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I managed to get a run in today! Yay!
The regular Amtrak, on the weekends, is like a bus with a snack car. It stops just about everywhere and the bathrooms smell about as bad.
I'm spoiled from having a job and, therefore, feeling justified in taking the Acela.
Now, jobless, I take the cheapest regular train I can find.
At least I get a chance to get work done. A LOT of work done.
Yesterday, I left Boston at 3:00pm. I got home at a quarter to midnight. After chores and such, it was 1:00am or so.
Not the best for feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning before class!
(By the way, I have no idea, really, why that saying is supposed to mean what it does. Suave says that my family has an odd set of Southern colloquialisms.)
And today was a doozy. Constitutional Law and Contracts, where I was on call, plus some extra Legal Writing homework and a meeting to go to in the afternoon. Add tired and it was not conducive to actually getting out there to run.
I've been having a lot of afternoon running motivational problems, actually. I fought with myself all the way home about running, giving myself deals and lying to myself about where I'd go.
Cloudy but cool as I strapped on my shoes. Funny, but my body temperature has gone haywire: the cool weather makes such a difference. I felt it on yesterday's slow run with Suave and I felt it again today - it was only about 72 and cloudy.
Plus, I didn't bring my water bottles. "Just go down H Street to 8th Street NE and see how it goes."
The run was broken up into motivational segments like that. "You can always just stop after the next one, if you feel like it."
White lies. I'm still not sure how I convince myself of the truth of them, even as I am conscious of the fact that I am lying to myself.
Anyway, I got to tour the cool houses of the revitalized NE and SE before turning right onto Pennsylvania Avenue, then right onto 1st St NE by the reflecting pool, around the pool to Madison and down the Mall, around the Washington Monument and around the Lincoln Memorial then back around the reflecting pool, up 1st Avenue NW and left onto Massachusetts and home.
A lot of people play softball on the lawn by the Washington Memorial. Fear of getting hit in the temple by a ball, which caused the only fatality during a game in baseball in the early 20th century, makes me skittish.
And now that I'm running more slowly, running without my headphones doesn't seem to be as big a deal. Interesting.
A tiny bit under 9 miles. Yay!
Plus, I had an awesome fairy find my lost phone and give it back to me today. What luck!
Words matter
1 week ago
Betty Kirkpatrick writes in _Cliches_ (1999):
ReplyDelete*bright-eyed and bushy-tailed* is an idiom cliche meaning lively and alert. The expression is used in informal, and often in humorous, contexts, as "How can you look so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning when we've all got a hangover?" In origin it refers to the alert aspect and bushy tail of the squirrel and probably came to Britain from America, where it dates from the 1930s.
According to Robert Hendrickson's _Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins_ (1977), "bushy-tailed" is "a reference to the tail of a cat, which fluffs up when the animal becomes excited."
"Mr. Casey's been asleep but ... he's now bright-eyed and bushy-tailed." (Casey, _Torpedo Junction_, 1942)
MBlogger comments:
NOT A SOUTHERN COLLOQUIALISM but one used nationally - Ever since Suave attended schools in New England, he developed a snob thing about his SE roots. I can understand his thinking because it was not fashionable to have a Southern accent in NYC or New England until Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were Presidents. Sorry, Suave, but true. NYers rightfully love NY but they often know little of the rest of the country. Having lived in NY in the late 60s, early 70s, I found them (NYers) a bit provincial back then.