In my previous job, I never had an occasion to be on a conference call. In my new job, it happens rather frequently. That would be fine, except it turns out I'm really bad at conference calls. Here are some particular challenges:

• First, I spend a lot of time worrying about whether I'll get on the call at the right time. What if I have the time written down wrong? What if I've converted between time zones incorrectly? I'll probably have to check the time five or ten times before the appointed moment. I'll also have to google the time zone conversion three or four times. This will happen even though, so far, I've never actually missed a call.
• Because of the above time problem, I often dial into the call a minute or two early. Then, I awkwardly wait around for the "host." I am never the host. Eventually, the host will get on and say, "Hello?" and I have to announce my presence. Whichever way I say my name always sounds wrong. Should I refer to myself in the third person, as in, "Kathleen is here!" Or, should I offer a cheery "Hello!" with no name? I usually go for the second option, and then inevitably someone else will talk when I'm trying to say my name. 
• Talking at the same time as others is the next, and perhaps most troubling, problem. Whenever I want to say (or feel I should say) anything on a conference call, at least one other person starts to talk at the same time.  A long, "No you!" "No, you!" "I'm sorry!" "Excuse me!" chain follows. I wish I could just listen on all the calls, but sometimes, I'm supposed to weigh in.
• When I do manage to ask a question or make a statement, the other people on the call don't seem to know who I'm talking to, even though it seems obvious to me. Most recently, someone had to yell at me: "WHO ARE YOU ASKING, KATHLEEN?" In these moments, I'm very glad we're not having a video chat because I'd be blushing and sweating on camera instead of just in private.

My marathon is in two weeks, and I did pretty much all the workouts in my training plan. Well, to be honest, I did have to skip one or two of the hard ones because I'm pretty sure the plan was written for a younger person with enhanced ability to recover. I'm older--a masters runner--and I can only do a maximum of one-and-a-half speed workouts per week.

But, with the exception of that one week where I took an extra day off because I'd tweaked my Achilles tendon (on that run with the turkeys I wrote about), I ran all the miles. Yay!

Last week, I really celebrated my efforts by completing both of the prescribed speed workouts and my final 20-miler. I did that last long run all alone without my headset (I drove to a route and forgot it, which annoyed me till no end). In the final portion of the effort, I kept telling myself, "This is the last mile of your last marathon training run." It was a motivational little mantra.

It was the next day that I realized the problem with my end-of-run, last-mile pep-talk. While it's true that I was in the last mile of that particular marathon training run, I still actually have to go out the door and log the taper miles. I have skipped the taper in many a marathon cycle because I've been too busy teaching, but this time I'm seeing it through. Therefore, I still had a hill workout this week. I did four up-tempo miles yesterday in the early-morning dark. I did them even though I've basically been feeling like my legs are dragging for an entire seven days.

My friend Jordan says that my blah feeling is exactly appropriate. I should be excited to be feeling awful because it means I did the training just right. In two weeks at marathon time, I'll be totally ready. We'll see! I hope so, and I'm looking forward to lightening my load even further after today. Today's my last run over 10 miles. I've got 12, and I'm going with friends. It'll be way better than 20 with no friends and no headset.

Every once in awhile, I get obsessed with some dumb thing. There's ear wax, remember? And pedometers? Well, now I've added checking the weather app.

Four or five or twelve or seventeen times a day, I'll refresh the damn thing, especially if one of the kids has an outdoor sporting event. Today, for instance, Shef is supposed to have a running race. For the last ten days, the weather app has predicted rain. For the last five days or so, it's been a 90-100% chance of rain. The icon shows a cloud with a lightning bolt to indicate that there might be thunderstorms.

It's not like I can do anything about this forecast. It's not like it's going to change dramatically in 45 minutes. Clearly, the weather forecasters think it's going to rain. If it's not going to rain, they don't know about that fact. All signs point to rain! And yet, I continue to check to app.

Sometimes I look at the radar on the app, as if I'm trained in radar. I know the basics, which is green or yellow over the place where you live means it's raining. I know from unfortunate experience that you can't always tell what the blobs of rain are going to do in the run-up to your location on the radar. They split and reform in mysterious ways. Maybe I could spend less time thinking about it, but probably I can't.

They're gross, and yet recurring. I've had fruit flies on an annual basis, I'm pretty sure, for most of the time I've been a homeowner. I think it's because of the compost? Or at other times, because of the garbage disposal? In any case, I have some now, little fruit flies in my face while I type at the breakfast bar. I researched some solutions, and I'm happy to report I have made my own fruit fly traps with cider vinegar and a bit of dish soap.

Naturally, I've become obsessed with checking on the traps and counting the number of flies I've snared. It's been a day and a half now, and I'm up to fourteen. This is good, right? But still, I've seen other flies perching on the edges of my traps, not falling into the liquid and meeting their inevitable ends.

What can I do to entice them? What will finally draw this unfortunate infestation to a close? I'll probably spend time googling this after lunch. My writing really slows down in the afternoon.

And so closes the August Adventure Challenge, just a few days late.