so i've started running again. started at the gym, while it was all cold and snowy outside, but have moved to running outside, now that it's gotten reasonable weatherwise. running outside in one's city neighborhood really goes a long way toward introducing you to stuff. so we live out in west philly right? and all of our activities take place east and north of our house. so before i started running outside, i had not gone south or west of our house.

description: west of our house, on our street, at least, it gets crummy really quick. abandoned houses with boards instead of glass in the windows, that sort of thing. south of our house, it's nice. there are some really lovely houses down there. some have great brickwork. some have incredible purple and green victorian paint jobs. some have ingenious architecture, complete with dormers and overhanging second floor sun rooms and turrets. lots of turrets. west philly, home of the turret! there are also little patches of garden occasionally that make me stop and marvel. look at the paradise someone created in a 3ft x 12 ft space! today my discovery wasn't a garden, exactly, but a small outdoor theatre called squirrel hill falls park. there are no pictures on the web. damn! but, it's a teeny little park with permanent bench seating for ~75 people, a teeny stage, and a huuuuge mural. oh, and it has a solar-powered waterfall. apparently. not that i could see it through the locked gates. gonna have to see about some summer concerts there.

also, the house across the street from me has a 3rd floor sunroom that must be just amazing to be in. east wall is all windows, as is north wall. one window each on the south and west walls. even looking at it from below, the light was incredible.

in running-related news, i currently weigh 142.5 lbs, so sayeth the bathroom scale. my recent low, of sometime in the fall, was 138.5. so i'm up 4 lbs. hence the running. particularly important because i've just bought 2 new bikinis and damn if i don't want to look good in them by the time karl and i go to tenerife with his parents in august.

this tenerife thing has been a huge pain-in-the-ass. the idea was to be able to see his parents in some other way than the usual. the usual is that they come over here and stay a week with karl's brother. or we go over there and stay with them. point is, we wanted to combine a real vacation with seeing the parents. now, they had plans to go to hawaii. waikiki, specifically. they had enough frequent flier miles to get a free ticket anywhere in the US, and the airlines apparently don't exclude hawaii! so duh, that's where they're going. we were invited to come along, but it was going to cost $1200 before food and entertainment, and i didn't want to spend that much money to go to waikiki. i've been there before (in high school) and it's just a concrete jungle of high-rise hotels populated exclusively by tourists. not my ideal beach vacation. so karl recommended going to spain with his parents later in the summer. they used to go "on holiday" to spain a lot. great! this sounds like a good idea! til they started planning. when karl suggested tenerife, i said sure. i didn't know anything about tenerife except that it was a tropical island. turns out that it's actually a lovely island, but the place we're going is a huge touristy resort filled with europeans. mostly brits, but also germans, and swedes. the reviews talk about how shabby it is, how you can't avoid the "looky looky" (at my fake gold watches) men, the prostitutes, the time-share guys, and the PR bar guys, who try to get you to come into their pub. you have to get up at the ass-crack of dawn to get a sun chair by the pool (they're all taken 5 mins after they're unlocked), wait in line for an hour for dinner (lots of places are half board: breakfast and dinner), and listen to the nighttime noise of packs of drunken british lads just coming in at 6 am from a night out at the veronicas. but i didn't find this out until plans were well underway for going to tenerife. all i want is a bungalow by the beach. or, if i'm going to stay in a resort, i do enjoy a swim-up bar. not a run-down, crowded, high-stress slum-by-the-beach.

and of course, the kicker is that this is still going to cost me over $1000. roll eyes, grit teeth, furrow brow.

okay, so i bitch. but, dude, i'm still going to tenerife, which aside from this particular area, is supposed to be a beautiful place. they call it the island of eternal spring (is that not inviting?). there's a 12,000 ft dormant volcano called el teide. microclimates abound, as does varied flora and fauna. i'm hoping to convince everyone (or at least karl) to take at least one day to go somewhere else on the island (perhaps the wetter north side?) for a hike. i'll make the best of it. the nightlife is supposed to be top-notch. perhaps i'll go to my first foam party? time shall tell. in any case, in preparation for this party in the sun, it would be nice if i looked good in my bikini.

confession: thinking about looking good in my bikini reminded me of something that i do that i wonder if other people do. perhaps in variation. okay, so like a lot of people, i try to present my best profile to the world (think: guy with big gut sucking it in when perky co-ed walks by). one of the manifestations of this is me trying to hide the extent of the flabbiness of my stomach from karl. so if we're sitting on the couch, i don't let him rest his hand on my tummy folds. if he happens to put his hand there, i always flinch away. don't feel there! don't feel there! then, of course, i have to explain my flinching. so i pretend to be ticklish. it works. he moves his hand.

so this brings us to the end of this rambling wandering entry. i now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.