Rhythm Detected, No Shock Advised

6 days since I've posted. Eek. Bad blogger. Heart still beating though...

In my defense, life has been very full lately. Two full time jobs, 3 children, no daycare--it's a lot for two people to keep up with. And there have been some extra things in the schedule as well. Last week my oldest daughter and I drove 9 1/2 hours to meet up with my parents. She continued on with them another 4 hours to the family farm. She's spending 10 days with grandma and grandpa. I turned around and drove back home, another 9 1/2 hours. We left at 0600, and I pulled in at 0300 later that same day. I covered 1282 miles in 21 hours--average speed including stops for meals: 61.05 mph. Needless to say, I was a little punch drunk the next day.

My dad is planning to drive across the country to the West coast in a couple weeks. He's taking about 10 days, and making scenic stops along the way. I'm contemplating going with him as the timing works out perfectly--I'd get back home the night before my classes start. I was hoping to get away from this metroplex that I hate can hardly stand before classes start up again anyway. It'll be pretty low cost to me since he was planning to go anyway so he'd be picking up most of the tab. Most of all it will be a chance to spend some quality time with my dad. That hasn't happened in a very long time--probably 15 years. Turning 71 this year, he's starting to age a bit. The last few times we've visited, I can tell he's starting to feel the mileage. He finally retired, and they're staying busy, but I can hear the slow-down a bit.

Running has had some lows and highs. Last time I wrote about running, the beginning workouts for week 5 seemed like a step backward. But for some reason, they were NOT. They hurt so bad! They shouldn't have, so I'm not sure what the deal is. But the middle workouts were tolerable, and the final workouts for the week went really well. 20 minutes straight. The first time was on Tuesday, after I'd worked all day. The second was just a little bit ago today, and I actually ran an extra minute, and then jogged the first minute of the cool-down as well. Very gratifying. It was the first workout in a couple of weeks that I didn't have to combat thoughts of quitting the entire program during the latter half of the workout. Sunday we start Week 6. Since we do each week work twice, we've been running for 10 weeks at this point. We've made slow but steady progress. Still no appreciable weight loss, which is frustrating. Can you imagine how much easier it would be to run if you could take a 65 lb backpack off before you started?

Work has been interesting. Joint Commission was at our hospital the last two days. I'll have a post about that coming along soon. And I helped take care of a Pakistani man who came to our country just 10 years ago. Now he has lung cancer, and I'd like to write about that experience as well.

And I certainly hope to make it around to all the blogs on my bloglist, it's been several days...