..I Can

 
Last Post to this Blog. All following posts will be at Live journal (I got an account, yay!)

Live Journal Blog
posted by Jeremy at 8:13 AM

 

I'm getting ready to burn a data DVD, so I have time to wax philosophical today. I'm sorry to say I'm looking with a bit of trepidation at my birthday coming up this next week, which is my 30th. How scary is that? I remember being 13 and wondering what it would feel like to be 30...well, here it comes. I think part of the mysticism in my mind around the concept of 30 is the 13 year old concept (at the time) of the milennium. The thought process went like this: "In 2000 I'll be 27, and then three years later, I'll be 30. Great! Of course, in the late 80's, I always wondered if the world would survive until I reach 30. Obviously, it has, and I think everything has turned out all right to this point. I've got all sorts of great things going for me at this point, which makes life worth living. I'll save the long list for a later work. Let's just say that all is right with the world.

So the merit increases hit the floor in Astronomy last week. At first, I didn't think I did so well, but then I figured it out: 1.7%. At first, I thought it was zero, but then my wife reminded me that one digit was one number higher. Oh yeah. That's not so bad. The university average in this tough time was about the same, and the faculty in my department roughly got the same amount as a whole. That's pretty decent. Would have been nice to see a round number on that line this year, but next year we'll cross that line. Heck, I was up in the 5.somethings last year due to extra duties, so it's back to earth now. :-)

Well, off to an eye-doc appt.
posted by Jeremy at 3:40 PM

 

Lost an entire post, so I'll be concise. Big blackout, survived after 16 hours without power. Work survived without losing a computer. Ran 20 miles on Saturday last week. Very cool. Not much else to say since I'm late to go home.
posted by Jeremy at 5:04 PM

 

Good news afoot in my world today. My wife and I celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary last night. We went to an expensive italian restaurant last night and spent lots of money on food we normally wouldn't spend that much money on. Then we went next door and spent money on dessert I wouldn't normally spend money on. I had a caesar salad, and then the Filleto di Manzo, which is a beef tenderloin with a portobello mushroom, goat cheese, potatoes, asparagus a slice of tomato and shallots. It was all artfully designed so that the steak was on top of the goat cheese, mushroom and tomato with 4 stalks of asparagus around that, and then 4 wedges of potatoes around that, and then the shallots around that. On top of the whole thing was green onions fried like onion rings, with this fantastic breading. My wife had the Insalate Calaprese for a salad, which is slices of mozzarella with hunks of tomato, and basil and balsamic vinaigrette. For the main course, she had Spignola con Panzanilla, which is Grilled Atlantic wild striped bass with a classic Tuscan summer panzanilla; with tomato, cucumber, olives and wine vinegar; topped with rosemary infused olive oil. The steak was delightful, but the there may have been too much rosemary with the fish, and so it wasn't that great. It wasn't completely filling despite the price, so we went next door (from Gratzi to La Dolce Vita) for dessert. There, we had a pair of desserts, a chocolate crepe with white chocolate mousse and raspberry sauce, and a chocolate fudge cake with chocolate covered raspberries and raspberry sauce. The crepe with mousse was extremely satisfying, though we could barely finish the fudge because it was incredibly, incredibly rich. Woo! We thought the chocolate with raspberries theme would be nice, since we had had that for our wedding cake 3 years ago. ;-) All in all, a long and delightful evening with my wife. I thoroughly enjoyed her company the entire evening.

So my running is going well, though it is in the phase where it kinda dominates things. I just completed my first 50 mile week since I was 17. After I did my first 19 mile run on Sunday, I was super hungry, I think my body is in high powered metabolism mode. It is ready to eat everything in sight. And it's not gaining any weight, despite my eating all sorts of slightly unhealthy things. My wife and I had a short discussion about how this particular training period has already been hard for her, since I don't get moving on weekends until somewhat later, and with 90 minute runs on Saturday and 180 minute runs on Sunday, its hard to get anything done. Though I felt really attacked at first, she wasn't telling me too much that I hadn't thought about tangentially myself. We haven't done much with the house lately, since we last painted the last bedroom 2 months ago. We still have one room left to paint, and as I reminded myself this morning, we have some trim to paint in the master bedroom yet. And we have to do the deck, and there are a bunch of little things that should be done. So it's time to start doing them before the summer ends and it really starts getting cold and wet.

So, what are my goals for October 5th? Well, they keep on morphing. First, before June 1st, it was simply to finish. That was it. After June 1st, I ran my half marathon time through a few calculators, and they said, accounting for pace differences in running twice as far, you should be able to finsh in about 4 hours. Fine. That is 9 minutes a mile, which is fair. Well, I just pushed out 19 miles in 8:54 pace, and felt pretty good about it. So, perhaps 4 hours is a bit slow. As much as I want to, I'm still not going to make any firm goals beyond finishing, and under 4 hours yet. I don't feel I've hit the wall yet, which is something that I really should understand before setting a faster goal yet. Its so exciting, though! I'm almost to my goal! I'm gonna party when this is all done! And then after that, I'll keep on running, just not so much! Maybe in a couple of years I'll try again, but right now, just to complete my goal is enough, and next summer I'd like to run in a few more 10Ks, 10 milers and half marathons. It's a good distance for me. Will have to run that by my wife, though two hours is the max time for the long runs in that scheme, not 3.

What else is going on? Not much. Prog Power is coming up, though I'll save that for a later post, I have to get back to work now.
posted by Jeremy at 9:30 AM

 

Back again. Keeping busy lately. Had a late night on Thursday night, we had the softball semi-finals and finals in one night. They were originally scheduled for 10:30 Wednesday night, and 9:30 Thursday night, but the rain that we had last week really mucked up the softball fields. Once they had things ready, they had moved the games to 8:30 and 9:30 Thursday. Not a problem, but then the lights for the field didn't work, and we ended up moving from Elbel Field, where the games are held, to Mitchell field, where only the fall tournament is usually held. It's a better field than Elbel, but other things have priority on the field. We didn't get started until ten, and didn't finish until eleven. The team that we played at ten was the toughest challenge this year, we played them twice before, and lost the important game, a bitter 8-6 loss in the quarter finals of the Spring season tournament. This time, in the Summer Season tournament, we had their number, and beat them 8-7 in a great top of the seventh rally.

One knock that I've always had on myself is that I don't feel like I've ever produced on our softball team in the clutch. Even in games where it doesn't matter, I've felt like may performance suffers in close games. Not this time. I didn't hit the game winning run home, or anything like that, but the walk I took to open the inning allowed me to score, and it ultimately was the deciding run (as the batter who hit after I scored hit a three run homer to decide the game). It felt great to win, and to contribute, despite having an off year. The .200 I batted this summer was very disappointing to me, as I just wasn't hitting well (though I was fielding extremely well). Oh well, not only did we win the first game, we won the second game as well, 14-6. So, again, for the fourth year in a row, our team were the best of the best of the best league at the university.

More later.


posted by Jeremy at 10:59 PM

 

Wow, more than a month. Can you dig it? Gotta get in here more often. It's hard to do, when I'm typing random lines in while I'm working. Let's see. Back from a vacation last week. Went to 6 flags in Ohio for two days, and then went on a day trip to the islands just north of Cedar Point. It was nice and more relaxing than I expected. Spent almost 12 hours outside in the sun at Six Flags, and if anything, my tan is much darker than it has been in years. The running and the last weekend sure have helped. There's just this strip of white where my arm mounted GPS unit sits when I run. I was hoping that would go away this weekend, but alas, it did not.

Running is going well. I was a bit burned out last couple of weeks. I'm pushing into the mid 40's in miles per week, and I'm starting to feel the effects of running that much and playing softball at the same time. It's an awful lot. I'm amazed that I'm able to do all of that. I took 4 days off last week instead of two, and then ran 22 miles and played 3 hours of softball in two days. This morning I'm pretty tired. I would like to run today to make up for one of the days I missed last week, but I'm pretty beat, so we'll see. It would be an easy 4-5 miler today, so it wouldn't kill me to do it. Then 7 miles of speed work tomorrow (probably on the track, 8x1/2 mile, with wmup and cooldn), and then Thursday off. I'm going to go out and get another new pair of running shoes this week, since I blew out the pair I bought in March, already. I've put 450 miles on those shoes, and another 230 on the pair I'm running in now, that I bought in May. Lots of miles. i'm surprised at how much exercise I'm getting. My weight is down about 17 pounds since January, to about 167 or so, and I'm feeling pretty good. I'll definitely be looking forward to the break after the Marathon, though. Training 40-50 miles per week is pretty intense, and it is definitely having a draining effect on me. Oh well, at least I'm only running five days a week. Any more, and I'd probably need some serious sleep. ;-)

Work is going well, there are no major major problems. I've switched my mail over to a different server, and I'm asking others to do the same. Something that I've been waiting to do for sometime, so it is about time.. More later.

posted by Jeremy at 1:44 PM

 

Busy time at work. Seems like one catastrophe after another lately, not a lot of time to go about doing system upgrades, which is what I should be doing this summer. Oh well.

My wife had a rough spell last night, and she's pretty depressed over it, though less than I expected. One of her online friends, who she talked daily to, suddenly shut down last night, and decided that he wasn't going to talk to her any more. She's not sure why, and to tell you the truth, neither am I. But, she's kinda beating herself up over it, which she doesn't need to do. I know that in the past, she feels like she could never make and hold onto friends, and there have been some experiences in her life where she hasn't had those life long friends, even though she had the opportunity to. Of course, I don't know that this is necessarily a huge problem, as I don't really talk to any of my friends from high school either, or over 90% of the people I hung out with from college. I talk to exactly one person on a regular basis that I've known for over 10 years (not including family). I talked with my parents about this when I was 20 or so, and we had a conversion about friendships, and how transitory they were, and they mentioned that what was happening to me at the same time (not the same way that my wife is going through it), had happened to them. So, I think over time, transitory natures of friendships is the way of things, unless both sides continually renew to maintain it. In my case, I went to school almost 1400 miles away from where I did my undergrad. That pretty much put a nail in the coffin of a lot of my college, and any remaining high school friendships I had. However, I replaced them with friends and associates here and in Boston, where I was before here. Hopefully she accepts this and moves on.

The college here is looking for a part time IT guy to help them with an important task throughout the summer. I'm debating. It's 20 hours a week, and it is at my current salary, which would make a pretty big dent in our other mortgage. I'm considering the offer, though it would make my summer verrry difficult, but financially rewarding. :-) I'd also get to play with some big iron, and get some AFS experience that I won't get in this department. So it is worth thinking about.

Running up a storm. I put in 39 miles last week in six days, which is more than I should have, but it felt right. This week is a week easy (34 or so miles). Next week is another two week cycle of running hard.

posted by Jeremy at 10:06 AM