Training Log Archive: barb

Shanghai Night. (?)
Portland OR.
Walked home after. Nice.

Railroad Earth.
Portland OR.
Lower back pain this week after standing for a while. Walking is better but still an issue.

walking in seattle. love the buses here. they are just regular public transit buses. maybe i love them b/c i used the new google feature where you ask for directions by public transit and it even tells you what time the bus will come. and i never waited more than 5 min. visited with Terry and Eric; made up a recipe with tofu, onion, green curry, ginger, green chili and mango.
Now (12/30) I am on the train to Portland OR for some shows.

short hike with Dave, John, Michael, Bill and Mike. This followed our insiders tour of Theo's chocolate factory complete with a lot of free samples. Yum!!!

(Time is approximate.)
Bog Slog in Seattle WA. Nice weather: 40s with a bunch of wet snow and slush on the ground. Not raining. Both John and Dave beat me. Had trouble going into a reentrant too early; I think that was control 7. It was the one beyond. Saw Eric.
This evening we're dining with friends at Bill & Renee's house. My friend Daria from college is coming - haven't seen her for a while. And various friends of Dave & John and Bill & Renee...
5/21

Left the house with Mom and Dad in their car around 6 am to get a 9:55am flight from O'Hare. Driveway and roads were glass ice, thick. We got about a mile before deciding this wasn't going to work. Up ahead there was a dip in the road, and cars looked like they weren't moving. Lots of brake lights. We pulled off and Dave and I got our stuff out of the back. I put on my Sarvas and Dave put on his Falcons. Mom and Dad made it back home and sent us an email to confirm. Dave and I made it to the train station, another mile beyond. We had just under 3 hours, at that point, to the departure of our plane. Cold, low 20s. Train into Chicago takes just under an hour. Then there is a 3.5 block walk to the big Picasso and another 45-min train to O'Hare. Then subterranean passageways partly covered by long moving walkways. Lines to get tickets, line through security, line for coffee, line in the bathroom, line to board. Made it. After lines of cars, lines of train cars, lines on the escalators. Line-y.

The cleats were key. It was the dark side of dawn when we started from the car. Unwieldy luggage, kind of heavy. Rolled the suitcase wherever possible. All shapes of frozen surface - frozen walked-in foot of slush (rough); ploughed driveway (inch-thick sheer ice). Jogged on textured ice past two women clinging to the fence in the rough frozen stuff, inching along. "How is she doing it?" asked the one in front of the one behind, referring to my running. "Cleats," I said as I went by. "Oh, cleats," she said. They made it to the platform in time to catch the train that we did, maybe 8 minutes later. Light side of dawn by then.

Oh, and the most surreal part was the first half mile of our Park Forest walk along Sauk Trail. Cars by the dozen littered the skating pond road, down into a big dip and back up again, at all angles, a few of them still spinning their wheels with an angry whirr. Like nothing so much as a bunch of deer flies stuck on your hat, a few still on their feet and able to beat their wings, more symphony than noise.

On plane, read book about nun with epilepsy. Would make excellent book club fodder.

C • Cool Story... 3

3/21

With Dave around the forest preserve. Jogged through a herd of 17 deer.
7/21.

Wore the Sarvas for this run through the forest preserve here in Park Forest IL (home for the holidays). It snowed yesterday, and is 33 and raining - has been for hours. So it's fairly nasty out. Slush and ice. Shoes were great - good exercise in uneven moving footing. In the woods I saw no deer, only their tracks. The weather conditions revealed every place any dog had peed in the past few days.

9/21.

Travel day - made it to Park Forest IL. Just got my hair cut by Debbie, who I went to grade school with. She filled me in on the lives of a few of her friends: Patti, Beth... Her husband has just lost his job (of 14 years) - the job losses are mounting amongst my acquaintances.

First day of Boiling Frog II.
Target: do one thing on the list of 21 (which is approximately the number of weeks until the rogaine).
Actual: 4.
As usual, target number increases by one each week.
Current list:

aerobic 30 min 1
aerobic 30 min 2
aerobic 30 min 3
aerobic 30 min 4
run fast
strength or stretch 30 min
strength or stretch another 30 min
accomplish 5 goals set at beginning of day (delegation is OK!)
accomplish 5 more goals
organize/clean/file 30 min or PLoS CB
no AP, news, DailyKos, sudoku or excess gmail @ work (friend outreach weekends)
vitamins & minerals
early to bed (10 pm)
perfect Mom
floss teeth
meditation
no refined sugar
no caffeine
no alcohol
no white wheat flour based stuff
no meat

Jogging around Cambridge in my Sarvas. When I got these, which I think was pre-Icebug, and from Larry, I believe I was a little disappointed b/c they were slightly big in the heel and tight in the toes. Today they felt fine. Perfect to have the metal cleats on the frozen sidewalks. Powerful. I wore these and not Icebugs because, frankly, I do not know, in the clutter of home, where the Icebugs are.

Happy to be getting exercise.

I ran to near MIT for a breakfast meeting, then back to work. And to the T to go to Davis Sq for a lunch meeting. Then ran to H Sq for Xmas shopping and a salon appointment, then on to Central Sq for beers with an old work buddy, then to work, where I am. Soon, home.

Lazy snow day off with Dave. We finished watching all available episodes of Battlestar Galactica and are looking forward with anticipation to the remaining 10 episodes. We also watched a Bond movie and mixed up some xmas cookie dough.

Kids flew out shortly after the snow started, and were delayed by 1:40 but made it safely to Pittsburgh and then by car to Erie. They've been reunited with their 1-year-old adopted siblings Diego and Lucia and are gearing up for their uncle's wedding right after Xmas.

Here are the Scratch programming challenges from the party:
(1) Boxes
(2) Racetrack
Click on the green flag to start the program running.
For #1, click on the boxes.

David's birthday party today. He's turning 14. We had 22 other 8th grade boys over. They brought laptops. We had a couple programming challenges and then played networked BZFlag, thanks to our resident IT guy, Dave, who set up a server. By the way, someone really needs to marry BZFlag and Catching Features. It would do wonders for orienteering.


Programming in Scratch.


One kid took pictures of himself. They used pictures in their programs.




Line of Macs.
One Laptop Per Child.
Something I like about this photo is that 2 of the boys are looking at their neighbor's screen instead of their own.

Part way through the playing of the networked game, I tried it out myself. It was a hoot. Once I started getting the hang of it, I was able to start checking out some of the information in the side bars. Then I had Dave stop the game on the server, and I gathered the boys and asked them to be quiet and listen to my announcement. It is really really hard for 22 8th grade boys to be quiet. So eventually I just started talking in a relative lull. "If your game name has the words f***, s***, n*****, f*****, d*** or d*** in it, please change it. That is not OK. Cool?" Everyone actually stopped talking and looked at me after the second bad word. They were cool with my edict. Then I went back and played some more. Later I joined Isabel where she was hiding out in her room watching a girl movie. I watched it too, and cried at the moving parts. By the time the movie was over, most of the boys were gone, and it was almost calm.

Tough bike ride from a swim meet in the grittier burbs, to Cambridge. Saturday mid-afternoon is a busy traffic time, in all directions, with drivers that do not know the route cold. Speaking of which, it was very cold, below freezing; puddles on the side were solid and frictionless. I didn't have a map or know my way but the sun was out and I was headed west. Still had a bit of a bobble; good thing I was crossing the Mystic and not the Potomac. More bridges.

Time is a guess as I didn't look at my results yet...
Unbelievably tasty orienteering in Great Falls MD. Beautiful open woods but still for me quite challenging contours in places. I made some errors being too lax in the first few controls and decided to quit because I wanted to not have my friends wait too long for me. But then I kept going and completed the course without further hassle.

Then a very nice outing for lunch, beer and champagne (!) at the nearby Hunters Inn. Max has got to be the easiest 4-year-old ever to go out to a restaurant with. He was especially hilarious when he got into imitating his mom or Kissy. Apparently he doesn't do impressions of Nadim - a sign of respect?

Kissy was looking extremely fine in her new gear purchased for the recent rogaine. As is the case with rogaines, the experience seems rewarding in retrospect, and so we started talking about when we'll try it again. Although it remained unsaid, I began to wonder how much we all just wanted to do some more shopping.

I learned that Eddie once spent a summer getting paid to release mice into the woods by day, and do line-Os at night - while hooting. He reproduced the call for us at the restaurant, which made Kissy a little nervous, especially when he prefaced it by saying it was kind of loud. I used to think of him as "Big Eddie" but perhaps a better moniker would be "Hooter."

After that I stopped in at my beloved Symington friends in Glen Echo. Yes, they are related to the political Symingtons. Which I find amusing given that Jeremy is so shy he starts to feel nauseous if you look at him too long.

Then on to the FASEB meeting where we heard from a slightly gleeful (Democratic) Congressman Chris van Hollen, who said that the economic stimulus package(s) will be focused on short-term boosts and offered some advice about advocating for biomedical research. Then the amazing Carrie Wolinetz, public affairs staffer for FASEB, told us about her recent foray into learning about marketing research as we consider ways of educating the public about what NIH does.

So I think Eddie said the Hubble telescope can image 3 arc minutes in - was it 2 minutes? If so then that's a fraction equal to (3/60 x 1/360)^2 of the sky, right? And if that takes 2 minutes then you could do 30 of those in an hour or 30 x 24 in a day or 30 x 24 x 360 in a year. Which I think works out to 0.5% of the sky in a year. And if you got 100-fold faster with the next generation of telescope you might be able to check out 50% of the sky in a year?

To MFA & back - to have lunch with David and hear about BU's arts major.

From other side of town to home and then back later as part of a birthday party dropoff scheme.

I'll be at the Washington DC orienteering event tomorrow and would love to get together with orienteers afterward at the Hunter's Inn for beer & food.

To school to try and get a contact from the gym teacher for the Sargent center people. Vague idea is I'd talk to them about what they already do in terms of orienteering and then see if it might make sense to morph it a little given the programs I'm doing at the school - and the interest I may or may not have in making something happen at the high school. Yeah.

Maybe it's someone I know who does the O piece on this weekend in May for the 8th graders...

Today's albatross: cleared out my queue of papers to assign to Associate Editors for the journal! This was a big albatross for me, so yay!

to school for monthly parents/teachers jr high meeting.

Have been BAD. Eating lots of bad stuff, junk food; caffeine, alcohol. No exercise. Not getting enough done. Feeling kind of unproductive at work. I have so many things I should be getting done, and I am having trouble actually sitting down and doing them.

On the positive side:

We had a nice Thanksgiving holiday with my parents. Watched some really good movies via InstantPlay on NetFlix ("Vitus", "The Illusionist") and saw theater (Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter at the American Repertoire Theater; "Einstein's Dreams" at the new Central Square Theater).

I haven't been eating meat, not even turkey last Thursday.

Tuesday I gave the Tuesday Club girls some theater exercises to do, and they ate them up. They are really into making up little plays - as long as it doesn't get too formal. Next Tuesday we'll go to Lincoln and visit some pet (but hard-working egg-laying) chickens. So there, I am providing some activities, and that's sort of good...

I bought a beginning jazz piano series of books and started teaching the kids. But haven't set up a regular time for them to practice or learn or anything.

Tuesday I took the day off work in order to prepare a presentation which I then gave at the Graham and Parks (school) staff meeting. It was laying out my vision that EVERY kid at the school would orienteer EVERY year. Wouldn't it be cool if by the time they get to junior high, they have learned a set of navigation skills? Wouldn't it be cool if for years they look forward to getting to go on the junior high trip? Wouldn't it be neat if the entire school went to the woods together in September? Will I still be into this when my kids have graduated from the school in 3 years? Anyway, I was basically asking whether the teachers who have not planned orienteering activities with me this year would like to; 8 teachers signed up as "maybe" or "yes" so I have some more business to take care of! More albatrosses!

You can check out the presentation here! It's my first time trying to publish a file using box.net so I will be curious whether it works.

After I spoke, the special ed teacher who is on the junior high team said a few words. She praised my organization skills (OK, now if I could just apply those to my Whole Life!!), talked about how every single student, no matter how challenged they are in regular school, benefits from and enjoys the orienteering activities, and said the other teachers should not miss this opportunity to sign up.

C • teachers 2

C • Not getting enough done... 2

"Get started using your log!"

Did you miss me?

C • Yes! 11