Karen's Journey

One would think this might be remembered as a happy time.   Let me start out by saying it's not entirely my fault. For reasons I cannot fathom, T's class had a Thanksgiving party today. Seriously? A Thanksgiving party? Because there aren't already enough crazy-making days in the school calendar? I'm thinking of getting a list of all the scheduled party days and keeping T home those days. Party days never end well here at home. But. As I flipped through the pile of papers he came home with -- that class must go through a forest a day -- I found an assignment he had completed about "Things I Remember." "Write about a time with a family member that brought out strong feelings in you." All older adopted child families are groaning with me right now. I understand the kids are learning to write descriptively, but we can't ask our kids to think about family and strong feelings without….getting strong feelings. He had to name the famil...

As a runner, I've had this weird ability to set a desired pace per lap/kilometer/mile -- whatever event I'm running, whether in training or a race -- in my mind and nail it. Back in my competitive days, when I was doing regular interval training with the guys, they loved it when it was my turn to lead the next 200 or 400 or 800 or 1000, because they knew I'd come through the splits within one second of target time. Just call me a human stopwatch. I'm no longer competitive, and we now run on a weird excuse for a track -- a certain university with a regularly losing football team decided to rip up a world class indoor track in order to give the football team an 80-yard practice field. It's maybe 257.7 meters per lap -- who knows -- it doesn't matter since whatever the distance it is, it's not something you can put into a pace calculator and figure out what your times need to be, and there's no checking at the first 100 meter mark to make sure you're ...