Dog Bowl Forecasting

Who needs weather.com and all those fancy weather satellites? My trusty dog water bowl on my patio can tell me whether I should run outside or flee indoors. (Note: This is not their only bowl. They have one inside, too, but the dogs seem to prefer this one.) The forecast indicated by this particular bowl configuration is "iffy, you might want to go to the gym." How do I know this?

1. There is ice on the bowl, indicating temperatures are below freezing. However, the ice is not that thick, maybe a half inch, so it's between 20° and 30° F. The hole in the ice is only there because there's a spigot that drip-drip-drips into it (no matter how hard I try to get it all the way off, I can't--blame me when the world runs out of potable water resources).
2. There is a definite shadow cast by the bowl, indicating sunny or mostly sunny skies.
3. The ice is evenly distributed around the bowl, not thicker on one side than the other, and it is not slopping over one edge of the bowl more than the other edge (which would indicate strong winds).

So put that all together, and you get "It's cold, but not so cold you'd reject the very thought of running outside. The sun is shining, which is nice, and it's not incredibly windy." Really a toss-up in terms of running outside or not.

I ended up deciding to run inside mostly because I ran yesterday and I'm running again tomorrow, and because I knew I'd have to spend two hours in a barely-heated building at a dog seminar tonight. I think I might have braved the outdoors if it hadn't been for the two-hour freeze-your-butt-off-fest that I knew was coming. (Good seminar, though. Worth the cold.)

I wore my awesome Team in Training tech shirt for the first time at the gym and expected to get some approving looks, maybe even a thumbs-up or two, but I got nuthin'. Zip. Apparently people can't get on a treadmill without their iPods these days. They don't talk, unless they're talking on a cell phone to someone (a girl down the row was doing this and wow, was it annoying), and they don't look anywhere except dead straight ahead. Like iPod-wearing zombies.

I finally had to ask a woman just hopping on a treadmill to get photographic proof of yours truly working out in her fabulous new shirt. ("Sure, as long as you're not going to ask me for money," she agreed.) The picture's a little funky, but it's better than nothing.