SHMT Day 1

Last week, my lovely wife innocently said "So do you think you'd be interested in training for the Seattle Half Marathon? Shar's thinking about doing it, and I can have her send you the training schedule she found online if you want..."

Of course, I thought of little else the rest of the day. Running a marathon is one of those things that I've considered doing, but haven't ever committed to the training to actually do. Maybe this is a good first step. It's "only" thirteen miles. I've run nearly half that distance before - I did the 'Beat the Bridge' run back in the spring - and we've got a couple of months to work up to that distance being comfortable.

Turns out "Shar's thinking about doing it" really means "she's committed to doing it," so we're on.

5:30am - still dark outside. I drive to a nearby high school and meet her. We walk to the track. It's dark (the lights don't come on until 6:00am).

Two miles, five to seven one-minute "aerobic intervals" (faster than normal) with recovery, then two more miles.

We run at about the same pace, which is nice. The first two miles went by quickly. The intervals, and we only did five this morning, were noticeably faster at the start, but slower as we repeated (no surprise there!). The last two miles were slower than the first two, but not that much slower. About five and a half miles, all in all. My legs are sore, but I was expecting that.

Tomorrow's a rest day, then we're back for another round.

The sunrise was pretty, and there was ground fog on the football field inside the track. We couldn't have asked for nicer weather; we'll long for this weather in mid-November when it's dark and raining.

This 'n That...

Wally Hilgenberg passed away today. I didn't know him, but always thought it was kinda neat that his parents lived up the street from my grandparents in Iowa City.

Nathan's on a three-day field trip with the entire fifth grade at Islandwood over on Bainbridge Island. I do hope he's having fun and learning a lot about the world around us. (And not getting in too much trouble.) This means that we are a one-kid family this week, and it's a completely different atmosphere around here. It'd be similar if he were here and Sophie were gone, but different. Without the interaction between the kids, it's a whole different ballgame. (It's a good deal quieter, too.)

Summer does appear to be over. It was 45 degrees this morning as I biked to work, and that was a chilly ride!

The Front Porch Project, Part Deux.

Done.

The brush and the roller? In the trashcan. (They were used to start with, and between the non-skid paint and the organic matter that crept in along the edges, well, I wasn't going to get them clean enough to use for any other painting project.)

The sticks and caution tape? Back in the garage.

I'm pleased with the work. Two coats of non-skid paint, from the front door to the sidewalk. I'll be curious to see how long it lasts before I start thinking "It's time for another coat of paint." because once you paint concrete, you get stuck with painting... concrete... forever.

Meetings.

Does anyone really like meetings?

All-day meetings, with a facilitator?

I'm not big on meetings, but then again, most of the people I work with on a day-to-day basis don't, either. (We're a team of individuals, an incredibly flat organizational chart, but it works well for us.)

Impressively, though, we came together for a day-long meeting about where we are now and, more importantly, where we think we're headed in the near (3-5 years) future and how to get there.

We'd had a retreat a number of years ago - just after I started in this position - and it was a disaster. "Better communication, more teamwork" seemed to be the goal of that retreat and it just didn't work. At all.

This one worked much better. Yes, we talked about communication a bit, but more about what we do and how we do it and recognized that we do work together as a team.

A team, that is, of individuals.

(I overstate that a bit; there are subsets that work together as a team more frequently, but we all have our specialities and there's not as much overlap as you might think.)

Of course, having an all-day meeting meant that the other work that needed to be done today - and there was work that did need to be done today - got done after the kids were in bed. That's why it's 11:46pm and I'm still awake and online.

G'night!

The Front Porch Project.

Sigh.

We have concrete front steps (two sets of steps, really) from the front door to the sidewalk, with a eight-foot section of flat(ish) pavement between the sets of steps. I say "flatish" because there's a bit of a slope; flat it is not.

Some previous owner of the house had the bright idea to paint the steps bright red. Some later owner of the house - I think it's the people from whom we bought the house, as the color matches the basement floor and the garage floor - covered up the red with a more tasteful gray.

It looks like hell now, with the gray flaking off and showing the red underneath, so my current house project is to prepare and paint the steps. Gray again; it's not a bad color.

The prep work's a killer, however. Scraping, sanding, recaulking some areas, and this afternoon's adventure, mixing up quick-set cement and patching where the old concrete has disappeared.

They are looking better, even if, to the casual observer, they still look like hell. Everything I do now, though, will make the paint layer look all that much more pleasing.

Conconully, 2008.

We've just returned (last night at 12:30am) from our yearly visit to our friends' cabin in north-central Washington. These are friends we met when our daughter was in preschool; their daughter and ours are the same age and were in the same room(s) at preschool.

Our friendship has grown over the years: the grownups share interests both musical and athletic, and the girls play soccer and take dance lessons together.

This is the third year we've gone to their cabin on a lake. It's a delicious break from the ordinary; no Internet, no TV, no mobile phone. There's a cabin, a landline phone (which doesn't ring often), a boat, a wakeboard (more on that in a second), and a foosball table.

Dear son loves the foosball table, and has progressed to the point that he's beating all but one of our group. (Good luck with that, son, Bill's been playing foosball for many years.)

It wasn't as warm this year as before, making it to the mid-70s and no further. We've had hotter weather, up in the 90s, which makes getting out on the lake so much more pleasant, but we'll take what we can get.

Wakeboarding is an activity in which the grownups have participated from the start of our time at the cabin (excepting last year, when I broke a rib work on the cabin's new deck), and this year, we have introduced two more participants. Our daughter, and our friends' daughter, both made the effort to learn how to ride on the wakeboard this summer! They got a little guidance from their parents on how to "get up" out of the water, and how to position the board when the boat starts moving, but both did very well and had success sooner than their parents did.

I look forward to the days I spend at the cabin. As much as I love and depend on the rhythm of the day to day, the regularity of work and home, it's so much fun to get in the car and drive and pull into the gravel driveway, the faded red paint of the cabin, all of the deer we see driving through town, the big deck with the foosball table, the refrigerator with a cold beer, and the friendship.

Life, With Glasses

It started with a button.

A button that needed to be reattached to shorts. I don't recall whose shorts they were (but they were probably mine).

Threading the needle was the issue: holding the needle and thread (cue the Richard Thompson song here!) close enough to see the hole in the needle made it all fuzzy, and holding them far enough away so they were in focus, well, they were too far away to resolve. Crap.

Fast forward... A few months ago, picking up a prescription at the drugstore. Waiting, waiting, looking at the "reading glasses" near the pharmacy.

What do you know (trying on a pair) - I've got fingerprints! (Crap, again.)

A visit to a highly-recommended optometrist was scheduled. I wasn't nervous, really; I knew there was an issue here and that glasses were the solution. How the issue would be resolved was still up in the air.

She (the optometrist) performed a number of tests, noting that there was nothing out of the ordinary with my eyes, and that there was nothing that needed further scrutiny. After forty-five years, though, they aren't quite as flexible as they used to be. The left eye's in need of a bit more correction than the right, which explains my late-night-reading habit of closing one eye to read. (Ahem.) The most gratifying part of the examination came at the end, when she mocked up what the prescription would do for me: an amazing difference in reading the eyechart with and without the lenses.

I've had them for a couple of weeks, now, using them for reading and for working on the computer (which, given my profession, means I'm wearing them quite a bit every day). They have made a positive difference: type, whether on a computer or the written page, is sharper. Small type, especially, is easier to read.

It's one more thing to remember (the keys, the phone, the wallet, the glasses), but it's just as important as the others.