Saturday

Saturdays are not really lazy days for me. I've lost the ability to sleep in once the sun's up and there's generally alot to do. This past week has been fairly busy outside of work. I've been attending a Javascript meetup to learn more about how that language moves so much of the heavy lifting into the browser. Our friends Anna & John came into town, spent the night, and took our remaining chickens & our coop with them back to their farm in Georgia. The kids weren't really into caring for them anymore, despite the income Maxwell could earn from selling clean eggs, and not having them will make moving closer to town easier. A week from now I'll be running in my first half marathon. I've been running for over 8 years now, so I figured it was about time. Training has been hard though. Let me rephrase that: finding the time and the motivation to train has been hard. I haven't managed to run more than about once a week for the past few months and my weight is sitting at around 225 lbs - not exactly optimal for distance running.

As you can see from this graph of race paces, at 225 I'm averaging just over 10 minute miles while twenty pounds lighter, at 205, I'm averaging just over 9 minute miles. On the other hand, I have run races at this weight where I averaged 9 minute miles. Last month in fact. So it's entirely possible that my weight has historically been correlated to the rigorousness of my training regime. The difference between a 9 and 10 minute miles is the difference between finishing a half marathon just under or just over 2 hours. I have never run for two hours. I have never "hit the wall" that some runners talk about either, although some runners don't believe in it. Deutsch has a great word to describe eating to combat sadness: Kummerspeck. When I am feeling down, nothing perks me up quite like a bag or 3 of Doritos from the snack closet at work. And, failing that, I know of the bliss that only a double quarter pounder with cheese can bring. How many Saturday's like this one have you seen me tweet that it's Bacon O'Clock? Yesterday after my evening run and several hours of lawn mowing I gorged myself on a bag of chips and fresh salsa while guzzling a Negro Modelo. It's the simple things, really, which make me happy. Food is so simple, so pure, so goooood. Two years ago I managed to switch from my soda drinking habit to a healthier equilibrium, a pretty big change for the guy the Europeans used to make fun of at SLAC for drinking a Coke while they had their morning coffee. Now I have the morning coffee black - the same caffeine hit I used to get from Coca-Cola but with none of the calories. Then sometime late morning I transition to Vitamin Water Zero. I couldn't abandon the Coca-Cola Company entirely I suppose... The cheaper alternative to the Vitamin Water is water with a little bit of lemon juice. Straight up water I find gives me heartburn. Yes, I know that's a little weird. Per common phenomenon, my blogging has decreased as the social media have increased in popularity. The microblogging of Twitter I find most enjoyable personally, but because most of my family prefers Facebook I have the non-conversational tweets automagically forward to my account there. Facebook throttles this of course, so if I have a particularly loquacious day on Twitter not everything makes it through. Last year I wrote a blog on Getting Your Twitter Archive and it recently occurred to me that it only made sense to store that record here for posterity (and to let y'all play with it, too). Added bonus: looking at my tweets here doesn't show the annoying wonky font size shifts twitter is using lately. Unfortunate downside: none of the photos are stored here yet, they're still just links to twitter. Eventually I'll have to rectify that. Also today I am starting to clean up some of the annoying advertising which generates bumpkiss in revenue on this website. It was a failed attempt at monetization that ironically required more work to change than to leave it in place. You'll note the absence at the top of this blog and future blogs, but I'm not going to go back and change past ones. Well, I've got more lawn mowing to do so I should probably stop here. Hope your Saturday is restful or productive per your proclivities.