I spent the weekend doing the two-day US Championships for orienteering at the Quantico Marine Base. I ran my age group which was hard. There are beginner & intermediate courses that kids and teenagers and adult beginners learn on and then as one gets older and better you go onto the advanced courses. There are 4 advanced courses, each of them are equally difficult in terms of navigation, but they are all different distances. So as you get better, you run longer until you peak and then as you age, you go back down in distance, but not in difficulty. Because I wanted to run my age group and I guess I’m still young-ish, it was pretty long – 6.2 km as the crow flies and I covered 7.7 miles on that first day. I think I ran 25% of the time. I covered 4.5 miles on the 2nd day. I wish I had more friends at these events, but the friend making is slow going, though progressing. I did pretty terribly, the first day it took me over three hours. I finished well after the 2nd to last finisher – the dreaded step function drop instead of the gently slow slope into last place. The winner finished in 55 min, I’m not sure I could even run that quickly through the woods even if the whole course was marked with orange streamers and I didn’t have to navigate at all. I might have wandered into an area marked – “dangerous, buried explosives” yikes. I’m glad I didn’t get myself blown up. It was a beautiful weekend, cold, but sunny and bright. I saw lots of obstacle courses scattered through the woods, it all looked very difficult.
I manned the food station after I was done.
I was going to go to the spaghetti dinner to try to be sociable, but instead, I had gotten a last minute email that Lael was going to be in town for an hour and I really wanted to see her and it gave Jeremy, Louisa and Kiki a chance to go to Vince’s opening night! (We had bought tickets for next weekend.)
Vince in the control tower – spotlight!
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On Sunday, we Facetimed Litian, who we haven’t spoken to in many years… Hi Litain!
Sunday night dinner – Ree Drummond’s chicken enchiladas.
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Vince accidentally ordered Supreme underwear. There is some weird online rush to buy these things at a certain time, with frantic screen refreshing and crap like that that I’m too old for and Vince had these in his cart to enter his info and he didn’t mean to buy them, but he clicked too quickly and they were on our doorstep in 2 days. He refused to tell me how much he spent on them. I will honor this by not looking too closely to his debit account which I have full access to.
He’s sick today.
And he has a huge bottle of pee on his desk? Hmmmm.
But he was well enough in mid-day to go to the chinese market with me.
Also, he’s learning the word for cassette tape in Chinese. I don’t think it’s super important for him to learn this. What is a cassette tape anyways?
