Tidbits and nonsense. The usual.

"You're kinda red in the face, you know."

"You should have seen her earlier. She almost passed out on us."

"This isn't red (gasp) — I'm kinda purple (gasp) in the face."

"It's a bitch, isn't it?"

"That's the wrong word (gasp). Inadequate (gasp). There should be (gasp) a few more expletives (gasp) in there." (wheeze)

"C'mon, guys! Let's do the plank!"

(At this point, despite the fact that Jason had warned us we'd hate him, I really, really hated him. I detest the plank. But I only went down on my knees three or four times, compared to the ten times or so that I usually collapse doing this. Maybe I'm getting better. Or I was ... until we had to do the super(wo)man. My butt hates me.)

At the end of today's Sarah Learns to Kick Ass Class, my lungs were in full rebellion. This may become an actual problem. I hope not. I hated the few years I was on an inhaler because I was just too fat and out of shape to do anything truly physical. I'd rather not go back on one because my lungs are wimping out over jumping rope and lunging my way around a gym while clutching a ten-pound medicine ball. Psh. I feel like a weenie right now. A faint, breathless, weak weenie who sat with her head between her knees while Mr. I'm Not A Weenie did leg lifts against a punching bag.

Mr. I'm Not A Weenie and I finished the day practicing our punching combinations on each other and learning an upper cut and how to duck a left hook after dishing out a two (a one-two? I have no idea. Don't quote me on any of this lingo. I'm clueless). It felt like ballet class toward the end — all the ducking was more like pliés (on my part), and I was considerably slower than my rather macho practice partner. But my legs will be in great shape.

******

My weekend with Em was wonderful.

Emily (an American) lives in Thailand, where she teaches French at an international school that predominantly caters to kids whose parents are doing missions work in Asia. Yeah.

Which all boils down to this: I haven't seen Emily for three years. So we had three years' worth of stuff to catch up on (because no matter how fabulous Facebook is, it still can never take the place of a face-to-face conversation over too-spicy curry in a tiny Colorado Springs Thai restaurant; and it can never measure up to putt-putt with a giant gorilla and the Eiffel Tower or a tour of the Garden of the Gods or Glen Eyrie castle and its beautiful gardens).

And no matter how much Emily tells me about her life in Thailand, and her home, and her school, and her motorbike (I just can't picture my tiny friend roaring around Chiang Mai on a giant Kowasaki motorcycle), I still imagine Thailand the way my dad photographed it in the early 1970s: Dirty, hot, a little bit starving, and all up on stilts. And I'm not far off when it comes to some villages, Em tells me, but that's not how she lives. She even has air conditioning.

She's still trying to persuade me to come visit. December and January are ideal, she tells me. We'll see.