Quintuple Happy Monkey Luck

Today's happy occurrence:
I managed to shave a whopping 13 seconds off of my last half marathon time so today's 1.41.37 is now my second best. How the hell did I ever get it under 1.40 last year? Bloody hell. But the happy occurrence was that Michael and I were given a lift to the start by D and his girlfriend and then she drove to the finish to pick us up. Not having to worry about finding parking and not having to take the smelly bus back from the finish line to the start was such a nice treat! Five of us went for brunch afterwards.
D placed 3rd in his age category and Michael had a PB of 1.30. Wheezy, who had been on the fence, breezed by me at the 15k mark. We saw Big D finish and he treated us to a most animated story about how how he woke up at 1am (six hours before the start of the race) and realized that he hadn't picked up his race package. I have nightmares about stuff like that.
C and his wife (who was running her first) found us at the end. I was aggravated that I didn't have some super exciting time to report and he muttered something about me recovering from my tonsillitis and then coughed surreptiously into his hand and it sounded suspiciously like he had said "whiny baby" but I can't be sure. I hope he's enjoying his Scotch. I need to get faster.
And finally? The girl I ran the Sun Run with almost two months ago ran her first half marathon today. I walked back on the course, found her and ran with her for a few minutes. I asked her how she was doing and she said her knees were a bit sore and where was the finish line? She looked so great: it was so exciting to see her.
And, the feel good story? Her fiance lives in Seattle and up until last Friday he was not planning to come up to see her run her first half marathon. I was pretty choked. So as we're running along she points to this guy that keeping up with us on the sidelines and said, "That's my fiance". He looked thrilled.

The good news:
I found another excuse to not give up wine.