Daily: April 2007 Archives

I just spilled my coffee all over my keyboard and desk. The scent of Almond Joy Decaf is overwhelming. I spent 4.5 years down the hall without ever spilling anything on my desk. Now I've spilled coke and coffee on my new desk within a month of each other. Hmm.

The New York Times had an article today about the dwindling numbers of private pilots, especially young pilots. (There's always been a lack of women pilots.) I've been surrounded by pilot talk lately, with both Jose and Jen taking lessons, and many people have asked when I'm going to start. The honest answer is that I don't know. Maybe some day. Maybe never. I have passing interest in learning to fly, but at this point I'm not interested enough to invest the time and money. Maybe the article is right, maybe general aviation hasn't been "exciting" or "new" enough for me. But I like flying, and I love that Jose is flying because it makes him so, so happy. I would never think of being a wife or girlfriend like those mentioned in the article -- someone who would tell him not to fly because it's too expensive, or because I need him at home. Why would I tell him to stop doing something that he loves?

Sadly, though, I think that's why a lot of people do stop flying. In my division alone here at work, there are at least 12-15 people with pilot licenses. That in itself isn't a surprise, since we're all aviation and space buffs on some level. But of all those people (all men, except for Becca and Jen), there are only 3 or 4 who actively fly today. Most of them used to fly, but stopped when they got married, or had kids, citing the risk.

It's weird. I know flying is a risk, and that one day Jose might go flying and something might happen. But what in life isn't a little risky? He probably has a better chance of dying in his car than he does in that plane.

Anyway.

Despite the weather clearing up beautifully, I still rode on the bike trainer yesterday. It was just one of those days. I got home, and didn't want to leave. So I compromised. It has been too long since I rode my bike, as I found out by the discomfort I felt in certain areas. Anyway, I rode for an hour and watched two episodes of Scrubs while doing it.

As I rode, cramped into the only available space in my living room, I looked around my apartment and thought about how nice it could be to live in my own house. I'm just so indecisive. I want a house. But I'm scared, and somehow the timing never seems right.

Bits and pieces for today...

I ordered two small posters of my photo alphabet from zazzle.com. We'll see how they look. I ordered some note cards from them as Christmas presents and they turned out very well, so hopefully the posters will turn out similarly.

It's one of those gray days that makes you want to do nothing but curl up in bed with a book and maybe a cup of something hot. Seriously. It's just drab outside. Hasn't even rained that hard. Just dull, flat gray.

Had dinner at La Madeleine last night. Man, I do love their tomato basil soup. I slurp it up happily and just don't think about how many calories are in it. It's so good. Along with that, I had their spinach salad which is also very good. We went late, and they must have been trying to finish off their supply for the day, because I got a huge mound of spinach. Seriously, I think I got at least a bag's worth. Lots and lots o' spinach.

Anybody know how to replicate this vintage photo effect in Photoshop? I love it.

I haven't run since the Charlotte Half Marathon. I haven't been on the bike or in the pool since the Half Ironman. It's official: I've fallen off the wagon. This is a familiar place to be, as it's happened after every big event. Fortunately I have people waiting to pick me up. I just have to make myself available. Yuri's Night is over. Class is over for the semester and won't pick up again until August. I have no more excuses.

The Combat Triathlon is coming up on May 26. I may also do Silverlake on May 20. Time to get ready for these shorter races, and quit languishing in the aftermath of the Half Ironman.

The week's plan:
Tonight - trainer ride (since it's raining)
Tomorrow - pool
Friday - off
Saturday - bike/run brick with Buzz and company
Sunday - "long" run of 5-6 miles

In the coming weeks I will likely make appearances at two local 5Ks -- the Village Fair 5K on May 5 and the Summer Kickoff 5K on May 12, both down here in League City. Hope to see you there!

Becca brought me lunch from Tokyo Bowl, since I was stuck in the never-ending and very boring sim. (And I was so excited to have a sim too. Pity.) Tokyo Bowl is by far the best sushi place in Clear Lake. By far. I'm fairly indifferent to sushi, but I like Tokyo Bowl. Every time we go to a different sushi place, I'm disappointed. I think I'll stop going anywhere but there.

Just in case you cared.

Two of my officemates are gone this week on "the trail," a huge golf trip they take each year. From what I can tell, the year is divided into three parts:

- six months prior to The Trail, which are spent talking about the upcoming trip
- one week, which is spent actually on The Trail
- six months after The Trail, which are spent reliving the trip

I'll just enjoy this week in the office without golf talk. It's actually sort of quiet, since we don't Dave and Ted around to tease.

I finished up my grad project for typography class. It was actually a fun assignment -- found typography. "Carry a camera with you throughout the semester. Look for the shapes of letters in the world. Notice how a chair may look like an H, a cloud may look like a T, or the dial of a radio may look like an O. Throughout the semester, take one unique and innovative photograph for each letter of the alphabet. As the idea is to look for shapes in unusual places, your found letter shapes may not be made out of text. For instance, the Q from a Quick Trip sign will not count. All images must be found and may not be staged."

Here's my poster (click for a PDF):

The HARRA email list manager retired from the position a month ago, so I set the club up with an option via our web hosting. Every 10 days or so, I send out an email update. This process has worked well for the past 4 emails. Last night I sent out the April 20 email and this morning I awoke to find that it came through the system as a long string of Chinese characters. Unreadable. So now I'm dealing with the web host trying to get them to figure out the problem while also resetting my email count, because I'm only allowed to send so many emails per month. And last night I sent an email that got turned into gibberish to 1,500 people. 1,500 emails of junk. UGH.

An assortment of responses:
"Sorry, my Chinese is not up to snuff."
"Your announcement is not coming through on my computer, just a lot of jubberish stuff."
"You're kidding, right?"
"Yikes! It looks like someone has hijacked the HARRA list!"
"No message. Everything garbled."

And my favorite:
"Is this some kind of joke?"

Yes, yes it is, because I enjoy sending junk to 1,500 people and answering the ensuing dozens of confused inquiries.

I'm so glad we're going to a new website and membership system soon.

In the meantime, the email has been posted on the HARRA website.

I've been thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings, but haven't been able to figure out what to say. It's horrible. Almost unbelievable. And the media treatment is even worse, turning a tragic event into a circus and a chorus of trying to blame someone, anyone. It's absurd to suggest that VT should have shut down the campus (equivalent in size to a small town) after the first shooting, when reasonable belief pointed to a domestic dispute. And is it really necessary to publish the shooter's hyper-violent writings and broadcast his "manifesto" to the world? And why must the news keep harping on the fact that this was a new school shooting "record" -- are they trying to encourage someone else to go out and shoot even more? It makes me so angry.

But mostly it just makes me ache. Carter put into words what I've been thinking pretty well. I went to a tech school. Most of my friends went to a tech school. Georgia Tech, MIT, and plenty of other schools with large engineering departments... We're geeks, we're nerds, and yes, we're weird -- even the English majors, like this guy. The number of students at Georgia Tech that could have been described as "strange" or "a loner" or "sullen" or even "emotionally unstable" was not small. There were plenty of strange kids. People who never left their dorm rooms. People who always seemed angry. Could they have been pushed over the edge? I don't know.

It seems easy to look back now and see the warning signs. But there's still a huge difference between writing angry, violent literature and deciding to kill 32 people. There's still a huge difference even between needing psychiatric care and being so messed up that you think going on a shooting rampage is a solution to your problems. I don't know how anyone is supposed to be able to predict something like this. And if you can't predict it, how can you prevent it?

I just don't know.

Rain last night and sun today. It's funny how the world keeps turning and things keep happening no matter what the weather. There's a lot going on, but not much that's blogable.

The Yuri's Night race is this weekend. We've had a run on registration this week and I think we're going to top 100 participants, which would beat last year. If we keep growing, we may beat the year before that. Race registrations are such a strange thing; it's hard to predict how many people you're going to get. I had to order the t-shirts last week when there were only 40 registrants. I ordered 115 shirts, enough to cover almost three times that many people. And yet here I sit with the very real possibility that we might run out of shirts, and that we certainly won't have enough for the volunteers on Saturday. That is upsetting, but what can I do? I'm doing what I can: I'll be placing a second t-shirt order on Monday to cover anyone who doesn't get a shirt on Saturday. Better late than never.

It's been a weird week ever since I got off the plane on Monday morning. And it's only Wednesday.

And just like that, I'm back in Houston. I drove through the rain on Friday, then flew ahead of it. I saw the rain again in Charlotte, then flew behind it. Takeoff this morning was among the bumpiest ever -- up, down, side to side. Here in Houston the temperature is lovely but the sky is a little overcast. Up in Boston where some people I know were running some dinky little marathon, conditions were ten times awful. You just can't escape the weather no matter what you do.

I had a lovely time in Charlotte as expected. It is always nice to go home. My parents mentioned a conversation that they had with my dad's family last week, a "what if they moved to the farm" question. "The farm" is the dairy farm in Pennsylvania that my dad grew up on and that his two brothers, my uncles, own and manage now.

I stared at them. Moving to the farm is probably the one and only place they could move that wouldn't spark a riot from us kids. See, my parents have lived in Charlotte for more than 30 years, and in the same house for almost as long. Despite the monster mansions popping up all over the neighborhood (which has become popular and expensive; people buy the old houses for $300-$500K just to tear them down and build something entirely new and monsterous and completely too big for the lot), we love that house. I know my parents could sell it for 10 times what they paid for it, but still...

I don't think they were serious though. At least not in the next few years. There probably aren't many people that spend their entire childhood in the same house anymore. But I did.

I don't get to see Jose until late tonight because he has a sim. Boo.

Races are funny things. This is the fourth year that I've directed the Yuri's Night race. Each year with about two weeks until the race -- right around the time that I have to order t-shirts and spend the biggest chunk of change associated with the race -- I freak out because we never have more than a handful people registered. But in the last four days we've almost doubled our registrations and I'm not stressing out as much anymore.

I don't know if people just register late, or if I somehow get people to register as a result of my freakout. Either way, I guess it works.

In my mind I'm gone to Carolina...

I'm running a half marathon in Charlotte tomorrow morning with Katie, Joel, David, and Jennifer. Carter heard I was going to be in Charlotte and decided he wanted to come up for the weekend as well, though he's not running. It should be a lot of fun, even though they everyone will probably outrun me easily. (Katie said she was aiming for 2:15. Well, 2:15 is my PR!) I run the most, and I'm still the slowest. Somehow that doesn't seem fair.

I played softball last night and went 0-for-3 with a walk. I really suck at softball, enough that I'm not really enjoying it very much anymore. I thought about not playing this season, but I like the team, and if I didn't play softball I'd never see Edgar or Sean or Amy or Lenny or Katie or those guys. I suppose the solution is to get better. Go to the batting cages regularly. Or something.

It's a dreary day and I'm having mixed feelings about everything. I'm looking forward to being in Charlotte in the spring, though it looks like the weather may be crappy. But it's harder to go out of town than it used to be. I don't like it when J can't come with me.

I am feeling better today about the Yuri's Night run. We got some more sign-ups overnight (including some from friends -- thanks guys) and though our numbers are still low, I think we'll get enough to break even and maybe even make a few hundred bucks for our charities. I'm less stressed in the morning light.

There's a part of me that wants this fun run to become a big event that draws hundreds of people. Some part of me feels like I'm failing if I can't make the numbers grow every year. But then I realize that it's not necessary for us to draw a huge crowd. Heck, I'm not sure that the park could even support more than a few hundred. I'd like to see closer to 200 participants, instead of the 100 we usually get, but it's probably unrealistic of me to think that we can get that many when I'm doing the bulk of the work myself (partly my own fault) and when we're competing with an already very busy race season in Houston.

So the race will be small, but it will happen. In the next few days, t-shirts will be ordered and age group awards will be figured out (suggestions?).

Life continues to be far too busy. I need to weed some things out, and cut back, but I remain unable to figure out how to actually do that. Class tonight, with a run afterwards, hopefully with the BAFT folks if we get out of class early (as we usually do). I don't remember if I wrote about this already, but class has been particularly frustrating lately. This is the first time the prof has taught typography, and I don't think he was prepared for a full semester. The first half of class went well, with plenty of interesting and useful material to fill up the time, but the last few weeks have really suffered. He seems to have run out of lectures, and instead of cancelling class, he just rambles for an hour or two. The students seem to have noticed, because attendance has taken a nose dive. Oh well -- I'll have some words for the course critique at the end of the semester.

I'm planning to do the LP Run tomorrow night. Can you believe it'll be my first HARRA spring series appearance of this year? I know, it's downright embarassing. Hoping I can do somewhere around 10:00 pace, but that'll depend on how humid it is. We'll see.

Easter was fun, despite having to drive through the gloom to spend less than 24 hours at the lake house. I spent another holiday with Jose and his extended family and it was lots of fun. And they remembered me. Score!

One of Jose's aunts has a small house at Lake Corpus Christi, so that was the scene for the celebration. Because it's about an hour from Corpus itself, we just drove straight to the lake on Saturday night to save the extra driving time. If Thursday and Friday's weather had held, it would have been really beautiful up there. As it was, we just made do with the clouds, drizzle, and 40 degree temperatures.

We ate yummy food, we played basketball, we checked out a grass strip near the house (maybe Jose can fly there once he gets his license), we went out on the lake in a little boat to see if we could catch some catfish (nope), and we scared the geese and the geese scared us. Those were some seriously aggressive geese.

More importantly, we had two rounds of cascarones and I smashed many eggs on many heads. Jose's mom made me my own box of them so I had a secret stash. The funniest person was Jose's little 4-year-old cousin Megan, who would point at the ground and say "your shoes are untied" to get you to bend down to where she could reach your head. As luck would have it, my shoes came "untied" at least a half dozen times. Go figure.

The only downer was that I seem to be allergic to something -- the house, the great outdoors, who knows -- and spent most of yesterday sniffling and sneezing. It seems to have mostly cleared up today, with some lingering eye itchiness.

Now it's back to work, which is always a struggle after such a hectic weekend. I'm heading to Charlotte this weekend though, so that's something to look forward to.

So I should mention that Jose has started a blog. He doesn't plan to blog about his personal life, but does plan to write some music reviews and maybe a bit about his flying lessons. He said it was ok for me to post about it, so there you go.

Busy weekend on tap. It's supposed to give us a last gasp of winter with rain and highs in the 50s, but life goes on. There's a baby shower for Jen tomorrow, and then another 24-hour trip to Corpus for Easter. I'm looking forward to smashing an egg on Jose's head. Fun times.

It's been busy since I finished my race report, so that's why you got to look at it for an extra special long time. That, and the fact that I'm still revelling in actually finishing the race.

I've done exactly one workout since the race, a "hill" run with BAFT on Tuesday afternoon. I say "hills" because it was along the Middlebrook greenbelt (Joe, I think I saw your wife out running but I wasn't sure) and there are some "hills" back there. Apparently our hill workouts will soon be moving to the Kemah Bridge, at which point I'll no longer need to use quote marks. Anyway, we ran for 40 minutes, during which I covered 3.5 miles. Not too shabby for a mere 48 hours post-Half Ironman! And it was freaking HUMID. I am not ready for summer.

But the weather today, after yesterday's rain, is absolutely beautiful. Looks like it will stay that way through the weekend as well, meaning great temps for the Resurrection Run on Saturday! My plan to go for a 5K may be put on hold though. Jose expressed interest in running it, and if he does, I'll run with him.