A good death. That is our responsibility to the animals under our care, if we can possibly give them one. It isn’t always possible – they get lost, hit by a car, burned by a fire, swept away in a flood, poisoned by contaminated feed. It’s a dangerous business – this thing called living. Sometimes […] more

I had a reader send me this message in part: I was okay with the DNF (Mel’s note: this person attempted Rio and wasn’t able to make it to the finis line) for the first couple days but now I’m just upset and disappointed about the DNF. It has been really bothering me and making […] more

Dear Future-Mel. It’s not your fault that I’m sitting in the middle of NaNoWriMo right now. What YOU want is for me to write thoughtful and accurate blog posts so you can read and remember all the good and bad stuff that happened, because even though Present-Mel is sure she won’t forget any of this […] more

The day before Rio was a crappy stressful day in a long line of crappy stressful days that week (at one point tried to stick my lunch in the freezer to heat it up instead of the microwave, so yes, exactly that sort of week). After a bunch of ~~stressful crap that would tedious and […] more

Nailed it failed it…but without the cakes or Nicole. Let’s do my favorite post-event analysis. Choose the three best and worst things so that (theoretically) lessons are learned and stupidity is not repeated. Nailed it Electrolytes …I think? Basically I took as many as I felt like I needed, as often as I thought I […] more

Seven runners get into a shuttle van to get to a race start. How do you tell whether they are road or trail runners? Answer: Unwrap a McMuffin. I went from being embarrassed that yours truly was going to chow down on a McMuffin 45 minutes before race start, to thinking I was going to […] more