The $20 apple

I ran 4 miles at lunch today; felt great. I still have no pain. It is so amusing to me that I continue to gauge my pain after runs. My assumption is that someday (hopefully soon) I will embrace the fact that this new running style really is good for me and I wont have to expect pain. But for now, I am still cautious. I am Optimistic, but cautious; in other words, cautiously optimistic. Hehe….

I am going to start doing some timing runs to see where I am at in terms of upcoming races I want to register for (Philadelphia Broad Street 10 miler coming up in May!). I’ll keep you posted!

During my run I was pondering a subject that I read about on-line this morning that has been in the news for the past couple of years.

Bees. Or I should say the lack of them.

Erica likes to tease me and call me narcissistic and the most anti “green” person she knows. I am not dumping toxic waste into our back yard from some hidden chemical plant we have hidden in our basement, but I am not the one you will see out on the highway picking up cans on Earth Day either. One of the darker jokes I like to make is that as long as the earth stays in tact for the next 50 years or so, I am good. Of course I AM KIDDING! I am kidding… I have children and I want to leave them and their children with a stable, clean world. By the way, I realize that this slight indifference to environmentalism flies in the face of this new “lets all act like prehistoric man and run and eat an BE natural”. Maybe I am growing as a person.

My point to all of this is that not much really bothers me. I know right from wrong and live my life as cleanly as possible but news that “global warming this” and “Russian nuclear fallout” that; these things never seem to bother me much. But the lack of bees really, really bothers me.

If you don’t know, scientists have realized that the honey bee population in our country (and I guess the world) has fallen drastically and continues to fall. There are theories as to why (pesticides, etc) but nobody has definitively figured the problem out. This problem is huge as honey bees provide the pollination for 1/3 of our food supply. Can you imagine 1/3 of the supermarket either empty OR paying huge amounts of money for items that we take for granted now. The reason that this bothers me so much is that all these other problems that the world has (most of them at least (global warming, etc)) I assume some really, really smart people will eventually figure out how to solve. But this bee thing is baffling and looks to be headed, quickly, to the point of no return.

So will my grandson or granddaughter have to pay $20 for a piece of the ultra rare fruit called “the apple”?