When we first moved to Maryland, Patrick and I watched a movie called “Burn After Reading.” It takes place in DC and includes a line from Brad Pitt– it goes something like this: “Do you have anything other than Maryland swamp water to drink?”

The longer we live here, the more we notice problems with our water. Mainly, it’s smell. We threw away a bunch of towels thinking they rotted. But when we got new ones, we had the same problem. If I use a wash rag more than once, it smells moldy. We realize it’s the water. But we don’t know why.

The Associated Press (AP) has put together an interactive list showing schools with violations for contaminated water. You can click on any state and see which schools have been cited. Most schools have trouble with coliform, followed by lead and copper. This is alarming…

Worst. Run. Ever. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to run. But I didn’t want to quit, either.

I haven’t been getting much sleep and when I finally get to bed, the quality of sleep is poor. When my alarms went off Sunday morning, I was exhausted. I got up and took my time getting ready. I just wasn’t in the mood for anything. I kept forgetting things, like filling up my water bottles.

We drove to Georgetown– near Water Street– and parked. The goal: 15 miles. It’s only one mile more than last week’s run. But I dreaded it.

This is my favorite new toy. It’s a site called Trendsmap and it shows tweets on a Google map. Yes, it’s in real time and just like a tag cloud, words are big or small, bold or thin based on number of tweets.

I love looking at Twitter trending topics. But there are only 10 and they lump in tweets from all over the world. I want to know what my community is tweeting about. Now I can and I can also see where most of the tweets are coming from…

Health care is not simply a political issue. It is a personal one. What is decided in Washington now will determine how we are treated in the future. Our shared fear? We are afraid our loved ones will suffer or die because of mistakes or poor coverage.

Some people say they are happy with their current health coverage. Others are not. And many are afraid something new would be something worse.

Nothing pleased me more than to hear the President promise that people would not be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions…

It turns out that Republicans in the House tweet more than Democrats in the House and Senate combined. This information comes from the Congressional Research Service (which is funded with taxpayer dollars). They studied tweets recently, for two weeks. Here is the report.

What are they tweeting about? According to the study, most tweets are like press releases and include a link…

I am proud of this training run. I never truly took a walking break. I took walking pauses to quickly stretch my foot or down a GU and water. I ran the race in two hours and 25 minutes– that’s a 10-minute and 23-second pace. Not ideal, but perfect for a training run. I recovered fast and even saw the movie “The Informant” with Patrick in the afternoon. This week’s goal: keeping up with my short runs. That is the only way I can build enough muscle to finish a long run with energy…