Marathons, spreadsheets

This morning when I went to get the paper, the wind and cold bit right through me, and I remembered that my neighbor, Sue, and her kids were running in the Cowtown Marathon. I don't know how many years ago--thirty-some--my ex-husband, Joel, started that marathon or at least was a prime mover in the group that did it, and I clearly remember sitting in our bedroom that night and hearing sleet hit the windows and the roof. He said, "Sleet! I didn't want sleet!" (Well, he wasn't quite that delicate about it.) But we always watched marathon weather carefully--ice and wind and snow are bad, heat is bad, and there's sort of a delicate in-the-middle. I used to work publicity for the marathon, with my longtime friend Melinda Mason, from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The children ran wild in the Stockyards district, and when I think of it now I'm horrified, though they assure me they were always with a whole pack of "marathon orphans." Sue and I drove in our driveways about the same time this morning, and she told me she'd done the 5K in under 30 minutes and her son had done it in 23. Good times!
Susan in my office always wants to turn everything into a database or spreadsheet. I've learned to use and appreciate the overall database that Melinda created, but spreadsheets are the bane of my existence (along with a lot of other things). I've no idea how to create one, not sure I want to, balk when confronted with one. Well, this morning on NPR as I drove to Central Market I heard a gentleman say that working with spread sheets requires algebraic thinking--well, there you go! It's one of the modern miracles that I passed high school algebra. Trig? Forget it, although geometry did make a bit of sense to me. Melinda keeps minding me that I'm one kind of brain and she and Susan are the other--I get them mixed up but I think I'm supposed to be right-brained. So the next time I'm confronted with a spreadsheet, I reserve the right to scream!