Last Saturday was a mellow day, in a strange kind of way. I met up with Nate and Jason down in the Valley to go running. This is not all that unusual, but last Saturday was a 21+ mile run, and since Nate had a 9:00 track meet to be at, we started running at 5:30 am, which is about 45 minutes before you can see very well this time of year. By the time we could really see, we had already run 7 miles. Happily, the towpath is mostly limestone, so it showed up okay in the ambient light. It was still pretty dark.

The run went well, and afterward, I scooped Mer up and headed back to Akron to go to Wally Waffle. This time, I went ahead and ordered the chocolate chip waffle, which was quite wonderful and hit the spot. After breakfast, we were going to go to Aunt Mary’s to pick up her spare daybed since she gave it to us, but it was raining/snowing a little bit, so we gave up on that idea since the bed has to be in the back of a pickup truck. The happy side of this is that it allowed me to take a three-hour nap while Mer went and got groceries.

In the evening, we finally sat down to watch The Bicycle Thief, which is a highly regarded Italian film about a man who needs his bicycle for his job, and the bicycle gets stolen. The entire film follows his quest to get his bicycle back. Now, I have a bad habit of picking up bizarre or mood-killing foreign films. Mer loves foreign languages, so I like to get foreign films for her, but in the past I have picked out a film about concentration camps, a film about an orphan boy taking a train trip that ends with him flying away on a bird statue, a film about a woman billed as loving and individualistic by the write-up when she was really insane in the film, and a film showing the real butchering of a hog. I seem to get good ones. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that at the end of this film, Mer’s verbatim reaction was, “What!?!” which was followed by several minutes of discussion and disbelief. My streak continues.