I have nothing interesting to say...

...so let me just say a bunch of really boring stuff instead.

• The boy and I are going on vacation this weekend, a 4-day tour of the TX theme parks. I woke up the other day and realized that his "How I spent my summer vacation" essay so far would be one sentence long: "I got up at noon every day, then played Runescape all afternoon with my friend on speakerphone."

  So we're setting out after the club ride on Saturday, leaving Rob and the cats to their own devices for 5 days. Hopefully, the house will still be standing when I get back.

• My dad called last night...the wedding is definitely on for September. (Have I mentioned my dad's wedding? I think it was in one of the now-hidden baby-that-wasn't posts. Well--my dad's getting married!) I was starting to get a little worried because I hadn't heard anything about it for several months, but now they're sending out invitations. Whew. I've felt bad since they postponed it a year and a half ago (at least partly because I wouldn't have been able to travel in late September if things had worked out differently), so now I'm glad they're going ahead with it this year. I always wanted a stepmom, and I think he's picked the right one. I hope all my brothers can make it...we're all scattered to the winds, and the last time everyone was together was MY wedding.

• I've added two new things to my event calendar for this year: Bike Around the Bay and Urban Dare San Antonio. I may also do Novemberfest, but there's a big tri event in town that weekend that the club will be heavily involved in, volunteer-wise. I'll be manning an aid station, and I think it's for both days. Pity...I really loved the Novemberfest ride last year.

• And speaking of events, I still haven't started running again to prepare for the duathlon. I'm hoping to start back on it when we get back from vacation. My ankle feels okay...not 100% yet, but I think part of the problem is stiffness from how careful I've been with it for the past month. If I wait till next weekend to start running, it'll have been 6 weeks since I quit running last time. That should be enough, right? If I wear a brace? And go really slow? I just don't want to totally embarrass myself in the running portions of the duathlon in October, and I'm running out of time to work up to a 4-mile run.

• In bike news, I think I'll be ready to build the Orca by mid-September...possibly early September, if the money falls right. I'm kind of having a little moral dilemma about who's going to build it, but that's a theme for another post...one that I can't seem to get straight in my head. It has to do with bike shop loyalty and etiquette, and I'm not sure how I feel about the whole ugly mess. I'm also considering the option of buying the components locally, if I can get one of my preferred shops to give me a price I can live with. I'm willing to pay a little more to buy locally, but not hundreds more. But I'm scared to approach either shop about it, even though that would probably work out the whole loyalty issue right there. God, sometimes I'm such a wuss.

• Weight-loss wise, I've been stinking up the place. It's been so hot this week that I'm having a hard time getting hydrated since the weekend, AND the heat is making me want to do nothing but sit on my couch making a dent in my netflix queue. Food has been mostly fine, but it would have to be downright saintly to see any new numbers on the scale. So I'll be happy with a maintain tomorrow.

• The heat has killed not only my ambition, but most of my flowers. Only the begonias are still thriving; all but one of the pentas are barely hanging on, and the petunias, tomatoes, and that other little pink flower (let's just call them the LPFs) have gone the way of dozens of my plants before them. Dead. The LPFs were doing so well until the second over-95 day, then they started dropping like flies. I was very sad. I finally took the flowerbox off the porch rail, after discovering that the two, sad remaining pentunia blooms were not actually alive--they just dried in place before they had a chance to wilt. Of course, some of this could have been avoided if I had thought to water them after it quit raining every day.

  Now I need to find another kind of flower to put on the porch rail. Know any flowers that can survive with minimal watering in high-90s heat? Besides cacti?
  

Song o' the day: Dead Flowers* (link removed)

*hee...I was torn between this one and "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?".

Hey ! Mike is on runescape ! Does your lad want to meet up with him ?

Mike is in to to being William Wallace and - sigh- trashing Brits.

But it seems that he has a nice place....