Photo by rsadler / by NCND 2.0 CC

Ever since I started freelancing full-time, I’ve been tracking all my expenses. I like to make sure the money going out isn’t greater than the money going in, because that would be a very bad business plan indeed. (Unless you’re the federal government.) This is how I know that my food/grocery expenses have gone up since I moved from Indianapolis to Chapel Hill, though I don’t exactly know why. The first month I was here, I expected it to go up because I had to buy basic staples that I hadn’t bothered to move across the country, and I had to eat out on the road. But August’s bill was about $40-$70 higher than it averaged in Indy.

I’m not sure if the prices at Harris-Teeter are higher than they were at Kroger. I don’t know if I mooched more food off of my old roommate than I realized. I’m spending more time at coffee shops to get out of my apartment, which has bumped the sum a bit. [...]

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I need to start running with electromagnets strapped to my legs. Then when my MP3 player’s battery dies after 37 minutes, with 23 minutes of running left, I can power it myself. I’ll have lightning thighs instead of thunder thighs!

Today my half-marathon training group ran for 60 minutes. I have only run for that long once before. It was a Sunday in September. I ran 5 miles and I developed Achilles tendonitis shortly thereafter because I had increased my mileage too rapidly. Sixty minutes. The cast of Law and Order can investigate a crime, arrest a perp, and send him to jail in that time with an extra 16 minutes left dedicated to selling you erectile dysfunction pills. It’s a long time. It’s a long run. Looking at it coming up on the calendar freaked me out a little.

The only thing that freaked me out more was seeing my 10K run coming up in two weeks. Since my 5K and 10K were a month apart, I figured I had 4 weeks between them to prepare, [...]

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