Snowball trees

I had the first test today to make sure that it's my lungs giving me problems and not my heart. Lucky me, I had my very first ever treadmill echocardiogram. Gosh, that was fun. Well, up until he couldn't see my heart clearly and decided that a contrast dye was in order. And then couldn't find a vein to start the IV. Sigh. And ow. Finally he managed, looked at my pretty healthy resting heart, put me on the treadmill, la di dah, looked at my heart again, and told me that although he isn't a doctor, it looked good to him. Pretty much exactly what I suspected. Time to move on to the next test.

Claudia came over last night so that I could show her how to knit the thumb on her fingerless glove and she could show me how to be a better blogger. And so we could eat a good dinner, courtesy of the fine cooks at Whole Foods. It's funny how tightly she knits, compared to me. Every time we knit the same pattern, her project is much smaller than mine. Luckily she has small hands! Mission completed with the knitting and the blogging and the wine-ing and eating. And no Ms. Claudia, I'm not going to mention my classic spit-take with Zinfandel all over my knitting. Whoops, I guess I am. I just won't mention that I was knitting one of those same fingerless gloves for my sis. Whoops again!

Back in the days before I started running, I used to cycle with my good friends. We had our annual 100k ride through the Valley, the long-departed Hekaton, and also did other organized and unorganized rides. My buddies knew that my long ago college education was in natural resources, with a major in forestry. Thanks, UofM for seeing that I got a degree despite myself. They were always asking me what a particular tree, bush or flower was called. Well, I studied this stuff in the mid-west and we're living in California. There are similarities but not everything is the same. Oh, and the small problem that I don't remember most of the names anyways. I used to make up names, and most of my group would accept that answer until I let them know that "purple flowering willow" or "drooping oak" were not in fact real names.

In California there are several beautiful flowering ornamentals in the cherry family. There are plums, cherries, apple, crab apple, etc. I can't always tell them apart, although I probably should be able to. On one lovely sunny spring day I was riding along with my buds, and one of them asked me the name of the pretty trees with the white flowers. "Snowball trees" I answered quickly, and continued riding. Most of my group nodded their heads, knowing I had just made up that name. One friend, whom I'll refer to as "Curt," didn't realize that I was naming things however I wanted as we rode along. A couple of weeks later we were riding along in a big organized ride and he pointed out the trees to someone else. Those are snowball trees, said he. Not until the rest of us almost fell off our bikes laughing did he realize that he had been the victim of my supreme bullshit. To this day, these trees will always be Snowball Trees. You can see why they got their name, right??