I also enjoy baking now. Kind of.

I have no idea what is wrong with me. Between bouts of violent coughing spasms the other week, I declared to Jeremy that I thought another baby would be nice. This idea just... took hold in my brain right then, and a reasonable explanation is not forthcoming.

Both kids are 100% potty trained (even for nighttimes!). They can feed themselves. Kind of. They can even open the refrigerator and retrieve snacks and put things away for me. Why would I want to go back to changing diapers and staying up all night and cutting up food into microscopic pieces? I DON'T KNOW.

The only thing I can think of is that all that coughing gave me brain damage.

---

I took a few weeks off from running and swimming while I was sick. Weights and low-intensity biking were okay for much of it, but there's nothing less fun than choking up what sounds like a hairball in the middle of a shared pool. Croaking out, "I'm not contagious!!!" does not seem to comfort the people around you.

So now I'm back, and oh, I lost so much ground. I was down to a ten-minute mile (for 3 miles) right before I got sick. That's still really slow, but hey! it wasn't completely embarrassing anymore. Also, shin splints. They are back with a vengeance. I guess I can never take a break from running again without working my way through them every single time. I can't tell you how frustrating this is.

Swimming is good, though. I can't say I always enjoy swimming laps. It's not a sport that really invokes the word "fun." You can't look at scenery or watch movies or listen to music or talk with friends while you do it. You stare at the bottom of the pool until your goggles fog up, and then you stare at fog, and then you take your goggles off and have raccoon eyes for the rest of the day. Sometimes it kind of looks like Jeremy hits me.

But. It feels really good to be good at something. If I shared the pool with real swimmers, I'd get a discouraging ego-check, but I don't think Utah has real swimmers. Or if they do, they don't go to the Gold's Gym in West Jordan. Probably because it's only three lanes, and it's the last part of the facility that ever gets any attention.

Every single time I go swimming, I have to ask them to straighten the lane markers. Once, the guy said to me, "You can't swim in a straight line?" Really. He said that to me. He was joking, but I could tell he was actually kind of not joking.

A couple of weeks ago, I kind of lost it. I was trying to share a lane with another lady, except the lane line was so loose that we kept swimming into each other. So I got out of the pool and went up to the front desk in my swimsuit and swim cap. You people have never seen me in a swim cap, but it's not nice. It's just about as unattractive as I get. That includes childbirth.

So I went up to the front desk, which is right in front of the weights area, which is full of people who look a lot better in a swimsuit than I do, and I asked the guy if someone could come fix it. He said, "Well, the maintenance guy isn't in right now, but he can fix it when he gets back."

"When will that be?"

"Uuuh... an hour?"

"It's really easy to do. I can do it myself. Just give me the tool for it."

"His office is locked, and there's no way for me to get in there."

(At this point, my brain exploded because I can't believe there is only one person in this building who has access to the maintenance tools. It's a 24-hour facility. The guy must be exhausted. No wonder he's so terrible at keeping up the pool.)

"I know this is not your fault, but this happens every single time I swim here. It takes five seconds to straighten them. He can do it a couple of times a day when he walks through the pool area, which I see him do ALL THE TIME. I know the water aerobics ladies ruin them, and I'm really sorry about that, but it's impossible to share a lane with someone when the lane markers are everywhere, and it makes me completely crazy, and I don't understand why it is so hard to do this one tiny little thing as regular maintenance."

This doesn't sound all that terrible, but imagine the combination of swim cap, increasing volume, and crazy eyes.

He backed away a bit, then said, "Oh! There he is! I guess he's back!" and scurried off to get the maintenance guy who had magically appeared at just that moment.

The lane lines stayed nice for a couple of weeks after that, but now they're back to their drunk old selves. I've been working on my butterfly extra hard; I'm hoping that doing enough of it will prevent people from wanting to share a lane with me.