Where’s the peanut butter?!

I first heard about this guy in India who married a dog to atone for having stoned two dogs to death 15 years ago (!) from Howard.  My reactions were complex and instantaneous.

“How did Selvi feel about this?  She doesn’t look happy in the picture.”
“Did he at least get a second opinion from another astrologer before popping the question?”
“They abolished the caste system just in time…”
“What has Scott Adams said about this?”

I definitely recommend reading the Scott Adams response. It’s as funny as his response a year ago after a runner failed a sex test.

Tonight I felt like I was got back on the saddle at the track. At the time trial last week I did not take 27 seconds off my previous time - for the first time I added time to my last run. I really wasn’t feeling that enthusiastic about it. Not that you’d know that from how I started out as I paced with Rolando* for the first couple laps running something better than 1:20’s (which I knew was totally a mistake). I felt like bailing out after the first mile but remembered the day at Denali when I pledged to myself that I would never quit when some goal was looming, so I struggled through the next four laps and eventually finished. It was a totally respectable finish but that’s the good and bad thing about running — at the end of the run your friends or running partners can tell you whether they think you did a good job or not but you are the final judge of whatever you accomplished.

Tonight we had the familiar workout we’d done the two weeks before the time trial: 4×200’s with 200 recovery, followed by three 1 mile repeats with 90 second recovery, and then the 200’s again. Earlier in the day I was looking forward to the track but the spirit of that excitement was completely broken by the freezing scooter ride from work to the store before heading to the track. The nice people at Jock n Jill let me stash my stuff behind the race registration counter again, though, and there was some hot massage going on in the womens’ apparel section between Manos and Twinkles so things were definitely looking up!

The first time I did the workout, I did the 200’s at 36-38 seconds and the mile repeats at 6:20 and have whittled those times down a little, but tonight it was whittled down and felt good at the end. I kept all the 200’s between 34-35 even with an enormous puddle on the track in the first turn to avoid.

The mile repeats felt kind of hard at a 6:15-6:20 but totally manageable (and after talking with Tom** I think I should have run these faster). I did these with Kinicki, who was in the club a while back but has been travelling so hasn’t been there all summer. He seems totally cool and it’s good to have more people pushing it at that level but this is my first experience seeing someone I didn’t know at all just start showing up and go out and be an awesome runner. I got my first hint at how it could start to feel pretty competitive.  Some day.  Good thing I’m waaaay above that now!

We did the last batch of 200’s the “fun way,” taking turns leading.  I took the first one and caught some static from Lemmy loudly announcing I was slow. Yeah, well, everybody knows he’s a jerk.  He led one and I think Grayson and Rolando had the other two but I tried to drop back to get a clearer track and honestly can’t remember who had all the leads this week.

But the exciting thing was I haven’t really had a hard track workout since before Portland that I really enjoyed. At the start of the night the coach talked about the different workouts people would be doing and I got nostalgic and said that I, too, wanted to do a tempo run. I was laughed at.  Not by the coach but by Lemmy - did I mention what a jerk he can be??? - who told me that no, I never get to go back and run tempo runs again. So I did the track work, and it felt great and I was really glad to enjoy it like that again.

The ride home, though, was another story…

* I’ll be using made up names for people in the club now. If there is anyone in the club with any of these names, that’s news to me and that’s not who I’m talking about here.

** Until Tom ponies up and decides to pay to run with my club, he gets referred to by his real name.

It went like this:

• I announce: “Speak Slow” by Tegan and Sara is the best pop song of eleven eleven, two thousand and seven.
• Erin Dean says: “Killer Queen is way better - that’s what I’m learning on Guitar Hero”
• me: “Nuts to that - either of Tegan or Sara could have totally out arm-wrestled Freddie Mercury. Is ‘Speak Slow’ even in Guitar Hero?”
• Erin: “I have no idea but if it is, we duel.”
• I: go to Erin’s profile page, find some fruit ripe for the picking in the form of a movie quiz she scored 74% on, I score a crushing 93%

And just like that, I like Facebook. I’m so fickle with my internet fads but unlike all the other busted social networking sites, facebook is actually fun.

Today’s route.

…it’s windy…it’s cold…they tipped all the chairs over - I guess no one wants to watch over the park on a day like this…it’s windy and cold…good day for the north run - wind at my back…raining, too - I drew an unlucky hand…kind of a surprising number of bikers out this morning…Unlimited Hydroplane…maps said this keeps going up the hill - guess I take these stairs?…this road is just almost big enough for me and these cars - they win…jeez queen anne is a lot more like a volcano than a hill with these dips at the top…wow - incredible view from 8th!…could my clothes possibly hold any more water?…”Property guarded by Pierce County Security”? I guess a lot of crooks aren’t that smart but this wouldn’t really deter me…rain plus ipod equals the end of “Give Up” is the end of my music today…too bright for the opera lights to be on…tourists filming nothing at seattle center - “Look at this drenched American!!”…finally done…shoot - not even 60 minutes - I need to go further next time or I’m falling short…

Say you want to run IE6 in Windows Vista.  If you think “that sounds like it should be easy but I bet it’s not” then you’re right.

This dude has packaged up various versions of IE into a single installer that lets you get multiple versions of IE on the same machine.  However, it doesn’t work with Vista.  There’s a link to a post from Pete LePage from the IE team suggesting the way to do this with Virtual PC (Microsoft’s virtualization product that competes with VMWare).  That seems easy enough, but boy is virtualization not convenient.  I have a half hour to go on my 600MB download of the VPC image with IE6.

Time to go heat up some more coffee…

I just got my assignment from my coach and I’m going to help pace one of the legs for the 3 hour finishers at the Seattle marathon after Thanksgiving. I’m super excited to get to pace and VERY excited to get to be a part of that pace group. It’s not too far from what (on paper) I should have been able to run my marathon at and I’m going to be out with a bunch of total bad-ass runners. I guess I have kind of a weird sense of “fun” but I’m really looking forward to this. Woot!!

Update: Good news, bad news, and awesome news.  The bad news is I’m pacing the half for 6:52’s, not the full, which means I’ll be in much less bad-ass company than I’d thought.  The good news is this should be a great group for me to run with (not way out of my league) and if I run the whole half with them it will be a good race for me.  The even better news is we’re getting a whole new wardrobe for doing this!  Hat, vest, and shoes - all (well, maybe except for the hat) stuff that I really need.  More woot!

This is super excitng:

1. No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it.
2. Never look at the wives of friends.
3. Never be seen with cops.
4. Don’t go to pubs and clubs.
5. Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty - even if your wife’s about to give birth.
6. Appointments must absolutely be respected.
7. Wives must be treated with respect.
8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.
9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.
10. People who can’t be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values.

I’d intended to go see Control tonight but now I’m tempted to get out my Godfather DVDs instead because I’m pretty sure there’s a scene in 2 around the time of the trial where Michael does not treat Kay with respect.

Now I wish the flunkies at TSG would get the document up!

Tonight’s the 2 mile time trial with my running club.  I haven’t done one in what feels like forever (the October trial was right after Portland so like a bunch of people in the club I skipped it).  I feel like I have my work cut out for me.  So far I’ve run three trials, cutting 27 seconds off each time from trial to trial and I ran the last in under 12 minutes and if I account for the off month and calculate needing to improve at a constant rate, I’d need to run tonight in 10:45.

No problem.

OK - so that’s absurd. I’ll be happy if I can take just two seconds off my time

I have no idea what kind of store HEMA is but I gather they’re dutch (.nl) and the have brilliant webdesigners.  Check out their homepage:

http://producten.hema.nl/

It combines a fairly dull home products interface with the Rube Goldberg interaction and some flash to make an awesome introduction.  Flash introductions are almost always just really annoying - it’s a rare treat to find a website where this introduction is done so well that it is the reason to go to the site.

This is awesome.