Today, I left the house.

I find it ironic that in a previous blog post, I named nature as a great healing force and then a few days after that, the weather decided to be cruel, thus sending my emotions into an unexpected downward spiral.  So I now  must ask that you let me reverbalize that one sentence I wrote about nature being a powerful healing force.  Here's what I really meant:  Nature is a very powerful healing force when it wants to be.  And right now, it just doesn't want to be.  But I've found something way more reliable (take that, nature!! [fists in air]): EXERCISE.  I hopped back onto the treadmill last week for my first run in months.  It hurt and made me want to cry...but I continued, day by day, one foot in front of the other.  Yesterday, I decided that I would not let the weather send me into another oblivion of sadness, so I got back on the treadmill (but more slowly and with less dedication than I was sporting last week).  I told myself to run five minutes, walk three, run five, walk three...and so on.  Except when I got through the first five minutes, I just couldn't stop.  Instead, I wanted to go faster.  So I did.  After twenty-five minutes, I was exhausted in such a way that my mind was completely cleared and I felt like I could finally see straight and breathe normally.  In other words:  that was AWESOME.  I shall do that every day now.  Or at least mostly every day.

Today was a whirlwind of a day.  I woke up with only one thing on my mind:  Top Secret Mission.  Yeah, again.  Except this one, I don't know if I'll ever tell you about.  Maybe.  What I can tell you is that said mission landed me in Middle of Nowhere, Iowa.  Everything in this strange, never-ending country was slower.  The cows, the people, the cars, everything!  I began to worry that I would be kidnapped or murdered, but then I decided nah, they'd have to catch me first.  After a total of one hour, my mission was accomplished so I headed home.  I called Kenny from Mae's phone (because my eight-year old daughter has a cellular phone but I don't) to tell him that this place was weird and slow and scary and might I be dreaming?  He told me to just get home and he would hug me later.  

And Kenny...of course, you know I have to write something funny about him because that's what I do.  I notice that he's been talking to himself lately.  Or not really himself, but parts of his body.  Yesterday, he tripped over nothing while walking out of our bedroom.  He then stopped, looked down at his feet and asked, "Where do you think you're going?"  Later on in the day, he passed gas, quickly looked behind him and said, "I don't even know what you're talking about!"  Both times, he had no idea that I was nearby so he wasn't doing it to purposely make me laugh.  But that's all I can do and sometimes I even applaud at the realization that I have somehow managed to find somebody in this world that is just as strangely weird as me.