This is the second part of a two-part Summer Sunday Stats post. This post will make more sense if you read Summer Sunday Stats #6A first.
Today’s Chicago Half Marathon was the last meatspace race I’ve registered for this year, but I have one more virtual race to go: The 3rd annual World Wide Half Marathon, part of the Phedippidations World Wide Festival of Races. It’s self-timed, and the course isn’t USATF-certified, but the race directors do a great job building the excitement and even put together a e-goody-bag, and Steve prepares a special episode of Phedippidations with people cheering, which is great to listen to. The race is October 11 and 12; each runner decides when and where to run his or her race, then post results to the website. It’s a lot of fun, and there’s still time to register for the half marathon, 10K, or 5K races.
Moving off the running:
Words of Meet the Larssons written this week: 3,770 (92,948 total). That’s more like it. I managed — for the week, anyway — to stick to my pledge not to work on any other writing projects until the first draft of MTL is finished. The draft will need a lot of work, but I think I’m on track to make my self-imposed Halloween deadline.
Other news: We introduced the kids to Go Fish! yesterday, and Unfocused Girl to Clue, both of which went over big. We were looking for something to do together on a rainy afternoon other than watch a movie; we’ve tried card games and board games before (Candyland, Hi-Ho-Cherry-O, a couple of others) without success, but it looks like the kids have finally gotten old enough to handle games with rules, which is great.
What a disaster of a weekend, weather-wise. Even here in the city, not far from our house, the Chicago River has flooded hundreds of homes and streets with waist-high water. Unfocused Girl’s school is closed tomorrow, thankfully just because of flooding in the streets and not in the school itself. We’ve been lucky to have had only a trickle of water in the basement, back by the mechanicals. Anything I can clean up with a few towels qualifies as a minor problem.
Finally, I came across a couple of interesting writing blogs this week, which I’ve added to the “On Writing” section of my blogroll on the sidebar. Chicago-area mystery writer J.A. Konrath writes A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, which focuses on marketing yourself (and your book) and the business side of being a writer. Scott William Carter, whose own first novel is coming out soon, writes The First Book, with interviews of authors whose first novels are about to be or have recently been published. If you’re a wannabe novelist looking for inspiration, you might want to check these out.
There’s more I meant to put into this post, but I’m exhausted and I’ve forgotten what it was. If I remember it and I have the energy, I’ll post an epilogue.
The Unfocused Life 
Dusty wants Clue. We got Monopoly for the beach this year which has been a big hit even though it’s only the two of us playing. I tried Candyland with Red recently and, well, it wasn’t a big success. She’s not big on rules.
Yeah, Candyland seemed like a good idea when I spotted it at a garage sale, but by the time Unfocused Girl was mature enough to be willing to play by the rules, she was too old to be interested in the game; Junior isn’t there yet by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, I bought it at a garage sale, so no big deal.
The only clique I was ever part of in elementary school was in second or third grade and was made up of the small handful of kids whose parents had to drop them off at school *really* early; we played Clue every morning. I had one friend who got up ridiculously early and came to school even though he didn’t have to, just to play with us. It was cool, and horribly geeky, all at once.