I was sad to wake up and hear the news of the terror attacks in Brussels. I feel like I should mention this, as I sit down to blog about fun things that I’ve been doing. My blog seems frivolous at times, and yet, I feel so incredibly lucky to have the experiences I do, to be able to share them, to live where I do, to have had the parents I did, and I could go on. Sometimes I get angry at how unfair life is, and how much I work and yet still things are so hard, but today I think, I am lucky, life is good for me, I am very lucky for this.  I won’t pretend to have any answers in life and how to solve these horrible problems we have in the world, but I think the first step is to look around, admit how lucky some of us are and to look on everybody with love and compassion.

And…let’s segue into the luck of the Irish. Ha! Terrible pun, but I never told you about the 5 mile St Patrick’s Day Race I ran with April the other weekend. I took the Metrolink downtown with her (I drove to her house which is very near a stop—the Metrolink is very convenient for her and very inconvenient for me, but since she has a pass, it was cheaper for the two of us than driving downtown and parking. For what it’s worth, if she had had to buy a ticket it would have been cheaper to drive, but I digress.)

I got a free entry in exchange for doing a little publicity (Thanks Clare!) and April and I decided we would stay together the whole race. Our friendship really blossomed during a race a few years ago (we were both in drastically different places in our lives then than we are now, but I think…both much better off and happier!) so we thought it would be another excellent bonding activity. We were correct! Anyway, April has had a few injuries and her knee started bugging her, so we did a fair amount of walking, and I am just really slow when I am running, so whatever on the whole RACING bit, but the run is just so much fun—people in costume, people with kegs, people all wearing green and shamrocks and whatnot. It was a wonderful way to spend 1:11:21 or so.

We stopped near the finish line to try to get that picture. Not our best, but not our worst!

Anyway, I realize this seems like a half-hearted post, but I wanted to write about it 

I’m back to work after Louie and I took a little trip to Chicago for a few days. Today I dropped Chloe off at the vet to get her eye checked up on—it’s still looking weird so we wanted to get it looked at. Mackenzie is a little tired, probably from allergy meds, but she sees a specialist next week, and we will hopefully get to the bottom of her issues (hopeful, I’m hopeful for her). It’s hard to transition from vacation to home, but it’s not so bad. Chicago was great and deserves it’s own post, so I’ll tell you about it soon! One thing is that we really mastered the public transportation…well, at least, we used both buses and trains and only ended up in a rough neighborhood on the Southside one time (where a bus driver pulled up and asked us, what are you doing here?). We ate some good food, saw art and stuffed animals in museums (that’s dead, stuffed animals…) and overall had a great time.

I’m off to lunch and then teaching. Not overly busy this week but lots to get done.