I’m back from Florida and we are now officially Florida trailer trash. We closed on the place on the 5th, moved everything from Mom’s den on the 5th, unpacked boxes on the 6th and 7th, and I came home on the 9th to rest.

I could have closed the deal through the mail, but flew down to combine the closing with being with Mom on Mother’s Day. I probably gained a few points vying for “Son of the Year” but may have lost a few since then. Mom helped with all of the above, plus drove me around to get insurance, drove me to buy a mattress and box springs, drove me to buy shelf liner, and drove me to Withlacoochie River Electric to transfer the utilities to my name. We (brother Bob and I) talked about taking Mom out to eat, but she had to settle for a bucket of chicken cooked by the Colonel (popcorn chicken, original recipe and chicken strips), cole slaw and mashed potatoes on plastic plates at the kitchen counter of the mobile home while a guy was cleaning the carpets.

In addition, Mom has the responsibility of sitting there with no running water (I turned it off before I came to Michigan) waiting for the bedroom set and dining room table to be delivered and “Holy Ground” to pick up the twin beds that came with the place but I didn’t want. I’ve also asked if she would make arrangements to get the carpet stretched, have new rollers put on the slider screen, have the place bug proofed and make arrangements for someone to trim and edge the lawn. Mothers like to do those things, don’t they?

I saw a pontoon in the Reminder (local advertising paper) on Tuesday, went and looked at it, took Jean to see it, and told the guy I would buy it by that night. He called on Wednesday at noon saying he had the paperwork all ready and I had a cashier’s check, so we were all set to do the deal. He was going to deliver the boat, but couldn’t get hold of the guy where he rents the pontoon trailer. He called at 5:10 PM and said he was about to pick up the trailer, and would probably be over at the landing at 7:15 or so.

After I hung up, I realized I was here at the cottage alone and the boat landing is a half mile by water and 2.4 miles by road. If I drove over, I would have to walk from the house to the landing to pick up the car. I decided to walk over and called the guy at 6, telling him to call me on my cell, not on the cottage phone, when he was ready. He said things were going better than planned and he would be there in half an hour. I couldn’t walk there that quickly so I decided to drive downtown, leave my car at Felpausch, and walk from there to the landing (1.1 miles).

I got to the landing just as the guy was pulling in from the Gun Lake area (Shaw Road off Gun Lake Road). He launched the boat and drove it to the shore while we finished the paperwork. I hopped on, he showed me how to operate the controls, and away I went. I have a sandy beach so I thought I would run it up on shore (my dock isn’t in yet) and tie it to an anchor. As I landed on the beach, the wind picked up to about 20 mph from the northeast. One pontoon came loose and the boat swung parallel to the beach, the other pontoon pulled loose and the entire contraption was headed for the neighbor’s dock.

I jumped off and pulled the one pontoon back to shore, but the boat was still swung over. I was up to my knees in the water with my pants, shoes, and socks on, wrestling with a boat that weighed a heck of a lot more than I could lift and pull. I know I looked ridiculous, but it would have been worse if I had taken my pants off to keep them dry. I finally got the boat to the point where it would hold there while I rushed up to the boat house, flubbed around with the lock (while in panic, you forget combinations), got two anchors and ran back down to the shore just as it broke loose again.

I wrestled it back to shore and got it stable. I knew the anchors wouldn’t hold it there, so I went to the seawall and got six concrete blocks, ran the anchor rope through the holes on three of them, and hooked the whole mess to the pontoon that was on shore. I pulled the other pontoon as close as I could get it, and tied it off to the other three blocks. It held! I went inside, took off my pants, shoes and socks, put on my jogging tights, dry socks and running shoes, and set off for Felpausch (1.3 miles) to pick up the car. I finally ate around 8:30.

I’ve been swimming at the pool at Pennock, and, as many of you know, my skin reacts to the chlorine. I usually go through 24 hours of intense itching before it’s tolerable. I had been swimming that morning and had welts under both arms, on both shins, on the backs of both legs (hamstring area) and in the middle of my back about two inches above my butt crack (I guess I could have said the small of my back instead of being crude…sorry!). I also had individual itch spots at various places, but let’s not go there.

The next day I was attending an all day conference at the Lansing Center that started at 7:30 AM, so I went to bed at 9:30. Between worrying about the boat breaking loose (I got it so late I didn’t have a chance to get it insured) and the intense itching, I didn’t sleep much. I finally awoke for good at 4 AM. I must have gotten out of bed, put on my glasses, and looked out the window a dozen times to see if the boat was still there.

I had an awful time staying awake during the seminar (can you imagine having no sleep and sitting in a classroom listening to a CPA talk about “The Financial Accounting Standards Board Update”, “Outsourcing’s Impact on Internal Controls – An Auditor’s Perspective”, and “Accounting Issues for Contingent Environmental Liabilities” …my three afternoon breakout sessions?). I drove home thinking that I would pull in the driveway and the boat would be gone. It wasn’t!

So again I ask the question. Why does all this happen to me? Does everyone go through these ordeals and are to embarrassed to tell anyone?

As soon as I get the dock in, the boat cleaned up, and my Captain’s hat, you are all invited to a ride around Crooked Lake on “Floating Margaritaville”.

Just (Dodged Another Bullet) Jack

 There are a couple of reasons for this e-mail even though I’m not away from home. First is the Trilanders meeting this next Saturday, April 16th, at the cottage at Crooked Lake. Any of you who don’t know the way, let me know and I’ll send directions. Bring what you want to drink (I have Crystal Light, beer made by son, Matt, with me watching, fixin’s for Margaritas, and some odd assortments of fine liquors and wine). I’ll cook some sort of dead animal, but a few could bring salads, vegetables, or other things jocks are supposed to eat.

Secondly, I think we need to have an intervention for Jon. Back when we started training for Triathlon, he said that all bikers shaved their legs, so he did and many of you went along. I didn’t because I’m a little on the hairy side (sorry for the gross-out) and don’t know where to quit.

Then when the group did their first Ironman race at The Great Floridian, Jon said Ironman athletes painted their toenails, so many of you did that too. The excuse was that the toenail polish helped the toes slide against the shoes and alleviated “black-toe”. For you non-runners, it’s not a pretty sight.

Now that many of us are training for the Bayshore Marathon, and he’s running with Laura helping out with her training, he says that he’s wearing women’s underwear because the seams are less irritating on those long runs. He says he gets them from Victoria Secret, but I think he’s wearing the “J. Edgar Hoover model” from those “special catalogs” they advertise on the internet.

I thought this training was for health and fitness, but this seems to be going a little too far. I’m not sure whether Jon’s suggestions are genuine, or he’s fulfilling a life-long fantasy. What do you think? At next week’s run (at Becky’s cabin in the woods-no, the run isn’t flat), maybe we should elect three unbiased chafing checkers who would inspect all runners for “rub marks”. Any volunteers?

Just (Unshaven, Unpainted, Tighty Whities) Jack

 I thought I would start by clearing up some confusion about last week’s epistle. We are not buying the “pumpkin trailer” nor the “cracker shack” we sent pictures of last week. The house is on the corner of Hudson Avenue and Old Dixie Highway, is a typical old Florida shack, and will be the future home for a real estate office. The pumpkin trailer is on one of the canals near brother Bob’s house, is in the $175,000 range and, believe it or not, looks much worse in person than in the picture.

The one we are buying is in a mobile home park and is actually quite nice, but much less money. We’ll give park life a try to see if we like it. If not, we’ll make a change a year or two down the road with not much ventured. We have several friends in Club Wildwood, some from Hastings, and others who are avid bikers (cyclists, not Hell’s Angels).

So now for the good news bad news stories. There are two. First of all, the bad news (to me at least). There won’t be a Tiburon Mile in September this year. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a mile swim from Angel Island to Tiburon in San Francisco Bay that I did last year with my son, Matt, and was scheduled to do the week after the bike wreck of ’03 but couldn’t. The next one will be in September 2006 and I don’t know why they’re skipping a year. The good news is that my son Matt and I have signed up for the Alcatraz Sharkfest Swim. As the name implies it’s a 1 1/2 mile swim from Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park in San Francisco. The bad news is that it takes place on the same day as the Muncie Endurathon.

The second story has to do with this morning’s long run. My schedule shows 150 minutes and, as many of you know, I have some issues going on in my left ankle area. The good news is that I had an excellent run. It was one of those days when everything felt good and, although I could feel the ankle problem every step, it didn’t hurt enough to stop me from enjoying the day…enjoying the day up until 144 minutes and 58 seconds.

I was on my way back and was in the last mile on Sea Ranch Drive which goes from US 19 to the condo. It’s a two lane street with sidewalk on one side. The street has no shoulders so I always run on the sidewalk. About a half mile from the condo I noticed a pickup truck going west. He slowed, made a u-turn, drove onto the sidewalk and parked the truck there so he could go to a garage sale across the street.

He was about 25 feet in front of me and I didn’t know what he was doing so I fixed my attention on him ready to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. The bad news is that the sidewalks aren’t well maintained and I stubbed my toe on one of the spots where the cement had heaved from tree roots. The good news is that, contrary to the theory of gravity, my feet caught up with the rest of my body and I didn’t fall. The bad news is that my big toe on that battered left foot started to throb. It’s color is similar to a concord grape and, no doubt, I will lose the nail eventually.

The second bad news part of that story is that I had to leave the sidewalk to run around the truck and ran through the “dog crap strip”. That area is about eight feet of grass between the sidewalk and the street. Dozens of people walk their dogs up and down Sea Ranch every day and use that part for their bathroom (the dogs…not the people). As considerate as they seem, most of them don’t clean up when their dog leaves a deposit. Between the throbbing toe and the good chance of slipping and sliding in doggie doo, I stopped 5 minutes and 2 seconds short of my 150 minutes. I walked, or I should say limped, the rest of the way in. My attitude’s improving since I didn’t use any bad words to let the young man know what I thought of his driving skills or his parentage.

Our plan is to leave Florida on Thursday, the 24th, and we should be home sometime on Good Friday. Robert works through Wednesday and plans to drive from West Palm Beach here that night so we can bring his bicycle back. So this is probably the last e-mail for a while. As always, I will miss writing them as much as many of you will miss reading them. For those of you who think they’re a nuisance, the good news is that you’ll hit the delete button one fewer time each week.

Until the next trip,

Just (I Hope Michigan Warms Up Soon) Jack

 Remember last week when I wrote about having one of those days where you thought you could run forever. Well, that’s at one end of the running spectrum and this week was at the other end. The way things have been going, that sounds about right.

I’ve been whining about this lower left ankle thing (yes, that is the proper medical description…like when I crashed the mountain bike on the Iceman and told the ER Doc I had “munged up” my shoulder). I felt it on every step. It doesn’t hurt like an ankle sprain…it just aches all the time. It didn’t used to bother me when I ran, just all the rest of the time. Now it bothers me while I run too.

That alone wouldn’t have stopped me. It was the blister on my left arch that brought an end to this morning’s 135 minute run at 95 minutes. We’ll go out and do an easy ride later and, afterwards, I will probably run the last 40 minutes ala Roch and Paul’s triahlon training schedule. As I took off my socks and was looking at my blister, I found a spot where one of my toes was all bloody (yes, it stained my sock). I had clipped my toenails down and thought there was no way one nail would dig into the toe next to it, but I was wrong. I guess I’ll have to resort to taping my toes. Oh No!! I’ve become a Jean clone.

It’s been an interesting year down here. We’ve gone through at least 30 different model homes and I’m not sure why. We can’t afford any of them. Jean says she likes to look at them to get decorating ideas and to see different floor plans we might like, but when we look at what we can afford, nothing is quite good enough.

Tuesday we looked at place in a mobile home park where there are 8 Hastings families. We picked out 6 to look at and could only get into 5. The other people weren’t home and the guy showing us the places didn’t have their key. The one we thought we would like we didn’t. They had a Golden Retriever and it smelled like he was bathed right before the Y2K scare. The odor permeated the trailer (Whoops!! Mobile home). It was in an area of the park we liked which was away from the noise of the highway and busy side street.

If I hadn’t bought the cottage at Crooked Lake, we could get anything we wanted down here. But then when we were in Michigan for 6 months each year I would have to stay in town trying to sleep in a house on the busiest street in Hastings that isn’t a state highway and spend my waking moments in a 60 degree house with two televisions that get 4 channels each and a hot tub that doesn’t work. So I’m stymied (not to be confused with Stymie, one of the “Our Gang” kids…you youngsters don’t know what I’m talking about) as to what to do.

We’ve met several people down here that like to bike, so we have plenty of group rides we can do. We went out to San Antonio (Florida…not Texas) Wednesday and did a 40 mile ride with three other people. It was on County roads and was like riding the back roads in Barry County (if you pretended the oranges on the trees were apples and the palmetto fields were corn fields). We may meet up with a group tomorrow from Tampa that will ride about 40 miles on the Suncoast Trail from Starkey Park to Anderson Snow Park.

Friday we drove 2 1/2 hours to the Sebring/Lake Placid area where we hopped in a car with friends and drove around all day looking at places there, then drove 2 1/2 hours back to Hudson. Someone please come down and babysit Jean so I don’t have to look at any more model homes. She even dragged me through the flea market yesterday afternoon. What a treat!!

Sayonarra,

Just (In a Bad Mood But At Least I Know Why) Jack

 People come to Florida to escape the cold, nasty winter weather of wherever they come from. If you ask Bill Bradley, he’ll tell you about some of our really bad weather run adventures. Whether it was rain, wind, snow or a combination of all three, we went out. On one of the runs, we had a chance to turn around a mile into the run and we passed it up. The snow was heavy and the wind was blowing hard (I’d say gale force but it probably wasn’t quite that strong).

We ran an 8 mile out and back from Green Street to Sager Road. On the way back we were coming up the hill just South of the corner of Cook and Quimby. We got about 10 yards apart and, with the heavy snow being blown all around, we completely lost sight of each other. We decided that day was the benchmark for the worst weather we would go out in.

So here it is at 9 AM when everyone in the running group is out running in Michigan and I’m in Florida sitting inside. The weather report for Sunday for Hudson was an 80% chance of rain with some wind and a chance of thunderstorms. Since I don’t like running in the rain, and I never run in thunderstorms, I ran my 12 miles yesterday. So I guess that means when the Trilanders Triathlon Club has their next meeting, I’ll have to stand up and say “My name is Jack and I’m a weather weenie”.

Everyone who runs knows that there are some days that you have to drag yourself out to run, and often have to fight yourself not to quit in the first mile. On other days, you feel comfortable from the first step and you feel like you could run all day. Ever since the Ironman Wisconsin race, I’ve had those difficult runs where I’ve never felt comfortable, my heart rate was high, and I got tired quickly. Not yesterday. I started out comfortable and never got tired. At two hours I felt like I could keep going forever, but knew that would be a big mistake. So, as of today, in my training for the Bayshore Marathon, I’ve had one good run day.

Jean is spending less time on the run and more time on the bike. We had been riding a flat stretch of the Suncoast Bike Trail from Hwy 52 to Hwy 54 and back, a round trip of 21.5 miles. When I was back in Michigan, she rode with some people from Buffalo, New York on a different part of the Suncoast. There are a few cross streets that you have to get by, but only two have very much traffic. The ride starts near the YMCA where we lift weights and goes North. The first 6 miles is a fairly flat warm up. After Hwy 50 (yes, the same one that goes through Clermont for you Great Floridian veterans), it becomes rolling. By the time it gets to US 98, it has some pretty good hills. Not like Ironman Wisconsin or Lake Placid, but definitely hilly.

The entire ride from the park where we start to 98 and back is around 36 miles. Jean wants to get her mileage up so she has some base going into the 24 Hour Challenge, which she plans to do this year for the first time. She says she’ll only do the 125 mile loop and then quit, but I’ll believe that when I see it.

Well, I’d better sign off. I’m trying to muster up the courage to go out to the local IHOP for pancakes. With this terrible weather (OK, it’s only sprinkling and it’s 60 degrees), we may be the only ones there.

Just (I’m Afraid to Get Wet) Jack

 Today ends the first week of my formal training for the Bayshore Marathon in Traverse City on Memorial Day weekend. My schedule calls for running five days a week. Three are short (35 to 45 minutes) and two are longer. This week’s long runs were 70 minutes on Wednesday and 105 minutes today and I’m tired, or as the rednecks say down here “Ahm tard”. I’m used to running three days a week since the race in September, and it’s quite a shift in the energy drain. Studies show that geezers (that’s the medical term for what we refer to as “age challenged”) need more recovery time than younger people (let your mind wander on this one).

It’s interesting that when we run with our friends in Michigan, I know I’m the one of the oldest (Pat’s much older than I am) and, as a result, I’m not expected to finish the long run until well after the youngsters are done and have eaten most of the food at the Sunday  brunch. Down here, we’re considered the youngsters, and most of the people just shake their heads and think we’re nuts, which we are.

This morning I had an age challenged gentleman, who was shuffling out to the street to pick up his morning paper at 10:30 AM in pajama bottoms that were as old as I am, tell me I should be carrying weights in my hands instead of my water bottle. I was100 minutes into my 105 minute run, and my water bottle, which was empty, felt like it weighed 10 pounds. I usually come up with some cocky, snide remark like “Come out and run with me and tell me what I’m doing wrong”, but I was too tired even for that.

Most of you know I’m an animal lover. Not just dogs, and I do tolerate cats, but I marvel at the different things I see on my runs (and road kill on the bike rides). Today it was the wild parrots that have a raucous squawk, but are fascinating to watch, and are a pretty green color. On my Wednesday 70 minute run, a big gentleman (yes, bigger than me and he was age challenged) was walking two little dogs, the kind I refer to as “ankle biters”. The dogs were on leashes but as I ran by, unlike everyone else, he let one dog get too close and I was almost nipped. He thought it was quite funny. I didn’t. They might have been his little “children”, but to me they were a couple of furry rats with a somewhat dimwitted owner.

Contrary to my personality shortly after the bike accident at IM Wisconsin, I kept my thoughts to myself. When I ran by him a few minutes later he said something and laughed and I didn’t say a word. So, Bill, Diane, Becky and Jean, unlike the young man at Panama City Beach, I didn’t call him an a$%^#le. I must be getting better.

I’ll be back in Michigan on Thursday this week for some hospital meetings and will fly back down here on Tuesday, the 22nd. My plane gets in at 1:30 PM and I’m still trying to make arrangements to get from the airport to Green Street. It’s not like down here where they have shuttles that take people to all the coastal cities from the Tampa airport. So my e-mail next week may be from the cottage, if I can get in the driveway and get the heat cranked up. If not, I may be off the air until the 27th.

By the way, that’s the date of The Great Escape Triathlon (olympic length) at Clermont, so if any of you are flying down to do that, let us know.

‘Til Later,

Just (Oh My Aching Body) Jack

 My training for the Bayshore Marathon starts tomorrow, so my run today was the last of the base warm-up runs. I only went 9 miles (my first long run is 105 minutes), and ran quite slow, but I always do so what’s different? Every time I run I see Robins, so spring must be just around the corner. It seems that I see them earlier each year. It must be a global warming thing.

Jean and I went on our third bike ride yesterday. The wind was the same as the previous two times, out of the North from 10 to 15 mph. The ride down was easy and the ride back was a chore. I had a hard time keeping the bike at 16 mph on the way back, and dropped to 14 in a couple of spots where the wind was blowing hard.

Of course, Jean rode behind me on the way down (just to warm up) and rode away from me on the way back. When we got back to the car, to rub it in I think, she asked if we were gone an hour. It’s a 21.4 mile down and back, and in my trademark, sarcastic way, I said “I didn’t average 21.4 mph so I was gone 1:15:43”.

Brother Bob and his girlfriend, Debra (not Debbie or Deb, but Debra), said they would go with us when we were out to dinner Friday evening. I don’t know if it sounded better after a couple glasses of wine or not, but they didn’t make it. They both let work get in the way of bike riding, something our group doesn’t know about. I did that for 28 years before I attended one of Jon Anderson’s “big tent revival meetings” and saw the light. He must have learned the process from Jimmy Swaggert on TV and adapted the “altar call” to a “1,000 jumps” spinning class.

Jean and I spent the last week going through model homes in some new developments. One was a golf community and two were not. On the 26th or 27th there is a”Great Escape Triathlon” over in Clermot. We aren’t ready to do one yet this year, but will go over and watch it, then take a tour of the Clermont area with some friends to see what is there.

We had dinner with Larry and Lorrie Blair and Jan Kietzmann (all from Hastings) last evening at Club Wildwood. Many of you know Larry as Dr. Blair but most of you don’t know he is an excellent cook. Jean made the mistake of, twice, calling it a trailer park. She was told it’s not a trailer park, it’s a mobile home community. When we left, we dropped Jan off at her place, and several residents followed us out with flaming torches and pitchforks, with signs that said “Yankee Trailer Trash Go Home”.

The weather is warming up and I kow it’s been quite mellow in Michigan for the last week or so. I’ll fly up on the 17th for a meeting on the 18th, teeth cleaning and a haircut on the 21st (yes, it’s long, but not as long as Larry Etter’s was…hair, not teeth), a Pennock Board meeting on the 22nd, and will fly back on the 22nd late.

Better go. We’re on our way to brother Bob’s to watch the superbowl. I made a bowl of what they call “South Georgia Caviar”. It has black-eyed peas, corn, diced tomatoes and chiles, diced jalapeno pepper, diced red bell peppers, diced onion, diced pimento, and italian dressing. It’s served with corn chips or tortilla chips (no double-dipping allowed). It’s enough to feed 50 people, so if you are free, stop by. Call and I’ll give you directions.

Just (Tired From This Morning’s Run) Jack

 Jean is still in Boynton Beach helping Robert live his life, but says she’ll be back tomorrow. Time will tell. It was supposed to be Thursday, then Sunday, now Monday. Rocky’s had a break for a couple of weeks and now Robert will after tomorrow. I’ll take my turn having Jean tell me what to do and when to do it, but I plan to come back to Michigan on the 20th for Pennock’s February board meeting (2/25) and a Joint Conference Committee meeting (2/21). We haven’t talked about whether Jean will come back with me or not.

Interesting run today. I ran in some older, but low mileage, Asics Gel Foundation III shoes. I forgot to use Vaseline on my arches and luckily had no blisters. On the down side, I intended to run 7 or 8 miles at an easy pace, but I ran 6 miles at an easy pace and ran out of gas. I don’t know whether it was mental or physical. I don’t have any gels down here and didn’t have any sports drink either, just water. I think my muscle glycogen was depleted and there was nothing to replenish it. My Bayshore Marathon training starts on February 7th so I hope I get it figured out soon.

I went to the book store yesterday and bought “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Total Nutrition” by Joy Bauer. On the way out of the mall, I stopped at Best Buy and got a Yoga DVD, “Yoga for Strength” with Rodney Yi. If I can convince myself to follow the nutrition guide closely and do the Yoga DVD two or three times a week, I won’t have to starve myself to lose weight and my old geezer joints will start limbering up. I don’t think there’s much in the book I haven’t read before at one time or another, but I just have to make a commitment to stay with it.

As a side note, I wasn’t paying attention when I was looking for the book store and stepped into one that I know said book store on the front. As I looked around, there were no books, lots of magazines, and the DVDs had people, mostly women, in various positions, but I’m sure they weren’t doing Yoga. When I saw that they had booth rentals “by the minute”, I knew I was in the wrong place. As I left I saw the sign “ADULT Book Store”. Lesson learned (Pay Attention).

Bruce and Ruth Gee were down here (Spring Hill) for a week so they invited me to lunch on Friday. They had a house built in a development called “Pristine Place”. I got a tour of the house (beautiful layout and nicely decorated) and we walked around the neighborhood. It was a little chilly (low to mid 60s) so we didn’t go canoeing like we planned.

My Terry Liberator bike seat came yesterday and I had it on the bike within an hour. It’s about the same length as the Alias 130 seat that came with the bike, but a little thicker. I measured distances as closely as I could and tried to set the new seat in the same position. My first ride (probably today) will tell the story.

A couple of years ago I started writing about my life as a “mediocre athlete”. I titled the piece “I Am Not The Greatest”, a take off on Muhammad Ali’s statement. The first writing was what Anne Lamott, the author of “Bird By Bird” calls a “sh*&%y first draft”. I tried to rewrite parts of it last year, but my memory problems made me forget what I had just read two minutes before, so I scrapped the project. This year I brought the word files with me and am rewriting, chapter by chapter. My plan is to get it where I want it, word protect it, and file it away. Then I can go on to other things. The “Monk” in me won’t let things stay undone. If I ever write anything I think is readable, I’ll pass it on.

Time to go. The warm weather beckons me.

Just (Missing My Friends) Jack

 We’ve been down here a little over a week so there’s not much news. I promise not to whine about the wind while I was out running today, or the fact that the temperature had dipped to 47 on that same run. I’ve heard about the snow and wind in Michigan and I’m glad I didn’t have to run in that (did anyone run today?).

Jean and I joined the YMCA in Springhill for two months and she promptly left town to stay with Robert for a few days in Boynton Beach, just South of West Palm Beach and North of Miami. After we joined the YMCA last year in Venice, we went to Michigan and she never came back. I don’t know if she’s trying to spend her inheritance early on these faimly memberships or wants to whittle the divorce settlement to an even number.

For you runners out there, I’m still having blister issues. My “during the week” runs are in the 4 mile range and I never have any problems. The Sunday runs are from 6 to 8 miles and the blisters start forming on my arch around 5 miles. This morning I had blisters on both feet (to date it has only been the right foot). I’ve used three different brand/style shoes and have problems with all three. I guess it’s time to try vaseline. By the way, the shoes and socks are the same I have used for the past year and, yes, I do wash the socks.

I’ve had a couple of things happen the last couple of weeks and I don’t know whether I should be offended, people are try to tell me something for my own good, or I’m just imagining things. First of all, I told you all last week about the problems with my bike seat. I decided to get a Terry Liberator since that’s what I use on the Trek and it’s comfortable (I won’t get into the mechanics of how we plant 3/4 of our body weight on a bike seat on a few square inches of a tender part of our body and it is “comfortable”).

Anyway, I went to a bike shop in Springhill which is 6 or 7 miles North of Hudson, where we’re staying. I walked into the shop and it appeared to be geared toward Florida riders (draw your own conclusions). There were a few bike seats on the wall near the front of the store so I wound my way through the bikes and looked at them. None of them were what I wanted.The owner of the store was in the back, reached up to a bike seat on a shelf wrapped in plastic, unwrapped it and said “I’ll bet this is what you’re looking for”. It was one of those seats that looks like a John Deere tractor seat. It’s wider than it is long and accomodates big butts. I said no and walked out of the store.

That same day I got an e-mail from Florida Realty Centers with an attachment. That’s where brother Bob works and I assumed he had sent me a picture of some real estate I may be interested in. Instead it was a series of pictures, taken from behind, of a young woman who must have weighed 300 pounds with the caption, “Does this thong make my butt look big?” (shades of last year’s thong pictures of Bill Bradley and me).

Then this morning, just as I opened my e-mail program to write this, I received a message. It took forever to dowload so I knew it had an attachment which happened to be a song. It was titled, “I just don’t look good naked anymore”. I did listen to it but I won’t repeat the lyrics. I won’t say who sent it but his initials are ERNIE STRONG. We do take a trip together to the U.P. each August to a one room cabin, so I know he’s seen me naked.

So are they trying to tell me something or am I ust being too sensitive? Two of the encounters may have been a coincidence, but three? I think not. I know I gained 12 pounds after Ironman Wisconsin, but I’ve been trying to lose that and have a good start. Once Mom left for Michigan I took the homemade chocolate candies over to brother Bob’s so he could take them to work (I can’t stand the temptation).

Since I’m so close to fresh seafood, I’m trying to include more of it in my diet. Yesterday I went to the shrimp docks and bought 2 pounds of shrimp fresh off the boat and a 1/2 pound of Grouper. That was too much for me so I enlisted Bob and his friend, Debra, to help me eat it. The shrimp was boiled for 1 minute in salted water, then rinsed in cold water to stop the cooking process. I took two thirds of them and sauteed them quickly in olive oil, butter and sprinkled them lightly with cajun seasoning. I sauteed the grouper in the same olive oil and butter, and sprinkled it lightly with lemon pepper seasoning. We washed it down with a glass of wine. That sounds healthy, doesn’t it? O.K. Next time I should skip the olive oil, butter and the wine. But we all should enjoy life every once in a while, shouldn’t we?

Until next week,

Just (Chilly But Not Complaining) Jack