Dear Payne Whitney,

I love you, I really do, but why are you closing right when I need you? You do this to Kevin every year, and while I pretended to sympathize with him (and I can see how it would be annoying to lose your swimming pool access every year in the last 10 days before the first triathlon of the season), I secretly knew it was a sign that you loved me best.

But now you're doing it to me too--closing and keeping me away from my beloved (although falling apart--if we can work this out, maybe you could do something about that?) ergs. And right before my birthday, just when I realized that it might be fun to reach a million meters erged (total) by that very same birthday. It would have been so easy, except that you're closed from May 16 to 24, and I might be out of town on my actual birthday, so I need to finish up by tomorrow.

Which is totally do-able (10K both days, no problem), except that I gave myself a dramatic blister yesterday, and it hurt at practice this morning. Also, in retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have run 5 miles and erged 10K less than 12 hours before a hard practice, so my legs were really tired, and now (that it's too late to rest before a practice that's happened already), I'd kind of like to take today off from erging.

Anyway, back to us, PW. I know you are, technically, a gym, but I thought things were going well. You let me me have my own locker, borrow your towels, and leave my clothes there (although not a toothbrush), and I feel like I spend more time there than home (I definitely take more showers there--that should count for something, right?).

I know I'm married to someone else, and that I also visit the boathouse, and workout outdoors sometimes (OK, a lot). And I'm not blind, so I've seen how many other people you have over. I realize that maybe I complain too much about your ergs--maybe you had your own reasons for taking the working monitor off the working erg, and the broken monitor off the nearly broken erg, and putting the broken monitor with the working erg, and working monitor with the broken erg, and it wasn't fair of me to talk about that decision behind your back with other erg-ers.

But please, rethink this whole closing thing. Not this time, I know you've been looking forward to it, but maybe skip it in the fall? Or this time next year?

Love,
me

P.S. This is probably not a good time to bring up my other hobby, but I have only 2.5 more pairs left in the 52 pair plunge (and 2.5 weeks left till June 1, how convenient), and I've just sent off 2 secret knitting things, so maybe my knitblogging will get more interesting soon!