leaving for new york

well, i did not get my run in here in seattle. Once I got to the hotel yesterday, I had little time to get to Pike Market - the buses took forever. But it was worth it and I'm carrying back some very nice tuna for tonight's dinner and got more of those amazing peaches. I have turned into a food tourist of sorts and I also tracked down the Cold Stone Creamery I'd heard about and got myself a mint ice cream with chocolate chips mixed in. I'm not aware of anything like Cold Stone or Maggie Moo's in my area, so I had to take advantageof this. (I also picked up some interesting candies in Calgary. One is a large tube of fruit-flavored jellies, which were good, except for the black currant flavor. Another was some big chocolate-toffee-nut concoction which wasn't the amazing experience I'd hoped for. What IS good, though, is the Mack caramel bar. You smack it on a hard surface to break it up before eating and the caramel is so very chewy. I love it.)

By the time I got back to the hotel, it was pretty late and I got to bed about nine, fully intending to get up and run this morning. 4:30 came and went. Too damn tired. This whole two weeks has piled in on me and I feel like I really need to get back to the regular routine. I have learned that I can't function and keep up my running unless I'm getting at least seven and a half hours of sleep a night, no exceptions. Any less and runs become slow, awkward, and more painful than not. I also need to get back to my regular diet.

It's too bad I didn't go this morning...it's foggy outside and that would have really been something. There's a little lake not too far from this hotel and it would have been neat to find out if there are any running paths around it. Well, better luck next time.

The bigger news is that I nearly amputated the tip of my ring finger.



it's hard to see here because the focus isn't great, but the front half of the nail is gone. I got my finger caught in the calgary hotel's TV turntable thing. It pulls out from the cabinet and then can swivel. Well, to pull it out, you have to grab underneath its lip and pull. But it is unwise, to say the least, to keep that hand position when you swivel the TV. The TV was big and had a lot of weight. The turntable was sticking. Once it got going...well, inertia spun that TV around smartly, trapping my fingers underneath the turntable between a piece of it's wood and the slider that allows the whole thing to protrude from the cabinet. I take it that the impact was great enough to immediately flatten my nail, which then shattered in a bit of a zigzap pattern and separated from my finger. It was left hanging on by a little bit of skin and nailbed, which of course was no fun when I had to rip the rest of the piece of nail off. I believe that if my nail hadn't been there, I might have managed to clip off the end of my finger completely - now I know what nails are actually for: they're armour!

This happened night before last and as I waited for a cab yesterday morning, I spoke with the manager about it. I will also be writing a letter to Holiday Inn Express about it. I'm not seeking any kind of payoff or anything, but a letter of apology for their stupid design would be nice as well as seeing some action taken to remedy the situation. I CAN'T be the first person to have crushed his fingers that way, it is simply too natural a way of manipulating the turntable. And I can't imagine the fallout if some little kid were to manage to sever a finger in this way, especially if they didn't fix their turntables.