A three-legged commute from home to work to gym to home. For now I'll call it eight miles, figuring that the diagonal cuts off a lot.
At the gym I swam, or traveled, 2.05K. Fiften of my 21 laps were with a kickboard, and five of them were dolphin kicks for butterfly. I have never worked on my kicks or (strokes? is that what the arm movement is called?) much, not since college. Also, not being a technically proficient swimmer, I seldom swim anywhere near my aerobic capacity because of that breathing thing.
Two laps of dolphin kick had me gasping. I did another two of regular scissor, really concentrating on my core and trying to kick from above my hips. I would dolphin until my muscles were so exhausted I couldn't hold my legs together and got even sloppier, and then I would scissor or give up the board and crawl. It was a fine workout.
On the way home I saw something, let out a cry, jumped off Shadowfax, and hurled myself in the direction of Tia, an eight-week-old English Mastiff puppy who just came home last night. She has two older siblings, a cocker spaniel and a rat terrier (so no wonder the man wanted a real dog), and I would love to see that interaction as she burgeons to her anticipated weight of 150 pounds. Her human let me hold her, and she kissed me all over the face and put a paw against my neck with considerable force and let me feel her buttery soft paws and fondle her ears and stroke her nose and what an adorable dog. Her sire fathered the largest dog ever in North America at 295 pounds, and while such dogs of course have an abbreviated life expectancy and probably a messed up phyisology, the cute is considerable. Especially now, before the drooling. I was so in love.
Then I stopped at the newish Starbucks in my neighborhood, because last night with Kal I discovered that they just bag their grounds and set them out instead of needing to be called and asked and then reminded when I show up at the agreed-upon time, unlike the other Starbucks I've used.
It was a good bike ride.
Number nine, number nine, number nine...
We each gave the other a card with a dog on it: he a bulldog wearing a flowered bonnet and I a basset hound with its ears held up like a rabbit's. Also mine came in a silvery envelope, stainless steel to match the kitchen, I said. He gave me Eats, Shoots & Leaves and I gave him a last-minute impulse buy (because this is the first time we've done anything more than cards, I think) from when I bought the basset ears: a deck of George W. Bush cards. These will go with his Friendly Dictator Trading Cards which pack was a text in a class once.
His card read, and I quote,
Then we went to Bistro Vendrôme, whose patio even looks vaguely Parisian, since it's in a pedestrian courtyard with a garden. It's surrounded by three-story Old West buildings instead of five-story baroque ones, but that was close enough for us. I had chocolate-hazelnut crepes for dessert. Yum.