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My Fitbit was somehow in logging mode while I drove home from Albany and it interpreted my bumpy ride down the Catskills as me having climbed 244 flights of stairs and having ran 11 miles.  This was going to be a hell of a nuisance to the integrity of my pedometer data unless I were to run a half marathon.  So I did.

The first 10 miles passed quickly as I was watching Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and keeping a 6 MPH pace.  The next mile was tough and for the last two and a tenth I felt bored out of my skull and may have wanted to die a little.  My motivation was going to be able to say “screw you, Clara” after her “I’ll be able to walk tomorrow” comment.

I finished in a little over two hours and twenty minutes and hobbled off my treadmill.  I showered, sat down, and couldn’t easily get up again.  Maybe Clara was right in the end in that annoying Oracle at Delphi kind of way.

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Pat Toye, Clara Rimmer, Joe Naylor and I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute and after talking about whether rain would increase or decrease visitor count with the line attendant we went in.  Notes:

  • The theme was “Body Worlds 2 & the Brain”.  I went into the exhibit with the idea that the brain was a visually uninteresting gray lump that constituted a dog’s breakfast.  I left with the impression that the brain was a visually uninteresting gray lump that constituted a dog’s breakfast.
  • The attach points of the various pieces of the male package are not where one expects; if the ones for the testes were any higher they’d be strung from the nipples.
  • Nobody looks fat after their skin has been flayed.
  • Never go to an anatomical exhibit with two medical enthusiasts without putting at least 4 dollars in quarters in the meter.  The estimated 27 minute difference between Joe’s museuming rate and Pat/Clara’s museuming rate cost me $36.00 in parking tickets.
  • Every animal looks badass when everything but their vascular structure is dissolved.
  • One can fake being anatomically competent by taking any term for a body part and adding one of the following: majoris, minoris, superior, inferior, anterior, or posterior.  This was proven by the woman who nodded approvingly as I referred to the vulva as the “hoo-ha minoris” and the gut above the point that dangles over the belt in fat people as the anterior superior dunlop.
  • When one dies, the eyebrows remain until the end of time.   Or at least that’s the impression I got as we went about and everyone had no skin but still had eyebrows (IT WAS WEIRD).
  • Due to the exhibit “The Exploded Man”, I can now accurately imagine what it’d look like to take a slow motion video cap of someone eating a hand grenade.

The end of the exhibit featured a donor statement that brought tears to my eyes.  The only other time I’ve been moved like that in Philadelphia was during the opening of the Constitution center.  I wonder what it mean that I get emotional around liberty and utility but rarely at funerals.

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New Year’s Eve was spent at the Rimmer household where Joe, Kendra, Pat and myself spent most of our time avoiding Clara’s sister and her friends. One fellow was nice and looked suspiciously like David Krumholtz from Addams Family Values and was continually assaulted by his daughter that thought there was no such thing as having too many blankets. Pat made a vague attempt at introducing me to a women that “wasn’t interested in men” at the time which joined the long line of lesbians and pregnant women at which I’ve made passes.

We then moved to a 110 minute game of Taboo. Mr. Rimmer went through 13 cards in one round, mostly by ignoring the timer and counting clues he didn’t like. Genius.

Finally, during the ball drop the little clock disappeared from the screen so we all depended on inaccurate watches to guess when 2008 began. Joe won by realizing his watch was off by 23 minutes making me realize why he always missed most of each episode of MASH.

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Pat and Clara doubted the glory of the atlatl and I was on a mission to prove the supremacy of meso-American weapons. We (that’s Pat, Clara, me and the dog Tipsy, a border collie) went to a park in King of Prussia and my heart sank as I saw there were no lights by which to find the dart.  Pat cast a dart hoping the ambient light of King of Prussia would be enough, and the projectile disappeared into oblivion.  After about 30 seconds of scanning the field for the missing when a black and white splotch approached us.  It was Tipsy, the border collie, with the dart in it’s mouth.  For the next hour we cast slobber-covered darts into the darkness only to have them returned by an over-enthusiastic border collie.  It’s doubtful that I will ever be able to train Max to do the same.