No cat at the door/ The kitties roam the house/ But Spot is not here
I’m up early today—it’s not even 7:30 am yet—so it will be a while before I can call the vet and find out how Spot is doing. I didn’t hear from them at all yesterday, which means there were no problems, so I’m hoping that means I will be able to bring him home today. My poor kitty is going to be so upset. He doesn’t get mad when I take him to the vet or give him medicine, and he doesn’t resist me, but he gets all sad and his feelings get hurt and he sits next to me with one paw hesitatingly touching my lap, looking up at me as if to say, “Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you love me any more?”
I’m glad I don’t have to go to work today, so if I can bring him home, I can just spend the day giving him cuddles and love. I do have a couple of things I need to do today: I must clean the fish tank, since I didn’t have time yesterday, and pump water. I should pick up a few groceries, but maybe I’ll hold off on that, too. I just want to sit on the couch with my kitty in my lap all day!
Yesterday was a very full day! I did my 14-mile run, and it went well—I finished in four hours, just a few minutes more than the 12-mile run! I did have some stomach wonkiness, but it didn’t interfere with my run too much. I’m glad I ran at Meadowbrook Park, so I had a bathroom nearby for miles 5–9. It was fun running at the park, although the trail had been dragged until there was a thick layer of fine, loose dirt on top of it, which meant I kicked up lots of dirt as I ran, and ended up with my shoes full of dirt and my legs covered with dirt. I stopped before I headed out to take off my shoes and try to get as much dirt out of them and off my socks as possible, but it was a very dirty run!
I got a bit overheated near the end, and had to stop in the shade of a huge ditch-digging machine parked at the side of Valley Blvd to cool down and catch my breath. Notes for future runs: watch what I eat the night before—no raw cabbage salads! and pour water over my head or something to cool down when I’m running in 90F heat. Maybe bring my bandanna along to wet and put around my neck or over my head. There was a slight breeze yesterday, but not enough to really cool me off. I’m running in direct sun very nearly the whole time, and the sun is hot up here in the mountains. Next month it should start cooling down a bit, which will be good for the really long runs, but I’ve probably got at least another few long runs in summer heat, and I must be careful not to get heat sickness.
I’m thinking of doing a post about a Supernatural vid that’s causing a lot of discussion on lj. It’s a series of violent images of women, set to a song by Hole. People are saying how disturbing it is, and how it shows how violence against women is used and eroticized in the media, etc. Me, I’m watching it from the perspective of a horror fan who watches SPN as a horror show, and thinking, Ooh, that was a cool scene. Love the way the flames engulf the woman on the ceiling, that dead zombie ghost woman was really scary, and so on. And… I’m kind of scratching my head, thinking, y’all do get that this is show is horror, right? There’s supposed to be violence in it. Bloody, scary, horrible violence. Supposedly the two people who did the vid said they could have done it for any number of shows—which suggests to me that they really do not know what the horror genre is about. Because taken in the context of the horror genre, these types of scenes have a different meaning than they would in, say, a police drama or a scifi show. Horror is all about the things that scare you. Horror holds up a mirror to the creepy, uncomfortable, scary monsters crawling around in your deepest lizard brain and lets you fight them, laugh at them, watch them from between your fingers, and ultimately chase them away—for now. That’s what the scenes in the vid are—the scary stuff of your nightmares. It is not horror’s job to make social commentary or to balance the power structure—it’s horror’s job to use the power structure to scare the crap out of you.
Anyway, after my run yesterday, Mom and I went to lunch at the airport, then hung about with John and Jill at the Flossie Flops booth at the Festival in the park, and then went to the rodeo. It was lots of fun, and I took lots of pictures, so I’ll have new photos to post for a while! I’ll start off with a photo of the Mountain Valley Airport, our little sailplane airport. We like to eat at the lunch counter there, and watch the gliders sail.
