1. Those of you who regularly read this blog know that over the last few months, I have had several dreams involving friends and family. The common denominator of these dreams is that they all have taken place at a mall. It feels like it was the Cape Cod Mall in the 1990s, at least in my dreaming mind. I mentioned after the last one that maybe the dreams were telling me something. Like maybe I needed to go to the mall to find an answer to some question. Well, this week I bit the bullet. While out for a drive, I took a detour and went to the mall. I wandered the corridors from one end to the other for the first time in years. Did I find some meaningful answer to some important question? Nope. Did I see anyone I knew? Nope. Did I stop and find some amazing deal on some product I didn’t know I needed? Nope again. I got some steps in, but all in all, it turned out to be me feeling old walking around, seeing mostly teenagers hanging out. It did make me happy that kids still carry on the tradition of being mall rats. Oh, and I did get some tasty Chinese food from a place called Ruby Thai, which I hadn’t had in a while. If that was the meaning of the dreams, then mission accomplished.
2. Maybe I’m different, but it’s never crossed my mind to take trash from where I live and go leave it outside somewhere. Sadly, it’s common to see full bags of trash left on the side of the road by people who are the definition of worthless. The ones that take the cake are those who bring furniture somewhere and just drop it off. Seriously? If it’s too much money to pay to bring it to the dump, maybe switch to cheaper beer or cigarettes. I guarantee people who drop a loveseat in the parking lot of an abandoned school have an open pack of cigarettes and an open can of some crap beer in the center console of their beat-up, rusty pickup truck. I say all of this because, yes, on Monday Runday this week, I found a discarded loveseat in the parking lot. Next up, it’ll be mattresses and televisions littering the school grounds.
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| Have a seat |
3. Normally, Monday Runday is pretty self-explanatory. We run. We go home. That’s it. This week had a few interesting developments. I just mentioned the loveseat. Besides that, there was a conversation with an osprey. Where we run is a slowly decaying track at an abandoned school, as I mentioned. Located behind the school is a wooden platform commandeered by a family of osprey as a home. As I was running my first lap around the back of the school, I spotted one of the parents sitting in the nest and sharing many high-pitched squeaks. I made sure to stop and explain to it that I didn’t have any fish and also didn’t speak osprey, but sadly it didn’t understand. The second time around, I got to see a pair of the young ones. Their heads popped up and were bobbing all around. I had to be 30 to 40 feet away, plus the tower was probably 30 feet high as well, so I never felt in danger. Although when the other parent returned carrying dinner in its talons, I did make a hasty return to running.
4. My brain still believes I am 30, but my body will vehemently disagree sometimes. Monday Runday was a huge success. Granted, I only ran about half of the time, but it was 4 miles in total, and my body felt good. I felt the mix of exhaustion and energy that I love about running. The next morning though, I had to pay the piper. My body wasn’t really sore, just really tired. My knees, especially, felt like they needed a few extra hours of rest to work normally. I felt like a crushed bag of potato chips. I definitely don’t regret running more than I have in a few months. Still, I am glad that I was smart and held myself back during that run. If it were 7-8 years ago, I’d have run way too much since I felt good and ended up injured. Now I held myself back and yet still felt like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken tossed in a dumpster. Forgive me, I was trying to find the funniest food-related descriptions for some moderate soreness. I was gonna say a pizza flipped upside down on a hot street, but the chicken one was funnier, at least to me.
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| My body felt like one of these things |
5. As the week got going, there was a foreboding sense of dread in the air in the northeast. Something called a ‘heat dome’ was approaching. Temperatures were set to be higher than they had been in many years. Predictions ranged from the low 90s to the mid-100s, depending on where you lived. I am very familiar with heat waves. They are prolonged stretches of hot weather that vary depending on where you live. I just find it kind of funny how language changes over the years. When I was a kid, there were no heat domes, there were no bomb cyclones. There were heat waves, Nor’easters, and blizzards. I know that things evolve. Maybe I am now the old man saying things were different in my day? I feel a bit like meteorologists think weather can be boring, so they invent new, scarier-sounding types of weather so that they get attention. Honestly, what sounds more impactful, a heat wave or a heat dome? It sounds like we’re going to be sitting in a rotisserie. Don’t get me started on other weird ones like atmospheric river and polar vortex.
6. Amazingly, despite it being in the low 90s to kick off the heat wave this week. We had two people signed up to use our infrared sauna at my work. The sauna is great for overall health, but not on one of the hottest days of the year. Of course, inside our office it’s a comfy 72 degrees, so it’s doable. I said that we should just put a lawn chair outside in the sun and place a sign next to it that says ‘sauna.’ Maybe we could shine red lights in their faces to make them feel more like a real sauna. Once it got up over 90 degrees, though, both people ended up calling in to cancel. I guess they built their own lawn chair saunas in their yards.
7. You don’t realize how much you depend on your phone until you go home from work for the weekend and realize that you forgot your charger in the office. There was no chance I’d be driving back into work to get it, so I decided to go the following morning and buy a backup charger. I know I’ll always need one. I went to Ocean State Job Lot since it was close and cheap. Just a reminder that it was Fourth of July Weekend, so everywhere was packed, and outside it felt like standing in an oven. I was thrilled to just get into the a/c and wander the aisles at Job Lot. Once it got to be ten minutes and I had wandered nearly every square inch of the store without finding charging cables, I broke down and actually asked an employee where they were. As you might figure, they were located in the one place I hadn’t checked. Oh well. Then it was option overload. Instead of choosing a typical cord, I got a fancy charging pad. Granted, it was $7.99, but still fancy for Job Lot. What I thought was that it was a pad with a plug so you could have it on your desk out of the way. In a way, it was. In another way, it was a pad with a USB cord to plug into a laptop. Of course, that defeated the purpose of the charging pad. It also came with the same USB I’d have needed for my phone anyway. I am guessing the charging pad will collect dust while I just use the cord. Nice.
8. Stepping outside into the soupy air on a day when the heat index got up as high as 107 is not fun. The sun was brutal even just walking across a parking lot. In fact, it was so unbelievably hot that the asphalt smelled like it had just been laid in certain areas. I was only outside for a handful of minutes on the hottest day of the bunch, but that was enough. It was capped off by seeing the hydrangeas outside of the front door where I live totally wilted. They literally looked like they had melted. Sadly, I wish I had gotten a photo of them when they were still fresh and alive. You can see for yourself the damage the heat wave did. The good news was that they recovered fairly well when the temperatures got a little more seasonable.
9. For all of the injuries over the years, I am at heart still a runner, and still foolish despite my increasing age. That meant that even though the heat index was over 100, I had to get some miles in outside on the 4th of July. It’s a bit of a tradition to run or walk to the water and feel good about myself because I can run faster than the cars stuck in traffic can move. This was not like other years, when I ran a lot of fast miles. I wanted to experience the full heat as safely as I could. This naturally meant running in the sun for stretches of my time outdoors. Even relatively early in the morning, it felt like I was inside a pizza oven. I never worried about myself, though. For years, I ran in extreme conditions, and to be honest, I kind of enjoy the idea of being out in weather others would avoid. I ended up doing five total miles of running and walking. There was a lot of beautiful scenery along rivers, and I made sure to wave to as many people as possible. Except not to those stuck in traffic, they were having a hard enough time as it was.
10. Every year on July 4th, they have the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest. That’s all fine and dandy as long as nobody tries to refer to people who gorge themselves on food as athletes. Training to eat dozens of hot dogs is not the same as training for anything athletic. I would never attempt to do a hot dog eating contest. I like hot dogs and could probably down several in a sitting without issue. My reason is that I want to enjoy my food. Jamming bread and meat into a glass of water to slide it down my throat doesn’t sound enjoyable. That being said, I did have my own eating contest on the 4th. My mom made her typically excellent pasta and meatballs. She made me a gigantic plate to take home. Rather than divide it up into two medium-sized meals, I figured, why not try to be a champion and eat all of it? The photo of my plate is below. All you need to know is that in the process of getting all of that food from the container to the plate, I managed to spill some on my table. It was quite a mess, but hey, that’s what soap and paper towels are for. Yes, I finished all of it and quickly fell into a food coma after. I might not have the ‘prestige’ of winning a hot dog eating contest, but I guarantee you the food my mother made was light-years better.
11. And then the bubble burst. After three days of 90+ degree heat and soupy levels of humidity, the heat dome finally cracked. The rain came pouring in overnight on Saturday. I was thrilled to wake up the following morning with the temperature only being 67. My air conditioner got to sleep in. To celebrate the heat wave ending, I took my tired legs out on the bike trail in the morning. Yes, it was still raining, but only lightly. Plus, after having dealt with a heat index of over 100 for a few days, running in the drizzle was heavenly. I chose to go down the bike trail extension, which when completed, will lead the Cape Cod Rail Trail from Yarmouth west into Hyannis. It is pretty much all paved, but the final step is the bridge set to be placed over the busy Willow Street. The footings of the eventual bridge have been built. I am figuring that they are going to wait until after summer or even until the end of the year before they finish the project. That’s my guess, although judging by the Barnstable town website, it might not be done until 2031. By that logic, it probably really won’t be done until the day after I die, yay.
12. I have been sharing and promoting the fundraiser for the feature film I will be producing called The Cabin. It’s been a month, and as of this writing, I am 1/3 of the way to the proposed budget. At this point, I am looking outside of the box for places to share the fundraiser. It had never dawned on me to look for fundraiser groups on Facebook. My friend, producer Frank Durant, suggested that, as he’s done it before. One such group has nearly 300K members. I’m not setting my expectations too high, but even a few new donors from that page would be great. The actual GoFundMe page on Facebook has 2.5 million followers. It’s a huge number, and you can message them to get support for your fundraiser. My issue is that even though this project is extremely important to me, it is not important in the grand scheme of things. What I mean is the fundraisers they share on the GoFundMe page deal with medical bills, housing, and things that are far more serious. I haven’t shared my fundraiser because, next to fighting cancer, donating to a small indie film fund doesn’t seem that meaningful. I’ve still got five weeks until I close the page. I’m thinking sometime in the second week of August to give me and the crew a little time to shore up all of the budgetary needs. It’s all new and out of my comfort zone, but that’s what makes it exciting.
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