240/365 Overly Coordinated

240/365 Overly Coordinated
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

I'll occasionally find that my shorts and shirt match, but I don't usually expect them to also match my sports drink.

76/365 Everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day

76/365 Everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's Day
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

...at least in Massachusetts.

Paisano -- the local Mexican/Guatemalan* restaurant around the corner from us normally has mariachi on the weekends, but is hosting an Irish band tonight.

I think they already had a green margarita on the menu.

* And, whenever we mention the name of this place, people think it's Italian.

Out West

It's 6AM local time and I'm kicking around at my parents' house until I have to head out to the airport to catch my flight back home. I've been in CA on business, and all told it's gone pretty well. My presentation seemed to go smoothly (there was no audible snoring), and I had some good interaction with the local peeps that will be implementing and verifying the design that I've been specifying for the last couple of months.

Given the problems I've had recovering from the time change the last couple of times I've travelled west, I've tried something new this trip: staying on east coast time. I actually went to bed "late" last night -- 10:30pm local and probably woke up late as a result. (5:45am) Other than that, I've been in bed around 9PM and up around 5AM all week -- a perfectly reasonable midnight/8am back home.

Anyway, a few thoughts from the week:

• A few minutes ago, I could hear the newspapers getting delivered -- it's actually the third time this week I've beaten the delivery peeps.

• I was pleased that I was able to run by the beach in the mornings before work. A 6 mile run on Tuesday and a 10 mile run on Wednesday.

  However, it should be noted that it's VERY dark at 5AM. The first night morning in combination with the fog, made the run on along the beach not much different from running through a foggy tunnel with an ocean soundtrack that you could barely make out if you tried to listen really hard. It wasn't light enough to see the surf until after I'd finished the run around 6:30. Worked out better the next day with the longer run when I could actually watch the surfers during the last few miles.

  Navigation is also challenging. It made driving and looking for parking more difficult than planned. I also stumbled a few times off street and driveway curbs and got poked in the eye by a tree branch because it was too dark to see.

• I was entertained by the sight of the throng of surfer kids who showed up at the beach at 6:30AM the first morning. I wondered if they were just following the surf reports, but it turns out that the parking lot didn't open until 6:15.

• Speaking of parking, it was strange to get turned away from a lot because it was too early. I wouldn't have wanted to pay $7 to park at that lot anyway (different from the surfer lot). Conveniently, the no parking zones generally didn't take effect until 8 or 9AM, well after I had left.

• 63 degrees at the beach at 5:30AM. 78 near the airport where we were staying and working. 98 in the valley -- whoa.

• Even though we were working near LAX, I flew into Burbank. A much easier airport to deal with, easier to get a rental car, and one of the two L.A. area options for JetBlue, which doesn't fly into LAX. And, the parental homestead is closer, so I was able to visit on the way in, and could stay here the night before my flight out. And I only had to navigate the traffic hell once.

• The traffic from the airport to my parents' house was surprisingly light when I arrived around 5PM on Monday. And no problems at 8PM when I headed down to the hotel. The return drive at 4PM yesterday was a different story. It took about an hour and a half to travel the 21 miles from the LAX area to here. And the majority of that time, maybe 70 minutes was spent on the first 13 miles from LAX to Sunset. There were miles that I could have run faster than I was going. I can't imagine making that kind of commute daily. And the round trip would probably eat a quarter tank of gas.

Ok, gotta head to the airport, maybe a few more updates later.

Ok, followup from JFK:

• coming through the Sepulveda pass into the valley, I couldn't help but think that it looked a lot more.... green, than I remember it. Hard to say whether it's because all the street side trees have just finally gotten visibly bigger over the years or it's the first time I've made the drive in daylight.

• Saw some surfer couples at the beach, complete with his and her surfboards attached to the roof or stuffed in the backs of their cars.

• Saw a prius with a HOV sticker. That really seems like a dumb idea. Sure, it's a motivation to get people to switch to hybrid cars, but taking up spots in the HOV lane? Isn't it possible for that to lead to an increase in the number of cars on the road, further increasing congestion, leading to longer commute times and more air pollution? I suppose I'm just being a whiner since the problem should be limited because they only issued a limited number of stickers.

3 things

18 mile run this morning. And for once, I kept to the plan, didn't start too fast, stayed off rough trails and hydrated on water and gatorade. It didn't hurt that it was a cool 60 degrees (make that 50 degrees -- brrrr... hoping it doesn't hurt the tomatoes) this morning and could see my breath at times -- a first in quite a few months. I've also been trying to keep the carb intake high, and didn't go all crazy and bike several miles the day before.

Anyway, all told, a good run. Even managed to have a good kick on the last 3 miles. The run felt good, and after the run felt pretty good, too, although I've got my nagging hamstring and achilles issues still going on. Tried to mitigate with some cold water cycles in the shower and a little ice massage on the achilles -- we'll see how that goes.

So, I think the quality of the run helped, but here are 3 things that made me smile (smile, as in, big toothy grin) on my run this morning:

1. catching a lungful of the sweet, fragrant smell of ripe concord grapes
2. passing a van parked on the side of the road by a field and catching the view of the woman in the driver's seat, pointing out the cows to (presumably) her daughter in the carseat behind her
3. sharing the playfulness of the side-to-side dodging game (pass on right? / pass on left?) with a couple walking on the path from the other direction. (I think I had seen the couple on another road earlier in the run)

Bonus: passing Peartree Lane and thinking about delicious pears. Yum. (ate two with lunch. :)

Whoops

I exchanged some email with a friend this week about my training conundrum, and she's reassured me that thing will be fine and that I'm doing the right things. Her main point: AVOID INJURY.

Got it.

Her other suggestions were to continue to include tempo/interval runs and to add "speedups" to the long runs as well. Also, hill workouts. And perhaps the most reassuring: to not go beyond 20-21 miles on the long runs.

Otherwise, the training runs had been going well the last few weeks (basically, since getting back from L.A. and readjusting to the time zone). I've been mostly running in the mornings, and I've generally felt pretty good both during and after the runs. It was mainly the length of long runs in the training plans I had seen that had made me nervous.

Yesterday, I proceeded with my new plan with the intention of ramping the miles of my long run, shooting for around 15 miles after only running a bit over 11 miles last week. (I had also snuck a hill run in on Thursday, but I did take Friday off as a recovery day.)

Route planning has gotten so much easier since the advent of GoogleMaps and the portable GPS.

In the old days, I would drive prospective routes, taking notes on street names and odometer readings. And then at home, I'd go as far as measure string on a driving atlas to guesstimate distances for trails or roads I hadn't driven.

I *heart* GoogleMaps and all your route dragging, mileage-calculating goodness. And with the GPS, After I map out a route on Google that's generally the right length, I just remember the one or two street names where I need to turn and then go. The GPS lets me know how far I've gone and how fast I'm going (for the most part... it does occasionally go off into the weeds where pace is concerned in hilly and/or wooded areas, but it's pretty obvious when it's off, and it's been pretty accurate for distance for the most part) so I don't sweat the details as much anymore.

Which may be less of a good thing sometimes. Take for example... yesterday's run. 15 miles, head out through Weston on 117, take a left on TOWER ROAD, and then follow the roads I'm familiar with once I pop out on Boston Post Road.

First off, I got held up by the train. Railroad crossing gates came down, so I turned around, retraced maybe 100-200 yards and then came back around. Still no train. On the second go-around, I see the train finally pull up. ...and stop, maybe 50 yards from the road. 2 minutes have already gone by at this point. After 3 minutes, I get impatient and just cross the tracks. I know I'm not supposed to. I was even good and waited when the gates first came down. But impatience, and fear of burning too much critical energy looping in the holding pattern got the better of me.

That threw me off. And I hadn't bothered to check where the train tracks were relative to the Tower Road turn off. And then I hit Route 126 and I was pretty sure at that point that I'd missed the turn.

Whoops.

I thought I might have missed it because I was distracted by the train or there was poor signage, but when I eventually found it, there were 3 signs, on both sides of the road. I either totally spaced or there was traffic on the road that was either distracting or obstructing the view.

So, instant 19+ mile run. I actually started walking after 15 miles, so I don't think I can say I ran 19 miles. I was actually feeling pretty good even on the 15th mile, but I guess my body took the 15 mile plan to heart because at 15.1 miles, my hamstrings and gluts suddenly got really unhappy. But I didn't stop -- just walked the next 3 miles or so and then ran the last mile and a half. (There was a false start maybe at the beginning of mile 17 where I tried to get it going again and the anterior tibs started complaining immediately, which led to some more walking.)

Anyway, really long run yesterday. Big ramp from last week. And... feeling pretty good. The quads are sore and the achilles has tightened up a bit, but pretty good, all things considered. I'm even thinking of running an easy 3 just to get the body loosened up a bit. Held off first thing this morning because I'm waiting for another stupid Craigslist person that I was hoping would call me back, like sometime during the day that she said she could pick the damn thing up "anytime." WTF is up with the flakey Craigslist people?

A few random notes:

• After crossing the tracks, I ended up running almost a half a mile MUCH much faster than I had planned (driven by adrenaline and possibly guilt for doing a no-no). Definitely sub-8s for a 9:30+ intended pace.
• Sheep! Moos! And only because I missed the turn. (but which unfortunately made me think of this comic.)
• Also saw a cardinal and a flock(?) of wild turkeys. (Not to be confused with a case of Wild Turkey. [Yes, that was bad. Sorry.])
• really good luck with the traffic lights on the last few runs -- thank you, Traffic Goddess.
• 3 Obama yard signs, in Lincoln and Weston. I saw my first McCain sign on a run on Wednesday, in Auburndale/West Newton of all places, which always struck me as slightly more working class than the other villages.
• Hit another "private road" that looks like a normal road on GoogleMaps. It cuts through a golf club. Only slightly nervous. Still better than some of the dead-end roads and non-roads that I used to hit from my driving atlas days.

Learning Experience

Today's lesson brought to you by Key Run Workout #2: a 5 mile tempo run at mid-tempo pace.

The lesson: apparently, I can't run 5 miles at a 7:30 pace. (a goal pace based on my half-marathon pace 3 years ago.)

It probably didn't help that I ran the first fast mile, well, too fast. After a 1 mile warm-up, the first tempo mile clocked in at 7:16. Whoops. I kept it in the ballpark (below 7:40) until about halfway through mile 4 when I hit another uphill section and just couldn't keep it up.

I could blame it on the fast start, the hills, the headwind, even fatigue from my "recovery workout." But really, I know I'm still being a little optimistic about what kind of condition I'm in. I'm testing the boundaries right now, basically just to make sure. This might also be considered "setting myself up for disappointment."

Another observation: my pace varies quite a bit moment-to-moment. The logs routinely present an uneven sine wave representing my speed -- a line littered with peaks and valleys. I suspect that it's in large part due to the lag of the GPS giving me a pace measurement and the ensuing hysteresis as I try to hit a specific pace. I'll have to try and not look at the watch so much and see how it goes.

Clearly, still a work in progress and always something new to try and figure out.

Retroactive

I just got an email from AirTran advertising their "Foolishly low prices" if you purchase tickets by April 1.

Is that supposed to be funny?

I can almost rationalize it making sense in some sort of post-ironic reverse-polish-notation kind of way. To be honest, when I saw an email from AirTran, I kind of assumed that they were notifying me that they'd gone out of business or something.

Meteorological Observation

The ground is wet, but it doesn't seem to have rained much at all this morning -- so much for heavy rains and local flooding.

Clearly, The Powers That Be are just fucking with me.

Bias

I like to pay attention to my surroundings when I run. I still find it meditative, but I enjoy noticing the sights and sounds around me, not to mention smells.

Actually, specifically to mention smells.

Often when I run after work, I can tell people are making dinner as I'll catch a whiff of a savory smell that will make me think of rich tomato sauces, juicy steaks, roasted chicken.

So tonight was not so unusual when I caught a noseful of something that made me immediately think of...

...bacon?

...barbecue?

Actually, it reminded me of the smoked meats we found in Hollins Market in Baltimore.

Seemed like kind of a strange time of day (and really, time of year) to be making barbecue, but hey, it's a free country. And we're no strangers to the whim of a random food craving.

Then, a few minutes later, perhaps another mile along and in a totally different neighborhood, I smelled... more barbecue?

No.

Chimney smoke from people's fireplaces and wood-burning stoves.

Duh.

Observations while traveling

1. I guess we aren't as extravagant with the heat as I thought we were. I was positively baking on the cab ride into Logan this morning (ok, yesterday morning) and waiting around at JFK. I normally wear a fleece around the house, and yet I was overheating in just jeans (unlined), T-shirt and a light button down. I'm pretty sure it wasn't just my body chemistry gone awry from lack of sleep given the number of stocking-less short skirts and be-sandaled feet I saw in the terminal waiting for my connection to Burbank.
2. I not sure I should be grateful or concerned of the apparently more-limited water processing done in New England. All I can say for sure is that there are a lot more chemicals that I can smell (some kind of chlorine, but also seemingly something else) in the water at both JFK and in L.A. I'm thinking I'm a bit dehydrated from all the flying and the general distractedness I've been experiencing in the last few days leading up to today's (yesterday's) travel, but I'm being deterred by the smell and have only been drinking juice and tea in any kind of quantity so far, which is to say, not much at all.

80 degrees and sunny today in L.A. -- nothing to complain about there.

sick thoughts

I've been pretty much out of commission since Friday with some kind of bug. I thought I was mostly back yesterday, but I guess I got a little cocky (I saw a client in the afternoon), and ended up almost back to square one last night. Anyway, not really feeling up to doing much else, so just a few thoughts and observations:

• It's probably been the longest that I've been sick since I started having regular acupuncture treatments almost two years ago. I'm pleased that I've only had a moderate cold maybe once in the last year, but I guess I'm kind of bummed that I've been laid up for over 3 days now. It makes me wonder whether the new assistant who works at the clinic doesn't have the same skills as the previous one or if maybe I need to reiterate that one of my original treatment goals was to keep my immune system up to snuff.
• Does anyone else find that they can't remember what it's like to feel healthy when they're sick? Over the weekend, I kept noticing myself doing little check-ins: Am I better now? How 'bout now? Is this better? Is this how normal feels? It's like a bunch of kids on a road trip asking "are we there yet?" Answer: no. (Also interesting that the opposite is true.)
• It figures that the nicest weather we had in the last week was yesterday and the day before when it got into the 40s. I was finally starting to ramp up the miles and was looking forward to a longer run on Saturday and I ended up not leaving the house. I barely left the bedroom.
• It also figures that I'm sick over the weekend. Of course, it was probably the stress from preparing for a meeting on Thursday that pushed me over the edge in the first place.
• Started reading the Golden Compass series. I'm enjoying it so far, but it's kind of a bummer when reading makes me tired. Geez, when am I supposed to find time to read if not when I'm home sick? Sucking it up and reading anyway. Probably part of why I'm still sick today.
• Being able to sleep on and off all day -- good.
• Not being able to fall asleep at night after sleeping on and off all day -- not good.

Also, less computing -- good... So I'm signing off now.

Later folks.

Contemporary Criminal Activity

A few weeks ago, my friend JBar thought she had been the victim of the stupidest thief on the planet. Someone had apparently stolen her credit card number online, but all the stuff they had ordered with it had ended up at her house. The connection was made when she started receiving a bunch of random shipments, including a package of "colon flow" supplements, a bunch of Disney DVDs and nine bottles of wine. She was annoyed because she had to deal with getting all the charges reversed (fortunately, she didn't have to actually pay anything -- go AmEx), but we had a laugh about our incompetent constipated and alcoholic pedophile.

My brain clicked briefly with the memory that both the SOOTTAD and I had recently had our credit card numbers changed out from under us because Citibank had apparently discovered that some retailer had had their records compromised. Yeah, changing all my automatic bill-pays was fun. Anyway, I guess I figured it was going around, but other than that I didn't think much else about it.

And then the SOOTTAD got an unsolicited order of multivitamins. No idea where that came from, but she didn't have any time to deal with it, so it sat in her office for several days. And then while she was away on business earlier this week, another package of vitamins showed up. And a book order from Scholastic -- apparently she was added to some Scholastic book club.

So it looks like it wasn't an isolated incident of incompetent crime.

The SOOTTAD spent most of the morning talking to customer service representatives (arguing with some that were exceedingly more incompetent than others), calling up retailers, having charges reversed, dealing with shipping packages. In the process, she even discovered that someone apparently even created a fake gmail account with the standard FirstnameLastnameNumber@gmail format.

Just some annoying, juvenile hackers who are having a laugh? Or maybe they're manipulating the market by increasing sales of particular targeted businesses. (Or driving them to ruin by tying up their customer service or eating the costs of return shipments.) Or maybe it's just theh trial run of some more systemic attack... on the nation at large! Terr'ists!

Bah.

Seems like some crazy movie plot: an underworld organization plotting to undermine the American Way of Life(tm) by disrupting our system of commerce.

But, of course, I'm only kidding. Well, half-kidding.

Good and Bad

It's 6:28pm and I'm the last person left in the office.

An Observation on Language

I'm finding that I have recently developed the habit of using the word awesome to describe a certain flavor of experience that I'm having or have had at a particular time. And generally in these instances, when I say awesome, I mean totally sucked balls or completely useless piece of shit.

So the SOOTTAD and I finally got a chance to play with a particular undisclosed object we've acquired in the past few months, and I think you follow me when I say that the only way that I can adequately describe this object is that it was totally awesome.

Ugh.

Stupid not being able to fall asleep until after 3AM. It's probably the third night out of the last four. And now I'm waking up wicked late.

Or maybe it's the other way around.

*sigh*

Eye of the beholder

Towards the end of my run yesterday, I was on a section of the Charles River Walkway that passes through Waltham as it approached dusk. The light was already starting to fade, but I noticed a short woman and her dog walking slowly along one of the larger grassy areas that bordered the path.

I assumed that she had just gotten up or had simply been standing motionless because I hadn't seen her until her movement caught my attention. And in my head, my brain immediately came to the conclusion that she must have been quietly taking in the sunset, admiring the late summer sky as the colors slowly faded beyond the trees. She walked casually, and I imagined that she was lost in thoughts about the transient beauty in the world, the value of each moment in the sea of moments in our lives.

I took a moment for myself to appreciate the failing light. And as I passed her, I noticed...

...that she was talking on her cellphone.

So I guess all that other stuff was just me.

POSTSCRIPT

A few minutes later I saw two girls walking together on the sidewalk who seemed to be engaged in a bubbly conversation with one another. (At least, that's how it sounded to me as I approached.) And as I passed... Nope. Just one girl talking on her cell phone, and her... friend(?) quietly accompanying her, destination unknown.

TECHNOLOGY: bringing people together.

Convergence

It is perhaps ironic that I have to log into my Google account in order to access my Blogger account in order to bitch about how my online identities are converging. Or perhaps it is simply telling. Or appropriate.

Regardless, I'm annoyed.

Flickr wants me to link my account to my YahooID, and frankly, the idea makes me a little uncomfortable. I remember back when they first announced that this was happening that there were some people making a stink about it in the forums, and others who couldn't see what the problem was.

Perhaps it's just more evidence of the generation gap that was described in a recent New York Times magazine article -- the gap between those who try to keep a certain amount of privacy online and those who put themselves completely online, their private life, public.

Sure, to be wholly anonymous nowadays, you pretty much have to be off the grid entirely, but I'd like to think that there's still a middle ground somewhere in there that I can carve out, with a little anonymity through obscurity and obfuscation, at least. I probably want people to find me if they're looking hard enough, but I don't really want to just drop it in their lap. A bit paradoxical, I suppose. Or like the article says, maybe I'm just fooling myself:

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure.

Back in the day, I only set up my Yahoo account so I could sign up for online stuff without getting my "real" email address spammed. Then my YahooID got tied to a bunch of my mailing lists when Yahoo! assimilated eGroups. That was the beginning of the end, I think. When that happened, all of a sudden my hidden email address was mapped to my "real" address and could be seen by groups of people that I actually interact with in the real world.

So now, if I attach my YahooID to my Flickr account, all those peeps will probably be able to see my photostream. Which seems pretty benign. Except, my Flickr account also links to this blog. And somehow, I've always thought of this blog as being a separate sort of thing. So if I link the ID, the connection's made. Probably fine, right? What's the big deal?

Well, if it's done, it's done. The internet sticks around.

And then how easy is it to out the SOOTTAD, who is fiercely protective of her personal information to the point that there are no unprotected pictures of her on our *private* online photo gallery. I don't even post many pictures of myself in order to reduce the odds of her being identified by association.

Except that the information is already out there. There is a picture of the SOOTTAD out there on the interwebs, with her real name attached to it even. And the Yahoo email address has always been tied to the Blogger account. It just didn't have the reverse mapping from Yahoo to Blogger is all. Oh, F. I already linked to the blog on that stupid Yahoo360° page.

Dumbass. (F'ing Yahoo, pushing and pushing and pushing to continue the convergence. At least I'm not bumping into the namespace issue that other people are having.)

Like I said, maybe I'm just fooling myself.

A quick observation on Waltham demographics

During a brief stop at the local Shaw's Victory Hannaford's Supermarket down by Main St, I saw not one, but two other asian dudes over six feet tall.

Represent, yo.