Pizza, pizza or pizza

So far, the "Cooking" portion of this blog has been sadly lacking. And I'm afraid tonight ain't the night to break it in... unless by "cooking" you mean "ditching plans to make homemade pizza dough and sauce because of super-long day at work, so stopping at grocery store to buy fresh dough and fancy-schmancy organic sauce, then ditching that to pick up the phone and dial for greasy, takeout, red-pepper-and-sausage pizza." Yeah, cooking.

So in lieu of any actual cooking - or any running, for that matter - I provide you with this exchange between the mostly fabulous husband and myself, as I was leaving the house to pickup the aforementioned pie. (Minor rant: Why don't people in New England recognize that "pie" is the same as "pizza," and that "plain" is the same as "cheese"? Have they never been to New Jersey, New York or any of the fine states full of obnoxious people from whence the delicacy of pizza sprung? And how long must I live here before I learn this??)

Me [yelling from driveway, through open window into house]: Hey, is Spruce Avenue still closed?
Him: What?
Me: Is Spruce still closed?
Him: Uh... I don't think so.
Me: Did you come home from work that way?
Him: Yeah.
Me: Really?
Him: Yeah.
Me: Then I guess it's not closed.

A veritable Algonquin round table, we are.

At least we have an excuse: Last night, some most excellent friends of ours had a dinner party to celebrate S.'s birthday - she turned a miniscule (yet mature and lovely and not neurotic at all) 26 yesterday. Methinks we are way too old to have such young'uns for friends... especially when it means celebrating until 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. You'da thunk we spent the night carousing and kicking ass, as D. likes to put it, by the 937 times I hit snooze this morning before slamming the damn thing off. 

And all day the brain cells just haven't fired quite right. Almost sent the paper off to the printer today with a MAJOR typo on the cover. Thank g-d for the perky, 24-year-old assistant who caught it. Stupid young people.

D.'s giving up and going to bed. I think I'm about to follow, with plenty of magazines to entertain me in the approximately 45 seconds before I fall asleep.

Poking around on Saturday

I am having the worst bout of procrastination right now. We've got friends coming in 90 minutes or so. The house is ready - clean enough, all the random Saturday morning chores done, laundry underway. But what is not done is the piece I need to write for work. It's short - 650 words. And it's pretty straightforward. And it really needs to get done if I'm to head into work with any kind of sanity on Monday. AND given how much I hate having work hanging over me on the weekend, it'd be really damn smart to knock this out before D. & A. get here. Plus, I've got my notes, got the PR materials, even got an open Word doc, named and saved and everything.

But I'll be damned if I can actually make myself settle down and write the thing. Part of that comes from the fact that I didn't really like the interview subject and I think his business is silly. Usually that sort of disdain makes the writing process fun, though.

Another part of the problem is that my mostly fabulous husband - who's in the living room watching Barbershop 2, an uncharacteristically lowbrow choice for him - dropped off a beer at the computer desk on his way toward the couch. I love the occasional Saturday afternoon beer. And sometimes it totally enhances the writing process. But today all it's doing is making me ponder the magazines that arrived in today's mail. Beer + wicker couch on the screened-in porch + new, frivolous magazine + shih tzu companion = bliss.

And then there's my total fascination w/ this here blog. I've been reading other blogs for months - one of the bajillions inspired by Julie/Julia... it just took me, oh, 12 months to get my act together and actually start this thing. So I've been thinkin' a lot about blog style and content and audience and... not writing my article. Hmm.

The other thing I didn't today was run. It's miserable here - gray, foggy/cloudy and very cool. Those happen to be the ideal conditions for me to run in, but it also makes a pretty darn good argument for installing software for the swanky new digital camera and, y'know, poking around. Plus, just as D. had gotten me to promise that I was almost done screwing around and was going to go put on running shoes, it started raining. And of course you can't run in the rain. Nosiree.

Ok, I just wrote 418 words in a matter of minutes. Surely I can get my work done if I just concentrate. Right?

Where the hipsters are

 
Spent tonight w/ good friends B & K. They're the kind of people who you can go months without seeing, then sit down w/ them and actually have a real conversation about real stuff. Y'know, like what reality shows you're addicted to, between New Yorker and Atlantic issues of course. They have a new baby, little E, who is wild and crazy and doesn't much like to sleep. She's a cutie pie, though... and astoundingly their tales of sleep deprivation and temporary insanity didn't dissuade us from our recent - and kinda surprising, most of all to me - turn toward the possibility of kiddos. For years I was sure I didn't want any - loved Rocky the shih tzu (and Sparky, her now-deceased pal) and books and quiet time and restaurants and also my job. And I thought that was enough, which it still could be.

But lately all the reproducing our friends are doing - I just hit the big 3-2, so my friends are procreating like crazy - has kinda lured me into pondering babies. Babies. So weird.

Don't know where this will end up. But we're talking.

And as for the running? Yeah, we did about 2.5 miles the other night. The race, which is 6.2 miles, is in a week. Hah. Hahahahahaha. Clearly the temporary insanity is catching. Must. Go. To. Bed. (Because, after all, it is 10:48 on a Friday, and that's where all the hipsters are - in bed, with magazine, separated from spouse by the bowling-ball-like weight of a 9.5-pound shih tzu.)

The first one

So, this is the first post in my new blog. I s'pose this is the part where I'm supposed to explain the name, right? "RunningCookingWriting" = Three things I like to do, in the opposite order in which they tend to actually take place. I edit a business newspaper, so the writing part pretty much takes care of itself every day (though the whole point of this here blog is to actually write for myself once in a while).
 
The cooking... most days it's something I love - a way to relax, with a glass of wine and NPR, after a day at work. Yoga works for a lot of people, but for me chopping vegetables, sauteing onions, pulling together a decent meal -- that's relaxation. Harried work life -- and a bunch of decent takeout places nearby -- means that I don't do it as often as I'd like. (Not to mention the occasions on which I come home and am pissed beyond belief that D., my mostly fabulous husband, has not miraculously intuited that tonight I don't want to cook - I want to sit on the couch like a zombie and read last week's Entertainment Weekly while he putters around in the kitchen.)
 
As for the running, "like" may not have been exactly the right word for it. I feel great when I'm done... something I wish I could remember - and act on - more frequently. Got a 10K coming up in - how 'bout that - 10 days. And in no way am I prepared. You should not interpret this to mean that I am a competitive runner worried about setting a personal record (a PR, to real runners). Nope, I'm just wondering whether I can complete the course in a quasi-respectable time that bears some resemblance to what I ran last year, when I actually followed the training calendar on the fridge. This year it's just hanging there, lonely, without a mark on it for the last few weeks. Egads.
 
The mostly fabulous husband and I are scheduled to run before work tomorrow morning. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one if I were you.
 
Will they? Won't they?
 
More scintillating details to come in the days ahead.