Yo, Banana Boy Fartlek

My sons had so much fun with these:

race car
yo, banana boy
toot (Joshua's favorite)
radar
never odd or even
a Toyota (I'd love it if it were a Prius)

"Huh?" you say. What are those? Can you think of one?

That was a game we played during fartlek. Starr, Sarah and Allison thought I was a kook for a few minutes there as I randomly blurted out words and phrases, but then Sarah figured it out.

We ran fartlek on the trail finally, so each group was on their own watch. I've been asking Gilbert for a trail fartlek for our class for months and months. Allison and Starr kept overtaking Sarah and I on their hard minute, and then we'd pass them on our "hard" minute. I made the comment that we were like the compass in an old classic poem, but they didn't know what I was talking about. :-(

So, here is some much needed poetry.


A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

- John Donne, 1611