V. Putin--in Albania?!?

Date	Place	Duration (min)	One lap around park	One lap around park	12 flights	Time
2 Sep	Moscow, Sukharevskaya	32	1:00.21	56.25	48.15	05:35

   Yesterday I behaved quite unwisely. I drank a bunch of Coca-Cola, probably about a liter, or a quart.  I sometimes do this so I won’t be sleepy.  I know the stuff is bad for you in any number of ways.  I looked on the web and found terrible affects from drinking the stuff.  It starts with the sugar that makes your blood sugar spike, disrupting the amount of insulin in your body,
and making your liver turn the sugar into fat. Then caffeine dilates your pupils, raises your body temperature, and prevents drowsiness.  Then acid in the coke binds with needed minerals in your body, so when you urinate, you lose the calcium, magnesium, and zinc.  An hour after, you become irritable and sluggish.

 http://www.evangeland.com/current-events/health-issues/coke-and-cola-bad.html

    In actuality, I don’t experience that stuff, at least not consciously.  It seems to me that my personality stays on a pretty even keel when I drink Coke (or Pepsi); I’m not even sure that it gives me the anti-sleepiness effect that I use as the reason for drinking it.  I’m thinking that it may be simply a psychological feeling of goodness because I like the taste.  Of course, I MAY have been irritable and sluggish, but as the subject, I wasn’t able to accurately discern my mood, behavior, etc.  Whatever the results of drinking this stuff, I dumped the remained of the bottle down the drain.  I had a big bottle of it—I think 2 liters—because it is so cheap, especially when the amount is large.  A half liter might be 42 rubles, a liter and a half is 50 rubles, and 2 liters is 55 rubles.

All I can say is that yesterday, I couldn’t sleep at night.  Everything in my life seemed to be going well, I wasn’t worried about anything, there wasn’t anything that dominated my thoughts.  But my body didn’t want to sleep.  I read all of a sample of a book that I downloaded from the internet onto my iPhone.  I started to read some of another sample on The Plant Powered Diet.  I read some of the Moscow Times.  I needed sleep.  Even when I first laid down at 11:00, my eyes were itchy and needed to sleep.  

After a couple hours, at about 2 am, I thought about going for a run.  If I couldn’t sleep, and I didn’t want to keep reading, I would do something else.  I cannot stand to lay in bed WITHOUT sleeping when that is what I want to do.  The problem was that I could hear it raining outside.  It wasn’t strong rain, but a simple pitter-patter of drops now and then.  Normally, I love to hear rain.  In this apartment, the balcony has some kind of metal roof or something that really gives the drops some volume.  Even that, however, wasn’t enough to lull me to sleep.  

    I was not overly dismayed when I looked at my watch and it was 5:30.  I had lost an entire evening of sleep.  Now I decided to go for that run that I had been contemplating earlier.  The pitter-patter had not abated, but I decided I would deal with it.  Shorts, t-shirt, shoes, and I was out.  

    The run was excellent. I was afraid that with the extended rain, there would be puddles all over the place.  When Moscow builds sidewalks, they don’t take into account rain, and they don’t build them in such a way that the rain will drain away.  The streets aren’t much better; massive rivers run down the sides of the street and lakes develop at the intersections.  This time, however, I guess the rain came down at a slow enough rate that the water had a chance to drain away.     Only a couple times did I have to slash through a huge puddle (unfortunately, once was right in the middle of my sprint around the park).

    The first time I sprinted around the park, I didn’t hear the beep from my watch so I had to (or over-anxiously demanded that I) check my watch to make sure the stop watch had started. It had. I threw my legs and arms full-bore into the run with no pain.  Soon, though, my iPhone was such a weight, that it had taken the pocket below the shorts and was flopping in the wind.  This was unacceptable, so I jammed my hand in the pocket to retrieve the device and pulled it out.  Then I had to put the keys in my hand also, so as not to lose them when they might fly out of the pocket—not a likely event, but I am often super careful.  All this fiddle-faddle added several seconds to my time, I’m sure.  My result was 1:00.21.  This wasn’t a total failure, though, because, as the careful reader of this blog will know, I love round numbers with lots of zeros. 

    I ran some more and 10 minutes, or something later, I sprinted again with a record-breaking result of 56.25.  How nice.  I broke my record for the 12 flights, too, even though I felt like I was sloughing terribly inefficiently up the steps.

    I entered the house, not sopping wet, but totally wet.  I put the clothes onto the drying rack, that I have set up all the time because I don’t have many clothes.  Took a lovely shower in a tub that does not have a shower hanger.  This time, as usual, I took what was called a Navy shower, by ex-officer in the Vietnam War:  I get wet, soap up, and then rinse off.  It’s the kind of shower that every person should use.  I ate some food, washed the dishes, and then laid back in bed.  I know I slept a bit at this time because I remember a dream.  

    I was in Albania, and who was across the table, but none other than Vladimir Putin!  I know that he got divorced a year or so ago, and he was there with a woman—but I didn’t get a good look at her.  While we were at the table, it became clear that instead of just two people vying for the attention of Maxim and Oskar, my sons, now there would be three people—me, my ex-wife, and V. Putin.  In the dream, I understood that he was also a parent to my sons.  The mind works in mysterious ways.