Sundaes for Breakfast

For today’s edition of revisiting old thoughts and finishing them, we will look at that one time, when protesters took over the capital building. And then thoughts on it now. I had strong feelings the day after it happened, which is when this was written. I still have strong feeling on it. The goal on revisiting old thoughts is to get one finished once a week. I have 11, including this one. Only ten more weeks to go and then more random thoughts about running and the occasional interludes about politics. and other ramblings.. which are thoughts that I tend to have while running in the morning. So, it works. Anyhow, there were only two corrections to the first part of this blog, both just needed better words due to too many redundancies. It is a bit scattered in the latter part. My mind is racing these days, I need a break 🙂

January 7, 2021

I was impressed with myself this morning for managing to get out of the house and go run. My head was not in the right space and it was most wonderful. I should have left the house a lot sooner than I did and as it would happen, I really needed that full 30 minutes to really get the endorphins going. And, as a result, my mood for the better part of the day was less than stellar. I feel like I should be taking my medicine before I get to work, and instead, it’s sat in my purse all day, and I have only just taken them since getting home today.

As I sit here, I can feel the effects of my meds kicking in and my brain tingles a bit and I can feel myself breathing a little easier. My body isn’t as tense and I’m relaxing into the keyboard as I get ready to get myself a nice bowl of chocolate ice cream. Tillamook Chocolate Mudslide.. if there is any left that is. And my bowl of which I speak, is no bigger than a small 4 ounce bowl, and I really don’t eat a lot of it. It’s too sweet for me. But it’s so rich and delicious, and I don’t eat it very often, I think after the last 36 hours or so, I deserve to take a deep breathe and try to relax. After all, shit really hit the fan yesterday and I can’t stay silent on this one. BRB…..

Lots of new things for me this week. I bought makeup and I actually like it a lot. I don’t feel like I have makeup on at all, so shout out to IL MAKIAGE for a fine product. I really like the concealer and eyeliner as well. And, the best part about their make-up was I wear a mask all day, every day, and I haven’t had any makeup wear off onto the mask. What IS this magic 🙂 Another first this week was I started to curl my hair before I go to work again. Why am I doing all of this fun getting made up kind of thing? Well, every few years I go through spurts where I want to look nice when I go to work, and so I will get up early and put effort into how I look when I get there. It makes me feel better about myself. I hate the time it takes because I don’t like giving up on my time to anything, so it’s a big deal for me to make an effort to be punctual. Yay me. Although, when I got work on Tuesday, my computer monitor died and I had to use a different one, therefore, I had to have my time adjusted because of the equipment and not because of me. Again, ya me. On Wednesday I got to watch in horror as domestic terrorists stormed the capital building. And what a fucking shit show that was. My stomach still hurts and I can feel my chest tighten as I think of it again. I am going to fast forward a bit to this evening, just before walking downstairs for dinner. I asked my husband did we have any protests in the 80’s that lead to the death of a police officer in the United States. We couldn’t think of any, but, let me take a look… and all the ones that I could find, there could have been more, weren’t on US soil. It was in the 1990’s that this started to happen.

Now, if you think back to the 90’s, I keep thinking it was like, 10 years ago, and it’s a lot more than that in reality. What can I say, I am child of that decade. I remember things happening and not really understanding the gravity of what it was until many years later. In 1993, there was bomb set off in the parking garage of the one of the Twin Towers. I can remember watching Peter Jennings as his calm deep voice would give me the news of the day, I had such a crush on him, who wouldn’t though? I can see the images in my head still of people coming out the building covered in concrete ash. They were coughing and it was a nasty site. I didn’t realize at the time that it was a terrorist attack. I knew what it was, but, at my age, I wasn’t old enough to really grasp the somberness of the situation. And then more things started to happen. More run ins with bombings in building and out in public. The federal building in Oklahoma was blown up in 1995. I was a few years older and I could see how bad this was. The very next year, there was a bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta. Thinking about it now, still makes tears start to well up in my eyes. And then we got to have a serial bomber send people packages that blew up and he did that for the better part of two decades. I could actually go on for a while about all the times since the 90’s that I have seen headlines about people dying in the country in mass shootings, protests, movie theaters, concerts, and our most vulnerable, schools. And while that would be a lovely dive into my thoughts on what we can do to do better, that’s not what I wanted to focus on.

My country has seen it’s fair share of radicals trying to destroy us from the outside. When the towers fell, I was 21, almost 22. I was in the United States Navy, I was in school, learning about lube oil purifiers. I knew in that instant, life was going to change. I had no way of knowing what was to come for me, but, I knew that being in the military, life as I knew it, in the blink of an eye, changed forever. This was the most earth shattering thing for me. That was scary, and I’m grateful I had sister there with me. No, I want to focus on the ones that came from within. The ones who say how much they love America.

Now, back to yesterday… that sounds funny doesn’t it 🙂 … I had no idea that there was anything going on recently. For whatever reason, I haven’t seen a lot of things on social media lately, so I was a bit late to the game about it. My boss was the one who told me about anything going on. It was when he came back from lunch and walked over to my desk and let me know that the capital building had been broken into. I was shocked. And since it was my early day, as I was trying to leave for the day, I was given the opportunity to talk to a woman for a good long while. I think she’s pretty awesome. And then she told me that she thought that this election was completely rigged and 45 won and there just couldn’t be any way that he would have lost. She had two grandkids who were there, she seemed jealous of them. My heart sank. I have a hard time with that one. So, I leave and put on Pandora, the 80’s alternative station. I was totally jamming out and loving it. Got home, and was glad to be there. Walked myself on up the stairs and Thomas has the news on live from a station out of L.A. They were showing photos of the destruction and videos of people wandering around as the bottom of the screen had a thing saying a 6pm curfew is in effect in Washington D.C. Odd. And then they started showing the videos of earlier in the day. The members of Congress and the Senate being taken out of the building through different staircases. Evacuated from their place of work and ordered to shelter in place. Almost like school children are rushed out of a building when there is an active shooter.. Fun Fact.. Most kids in this country have had Active Shooter drills at their schools because you never know when there is going to be a kid with their parent’s semi-automatic weapon that wasn’t locked up decide to take out their frustrations on their fellow students because life is hard and fuck this place, I’m taking everyone down with me manifesto kind of people. I hope during the next year or two, they will give some serious thought to changing the laws regarding guns. Maybe now that they know what it feels like to have that fear run through your veins, they can be empathic to the kids that have to do that drill to help them not get killed when it does happen… I digress… where was I?….. Watching the news reels of the events of the day. I stood there, still as can be, my hands pressed to my lips, eyes wide in shock, tears running down my face. I felt sucker punched, right to the gut. And then it felt like I was getting kicked in the gut over and over again. Wow.

Shock and disbelief is the best way to describe the emotions that I felt in the moment. My head was swirling and in a mess. Today, I tried to go run and it didn’t work. I posted my feelings on my social media, Instagram and one of my running groups. And then I got ready for work. My heart was heavy and I had a lot to say. I cried durning my run this morning. I let the tears flow as best as I could. I let them go some more today at lunch when I got a message that my post was removed from the running group. I knew I took a chance by putting my feelings into words. I was grateful for the kindness of the admin person who was super awesome. I never got to see the reaction to it, but, it could have been bad. I suspect that it was bad enough. I felt personally attacked, but, I didn’t have to actually read what others may or may not have said. It’s all just a gamble to me. And it could have been taken down before much was noticed. Who knows. I don’t right now. I’m ok with that, really. I have a hard time with online attacks, it’s not my best platform for trying to do debates. I would much rather get together with someone and talk to them in person, over a phone call, or whatever. I’m just not an internet arguing kind of person.

Anyhow, the point I was trying to make, very slowly, was that all of these things have hurt us. We have all felt the pain of an attack on our country. I would say many of us, but, then I realize not everyone is old enough to remember what it was like when the Federal building went down. It was more that the attacks had come from one of our own, one of our citizens, who was so upset with the way things were going, they decided they needed to make some changes. It’s like being stabbed in the back. We were unsuspecting fools to think it wouldn’t happen to us, but it did.

Yesterday was a far worse attack. Why do I say this? How can I compare this to Oklahoma? It’s nothing like that, and you’re right, to an extent, but let me continue. Yesterday, I got to see people who claim to be patriots of our country, the ones who say protesting and kneeling at a football game, silently, during the National Anthem, is disrespectful of the military, break through the doors of the very building that represents the law making part of our country and disrespect every military personnel, every veteran who ever put on that uniform, all of them, living and deceased. I saw the ones who claim that they are god fearing good christians act like shameful thugs and shit all over everything the military stands for. We took an oath of office to protect this country from all terrorist, foreign AND DOMESTIC. And what I saw yesterday was exactly that. They brought a confederate flag into that building, a flag from a group of people who LOST THE FUCKING WAR, into our most scared of places.

And those officers, wow. They didn’t seem to be prepared for any of this. Golly… When the protest for the Black Lives Matter was going on, the National Guard was called out and used lots of different way to subdue the crowd, including, but not limited to tear gas, and rubber bullets. People died in those riots. And the protests were over the disproportionate deaths of black men by the police. What’s really going to wet your noodle is know that if this was a group of black men, they would have been shot, a lot of them, brute force would have been used, and it wouldn’t have been the escorting out the building with no one in cuffs that was seen yesterday. Why was it so different? These people who took the building this week were white. You got it. A bunch of white people, who were incited by the president of this country to take back the vote, fight if you need, don’t give up without a fight, trial by combat, blah blah blah.

You know what this feels like to me. Well, first, work wasn’t as fun as I would have liked, given the day. I was relieved that none of my customers wanted to talk about today. And if they did, they didn’t say anything to me about it. At lunch, when I got the message from the admin lady, I was heartbroken. The place that I feel the safest to post about how I feel in life and getting though life, and it was taken down. I get it. But, I felt like a little kid getting in trouble for taking a chance and doing something that you might get in trouble for, but you might not. Today was a not. I was devastated, but, I was able to cry a bit more and that felt so much better. I got to talk to another cool person that I work with, and he was fun to talk to. Got back from lunch and felt better. I was still uptight, and I just put on my happy face and kept trying. On my way to and from work today, I changed the station on Pandora to U2 station and it was like it knew I needed that. They could read my mind. On the way home, it played The Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, and then I started to think about the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch the part where he’s talking about an essay he did for college, entitled, You, Cunt, Always Get What You Want. I giggled at thinking about that line. Always made me laugh. The last song on the way home with Pink Floyd’s Hey You, from The Wall. Now it’s one of my favorite albums, The Wall. I was given it the first time as a gift from my sister Colleen. She wrapped it in Starbucks napkins, and duct tape. Best gift! I listened to it for year. Today, while thinking on the lyrics, the closing lines of the song are, Together we stand, divided we fall. How true they are.

April 6, 2021

It’s been 4 months since the attack on the capital and there has been a lot that has happened. Including, but not limited to, a birthday present for Kelsie, already arrived, Hanna had her baby, Kim had her baby, My little friend is 8 months old.. He’s so sweet and cute and tiny. I set out to finish the David Goggins 4x4x48 challenge in March and completed it!! I’m actually wearing the shirt right now, but, it’s dinner time right now, BRB…. So I get downstairs and Thomas asks what I’m doing. I said you told me dinner would be ready in 15 minutes, so I’m down here. He smile and says, 5 minutes Turkish… I brought the computer downstairs instead 🙂

Other notable things that have happened since that day 4 months ago, another officer was killed at the capital buildings this week. Had a car drove into him. I swear this place resembles a battlefield more and more to my mind. I am heartbroken over the politics of it, of which I don’t even want to go into. Instead, let’s talk about the coolest thing to happen this year is that the Boston Marathon opened up for a virtual race in October for the marathon. It is only open for 70,000 people and wouldn’t you know it, I fucking signed up!!! Hells yes, I’m excited. I don’t think that at this point in my life I am going to qualify with the time. Not to say that I won’t do that, but, that’s not a priority right now. Once it’s something I set my mind to doing, I am going to bust my ass to get there and dammit, I will make it on my own merit, but, that’s not right now. I am so over the moon about it. I haven’t talked about it on social media much about it, but, I am now. I am going to run the Boston Marathon this year, on my birthday. I won’t get the medal as soon as I cross the line, but, I will getting it done.

I am thinking more and more about the route I want to take when it comes to this. I live at 6800 feet above sea level and am trying to figure out what do I want to do. I will have to plan this out, train, work hard over the summer and make it happen. I am not a huge fan of running in the summer. I tend to whine about it a lot more than I should. I can still run, and for that I’m very grateful. I have done a walk with the dog yesterday and today. I need to get myself up earlier so I can actually get a good run in daily. I love how good I feel after I finish running. I think this means that there is going to be a big change in the way that I eat. I have no choice in that. I need to treat myself more like an athlete. Feed it better food. Take care of it more.

I have been getting a little more sleep in the last week or two or three. I have found that I love getting 8 hours of sleep at night. It feels amazing. I would love to get to bed earlier so I can get 8 hours and get up and go run 6 miles. That would mean going to bed a lot earlier… And then I wonder what if I went after dinner? Wait about 2 hours and then go run. That way I could come home and stretch and shower and go to sleep.. But the dog wakes me up in the morning, so, that doesn’t work either. Who knows, I will figure it out. I will just have to find a career in writing and running and making a better hat for women runners.

So, that’s where I am now. Training for Boston. I also signed up for the Pat Tillman run that I will also do as a virtual race. I am looking forward to doing in person running races again. Dinner is ready now… BRB

Oh that was delicious. Grilled chicken and peppers and baby potatoes. No, I couldn’t eat it all. It was so good. After dinner, Thomas asked me to grab something from the gas station so I went. I walked up and down the candy, giggling to myself thinking, yeah, some athlete. I settled for a mango apple bar called That’s It. It just has an apple and a mango. I left them in the car for tomorrow. They will make for a great breakfast. I feel like being able to take on this marathon is big deal and it’s going to be won with the everyday battles I have with food and working out and taking proper care of myself. I will have to change the way I think about food altogether I think. Who knows. Maybe I will have more on this next week. Maybe I will make more sense next. Or, better yet, I will eat a bowl of ice cream and savor the rich chocolate flavors and smile at my day, give thanks for the wonder and beauty of my life, and go to bed happy. Again, who knows. Peace ~