Don't poop your pants ...

This blogger posted the following video and I had to steal it.

My niece and brother-in-law just ran a marathon over the weekend, and I'm betting most of this went through their head at some point.

I, myself, have never run more than half a mile and don't plan to unless I'm chased by a bear. And even then, I might try out that fetal position trick instead (that's how much I hate running).

In any case, I'll never know what running 26.2 miles is like, but this video gives me a little insight:

This makes me happy

So ... I know the lyrics mention "we're going at it tonight," which probably isn't the most wholesome message, but I can't help smiling when I hear this song.

I think it's the beat that yanks me into a good mood, despite all the horrible drivers on the road.

A little advice.

The next time you have a major surgery and you get out of the hospital and your parents ask which fast food restaurant you want to stop at on the way home and the closest one is Burger King so you tell them to go there and you walk inside and you can see flies buzzing around everywhere and the guy behind the counter looks like he hasn't had a shower in months and probably doesn't even remember what a shower is and the people "making" the food look like they would rather be out pulling the wings off of butterflies ...

DON'T EAT THERE.

I didn't get that memo, and I spent the next two days throwing up (which probably did a number on the work done by the doctor).

My Surgery

But first a little background.

When I was 14, I had a weird surgery.

The cartilage in my rib cage was ... extra productive, and it grew WAY to long. The pressure built up (unbeknownst to me) until I got thrown from a horse, at which point it began to buckle inward and push on my lung.

The fancy name for this is pectus excavatum.

(Tangent)
I'm convinced that doctors purposefully come up with random, convoluted names for things, mostly so they can sound smarter than the rest of us.

And it works.
(End Tangent)

In the hospital, the prep video they showed me the night before was for an open-heart surgery (since they didn't have a pectus excavatum surgery video). The doctor said the only difference is that they weren't going to lift my heart out of the chest cavity.

I spent a week of recovery in the hospital eating Jello.

(Tangent)
My first solid food was toward the end of the week, and even though the noodles tasted like soap, it was STILL heaven on earth.
(End Tangent)

Everything is fine now, but the doctor neglected to tell me one minor detail.

For the rest of my life, I'll have a numb spot about the size of a dinner plate on my chest. Granted, I still would have gone through with it had I known, but it was an unsettling feeling to realize I could no longer feel anything there.

I'm the Mommy

My daughter likes to pretend.

A lot.

Practically every waking minute is spent pretending to be jellyfish or unicorns or She-Ra.

One day, she decided to give us a little role reversal. First, she told my wife that she was the daddy. So, my wife tried to deepen her voice and increase the frequency of cool and leaving off the "g" in -ing words in her vocabulary. Then my daughter turned to me and said, "Daddy? You're the mommy." Since I already have a high voice, it wasn't much of a stretch. So I tried to act sweet and nice and completely enthusiastic about everything she did.

A few minutes later, I took her on an errand to a store. All the way there, she kept saying things like:

"Mommy, are we going to the store?"
"I like your hair, mommy."
"Mommy, will you read me a story?"

This was all fine until we pulled into the parking lot and I realized the disastrous effect her little game could have once we were in public. So, I told her, "Ok, when we get into the store, I'm not mommy anymore. I'm daddy."

Fortunately, she picked those 30 seconds of the day to listen and actually got the message.

I can only imagine the looks I'd get if she kept referring to me as the woman of the relationship.