. At least now there is the internet, while in 1991 I was cutting out tiny snippets of news about Liberia's civil war from the newspaper and pasting them into a scrapbook.

Now I can read an article about Ebola, shoot it off in an email to interested parties, and go get dressed up for a date with a cute guy. It is very disorienting, and also very sad.

plenty

It's kind of crazy that one can be unemployed and still be insanely busy. At some point, it just sounds like I am making this up, like someone is going to start asking, "How can you be so busy if you don't have a job, huh? Huh?"

Well, there is the finding work to pay the bills, the doing the work to pay the bills, the constant anxiety about finding enough work to pay the bills, and the constant anxiety about doing enough work to pay the bills. Also the looking for a real job to end the rest of it. It all adds up.

Oh, and did I mention that I will be homeless again in a week? 

There is plenty going on.

Meanwhile, I have driven over the mountains to Sunny Ski Town a time or two. I tried to explain to my mom why this is one of my favorite drives, but it's hard to explain everything that happens in three hours of driving except to say that there is farmland and then forest and then mountain and then forest and then open range with snow-capped peaks off to the side and then suddenly you are descending into a golden-brown canyon and then back out, and then there is more farmland high in the desert, and then there is a canyon so deep that signs warn about letting dogs loose near it, and then there are crazy rocks off to one side with more snowy mountains on the other.

This state, I tell you. It will wrap you up in its beauty and ruin you for anywhere else.

neck

A couple of times a year, I become convinced that I am dying, due to the fact that my gums get swollen and painful. Isn't this a sign of impending death?

I thought so the first few times anyway, but now I just have a moment or seven of panic before I remember that this is what happens these days when my allergies get bad: my sinuses swell into my gums. Lovely.

That's been going on this last week or so, and then I woke up on Sunday morning unable to move my head. 

I googled about, holding my phone in front of my immobile face, and discovered that the cause of this type of crick in one's neck tends to be either soft tissue or some little bone that gets out of place but would go back if the muscles weren't too tense to let it.

Which is all fine, except that it kept me from sleeping the next night, due to the precision with which I must place my head in order to be free from pain. It turns out that being the sort of person who moves about a lot in my sleep does not bode well for sleeping with my head precisely placed.

It gets better during the day - a hot shower this morning was the best thing for it - but I am very afraid of trying to sleep again, and even more afraid of my red-eye flight to the Mitten tomorrow. Why am I so frequently damaged when getting on planes?

cupcake

*discussion of gluten-free products to follow*

Last night, I needed a cupcake. I mean, look. Sometimes you just need a cupcake. I needed a cupcake.

I picked up some groceries at Trader Joe's and W@lm@rt. (I was talking to someone later who started laughing and said, "That may be the only time in history that someone has mentioned those two places in the same sentence like that.") Sitting in the W@lm@rt parking lot, I started googling cupcakes.

All the gluten-free cupcakes were either far across town or closed, so I just started driving down a street with a lot of interesting restaurants on it.

I briefly considered getting ice cream instead - there is a good ice cream store on that street - but the line was out the door and down the block, and waiting in it alone seemed boring.

At the last minute before the turn to go back to my house, I remembered the natural foods store. They would have something. Gluten-free cookies, or something.

But lo! They actually had gluten-free cupcakes from a bakery in town (one of the places that closes early).

I got a chocolate one with chocolate icing, and I brought it home.

Then I ate a bunch of watermelon and raspberries and I almost wasn't hungry for it, but I soldiered on. I wasn't letting the cupcake go. 

It was delicious.

summer

This has felt like a weird summer. 

Maybe every summer feels weird once you are no longer in school, I don't know. There isn't the change in schedule that we grow up expecting to have. Life just goes on, warmer weather notwithstanding.

Sometimes I forget all-together that it is summer. I mean, I forgot about watermelon until my dad mentioned it the other day as a hydration technique. Summer was specifically designed for the eating of watermelon, and I just forgot about it? This is ridiculous.

Admittedly, the size of an average watermelon is such that trying to go through one on my own can be a little daunting. I have thrown out a great deal of festering watermelon over the last seven summers.

But I bought one a couple of days ago, and I have been gorging myself nightly. Summer is here.

That and the raspberries. Oh, the raspberries.

failure at naps, vegetarianism

Today was one of those days where I only managed to get up after five hours of sleep by promising myself that I would take a nap.

Famous last words.

Of course a bunch of things suddenly became urgent, and I spent my allotted nap time working frantically to download a finicky program and to try to open files that required the program.

I miss that nap I never had.

...

Over the weekend, I went out to the coast. It is summer now, so the glorious power of the weather that rules the coast in the winter was missing. The coast in the summer is more like a beach with water too cold for swimming. (Meaning: pretty but useless.)

I joke. I love the coast in any season.

You pretty much just have to mention the word "coast" and I will be in the car with my seatbelt on before you can turn your head to figure out where I've gone.

I ate bacon.

I remember the last time I ate bacon. It was when we helped my sister move to Mountain State in 2010. "I'm going to eat BACON!" I kept saying, but then when we got it at the restaurant, it wasn't that good and I only made it through one slice.

This bacon was amazing. I didn't even set out to eat it, but there it was for breakfast and it had pepper on the edge of it and what can I say? It was amazing. I want more of it. More bacon.

I fail as a vegetarian.

Other vegetarian failures in the last few weeks: other pork, chicken (I always cheat with chicken).

dress

My friend and I looked at each other over her ancient, crusty car battery after we discovered that neither of us had jumper cables.

"Maybe the guys at the shop will come over here to install the new battery," she said.

"You'd better put on a short skirt," I said. I was already wearing a dress. (White. Not the best move when working on a car.)

"That is exactly what I was thinking," she said.

"Heels?" she asked.

"Always a good idea."

"I'll put on the bright lipstick, too," she said.

Thus attired for battle, we set out for the tire store. (Look, the sexism is there. We were merely acknowledging it.)

We* were not successful in flirting our way into getting the guy at the counter to offer someone to come out to her house to replace the battery for us (not our fault; it is a big chain and I suspect they have policies), but he did put the battery in my trunk so we could try to swap them out ourselves.

"Is that a sword?" he asked.

"Yes, but it's not sharp," I said. "It's a practice sword."

"Right..." he said, dubious.

We utterly failed at switching out the batteries, due to the mysterious disappearance of the correct size wrench from her tool kit.

Instead, we ran to the nearest big box store and bought a cheap set of jumper cables.

My wee little beastie did a right good job of getting a newer, more expensive car back on the road. And I didn't even get my dress dirty.

* She did all the work, really. I was distracted by a phone call that I had to deal with immediately.

outdoors

I have a four popsicle a day limit. I have to draw the line somewhere.

It's just that I get so thirsty here in the summer.

I just compared the humidity in my hometown in the Mitten with the humidity in Gone West. 

Mitten: 93%

Gone West: 57%

(For reference, Monrovia, Liberia: 94%.)

So all the water in my body is being sucked out by the lack of humidity, basically. I would be happiest being much closer to an equilibrium between the water in my body and the water outside. 

...

I was wearing a skirt today that is sort of peach and cream. Orange and cream? It has a slightly shiny finish. I like it.

As I was walking toward a building for a meeting, a bee landed on my skirt. I ignored it, hoping it would go away. Instead, it crawled over the bottom hem of my skirt and started up the underside.

I was not going to keep walking with a bee up my skirt, so I stopped and turned the hem inside out to try to remove the bee without getting stung.

"That's a very pretty skirt," a woman said, walking by.

"Thanks," I said. "I'm having trouble convincing this bee that the skirt isn't a flower."

The bee finally crawled onto my hand, and I blew on it, hard, and it flew away.

all you can do is try

A couple of nights ago, I went to bed at 1:30 am after staying up too late to work on a project. I set my alarm for 7:00 am, and I was not pleased at the thought of getting up at that time.

The fire alarm in my building went off at 3:22 am. 

I was severely disoriented, as one is when a fire alarm wakes you up smack in the middle of your first REM cycle, but I managed to gather the most vital things (computer, phone), throw on a sweatshirt, and stumble down the stairs. (I couldn't find my glasses, so it was rather a dim stumbling.)

The firemen came. (It should be firepeople but there are never any women.) They did their thing. The alarm went off. I got back into bed.

By this time, it was almost 4 am, and I had three hours to sleep.

The sleeping did not go well. It was that sort of sleep where you are hyper aware of the fact that you have to get up too soon, and so you never really sleep. 

When I got up, not having slept much at all, I ended up cancelling the thing I had to be up for so that I could get in at least two solid hours of sleep.

And for some reason, that night was apparently the end of my ability to sleep. I have no explanation. I just toss and turn every night now.

...

I drove down to Universe City yesterday, and I saw it with new eyes. I was so unhappy to leave Gone West in 2010 that I never noticed what a pretty little city Universe City is, with the hills all around.

My friend and former neighbor had a slip-and-slide set up in the yard for her son. We sat out under a tree, talking, while the kittens ran around and the sun shone and her little boy tried to put her earrings back into her ear. She laid down on the blanket so the baby would move and put my hands on her stomach so I could feel the strange little bulges under her skin.

I went to a party with some of my old coworkers. One of them drove a remote control car around the back alley like it was a drunk cat, chasing the kids, threatening our feet. These people, these people. I miss them. I miss the camaraderie of the little back corner of the building where four of us had offices, where we could yell questions back and forth, where I could go plop myself into a chair in any of their offices and get the benefit of 45 collective years of experience among them all. I would take that back in a second, but I can't, because three of us have moved on.

This afternoon, I had brunch with more lovely people who are leaving Universe City to move across the country. They got great jobs there, and they will be much closer to their family. Still. "You left us!" they said. "But I came back!" I said. "Maybe we'll come back!" they said. I held their munchkin and fed him pieces of broccoli from a little bowl. As I carried him out of the restaurant, an old lady with a walker looked at him with that open admiration that so many of us have when we look at babies.

I wrapped pictures in bubble wrap for another friend who is also moving across the country (curses! why must all my friends move away?).

Then I stopped downtown for tea and some delicious ice cream. I bought a scoop of basil strawberry peppercorn ice cream, and the owner got all excited when I asked about the seasonal corn flavor they had last year (next month, when the strawberries and blueberries are done), and so he gave me a little scoop of smoky caramel ice cream with apricot cardamom chutney on top. I would normally balk at the idea of apricot chutney, but sometimes you have to accept that the purveyors of food have come up with a good combination, and they had. I can't quite explain the flavor, but somehow the two things together made something completely new.

And then I drove home up the ribbon of highway, singing along to the radio.

cone

I made myself some chai this morning and took myself for a walk. Not an exercise walk, just the sort of walk that ensures that I do not miss the entirety of a beautiful day because I am stuck to my computer.

On the way back from my meandering, I saw a truck stopped about 20 feet back from a stoplight. My first thought was to shake my head at Gone West drivers. They love to leave huge gaps between themselves and the crosswalk box/the car in front of them. Space is frequently wasted. 

I had to walk over and back a block to mail a letter, so I walked past the truck three times. By the third time, I had noticed that it wasn't moving through cycles of the light.

"Can you put your hazard lights on?" I called to the woman in the driver's seat.

"No!" she said. "Nothing is working!"

There was a construction site a block over, with a lane of the street blocked off by orange cones. I went over to it and asked the guy loading the flatbed truck if I could use one of his cones. I explained that the truck was stalled in the middle of the road without lights and I was worried that one of the cars coming up on the light wouldn't see that it was stopped and so would run into the back of it.

He came over with me to help try to push the truck out of traffic.

Only the truck was so dead that even putting the key in the running position wouldn't allow her to shift into neutral (I knew there was a reason to drive a manual transmission). 

I waved oncoming cars over into the other lane while the guy from the construction site went to fetch a cone, which was actually more like a skinny orange pole. 

People in this country are so well trained. It's like magic. You put up an orange cone, and cars just miraculously move aside. We didn't even have any authority for the orange cone! We just put it there! In the middle of the road! And people responded like it was an officially sanctioned traffic device!

A van driving by asked if we needed help and I sort of nodded and shrugged at the same time, so they turned around and came back and parked behind the cone.

One of the guys from the van crawled under the truck and did something, I know not what, and suddenly the truck was in neutral. I was in awe. You can do that? I had no idea. 

That guy pretty much on his own (the other guy from the van was directing traffic and the cone guy had abandoned his cone to get back to work) pushed the F150 around the corner to a parking spot. I pretended that I was helping, but I had my purse and my tea mug in one hand, and I was wearing a skirt, so I probably looked like a comedy sketch of a woman pretending to help push a truck. 

After we got the whole thing straightened out, I went back to my apartment feeling full of purpose and vigor, like I had done something helpful already with my day. 

Then I called Sallie Mae to talk about my student loans. Pro tip: talking to Sallie Mae is guaranteed to ruin your day. Never do it if you can help it.

bad parking

When I came home from the store, someone had parked badly in the limited space on my block. There was barely space in front of the car to fit my car next to a driveway. I parked, and then I got out and looked behind my car, and then I reversed about 8 inches, marking my progress against a crack in the sidewalk.

When I got out again to check, there was approximately an inch and a half of space between my car and the one behind me. I considered it a victory.

A while later, after doing a sprint/walk stint, I was sitting next to my window, drinking water and admiring the sunset, when a group of people came out of a nearby restaurant and got into the poorly parked car. 

The girl who would get into the passenger seat walked up to the front of the car and checked to make sure that my car had not made contact with theirs.

I was very tempted to yell out the window, "I didn't touch your car. But you are very bad at parking!"

I refrained, though, and just laughed at them from inside my apartment.

mind = lost

The English language needs a word for that moment when the brilliance of the reflected light of the setting sun starts to fade out of the evening clouds. 

...

I have noticed about myself that I get ridiculously excited when I figure out an exercise thing that works for me. Possibly this is because I spent my entire childhood being the awkward tall girl tripping over her own feet on the soccer field. Details. 

This alternating running and walking thing is working brilliantly for me. I feel like I am working much harder than I ever did while jogging. It's a feeling that I never knew I could enjoy until I did martial arts: the feeling of pushing your body in bursts until you can hardly see, and then giving it a chance to catch up with itself. I didn't know that the burning in your lungs could be satisfying.

Now I find it kind of addicting. Endorphins and all. Much more satisfying than jogging, because I can do anything for a block. I can sprint full out uphill for a block. And I like it. I like pumping my arms and aiming for a goal. I like it so much that I deliberately did not go to a Spanish class tonight because I wanted to do my running. Like a person who has lost her mind. I have lost my mind.

Jogging, on the other hand, just requires gritting your teeth and plodding on. I get bored with it. I put it off. I don't do it.

The other thing is that I suspect that my running form is better when I run faster. I am actually running instead of shuffling. I don't have time to think about how I am running, so I don't overthink what my body is doing. I may take this all back in a couple of weeks when I have royally screwed up my knees with the sprinting on concrete, but so far my knees seem okay. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, superstitions etc.

motivation

There is pretty much one and only one thing that will really get me to exercise hard on my own. (Meaning not in a martial arts/circuit training class where someone is yelling at you to work harder.)

That one thing is hiking. I do not like being the slowest hiker. Thinking about being the slowest hiker will get me out doing something cardio-like when nothing else will.

After being the slowest hiker two hikes in a row (once because I didn't eat the right food and once because the other people were in better shape than me), I have had enough. 

I can't afford to pay for martial arts training right now.

My right knee can't handle jogging.

So I am doing the best combination I can. Instead of jogging slowly for three miles, I run hard for a block and then walk for a block and then run hard for a block again. As soon as my knee starts hurting, I give up the running and instead I periodically do some burpees. 

When I pass the stairs in the park, I run up them (or down them and then up them, depending on where I am). 

The result is that I spend the entire 35-40 minutes breathing hard. Interval training is better for you than jogging anyway, right?

When I get home, I run up the stairs sideways, hoping to strengthen the other muscles in my legs so my knees don't get so beaten up.

And then I do some situps and pushups and planks because, well, someday I am going to go back to martial arts, and I don't want to humiliate myself. I may add in some combatives work with my boxing gloves, too.

The weird thing is that I think that running fast might be easier on my knees than jogging. It seems like it shouldn't be, with the impact and all, but I ran a lot today without any knee pain, and I can only jog right around a mile before the pain sets in.

Maybe someday I will strengthen my knees enough to run a marathon...

A girl can dream, right?

For now, I will settle for a 13 mile hike on Saturday.

childhood

You know how you don't think about things for years and then suddenly they pop into your head? 

I just thought about how, when my brother and I were little but old enough to do things like the dishes (so I was maybe 8 or 9 and R. was 5 or 6), my parents would go for a walk in the evening and leave us to do the dishes. I mostly washed, and my brother dried and put away. I suspect that my sister was around there somewhere, toddling about.

The sink in the kitchen in our house in Liberia faced setting sun and the road and, much farther away beyond the trees, the ocean. We would watch to see when our parents came into view again.*

R. and I would sometimes sing as we did the dishes (or possibly I sang and he humored me):

hurry hurry hurry hurry come on the run

hurry hurry hurry hurry day is begun

come along and hurry now there's work to be done

when you are finished there'll be time for fun

alright I come now, alright I come

don't be so worried, my little one

if I should work hard out in the sun

I'll be so tired that I cannot run

Mostly I was singing so that when my parents came within hearing distance they would know how very hard we were working.

Even before we were old enough to do the dishes or be left home alone for half an hour, we used to clear the table. The floor was cement, but that didn't stop us, especially my brother, from piling all five of the Corelle-ware plates on our heads and trying to carry them to the kitchen without our hands.

It's a really good thing that Corelle-ware plates are just about indestructible, is all I have to say about that.

* I feel like I remember, when the war started upcountry, that there was a curfew, and part of my watching for the parents to come into view was hoping that they would beat the curfew. It may have just been the memory of the earlier curfew in 1985, though, combined with knowledge of the problems in Nimba County in 1990.

...

While writing this, I looked up our old house on google earth, again, and noticed that there is still a path behind the house to the other house that was on the road between the office and the high school. The path no longer cuts from the right side of that house, though. It has moved over the years, as dirt footpaths do, and now it cuts from the left side of the house.

One time, as I was riding my bike on that path home from school, I looked up as I rode under a tree and saw a green mamba lying along the branch I was just going under.

I have even more vivid memories of the other path, from our house to the office, especially the corner by the office:

Trying to push an old bicycle wheel with a stick, only to get it caught somehow and jabbing myself in the stomach.

Jumping over the inevitable ditch between the path and the road next to the office.

The time that the G. family daubed their house with mud and we got to help.

Looking at the scab on my arm that finally taught me which hand was right and which was left.

Watching the clouds and thinking how wonderful it would be if I could just get up onto one and nestle into its softness and tell it where to take me.

slightly more successful hiking

* Talk of gluten/gluten-freeness will be in this post *

I went for a hike today that was possibly a little beyond my current fitness level (no money for martial arts + bad knees means that all I do for exercise these days is go for long walks). But I met a new friend this week who suggested that I go on this hike, so I did.

I was determined that while I might be slower than the crowd, I would not have to stop for the dizziness of hypoglycemia that slowed me down on the last group hike I joined. I packed enough food to feed the entire group for the day. 

Most people seem to be able to eat breakfast, drive for an hour, hike 3.5 miles/2800 feet of elevation gain, and then sit down at the top of the mountain and eat lunch. I cannot. I will be dizzy and shaky a mile in. I need to eat immediately before I start out up a mountain, especially now that I do not eat whole wheat cereal for breakfast. I also need to eat along the way. By the time I get to the top, I hardly need to eat anymore. 

I ate in the car on the way to the mountain (a few rice crisps and hummus, some almond crackers, and some chocolate covered almonds - I told you I was not playing), and I filled my pocket with sour Jelly Bellies. I also drank a chai and started in on some Vitamin Water.

Good news! I am out of shape, but if I eat ridiculous amounts of food, I can make it up a mountain at a decent pace. (Side note: I am a turtle on hikes. I can hike forever and ever amen as long as I have adequate food and can go slowly, but I find that, as a general rule, men hike too fast. Even in my best shape, I still want to go slowly uphill. If you go slowly, you need fewer stops! It is brilliant. Men were leading this hike, however, and eventually I just slowed down and moseyed at my own little pace while they went fast and stopped, fast and stopped. Keep in mind: 2800 feet of elevation gain in 3.5 miles. It was steep.)

I ate so much that I was almost too full to breathe while hiking, though. Clearly I need to find a balance.

When we got back down to Gone West, I came home and laid down for "just a minute." Upon lying down, I immediately lost 4 hours of my day. Oops. This happened because I had two very short, interrupted nights of sleep in a row (I brought a friend to the airport at 5:30 am on Friday morning and got up at 6:30 this morning for the hike after going to bed later than I ought). 

I have no idea how I am going to sleep tonight.