For me...Friday the 13th Came on Saturday

I have bad luck sometimes...really bad luck. If I'm in line at the grocery story, you really shouldn't stand behind me, because inevitably, I'll be behind the person who decides to WRITE A CHECK...but doesn't start even looking for the checkbook until the sales clerk has totaled the sale...or I'm the one who will twist my ankle in the ONLY POTHOLE on the running path...or I'm the one who invariably takes the one item that doesn't have a price tag on it to the cash register...you get my drift.

So, Friday the 13th sorta makes me nervous because I just have that kind of luck...and yet, I got through yesterday relatively unscathed. Walter's team even won another game in the Little League Tournament of Champions...(which means we have ANOTHER WEEK OF BASEBALL, which I will consider good luck at this point). I was on time to said game. I almost finished one and a half of the six presentations that I need to have finished by Monday afternoon for a reading institute that I'm running next week. (Did I mention that I'm also a huge procrastinator?)

I really thought I was past the bad luck this morning when Betty and I did our first Saturday run with the Half Mad - Half Marathon Training Program. (I love the "I'm running half-mad" slogan). It's a much more mellow program than the RnR Training Program was. Paul was usually hell-bent on starting practices on time, which makes sense when you're trying to manage hundreds of runners on a Saturday morning. Our new coach, Stephen, is much more laid back... He tells funny stories...and doesn't use a bullhorn (although he almost could have used one this morning). I like both styles...but I must say for the summer, I think I'm going to enjoy the more laid-back attitude

So, Betty and I showed up a few minutes before 7:00...we started our warm-up somewhere between 7:10 and 7:15... And during the run, I felt GREAT! (No Bad Luck). Betty made me remind her that she's doing this because of ALL THE THINGS I'VE DONE FOR HER...

In short, the run starts. Everything is running smoothly. But here's the funny thing about this run. Today we started on the north side of the lake and ran to the gate and back...4.68 miles.

Usually when we run at the lake, we start at the gate...a common run is to the baseball fields (roughly where we started this morning) and back. This is the route I took on Thursday morning, which was about 4.5 miles was like this

Lots of opportunities for bad luck...but like I said, it was a great morning and I thought I'd missed the bad luck. Even when I'd forgotten to start the timer on my watch, good luck prevailed and when I returned a nice person who had finished around me said that she'd finished in about 49 minutes....I was really happy with the SUPER FAST (for me) 10:15 minute pace.

Also, starting the run this morning at the place which is usually a turn-around point for me could have led to all sorts of challenges. For example, when I run my usual-forward route, I try to pick up my pace for the last mile and a half or so, usually because I'm eager to be finished running, and partially because I'm so used to this path that I know exactly where I can push it (up slight hills for example) because there's a downhill stretch that's coming up, where I can relax a little.

So of course this morning, I could feel myself start to pick up my pace at, pretty much, the exact same spot. Only this time, I'd run only about a 1.5 miles...not bad luck exactly...in fact I'm pleased to say that I didn't walk, even though I wanted to, but I didn't.

But when I got home, the bad luck really got rolling. My goal for the morning when I got home was to quickly put together an iMovie slide show of Turbo's Little League season for parents because today was the team party (yes, even though we have another week of b-ball in front of us, the party was today)...now as the Heffers, and those who know me will attest, I'm a bit of a tech-geek and typically have no problem navigating technology, but silly, overconfident me decided to install the upgrade (iLife 8.0)...and of course the iLife 8.0 version of iMovie is not even marginally similar to the earlier version...

Can you see the bad-luck really starting here? Clarence does...

So, of course, it took me longer to put together the slide show than I anticipated...but all was still not lost... I was just tempting the bad-luck gods of fate. I decided that I wanted to burn the slide show onto DVDs so parents could watch the movie on their televisions ...which meant that I also had to quickly navigate and learn the upgraded version if iDVD...

It's sort of like I was shaking my fist at the fates isn't it?

To make a long story short...I pretty much created an overcomplicated DVD and it took my, pretty fast, Macbook Pro about 3 hours to burn it!

Did I mention that the team party started at noon?

So, stubborn me decides to wait it out (I'd promised Walter I'd do the DVD about a week ago, and of course I waited until the last possible moment to do it, because I was confident that I could do it quickly...and did I mention that I have a tendency to procrastinate?)

And can I kick myself because it took me 2 and a half hours of waiting for a single DVD to burn, to realize that the best thing to do would be to quit the DVD I was burning and create a simpler DVD... So I did that, but it took me about an hour to re-tool it.

So I missed the party.

ACK!

What a frustrating way to spend an afternoon. I mean if I was going to miss the party, I could have at least worked on the 4 and a half presentations I still have to do by Monday. Or I could have folded the three baskets of clothes that have remained unfolded since, oh I don't know, Wednesday, or I could have run another marathon.

Instead I used up five hours this afternoon doing a task that I should have been able to do in two...

Friday 13 on Saturday...

Oh yeah, and Father's Day is tomorrow...Walter's whole family is coming over here for lunch...I'm hoping the dark cloud of bad luck will have passed by then.

Did I say ACK?