Nothing stinks up a room quite like a pair of running shorts. And nothing sucks quite like not having a closet to sequester said shorts in to contain the smell, because you LIVE in the closet where the shorts are kept. I need some more shorts...
I had forgotten to mention yesterday that the race ended in the Houston Zoo, and so for the first time in my more than four years here I found myself wandering around, looking at monkeys and giraffes (all I had time for). Its odd, when we're kids, we're filled with wonder, but even then the real incredulity of being able to actually see a real giraffe escapes us. (And no, incredulity really isn't the right word, but the right word doesn't really exist, or would have to be used horribly incorrectly to get my point across. Something like incredibleness or amazingness.) I mean think about it. When's the last time you saw a giraffe? We take it for granted, but this is an animal that's 16-18 FEET TALL. Its a friggin freak of nature, a messed up mutated cow for cryin out loud (and I say that with awe, not disdain). And its from AFRICA. In this world of unprecedented wealth and spectacle, we take a giraffe for granted; there's nothing special about it as an animal or where it comes from. But I think that's just because we've gotten so jaded with the truly wondrous.
Seriously, go to a zoo and just LOOK at one. Its a friggin giraffe! From Africa! Wtf!
Now that's exactly the kind of rant that will most likely completely escape you, because unless you've felt something like what I felt on Saturday, or unless what you just read somehow gets what I felt across in such a way that you can feel it too, this little bit simply won't mean anything to you. But I hope it does. Because we're never too old to find something in the world that makes us go, whoa, even if its something we've known about and seen before. In fact, I'd go so far as to say rediscovering something that we had glossed over as a regular part of our landscape as something completely new is a pretty neat experience.
I think it keeps us young.

Pictures of the race are available now at raceshots.net. Click on the Great Pumpkin Fun Run and enter bib# 1336.