Nice, steady treadmill run after work. 10.25 miles. Kept it around 7:10 to 7:20 pace most of the way. Here's something interesting. In my U.S. history classes we are in the early 20th century now - a time period dominated by Theodore Roosevelt. Whenever I teach a subject, I try to come up with something interesting that makes people who lived long ago seem more human to high school kids in 2013. Today we talked about the most tragic day in TR's life, February 14th, 1884. On that day his young wife Alice gave birth to their first child and died later that day due to complications from the delivery. To make matters worth, TR's mother died that exact same day in the same house of typhoid fever. Roosevelt was devastated by this and gave his infant daughter, whom he named Alice, to his sister to care for and he moved to the Dakota Territory and purchased a cattle ranch. For several years he lived in relative isolation while he recovered from this tragedy. If you all want to see something pretty powerful and moving you can google "theodore roosevelt diary entry day wife died" to see what he wrote in his diary that evening. You might cry if you are the sensitive type. My students found it doubly sad that this occurred on Valentine's Day. But I had to tell them that I'm pretty sure Valentine's Day was a 20th Century invention of the floral and greeting card industries to make us feel like jerks if we don't by their products. I just looked it up. Valentines Day is older that I thought. I still maintain that your wife and mother dying on the same day in the same house cannot be made worse by occurring on Valentines Day.
| 