this is a story of forgiveness and breaking things in my hands

Working with a bunch of engineers like:

Mentor: Are you wearing lipstick?
Me: Yeah.
Mentor: Do you usually wear lipstick? You don't. Why are you wearing lipstick?


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Trying to vary up my runs. Sometimes I get so focused on one thing--speed, distance, a certain mileage that I leave some oversight and then injure myself. So I'm doing speed runs, incline runs, and distance runs. Oh, and puppy runs.

Over the weekend, hiking, I rolled my ankle bad enough that I ended up scraping the top of my ankle. (I don't know how it was physically possible.) But I forgot that, like, you get injured and then you have to take it easy for a second. So, swapped out a run for a walk, but good again now.

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Josh and I got into a spat when I had a little bit of a breakdown the other night and he lost patience with me. He said essentially what I myself--and probably everyone around me--has been thinking. How are you still not over this?

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I went over to my friend's house to watch a nostalgic princess movie. She likes them; she's pretty and petite and blonde, and it's fitting that she's amused by them. (I always figured myself more in the evil witch role.) But I like to sit on her couch and drink prosecco and make fun of old movies, so we watched Sleeping Beauty, which I'd never seen.

About halfway through, apropos of nothing, she turned to me and said "You know, when we started hanging out, you warned me that you were impossible to be friends with. You said you didn't return texts, that you liked to flake, and that you were a bad friend. But you've been over here more than [a closer friend of hers.] You actually show up when you say you're going to, and you listen to me." I didn't know what to say. I think she might have brought it up because she wanted to talk about her friendship with the other friend in the context, or maybe my warning had bothered her from the start, and she wanted to address it. Eventually, all I came up with was to tell her, "Ali, I'm really not a good friend."

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I had a real weird ghost time happen. It was funny. Having genuinely no explanation for it, I don't know what to say. We have this clock that's over 100 years old: Josh's great grandmother's. We'd unplugged it a year or so ago, since the chimes were rather loud and we'd had company.

So, on Sunday evening, I was alone in the house lighting a few candles in the living room. I stopped to look at the clock; I don't really know why, it just sort of caught my eye. And all the sudden it started chiming. It struck 12 chimes, to midnight, and then stopped. As this was happening, I thought that Josh must've fixed it and plugged it back in, but then I saw the plug hanging off the end of the couch, the empty socket. There's no battery in the clock--I've been all over the thing, trying to see where there was some kind of electrical reserve or something, but there's nothing.

Josh said that folk legends say that a clock will strike 12 in a house where someone is about to die, but we didn't die that night, and nothing else odd happened. I keep remembering it, and thinking it was strange, but then half forgetting it. I don't really have the energy to be more haunted these days.

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Odd day: started with a snow squall over my town as I got into work. Probably the best snow we'll see again the rest of this year, and I'm not sorry, though any other year I'd be crushed.