As I was gearing up to go to Brooklyn for some van driving and Prospect Park races in the worse-than-bitter cold last weekend, I kept discovering that things I wanted and needed had disappeared.
First thing I noticed was my grey Samsonite tote bag. This is a zippered, heavy-duty nylon bag that can be folded into an attached leatherette envelope about 10″ x 6″. Very handy, though I haven’t folded it up in years. It seems to be totally gone, since I’ve looked all over and do not recall having stuffed it into a drawer or storage bins. I did do a lot of moving around just after Thanksgiving, when Grimm was supposedly coming over with Wild Turkey, and I was making turkey chili. That would have been about the last time I saw it. Six or seven days ago I wanted the bag because I was going out shopping…and it was nowhere to be found. I have other tote bags and it is not a precious or irreplaceable item, I simply find it frightening to think I could have left it on the subway or in church or in a liquor store, and not noticed that.
Then, in the last half-hour before shoving off for Brooklyn, around 1 a.m. on Saturday, I was getting ready to pull on the black Asics fleece running pants, the ones with ankle zippers…and they weren’t there. I’d pulled them out of the drawer five minutes before, and now they were gone. I put on something else, since I had to be out the door shortly.
And then the Tiger Balm. Kept an unused tube of this around for years, I think it may have come in a goodie back for the Mini 10k or some other race 10-15 years ago. I used it once for that shoulder-neck pain that crops up whenever I’m carrying a strap on my left shoulder, and/or standing for hours. A pinched nerve, I believe. Anyway I tried the Tiger Balm for the first time a month or so ago and it worked wonders. Much better than the IcyHot or SalonPas heat patches I’ve tried. I looked for it in the blue and black Nike spike bag I’d been using for the nruns races, and it wasn’t in there.
A couple days later I found the Asics pants in the Moki chiffarobe, with some t-shirts of his and mine. Seems I was considering wearing the navy nruns sweatshirt to the race—was putting on many layers of clothing—but decided no, and tossed it back into its cubbyhole. But the Asics pants were bundled up with it. Then it occurred to me there was one last place I hadn’t looked for the Tiger Balm, and that was the yellow nruns windbreaker. I went to the coatrack and check it out. There is was, in an outside side pocket.
Two out of three not bad, right?
Went to Potbelly across the street for the first time in 8 or 9 years. Moki and I were using that a lot once, for meatball sandwiches on thin-sliced rolls, he with lots of mayo, me without. I’d pay with my HSBC debit card, which was topped up almost entirely with sales of books on Amazon. The biggest sale was a complete set of cassette tapes of The Power Broker. I believe I’d bought those for Moki for maybe $150 sometime around 2007, and now sold them for about $190 at the end of 2014. A collector’s item, I suppose. i don’t remember what I was paying for these meatball grinders back in 2015, but today a mid-sized one with small bag of chips came to over $14 with tax. Can’t do that again. But I feel very full and there’s still a little left.
Washed a few dishes before going out. Figured out why the handled dish-brush wasn’t secreting the dishwashing liquid as it should. It was clogged, apparently. Now I still have 3/4ths of the dishes awaiting me.
Tomorrow is Friday, must catch some sleep early Friday evening for I have to show up for the half-marathon in Central Park by 3 a.m. Much easier travel this time, no half-hour subway ride in the wee hours followed by the warehouse and dealing with Sean’s jumpy abuse, and driving to the park in a vehicle I’d never been inside before. I couldn’t even figure out how to get the windows up, so followed Katie all the way up 9th Street and down PP West with the 27º breezes coming in; not too bad because I was bundled up, see? No, this time I just have to get to 72nd and Fifth, and that’s like 15-16 minutes’ walk away.
Iggy at the Shriners’ Children’s Hospital: “This season at the Shriners’ Children’s Hospital, we have a special treat for all the kiddies… “Every child gets a fez!”
Kid is gagging while Iggy gives him a hat, says “Must be something I ate.”
Meanwhile Mutt from Mutt & Jeff appears at the edge, points to the “fez,” says “That’s not a fez, that’s my smoking cap!”
