I took this photo outside my gym yesterday morning—apparently the kids in childcare had been having a lot of fun with sidewalk chalk recently. I hadn’t been to the gym in quite some time, and I learned that if you don’t show up for some unspecified period longer than a few weeks, they deactivate your account and you have to ask the attendant to let you back into the system, which I did, rather sheepishly. I didn’t mean to be gone so long, but what with all the travel I did between ski trips and my mom’s troubles and succumbing to all the germs going around this winter, I just got out of the habit. Forgive me, YMCA, for it had been five months since my last FitLinxx session. I don’t intend to let it go that long ever again (well, unless I have to find a new gym after my office moves but I’ll figure that out when it happens). Riding the wave of motivation I got from re-engaging with the weight machines and stretching device and indoor track yesterday, this morning I got up early and went for a walk. It’ll be a while before I’m ready to run again, but I’m optimistic.

The other thing I learned yesterday is that if you are planning a trip with your spouse to one Texas city at the same time as you are discussing a trip with friends to another Texas city, you need to be very careful when booking plane tickets for the first trip that you don’t end up making the nonrefundable purchase for the wrong city. I was incredulous last night when I realized what I’d done; I can’t fathom that at no point before I clicked the purchase button did I see that I was booking seats to the wrong place. I’ve never done that before. Never. Sure, I’ve had some extra stress over the last few months, but I didn’t think it was affecting me too much. It’s scary that I could be so overwhelmed and/or distracted that I’d make a mistake like this. It was quite depressing to see how much it would cost to change the tickets, so Mr. Karen and I will be jamming about eight hours of extra driving into a trip that was already a bit tight on time. At least I booked us into the right state—I guess it could have been worse.