And just to get this out of the way: if you don’t know who Karen is, go ask your parents. It’s okay, I’ll wait. Got it? Okay. I’ll explain how she fits in a minute.

This morning I’m up at 4:30. Okay, I lied, it was 4:42. Anyway, I was up and ready to run.

What? Run? Yes, I’m sticking to my plan. My wife is up early (ever since I fucked up her laptop while trying to upgrade IE while in a hotel room, she not only hasn’t forgiven me, but also hasn’t been able to create her powerpoints as quickly, so she gets up in the middle of the night to get her work done without kids).

Crap, where was I? Oh yeah, up at 4 something. As I’m on the way out the door, my wife says something about rain from the other room. Like a good husband, I disregard whatever she said because dammit I’m going to go on my run.

Everything was okay for the first mile, it was sprinkling, and there was a nice lightening show off in the distance (I did the Poltergeist trick of counting between the lightning and the thunder – me so smart). And then it started raining hard. Then even harder.

At this point, I’m running along, splashing in the puddles, and I’m thinking – hey, this would make a good blog entry! So of coure a good blog entry has to have a snappy title (not that I’ve written any good entries, just that’s what I read on the internet). So I’m going through titles in my mind (wouldn’t want to say them out loud, people might think I’m nuts, jogging in a thunderstorm and talking to myself)

The first title I came up with was pretty lame: “hard and harder.” As in, you know how it’s raining pretty hard, and then it rains even harder? Then I thought “harder and harderer” because that’s what happened next. Also, a title about squishy. A little James McMurtry (“walk between the raindrops, dry as a bone”).

And then – this was the bad part. Not the rain, or the puddles, or the lightning, or being up at 5:00 AM in all of this – it was the next title.

Rainy days and mondays always get me down.

And dammit, Karen has been singing in my head ever since and still hasn’t shut up. (even the Wiggles couldn’t stop her. Bitch.)