Days 8-13

The last six days of running are a blur. All I remember, really, is that most of those runs I really did not want to do, they were almost all at night, and a couple of them were after 11:00. I do remember I saw a firefly on one of them.

Despite my horrendous job of blogging them, I'm proud to say that I still have not missed a single run. There were several nights when I absolutely would NOT have gone if it weren't for the nature of this goal. The purpose of this goal is not to do the runs perfectly, but to do them perfectly consistently. I know it doesn't work for everyone, but it seems to be the only way to motivate myself right now and I'm feeling so good about how far I've come.

Even without setting distance or time goals I've found my distance and pace automatically increasing and that is very encouraging.

As an excuse for not blogging for the whole first week of June, I will offer this story:

Saturday morning, Matt, Lilly, and I were getting ready to go to a baptism. I ran back to the bedroom to grab a sweater as Matt was heading out the door, I heard him exclaim, "OH MY GOSH!" in a very sincerely surprised voice. I ran to check what had happened and saw a chipmunk run across the living room and into the kitchen! It had run past Matt and entered our apartment through the door when Matt opened it to leave.

We cautiously approached the kitchen, pulled out the fridge and searched, but he had disappeared as quickly as he had come! To make a long story short, Matt and the Resident Manager ended up pulling up the floorboard and the bottom of our cupboard under the sink searching for the little guy. Right when Matt found him, he disappeared again! We later discovered a small crack in the cement under our cupboard and figured he must be hiding down there.

Despite our greatest efforts, he decided to stay with us Saturday and Sunday night. We set up a barricade between the kitchen and the hall that went into our rooms and had begun to become sort of accustomed to our little house guest. We had heard him only twice. Once was a scratching noise we heard under the cupboard. The other was when Matt mentioned that we might have to use the mouse trap that the apartment complex gave us to catch him. He squeaked as if to say, "Please have mercy on me!" My heart melted and I insisted that we go buy a live trap.

We put our live trap out on Monday. A pest control guy showed up and set up a mouse trap for the little guy and we promptly disarmed it. By Tuesday morning when he was still nowhere to be found, we were starting to think that the hole he'd hidden in might lead to the basement.

That morning I took Lilly out to play and when we got home, I had just set her on the floor to take off her shoes when I heard a rustling from the window. I thought--I don't think we left the windows open--and turned to look. Imagine my surprise when four feet to the left of me, at eye level, I saw our little house guest climbing on our new curtains! I screamed in surprise and fear, grabbed Lilly, ran out of the apartment and realized that was really dumb of me. I should have watched him to see where he went. I called Matt and he came right home to help me get him out.

When he got here about 40 minutes later, he discovered the little guy hiding in our heater that runs along the floor under the windows. I put Lilly down for her nap and we began the hour long human/chipmunk showdown. After pulling the furniture away from the wall, this basically involved scaring the chipmunk with a stick so he would crawl through the heater to the end of the wall where we then scared him enough that he hopped out of the heater and out the door. Woo hoo! Major victory!

So you can see I was a little distracted from blogging...