March Madness

The first week of March has come and gone.

With it, my 53rd birthday, complete with gorgeous chocolate birthday cake (Thanks, Gillian!).

 I have been eating birthday cake for breakfast this week.  Nothing better, and it has been a long time since I have enjoyed a cake this much!  I got phone calls, and cards, and gorgeous roses from that Spouse o' Mine, plus lunch with the ladies, some tulips from a friend, and a trip to the zoo to see the newborn chimp.  I say this was a terrific way to enjoy one's 53rd birthday.

In the past, I would take a celebratory bike ride on my special day, and hammer out the mileage equal to my trips around the sun.  This is no simple feat for a March birthday, when one has not ridden a bike during the winter months, not to mention the cold and windy Kansas March weather, or the fact that I am now in my fifties and that means a 50+ mile bike ride before I can blow out candles and be sung to.  (This year's birthday duet of that Spouse o' Mine and daughter Gillian was just lovely!  Ha ha!!  With daughter Claire on the East Coast and the College Boy on the West Coast, we missed out on a complete quartet, but it was lovely just the same!)  This year, I decided to forego the bike and concentrate on the subject in the next paragraph:

Along with the first week of March, and my birthday, 20 miles are now marked off my running calendar.  This means...um, not much.  I ran 2, 5, 1, 1, 1, 7.5, 2, and 1 mile the past seven days.  The running all had walking interspersed in it.  My time for running a mile went from 12:30 up to 13:10, and today was my week's PR (personal record) of 12:22.  Baby steps, I tell myself.  Yesterday as I was knocking off two miles, a memory flip-flopped into my head like a big ol' fish: in high school, I could run a half mile in 2:42.   If you add 2:42 + 2:42, it does not equal 12:22.

And also this first week of March?  Lots and lots of Snow Geese in the 'hood:

 

I love that we can see the mud on their webbed feet.  Aren't they so aerodynamic?  Singularly aerodynamic, and as a goose herd, as well.

Ok, Ok, I checked Wikipedia and here's what they say about groups of flying geese:
 "...The collective noun for a group of geese on the ground is a gaggle; when in flight, they are called a skein, a team or a wedge; when flying close together, they are called a plump..."

Wiki forgot to include the adjective aerodynamic.  

Nature is amazing.

So here's to the first week of March.  Thanks, Mom and Dad, for welcoming your fifth kid into the world fifty-three years ago.  Somehow I suspect the advent of my arrival, as Number Five, was maybe not as exciting as Number One or Number Two.  But I can thank you, my parents, for doing a bang-up job in the kid-rearing arena.  For all five of us.