November 2003 Archives

it is really quiet here at work today. i think becca, josh and i are probably the only three people on the whole floor. we're considering having a chair race later.

i think it is really cool that bush visited iraq for thanksgiving. go bushie. i don't agree with his policies most of the time, but visiting troops in baghdad is something i can get behind. the funniest part of the above article:

On the flight over, Air Force One had come within sight of a British Airways plane, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, told reporters on the trip, according to the transcript.

The British Airways pilot radioed over and asked, Mr. Bartlett said, "Did I just see Air Force One?" There was silence from the Air Force One pilot, who then replied, "Gulfstream 5."

There was a longer silence from the British Airways pilot, Mr. Bartlett said, who, seeming to get that he was in on a secret, then said, "Oh."

so if you didn't read my entry yesterday, you will have to go back and check it out. it has little to do with thanksgiving, and everything to do with the fact that i finally broke the 30-minute mark (29:28!) at the turkey trot 5k yesterday morning. i am so pumped. i have been telling everyone, probably to the point of annoyance, but it's just because i am so excited that i finally did it.

thanksgiving was lovely though. after the run, i came home, showered, and headed over to becca's house for kennda's brunch (though i think it really should have been called lunch). she had a lot of "non-traditional" things to eat: quiche (made by a german), turkey sweet potato hash, salmon cakes (made by becca's friend david), brie (which i didn't think i liked, but it turns out that i do), and more. it was all yummy, and the table was set just-so, and everything was prim and proper. the conversation was interesting too, since there were only 10 people, and at least 3 countries represented (the u.s., germany, and sri lanka). there was also one very cute 5 1/2 month old baby who is going to grow up speaking three languages. wow.

from there, i went back home for a couple hours to make my sweet potato casserole. while i was baking, i had the air conditioning on because it was about 75 and humid outside, and my apartment was hot with the oven on. however, by this morning, i had the heat on because it dropped to the low 40s outside. i am sick of this crazy weather! i wish it would just stay cool.

anyway, my sweet potatoes finished and i headed over to paul and josh's for thanksgiving dinner. theirs was quite a contrast to the prettiness of kennda's brunch, with all of us just sitting around a table (without place settings or centerpieces) and serving ourselves from the bar, but it was great. we ate turkey (which turned out very well after all our worrying about paul and josh's inability to thaw it, much less actually cook it--thank you 1-800-butterball!), my sweet potatoes, david and becca's stuffing and pumpkin pie, chris's artichoke cheese thingys, james's chocolate pie, and more. chris also brought some very strong bourbon balls, nacho uncorked a bottle of 40 proof port, and there was champagne, so a good time was had by all. especially nacho. ;) it was all great, and by the time 8:30 rolled around, i was both very full and very tired.

so it was a good day. even though i don't go home for the holiday anymore, i still end up having great thanksgiving celebrations. i was busy all day, but it still felt relaxing; i think it's just the magic of thanksgiving. it's hard to feel stressed when you are eating great food and laughing with your friends. it just gives me that warm fuzzy feeling.

aw.

happy thanksgiving!

i've already eaten one meal, and am in recovery preparing for the next one. but all this gorging is ok, because this morning i ran the turkey trot 5k over near the galleria, and not only did i run it, but i finished in 29:28! my fastest time ever, and the first time i've ever finished under half an hour. i've been working towards this for almost two years! i am SO pumped! i came home and immediately called my parents. hurrah!!

i love thanksgiving!

the 90 minute run last night went amazingly well, and i am yet again astounded by the effect the weather has on my running. if it's warm and humid, i struggle (hence my slacking in the summertime). but if it's cool and breezy, like last night, i'm great. we stopped at an hour and a half, and i felt like i could have gone ahead for another hour and finished my half marathon right then! we did a slow couple miles for my poor legs to warm up, then maintained a good 10:30-10:45 pace for the rest of the time. the only hitch to speak of was getting stopped by a jsc security guard and told that it's against jsc rules to run past avenue b. we had no idea. sort of a silly rule, if you ask me.

i am looking forward to a day full of yummy food tomorrow, and a quiet weekend (sigh, though i will be working friday, sigh). becca and i are running the turkey trot tomorrow morning, and hopefully we will avoid temporarily losing the car key like we did last year! it's warmer now than it was this time last year; despite monday's practically freezing temperatures, last night it was back up to 65. the wacky weather never ceases. hopefully the weather will be nice and cool in the morning for the race. and it's a good thing i'm running, because apparently i will be eating a lot of turkey. paul and josh got a 20-pound turkey for only 8 people...two of whom don't eat meat in the first place. ay yi yi.

so, i do a lot of running (as if it weren't obvious enough from reading this blog). i always have visions of athletic greatness dancing in my head, and with my competitive nature, you'd think i would be frustrated by the fact that pretty much all of my friends can run faster than me. but time and time again, i'm surprised to find that i'm perfectly happy playing the tortoise.

it would be nice if i could do a 5k in 22 minutes and win some races (or at least my age group), but i'm just not that person. and i'm ok with finishing at the back of the pack. i started running to lose weight and improve my fitness, but i've kept running because it became sort of fun. tortuous, sometimes, sure, but overall, i feel better having run than when i don't. and i run a lot of races, not because i ever expect to win, but because it keeps me motivated, and because i think runners are some of the nicest people i know. where else can you go and get cheered for finishing in 327th place?

i am pumped to plan this yuri's night race. now if only the ellington airport manager's secretary would call becca back so we could arrange a meeting...

yesterday when i got up, it was 75 degrees and humid. then it rained, and the wind blew. and this morning it was a brisk 38 degrees outside. now this feels more like november. ahh.

i had one of those weekends that went by too quickly, and left me sitting at home last night in a tired haze bemoaning the fact that i had to go back to work today.

i had a soccer game friday night and was thoroughly amused by this guy named scott, who plays on defense with me. he's got a british accent, but not a really refined one, so i can't tell where he's from. he smoked a cigarette right before taking the field, another one after the game was over, and as if that wasn't enough, he smoked one at halftime. i don't know how he could run after all that smoking (if it were me, i would probably lose a lung within the first five minutes), but he's actually pretty good. very fast. he would be interesting if he didn't smoke like a chimney. ah well.

saturday i joined the legions of friends helping edgar and betsy move to their absolutely freaking gorgeous new house. let me reiterate: their house is incredible. i could move into one of their bedrooms and they might not notice; in fact, now that i think of it, that's not a bad plan. i can't believe they already have a house! it is so cool. it makes me want a house... but anyway, moving day was fun. anytime you get a dozen people together for something that involves lifting heavy things, it's a good time. or something like that.

saturday night we went to the aeros game, and after having to deal with the immense hassle of their ticketing office and their utter incompetance in finding a wheelchair seat for chris, we ended up getting all 6 tickets for free. score! the toyota center is nice and new and all, but they still have a lot of kinks to work out. the place is so obviously designed for the rockets that the poor aeros sort of get the shaft in terms of space, concessions, etc.

yesterday i got up with plans to go bike riding and then to the bike store with debbie (she wants to get a bike), but the thunder and torrential rain (and associated 30-degrees-in-4-hours temperature drop) but a damper on that. but soon enough it was time to head over to sara's for the pre-thanksgiving dinner. since most people will be out of town on thursday, sara and brienne decided to throw a shindig yesterday, with everything you'd expect at a turkey day feast plus more. turkey, sweet potatoes (my favorite!), green bean casserole, bread, pumpkin pie, and of course, mujudhra. you know, like the lebanese eat on lebanese thanksgiving. uh...yeah. ;) anyway, it was all delicious, and by the time i got home around 8:00, it was too late for me to do anything but lay around till bedtime in a post-eating coma. sigh.

and now it's monday once again. we went out to lunch today, which will throw me off for the rest of the week because we usually only go out on fridays. yes, our office life is so regimented. :)

i almost forgot: at his request, i finally got around to posting pictures from daniel and virginia's wedding.

ooh, i am so excited. we are trying to finalize where our 5k race will be held in april, and becca has gotten in touch with the airport manager at ellington. we're going to meet with her sometime soon, and hopefully she will be interested enough in the idea for us to go forward. everyone i've recruited to help plan the race has agreed that running on the taxiway past all the planes and hangars would be awesome.

last night we had a half-inning of softball that will go down in loaded bats history. we eventually lost the game in extra innings (what is it with us and extra innings?), but that didn't cheapen the bottom of the 6th, when we came back from a 6-0 deficit to tie the game (and had to stop only because there's a 6 runs per inning mercy rule). it was beautiful. hit after hit after hit. not to mention that i finally broke out of my hitting slump. the only downside is that apparently i can only have one of two--catching or hitting. i started to hit well again, and lost all ability to catch. sigh. actually, i think my catching is ok, but i just have trouble judging the ball off the bat when i'm all the way out in left center. i can judge side-to-side distance, but i'm always slightly off on the depth. last night i missed a ball i totally should have caught. dammit.

after our game, i stuck around to sub for the 9:00 game for a team that was short a girl. i played catcher for them. now, i've never played catcher before, but i've always thought it would be fun. and it was. a little nerve-wracking at first to get used to a bat being swung close to my head, but fun.

soccer tonight. my shins hurt, but i will make do. as for the weekend... tomorrow i'm helping edgar and betsy move into their new house (!), and sunday i'm going to a pre-thanksgiving get-together. lovely.

and as a side note: so the cat in the hat movie comes out today. yes, not until today. what's that? you thought it came out weeks ago? me too. why? because it's been so heavily advertised and promoted that i'm already sick of it! and it hasn't even opened yet! why do studios do that? why do they recruit everyone from dawn dishwashing liquid to the us postal service to hawk their movie? ugh. i like mike myers, but i'm already sick of the stupid cat.

last night after my run (almost 6 miles total, which went well after running two slow miles to let my legs warm up, thus proving the fact that i run much, much better when it's nice and cool outside than when it's sticky) i watched the o.c. you know, my new tv indulgence. anyway. the quick summary is that there's this 16-year-old kid, ryan, who was from a ratty area of los angeles but got taken in by a rich family from newport beach. last night it was thanksgiving on the show, and ryan got a call from his brother, who's in jail, so he drove back to chino to see him and take care of some shady business.

anyway, my point being that they shot all the chino/seedy l.a. scenes with this over-contrasty, gritty filter on the cameras. i guess they were trying to illustrate the differences between chino and newport, but i think the grittiness of the shots was overdone. it was sort of distracting. every time the shot switched to ryan in chino, i wanted to fiddle with the dials on the tv to try to clear up the picture.

just an observation.

yeah, so as i already alluded to, my run went well last night. the weather was nicer than it has been the past two weeks, about 65 degrees with a light breeze. my lower legs went through their customary aches and pains, but after a very slow (like 12 minute pace) first two miles, they loosened up and i was able to run back at my more normal 10:30 pace. i ended up doing two laps on the trail, with the only real negative being that the battery in my mp3 player died about 20 minutes into the run. suck.

see, jsc has actually a pretty good running trail. it leaves from the rec center and goes through a locked gate onto site. for the first mile and a quarter, it goes through trees and past fields along the fence that separates the space center from the boulevard along the back. it comes out by the back entrance gate and goes all the way down the long road, past some of the industrial-looking building and to the water tower, at which point you turn to head past the child care center and back through a gate in the fence to the gilruth center. it's 2.9 miles total, according to the map. i did two laps, so that's 5.8 miles. woohoo. the best part is that there's always something to watch or someone to see. last night i saw co-ops, astronauts, multiple deer, and a possum.

possums are ugly, ugly creatures.

now this feels more like november. a houston november, anyway. it was about 55 degrees outside this morning, and thankfully not humid for once.

i bought my ticket home for christmas. hooray! i even have a couple projects in mind for the break. see, i always have things that i've been meaning to do but haven't had time for, and christmas vacation is the perfect time for them. this year i'm going to work on the scrapbooks for my past couple jaunts to europe, and hopefully turn some of my growing pile of race t-shirts into a karen-inspired quilt (with much sewing help from mom).

wow. those two projects make me sound like an old woman.

though maybe i am an old woman. it feels like it's been weeks since i came to work and wasn't sore in one part of my body or another. today, my arms, shoulders, and upper back ache. i'm sure it's from climbing on monday, and granted, i hadn't been climbing in probably a month, but geez, you'd think that with as active as i've been lately, the soreness would go away as my body adjusted. but at least the weird leg pain from yesterday has gone away. i took some advil this morning, which is supposed to relieve muscular pain, so hopefully that will help. i'm starting to feel like i'm 90 years old.

because of the whole weird toe tendon pain thing yesterday, i skipped the usual tuesday long run. buzz is out of town, but i had been planning to run for about an hour, to keep fresh because next week we're planning to increase to a 90 minute run. i didn't go. instead, i went home, cooked dinner, and sat around. i'm gonna run tonight instead, though i may go just for a half hour or so instead of a full hour. i dunno. maybe i'm trying to do too much too fast.

when i booked my ticket this morning, i checked out my frequent flier miles. a couple more trips and i'll have 25,000 miles, enough for a ticket within the 48 states (or, as george said, "just get their credit card and charge your rent each month"). but then i saw that you only have to have 35,000 to get a ticket to hawaii. so that may be my new goal. or, if i just keep saving, when it's time for our trip to australia in 2006 or 2007, i may just have the 80,000 miles needed for that ticket!

rambling. i'm feeling restless.

so we went climbing last night for the first time in a few weeks, jason, betsy, buzz and me. i was belaying jason, and he is just disgustingly spritely (that is the word we came up with for him--spritely). it's like he's just jumping up the wall. he makes it look so easy, as if he only weighs 20 pounds or something. while i have less upper body strength, and more weight to carry. sigh. ;) but it was still a pretty good night. i took it a bit easy after finding myself (mainly my legs) surprisingly sore from soccer sunday night. i think it was all the sprinting; really, i did more sprinting than i usually do, and i felt it.

i wonder if anyone out there knows much about tendons and ligaments. based on the way my legs feel, i'm guessing there is one tendon or something that runs from my second toe up the top of my foot and then up the front of my leg. or maybe a series of them that are all connected. in any case, that corridor--second toe to top of foot to front of leg on the outside of my shinbone--is mega-sore. if i flex my foot (either one, because both legs feel the same), i can feel it all the way up to just below my knee. it is very, very weird.

but i climbed the yellow route. with help from the rope, but still. i am slowly, slowly, slowly getting better at that route.

i'm about to buy my plane ticket home for christmas. my boss has been nice enough to let me take a couple extra days off (using credit time) so i'll be able to go home in time for my brother's college graduation, which i'm excited about. all my siblings came to both my graduations (well, david didn't make it to tech, but that's ok), but i haven't been to any of theirs so far because i was always in school or houston or out of the country. i'm excited i get to go to david's. and i'll have plenty of time to relax at home, and even catch a couple people in atlanta on the tail end. at least that is the idea, though it seems that new year's plans are nebulous at best.

we had a huge storm yesterday afternoon and last night that dumped buckets of rain on houston. fortunately the most intense part of the storm was downtown, and not in the southeast part of the city, where i live. we got about 4.5 inches of rain, but closer to downtown saw more than 8 inches in a span of about 6 hours. so while clear lake escaped relatively unscathed, with little to no flooding, other parts of houston do not appear to have been so lucky. i saw a poor little nissan just like mine on the news last night under an overpass with water up to its roof. lesson to anyone considering starting a new city: don't build it in a freaking flat flood plain!

though i do have to wonder why every time there's a storm, some idiot decides to drive their car through the water. every time it floods, you see cars on the news where the driver thought they could make it though the water, but didn't make it. you'd think people would learn...

so the houston rodeo announced its concert lineup for the 2004 rodeo in march, and leading off the whole shebang is none other than john mayer! i am so amused, and i am so there.

i had a nice weekend. one of my three soccer games got rained out after a late afternoon downpour on saturday, and last night's game was frustrating because my women's team still isn't consistent enough. we finally have enough people to field a full 11-person team each week, but it seems like it's always a slightly different group of 11. last night we were missing three regulars, one of which is a mainstay of my little defensive squad, and we definitely missed them. as a result, we had four or five people who were always playing slightly out-of-position. maria is a great right fullback, but not so adept at stopper (where the mainstay, meghan, usually is); veronica is ok as our right midfielder, but she's just not aggressive enough to play center mid. stuff like that. people get used to their one position, and it becomes difficult to switch things up. there was a lot of confusion as to who was supposed to be where. i did the best i could to direct traffic from my position as sweeper, but i wasn't always successful. when there are two players racing downfield and only me to stop them...well, i can't cover them both at the same time. our midfield has got to improve. i did far too much sprinting after the ball last night.

anyway. i also went to the movies for the first time in ages. i can't even remember the last time i went to the movies, but it was at least september (which is a long time for me). friday night we saw "master and commander," the new russell crowe flick, and it was pretty good. very well cast--paul bettany was great as the doctor/naturalist, crowe had the right authority to play the captain, and i loved the kid who played lord blakeney. he was fantastic. then saturday we saw "love actually," which was a little different than what i'd expected, but still very enjoyable. i'll take hugh grant or colin firth home with me any day. ;) the ensemble cast worked well together, i adored the kid who played liam neeson's son ("come on dad, let's go get the shit kicked out of us by love"), and i laughed a lot. my only complaint is that there were a few story lines that weren't exactly tied up. not that i wanted them neatly resolved, but i felt like a couple story lines got dropped at the end, without explanation. oh well. i did love how the movie began and ended at the arrivals gate at the airport; i have similar thoughts every time i pick someone up at the airport.

this morning as i was leaning over to put on my shoes, i slammed my knee into a table (by accident, of course), and it still hurts. stupid me. stupid knee. it was already hurting from me playing too much soccer and doing too much running, but slamming it into immovable objects is certainly not going to help. ugh.

lunch time. we eat lunch too early.

so this animation has been making its way around our office, and i have to say, it's pretty hilarious. it originally went to becca from the "no weapons in space" email list; apparently this is one of the few good things that has gone out on that list. anyway, it's a funny take on nuclear war. i know that sounds contradictory--funny and nuclear war--but just watch it.

the new york times has an article today on traveling to my lovely hometown, charlotte! yay charlotte. though i've never heard of half the places they mention... i guess that's what happens when you haven't lived someplace in 7 years. still, they mentioned one of my favorite stores in charlotte, the paper skyscraper; they carry everything from boxing nuns to test tube vases to little statues of buddha.

anyway. i went running last night, and my legs felt sort of weird. but the good thing about doing these long runs on tuesday is that i am already starting to cope much better with the boredom factor. i used to get bored really quickly on a run, but last night i didn't. in fact, the whole half hour (three miles) passed in a blur or my listening to good music and looking in the windows of other people's houses, and before i knew it, it was time to head home and get my stuff for softball. we lost the game in extra innings, by one run, so that sucked. and last night i not only bobbled a catch and screwed up some baserunning, but i also still can't hit worth crap. i really need to go to the batting cages. sigh. i know i'm probably too hard on myself when it comes to athletic skill, and it's just a coed rec league...but still! i don't want to suck!

this morning, i followed a trail from aaron's baseball blog to the periodic table of bloggers to the real treasure: how to learn swedish in 1000 difficult lessons. i haven't actually read any of the guy's blog yet, but anything with that title has got to be at least decent.

well that's enough linking for one day.

it sounds like my sister has had a rough morning, with some idiot telling her that her activities aren't "focused" enough to make her a strong candidate for the truman scholarship. sounds like it's time for me to go to atlanta and break some knees. well, not really, but that kind of thing totally pisses me off. whoever she talked to obviously has a very narrow-minded view of what a scholarship candidate should be. my sister isn't president of sga, but who the hell cares? she does more community service than anyone i know. she tutors kids, she is committed to making team buzz a success despite having to deal with some uncooperative and unhelpful people, and she's been going to mexico building houses for six years now, even spending two months down there last summer. where does this woman get off telling katie that she's not "focused" enough??

god, i hate that. i hate that you have be involved in the "right" activities at tech to be taken seriously. my first few years of college, i did a lot of random stuff, partly because i was trying to figure out what i really wanted to do, but partly because i was just trying to do what i thought other people would view as the "good" activities. it wasn't until my last couple years, and my year in grad school, that i finally narrowed my extracurriculars down to just the stuff i cared about--playing the flute, working for the paper, and being involved in the aerospace department. the sad truth is that when i got involved in something i didn't truly care about, i was pretty lousy at it. (just ask karen, who was infinitely frustrated by my half-hearted involvement in an organization she ran!) it would be far worse for katie to be sga president just to make her scholarship application look good, when doing the other stuff, the unfairly unappreciated stuff, is what really makes her happy.

rant rant rant.

well. when i came in this morning, i had nothing to say, but look what happened.

my job seems to be one of those "when it rains, it pours" type of things. the past month has been crazy busy. we're still dealing with the fallout from the degrees vs. radians tizzy, and then today i had a class most of the day. the spaceflight meteorology group's weather class. counterintuitively (ooh, big word), they don't predict space weather. but they do predict any and all ground weather that could affect spaceflight. there were some dull parts, and i was tired, but on the whole it was pretty interesting.

yesterday i ran with buzz, and i have to say, it is tough to stay positive about these long runs. our first week was so great, and i felt so good, but then the past two weeks i've felt horrible. i am really hoping that it's just the weather. the first week we ran it was lovely and cool and not humid, but the past two weeks have been sunny and very humid. it's amazing how much worse i run in the heat/humidity. today it's 84 degrees outside, which is only a degree away from a new record. i had to turn my air conditioning on yesterday because it was so humid that i was sweating inside my apartment. it's freaking november! houston sucks.

anyway, after our run i had lunch with nick and then got my car washed. it is all shiny and clean and lovely, so hooray. i went home and did two home improvement projects (these in addition to the two bulbs i planted over the weekend). i finally hung the candle-holder-thingy i got in greece, and also finally got around to filling a 20"x20" picture frame. it has openings for 16 pictures, but with my shutter-happy finger, i actually had trouble narrowing all my pictures down to 16 for the frame. but it turned out great, and now my bedroom has something new on the wall. perfect.

so i'm updating from home. from home? from home. this is one of those days when i love being a civil servant, and today i'm going to use the day off (and you know, honor the veterans) letting buzz torture me on another long run and then just relaxing at home all afternoon.

i need to destress after yesterday anyway. i alluded to a typo in a report we wrote, a simple "degrees per second" where it should have been "radians per second." all of our calculations had it right, it just got typed wrong. i confirmed the typo, confirmed that our calculations were right, and thought that was the end of story.

nope.

because the amateur analyst who found the typo happened to email the head of the space center, the typo worked its way into the management chain. and now all of my division has to check all of its software for this one parameter (the rotation rate of the earth) and make sure it's correct.

sigh. it's not a huge deal, and i would be incredibly surprised if anyone found any errors, but it's annoying to have to do it. i'm glad that this guy found a typo in our report; that's something we needed to know. but he compared it to the mars climate orbiter (which crashed in 1999 due to an english-to-metric conversion error), and just hearing that phrase got way too many people in a tizzy.

it creates more work for me, because it raises all these questions about our software, and the modifications we/i make to it. but at the same time, i can admit that it's about time we started documenting our code. especially if we're going to use it for mission-critical stuff.

anyway. look at that. i have a day off from work and yet i write multiple paragraphs about work. crazy.

i gotta go get dressed to meet buzz for our run.

well, so far today i've had an hour and a half of quiet interrupted by 10 minutes of near-panic. word to the wise: when writing a report that will get released to the entire freaking country, try not to make typos, especially in units. i wasn't the person who actually typed "degrees per second" when it should have been radians per second, but i was one of three people who should have caught it.

fortunately, it was just a typo, and not an actual error in the number.

i had a nice weekend. played soccer friday night, saturday morning, and last night (yes, it may be getting a bit obsessive), and it turned out to be a good weekend for it. though the co-ed team i joined friday night lost (and made me appreciate the defense on my other teams, as the defense on this team is one mass of confusion), both my other teams won! saturday morning my other co-ed team played the co-op team, and won like 7-0. last night my women's team played the galveston brutes (ok, they're not really named the brutes, but they should be because they play really rough) and we beat them 5-1. and i got an assist! granted, they were three players short...but i'll take the win. if nothing else, we needed the ego boost. as drea said, "this must be what other teams feel like when they play us!"

the rest of the weekend, i took it easy. i ran errands, watched a new dvd, and drilled useless holes in my ceiling (long story).

yesterday i had lunch with nick, his high school friend eric, and eric's wife jane. i'd met them before and it was nice to see them again, as they are both really cool. they used to live in houston (they met while students at rice), but recently moved to austin for jane to go to grad school at UT. we went to this place called the hobbit cafe, and sat outside on the patio. it was nice out, and as we sat there, i felt like we weren't in houston anymore. the trees were pretty, and it was quiet, and cool, and just lovely. i have to remember to tell becca about this restaurant because she would love it--all sorts of vegetarian options.

nick also came to watch our soccer game last night, and then we had a wendy's dinner. it was nice to have a spectator at the game, and even nicer to finally get to hang out with nick. he's been here for almost two months, and i think last night may have been the first time we've gotten to hang out on our own. turns out that i sorta miss the big jerk.

i mean, nice guy.

this morning i rode upstairs in the elevator with a woman i've never seen before. she got off on the second floor, but she left some of her smell in the elevator. i know that sounds weird, but i had to mention it because she smelled fantastic. i wanted to stay in the elevator past the third floor (which is my floor, and besides, staying would have been impossible because our building is only three stories tall). it made me want to go buy some nice perfume, and wear it all the time.

last night i ran 4 miles, but before anyone pats me on the back, they should know that it was truly a struggle. i started out at the buzz-recommended (and sarah-approved) 10-minutes-per-mile pace and immediately my legs (specifically, my lower calf and Achilles tendon) started to ache. after a mile, i had to stop and give them a minute-long break. i started up again, but had to stop again after half a mile for another minute break. started again, did another half mile, needed another break. it wasn't until this point, two miles in, that the pain started to subside. i was able to run a solid third mile back to gilruth, where i'd parked my car. total time not including stops: 30:34, so not quite on the goal pace. i was so annoyed with my legs though that when i got home, and they weren't really hurting anymore, i ran another mile (two laps around my apartment complex) to finish with 4 total miles in 40:21. but not 4 continuous miles.

stupid legs.

we had the late 9:00 softball game last night. i was talking to james while i was driving over, and he must have sent me good vibes or something because i had a good night, with my first legitimate hit in ages (over the shortstop's head) and two runs scored. woohoo.

carter posted something today from the meyers-briggs personality tests that i've seen so many times. a couple months ago i took a leadership class here at work where we took the personality type test again. the last time i'd taken it was freshman year of college, when i turned up as ISTJ. but this time, in that leadership class, i came out ESFJ. at first i thought changing by half the categories was weird, but after reading the description, it seems to be a reasonably accurate description of me. and even before the test, i knew i'd changed since i was 18. interesting.

anyway. i don't have much planned for the weekend, other than three soccer games and a possible 5 mile race. it will be sort of weird, because we have the weekend, then work on monday, but then we have tuesday off for veteran's day. if i didn't need all the rest of my annual leave for christmas, i'd take monday off and skip town. go camping or to austin or something. hmm. i'm sure i'll manage. :)

my sims run. and run, and run. they are ever-running.

this morning i spent like an hour (while the sims run, and run, and run) looking at all of rich's pictures from europe. he was just there for two weeks, and went to the french riviera, venice, innsbruck, interlaken, and london. (that is a lot of moving around in just two weeks!) he had some really good pictures from the mountains. ahh.

and the sims run, and run, and run.

after taking a class for three days where i was actually learning interesting things, i am reminded why there are days when i ache for being back in college.

i chose to leave stanford because i didn't feel like i was cut out to be a grad student, and because i thought i needed to get away from school. and that decision has turned out well enough, and i feel privileged to have worked on the things i have in the past 16 months. but in retrospect, that is, if i had it to do again, i don't think i would have left grad school.

i had to make my to-ph.d.-or-not-to-ph.d. decision in december of my first (and only) year of grad school, at the absolute low point of my time there. it was winter, so i was already marginally seasonally depressed; i also was burned out after the first quarter, had just gotten my worst grade ever in a class, and honestly felt i was too stupid for grad school. i remember sitting by a secluded fountain near the quad after taking my final exam in linear algebra, and calling home in tears because i felt so overwhelmed and so incredibly dumb. (as an aside, this seems to be a theme repeated among many of the grad students i know and have known, particularly the females.) and then i had to make a decision on whether to move to houston. so i decided to do it, and i decided to leave school. i decided that a ph.d. wasn't that important to me after all.

by april or may, things had calmed down, and i was starting to enjoy grad school, and my new friends there. and if i'd been able to wait until then, i think i would have decided to stay.

the past three days have reminded me that i like learning. it's not the classes at school that stress me out; it's the hours. i love to learn new things. i just can't stay up until all hours of the night to do them without starting to hate it, or without going a little crazy. that's a really simplified way to characterize college for me, but it's not that far off.

anyway. all that rambling basically to make the point that i do want to go back to school. sooner rather than later.

last night buzz, jess and i ran for 84 minutes; buzz and me at a slower pace than jess, so she kept looping behind and then catching up. must be nice to be a natural runner! anyway, it was a lot harder run than last week, despite the fact that we didn't up the pace. i'm not sure what's to blame for that, other than the facts that i was tired and the weather was warmer and more humid. i think next week we'll going to stay at 85 minutes before increasing the time again.

but i do mind the dark.

leaving work in the dark has got to be one of the more depressing things in life. it happened last night, and that was all i could think. i always get down in the winter, and there's only one thing that does it. it's the darkness. i hate the early darkness.

buzz and i are running tonight for 80 minutes. it will get dark as we run. but since we'll start in the sunset, it will be ok.

last night as i laid in bed waiting for sleep, i had a thousand thoughts running through my head, but today i can only remember the echoes. something about missing college friends, and not keeping in touch. something about being 25, and wondering if i expected to be here at 25. i don't really remember all the thoughts. ah well.

back to my spreadsheet class. the classroom has no internet connection and it's driving pooja and me batty.

so i'm taking a class this week, one of the many that jsc offers as "professional development." this one is called spreadsheet-aided engineering, and at a glance i thought it was going to be horribly boring. but actually it's going to be pretty good. we already learned some cool shortcuts that will make my life easier, and this afternoon we dove into excel's visual basic interface, which is something that i've never taken the time to learn but always thought it would be a good thing to know. so hurrah. i am learning useful things in one of these classes at last. it runs tomorrow and wednesday as well, before i'm back in the office on thursday.

well, actually, i'm in the office now. and not leaving until i get this damn sim working. if only i could figure out the steering model. all i need is for my bank angle to go from 0 to 60 degrees. this should not be difficult. if only i could find the command!

anyway, enough geeking.

i had a nice weekend. debbie, jason, chris and i celebrated halloween in costume at an aeros (minor-league hockey) game, where everyone in the crowd got a free glow-in-the-dark hockey mask. that was cool. i broke out the devil costume from last year. (aside: carter says i am always a devil or some form of evil thing. i say he has no right to insult my costume if he's not even dressing up himself. besides, i like dressing up as evil things. and so what if i'm uncreative with my costumes?!)

anyway. i came home after hockey and was in bed by 11 so i would be rested enough to run in the 5-mile kemah bridge run on saturday morning. i really wanted to do this race because it's the only opportunity each year to run over the bridge (which is the only appreciable hill around here) without paralyzing fear of getting mowed down by 55-mph traffic. i finished in 54:19, which had me totally pumped for the rest of the day because that's under 11 minutes a mile despite the fact that i had to run up the bridge twice. woohoo. i feel like every day i'm in better and better shape; i love it.

saturday afternoon i treated myself to a pedicure and starbucks, and then headed over to becca's for game night. katie, fred, gavin, jen, becca, and i played cranium while irwin headed to a game store we found online to get the game i couldn't find at target or toys r us--settlers of catan. carter, james, and kent will all be happy to know that within a week of playing it for the first time, i bought my own copy. freaks. anyway, we had a grand time, actually following the official rules (as opposed to what we did when carter, jelly and i played in atlanta), and i won one of three games.

yesterday i slept till almost noon (ahh, though i am still tired today, i have no idea what's up with me lately) and then bummed around all afternoon, cleaning, doing laundry, watching the u.s. women's soccer team beat mexico...and then finally heading to my soccer game last night. we lost. again. i played especially badly. frustration.