Every year for the past four years or so, my boss gets each of us a nice Christmas wreath and buys a big-ass tree for the office. We're talking big-ass: At least ten feet tall. The Christmas tree people bring it in to our office and instantly the whole thing smells wonderfully like pine.
And I start to sniffle through my enjoyment. Because I? Am allergic to evergreen. Good thing I live in the Pacific Northwest, eh? Although I'm also allergic to dust, grass, hay, mold, mildew, and cats, with many variations upon the theme therein. Nowhere is really safe for me. Thankfully I don't really have to handle the tree, because not only do my nasal passages dislike evergreen, I break out into a rash when I touch the things. When I was a kid in Seattle, we lived three doors down from a church that had a whole ton of juniper tams in the front. The church was the perfect place for rollerskating. One day, we realized that if you skated really fast across the landing you could then hurl yourself into the tams and they would bounce you gently back onto your skated feet. It was great fun for several hours for us. Then I went home and noticed (well, probably my mother noticed) that both forearms were bright red and splotchy. And itchy and hot. It lasted for days. I'm sure my mom was something like, "that's what you get for jumping into trees." So evergreen trees went on my young list of crap to avoid rubbing against. Right up there with fancy soaps; I washed my face with some soaps I got as a present and my cheeks turned bright red, splotchy, itchy and hot for several days. I looked like Faye Dunaway in Chinatown.
In other Christmas and even running news, it's not too late to sign up for the HO HO 5K going on in Tigard on Sunday. Check my earlier posts for the link. This race has the extra added bonus of you being able to kick my ass (figuratively speaking, because I'm a big moose and I could just sit on you) as I'm very, very slow. And I haven't run in a few weeks. However, except for the tree smell, I do feel better today than I have in weeks. That's what happens when your geriatric setter isn't waking you up six times in the night to take her pee butt outside. She still woke me up ten minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off (how do they just know?), but instead of passing back out I lay in bed realizing that for the first time in a bit I felt like running. Unfortunately, she didn't wake me up early enough to actually go for a run. I could've run to the track and back, but it was like ten degrees out and I didn't feel quite that peppy. But enough to where I feel like if I can get an extra hour or two of sleep over the weekend that I'll be pretty good for Sunday's race.
Hmm, I think that's all I've got for today. Soon I'm off for brews and crews! Yay!
Cheers,
the CilleyGirl
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