Day 3

It isn't really day 3; a 5K was held in the park, so the rest of us had to find something else to do in order to avoid being trampled. The field was so numerous that my daughter-in-law couldn't even enter the race because she waited too long to register. My husband and I drove back from the countryside late this afternoon, hours and hours after the event, and I swear I saw a couple of stragglers still trying to get to the finish line--which of course had been packed up and put back in the closet until the next event. Maybe that's why these competitors are still out there, and if this is so, then they will be gasping along until some time in May, poor devils.



So today was cross-training day: horseback riding. That is about as "cross" as you can get, since you just sit there trying to hang on while the horse does the work, but hey, it's still isometric work for your muscles.



You may have noticed that English writers are extremely coy about any kind of emotion-related statement. This was brought home to me as I managed to force myself into my riding pants this morning. Yes, it all sounds disjointed, but it just so happens that the last time I was in Barnes&Noble, I was thrilled to find a new mystery by P.D. James, a veritable master of the King's English, so I snapped up the book, dashed back to the house, and started to read. Right off the bat, something seemed dreadfully wrong. Had P.D. James suffered a stroke? Was the book ghost-written? Had she become a U.S. citizen?



Several more pages and it was now obvious the woman had either dumbed down or was trying to write like, well, an American. As I turned the book over and read the remarks on the back cover, all was made clear: the author was English, all right, but he was Peter James, not P.D. James. Out of pique I finished the book, and let me tell you, you don't want to read it. If I wanted typos, bad grammar, and really silly idiomatic expressions, heck, I could get that in my own backyard and cheaper to boot.



Again I digress. It's becoming a habit. As I was saying, an English author, contemplating her shape in riding pants, would carefully--nay, even phobically--creep up on her observations as if she were going to have to provide government certification justifying her conclusions and the resulting positive feelings:


"I cannot say that it was not without a certain subtle sense of satisfaction that I garnered visual, albeit wholly subjective, evidence as to a reduction in adipose tissue, contradictory though the terms 'evidence' and 'subjective' may seem at first glance."



The American translation, and the point of today's diary entry, is:

"Hot damn!!!!! My butt's smaller!!!!!!"