Early Morning is Not for the Faint of Heart

My cat is HUGE.

Really.

And when it's cold outside, it's quite cold in my apartment. Her solution?

Sleep directly on me.

Sometimes she will pin down a leg.

Other times, when she is feeling particularly adventurous/homicidal, she will crawl up onto part of my rib cage.

And I wonder why I have problems sleeping!

Did I mention that she is HUGE?

Tuesday night, however, I deployed the secret weapon.

The air mattress.

It wasn't just for her: I had a guest staying with me, too.

Poor guest.

My cat LOVES the air mattress. It's as if it is a personal cat ed, proportioned to fit cats such as her.

I saw her for 30 seconds that night/morning, when she was trying to cage more food from me after she gobbled all that came out of her automatic feeder.

So you'd think that I slept the sleep of the innocent Tuesday night.

Actually, I hardly slept at all.

You see, I am not a morning person. And I was going to have to leave my house for a run at 5:55am.

"But really" , you are probably thinking to yourself. "What about all those early morning runs for the last two years? What about those emails you sent me at 4:15am?"

Did many of those emails make a lot of sense?

And I HAD to get up that early to get myself prepared for those hideously early runs before work. You wouldn't have wanted me to run into a telephone pole, now would you?

The fact that I have to get up so much earlier than the time that I run is a good indication of how much I am not a morning person, in fact! Ammunition for the defense!

So, now that I don't usually have to run as early, because of the change in my teaching schedule, I'm sleeping in. Sometimes until 7:00am!

And I was really worried that I wouldn't wake up to meet the Vivacious Redhead.

Instead, I just didn't really sleep. So I was nice and grumpy for this run.

Did I mention that it was also really cold, as well as dark?

But my spirits lifted after getting to Ft. Greene, where we could see the sun rising over downtown Brooklyn. Almost as breathtaking as Manhattan's sparkle coming over the Brooklyn Bridge as the sky turns pink.

Those spirits didn't lift as much as they could have, however, because my weenie meter was still going off. And the Vivacious Redhead decided that it was high time that we did stairs.

My rear end's nemisis. And probably its best friend, if I ever gave them a chance to really get to know each other.

Something the Vivacious Redhead said on Sunday bubbled into my mind.

Me: my hair looks flat and lumpy.
VR: as long as your read end doesn't look flat and lumpy! Really, that's all we can hope for out of life.

So I did the stairs.

They actually weren't so bad. We were trying to see how it would feel to take them two at a time but neither of us are coordinated enough to run them two at a time just yet. So we power-walked the three sets of stairs 4 times in a row and called it as day.

Back up Myrtle and then Washington, whence we came. The sky was now a gleaming blue and the temperature was rising. We split off at Eastern Parkway, me turning east and her turning west.
I have no real idea how far we went. I figure about 2 1/2 miles of me running solo, then maybe 4 of us running together? Easy running the whole time.
I'd better pick up the tempo a bit on Friday! I'm likely going to run with the Speedy Blonde next week, after all!
Off to work some before running to school.....