UPDATE: Ups and downs

Well, Lost & Found comes through with a pleasant surprise for a fellow R-M employee. I thought I recognized that ROSE license plate when I picked it up yesterday. Sure enough, it belongs to Rosie R. I took the plate down to the paper this morning to check my hunch. Rosie wasn't there, but her daughter, Shelly T., was. Shelly works at The R-M, too, as does Shelly's hubby and a few other of their relatives. When we say The Register-Mail is a family newspaper we mean it.

I signaled to Shelly that I needed to speak to her with a curly come-here finger motion and she groaned. "Now what?" Like the newsroom is ever the bad guy in any of the interdepartmental interactions. I assured her I didn't have bad news. After confirming Rosie's license plate number, I retrieved the tag from my backpack and presented it to an elated Shelly. Later, Shelly's husband, Mike, told me the story of how Rosie's license plate ended up in the street. Seems Rosie and her husband were leaving Steak 'n Shake the other day and couldn't see past the snow pile on the north side of the lot exit. Nosing out onto Henderson, their car got just clipped by another vehicle already zooming along in the right lane -- clipped just enough to rip off the license plate (like would happen in a movie if the director wanted to show a close-but-no-real-damage encounter).

That felt pretty good, though I would have liked to add a real license plate to my collection of goodies. The pair of Iowa tags I found on a walk last fall ended up at the police station because I figured it was possible they were discarded from a stolen vehicle. Unlikely, but it seemed the good citizen thing to do.

On a lighter note, the C.J. Banks 3X denim shirt washed up nicely. It may be headed for the mission or someplace like that. It has one minor tear on the left halter tie. That's right, it's a halter-type top, kind of a midriff-barer. Check it out.

The downer today came in an email from MapMyRun.com. Seems I lost track of time and the 30 Miles in 30 Days Challenge has ended and I came up short. I was crushed. For months I have easily met that challenge. But hobbled for two weeks by a nagging injury that is just now nearly fully healed, my mileage suffered. I made it to 28 miles as of my last run. Had I just gone on my basic 3-miler yesterday I would have made the mark. Not that it means anything to anybody but me, but there was a prize drawing for those completing the challenge and it just sucks to fail.

My response to failure (after a little self-pity):

"So you failed. Alright you really failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You failed. You think I care about that? I do understand. You wanna be really great? Then have the courage to fail big and stick around. Make them wonder why you're still smiling." — Claire Colburn, Elizabethtown