About a day after I moved, I got a cold. I shouldn't be particularly surprised. The strain of moving, the intensity of training in the middle of race season, the 2-inches of black dust I removed from the blinds on the windows, much of which found a new home in my nasal passages and lungs. Except that this didn't turn out to just be a cold. This was a bastard of a cold, and it hung on and hung on and hung on.

If there's a stoop sale going on, you must be in Brooklyn. There are tons of them. Every weekend people roll out racks of clothing and set out tables of trinkets (junk), mountains of Tyko and Playskool toys and an occasional piece of furniture for sale. There are even a couple of entrepreneurial kids who set up a corner Panini business to feed the stoop sale goers. (They were
featured in the New York Times, though, according to the article, they rely on heavy backing from their father to keep the stand running.) The stoop sales are advertised on sheets stapled to telephone poles, chalked on sidewalks, and generally impossible not to stumble on if you're out for a weekend stroll. I don't have an opinion on stoop sales, though any urge to make a day of them harkens me back to my college boyfriend, a yard sale and thrift store addict and the one responsible for my vintage AC/DC necklace and silk jewelry box.

I come home around eight, attempt to grocery shop. The grocery store is a good 10-minute walk. I get there a few minutes after nine and it's closed. I hate Brooklyn.

I have a new goal to sleep as much as possible, so this will be a short entry, but while riding in Prospect Park this evening, on my way up the biggest hill in the park, there was a runner keeping pace with me. Granted, I was taking it easy on my ride, but still. A runner moving as fast as a bike? Uphill?

This is my first time back after almost two weeks off from training--hip/back/IT band injuries and a severe cold put me on the DL--and I was instructed to go at L2, which means one level above sleeping. But I wasn't taking it that easy on the hill, and I was moving between 12 and 13 miles per hour. But all the way up, I could hear the fast steps and steady gasps of this runner in my shadow, and he just kept on. I wanted to turn back and tell him how impressed I was. I also wanted to beat him up the hill, because, come on, even the fastest runner shouldn't be beating me uphill, even on my slowest most injured day. But he was one hell of a runner.

Hot. Just as hot as Manhattan. It's the first weekend in July. With the help of a friend, an 18 foot Budget truck and an indispensable, god-saving dolly, most of what I own is in my new apartment. (Sorry, Mom, I decided not to move my old stereo, dolls, high school and college notebooks and Christmas ornaments out of your basement after all.)