Occassional ramblings from daily life

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25 mile ride, completely different
I'd swear it was actually hotter today than on Saturday when I rode in the morning, but after the full 25 miles today, I was not nearly as sweaty as I was after 5 miles on Saturday. Maybe I was sick or I seriously overdid it trying to climb the Kemah Bridge, sad as that prospect may be? I don't know what to think, but it was like night and day between how I felt riding today and Saturday.

On the tingling hand front, I did make an effort to keep my arm off the handle bars every 1.5 - 2 miles and make sure blood was flowing. There was just a bit of tingle in my right ring finger by the end today, so better than Saturday, but still a little troubling.

Current Mood: busy

how hot is it?
Way too hot. I drank roughly 60 fluid oz on the bike ride today and still managed to lose 4lbs of weight. I meant to do 50 miles today, but I think I overdid it climbing the Kemah bridge cause after that the legs just didn't feel right. So instead I road 36.2 miles (58.25km) at 16.7mph (26.8 kph). I'm glad I decided to turn around at the 22 mile mark when my legs started feeling leaden. I took a nice break at a convenience store in Dickinson and then headed back home. By the end, it was very hard to keep going.

Also, my right hand was feeling not right, kinda tingly like it had fallen asleep. So I must be doing something wrong and cutting off the blood flow, definitely not a good thing.

You'd think I'd be happy that my weight is below 160lbs(72.5 kg) at the moment, but actually I'm finding that drop a little scary today.

Now time to drink lots of fluids and eat something. At least my blood sugar seems to be on an even keel at the moment.

Current Mood: tired

half bonkers
I've decided to go crazy and start training for a half-Ironman. I refuse to call it an Ironman 70.3 as I think it is now being officially called. No idea when I will actually do it, but starting training is the first step.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Hart Rouge

help me raise money for diabetes ride
It's that time of year again. I'm feeling tired but good after 31 miles of biking. Prep for the diabetes ride is coming along. Riding the first 13 miles into a strong headwind was not much fun, though.

http://tinyurl.com/martyride

If you don't want to donate online, let me know. I can turn in other donations as well.

strange printing behavior
So, I just received a copy of Wildlife Adventure and I was trying to print the quick reference from Boardgamegeek. Firefox downloads the PDF, and it opens in the Preview app on my Mac. I tell it to print. What comes out, though, is the web page rather than the PDF. Ok, I must have forgotten to switch applications. Try again. Same result. Slight variation for the 3rd try, but same result. I decide to quit Firefox and all of a sudden out comes 3 copies of the PDF. How did Firefox manage to intercept my printing when the Mac says I'm in the other application? Strange indeed.

haiku homage
Salt Lick BBQ
Blackberry cobbler good too
Check your blood sugar!

General updatery
I've not been posting much lately. Life has been up and down a lot lately, it seems.

A good friend had his daughter be born prematurely and the baby did not survive. I went to see them yesterday for a memorial day at their house. It was good to see them but definitely not the best of circumstances to see people I don't get to see very often.

I spent a little more than a week at my favorite game convention and had a great time seeing all my friends and playing lots of games. Also, lots of yummy ice cream. The best this year was the Lime/Cardamom flavor at Jeni's, I think. Of course, it was all good. I was a bit disappointed that Graeter's did not have the low glycemic index sweetened ice cream while I was there (they have not discontinued it, but they only get it in batches, evidently). I also had some smoked lamb at Pig Iron BBQ that was quite darn good. And even got to make two trips to Just Pies for some more yumminess. It was great to see E & J, N & S, J & J, and too many other good friends to try and name. On the game front, I played more older games this year rather than new ones, but I did end up liking Bananagrams and Via Romana from the new crop.

My Dad just spent several days in the hospital to try and treat his arrhythmia. This was planned and when they did the cardioversion on him, his heart went back into rhythm. Hopefully it will stay that way. He was more depressed than I think I've ever seen him when I was home visiting. I'm very glad that I got to spend time with him and family and that my job is such that I could do that relatively easily.

Work goes pretty well although it is interesting to see the changes happening as the company has been growing. Sometimes I wish we were back to being a much smaller company, but I can see how the company has to adapt as we've been growing.

My legs have been bothering me a bit so I've not been as good about exercise as I probably should be. My left shin has been bothering me up near my knee for several days now. I'm not sure what is going on with that. My right foot has been bothering me on the outside of the arch. I think I might need to go to the doctor to see what is up with that; it might not be serious, but the diabetes can complicates healing down in the foot.

We're settling into our house, but there is major work on the horizon once J finishes up with his comp exams for school this summer. I can't wait to get the work done, but I'm sure the house will end up being a total mess while it is being done, so I'm dreading it too.

bad beat
I'm home visiting family in Saint Louis and I managed to get down to the Lumiere casino and played a little poker. Wow, their bad beat jackpot is over $300,000! To win is very tough, though. You have to get 4-of-a-kind or a straight flush and have your hand be beaten by a better one AND both of the cards that you are holding have to be used in your hand (so for four of a kind, you have to be holding a pair).

I managed to get 4-of-a-kind on two hands while there in one night, but unfortunately I did not win the bad beat. Also nobody else even had a good hand when it happened either time, so nobody would really call any bets I made.

Austin half marathon
So, this was over a month ago, but I did run the Austin half marathon. I'm really pleased to have been able to get back to this point as I had not run that far in any fashion since hurting my knee while trying to train for the Austin marathon several years ago. I don't think I will ever feel the need to try and run a marathon again, but half marathons are much more manageable.

The course for this run could not have been more different in Austin than my previous run of the marathon course (the one I did not finish). The previous course was almost entirely downhill, starting way up north and proceeding downhill until you hit downtown and Town Lake. This run started at the lake and ended there, heading almost immediately up hill down South Congress. But the worst of the hills was later over in the Tarrytown and Enfield area.

I started out too quickly as I'm wont to do. My pace was under 8 minutes per mile for almost the first half. Unfortunately, that tired me out and the later hills really got to me. So I ended up walking a couple of times. Still I finished in well under my 2 hour target time at 1:48:30 so I'm very pleased with it. My knee did bother me for a while after the run and I took a little time off from running as a result.

Around mile 6 or so coming onto 1st street from crossing the lake, there was a big crowd cheering folks on. I had one of those moments. Their cheering really lent me some extra and got me remotivated for the race. I don't think I'd really ever felt that before despite hearing about it often enough.

Now I need to start focusing a bit on bicycling for the end of May Tour de Cure ride.

Running
Maybe not like the wind, but I managed to run my 6.5 miles today at a 7:59 pace. That's the first in some time I've managed under 8 minutes per mile when running solo. So I've signed up to run the half marathon in Austin although I actually registered for the full marathon since the half's registration was full.

Current Mood: accomplished

procrastination bites again
I finally decided to run the half marathon for the Austin Marathon. Of course, now registration is full. I will probably just sign up for the full course and then run the half marathon anyway. I know I'm not ready for the marathon.

Up to Austin for the rest of the week tomorrow. Hopefully the predications of ice on the roads will turn out false for Wednesday.

Current Mood: tired

closure
John and I have closed on a new to us house. It's about the same vintage as we are, maybe 3-4 years younger on the east side of NASA. I'm sure I'll be happy about it eventually but this week I happen to be sick and behind in packing and just generally panicky about the situation. I'm trying not to freak out about it too much.

I'll put up some photos some time soon, I hope. Now back to trying to pack.

Current Mood: aggravated

cool find
I'm under the weather and traveling this week to boot and ended up "home" from work part of yesterday and today. I felt just well enough to go to Half Price Books, though and browsed through their rare books section as I'm wont to do. Several cool things this time, more so than usual.

First was a copy of The Behring Collection. I wished John was with me as I think he'd like looking through this one.

Next was an interesting book from the NY 1939 World's Fair, The Time Capsule. The full name is quite impressively long. I didn't know that they had buried a time capsule at that World's Fair. The 1939 Fair has a reputation for being an amazing spectacle. It would have been cool to have been able to attend.

Last were these two Buddhist hand-painted manuscripts which looked quite fragile even in the poor lighting of the case.

Oh and they had a very nice slipcased version of Tea with the Black Dragon, but if I decide I want a copy, it looks like I can buy one online significantly cheaper.

Current Mood: sick

Christmas day in the kitchen
It was a very low key Christmas this year, spending it here in Houston this year. I had to work on Wednesday and will have to work on Friday again, so not a huge amount of downtime. I've been very focused on food lately in my life and Christmas was no exception this year. John had the interesting idea of making figgy pudding for the holiday since neither of us nor anyone we asked had actually ever had it. So that was in the plans.

The day started out exchanging a few gifts, then with making breakfast tacos here at home; this was the second time we've done it and things went pretty smoothly this time. The innovation this time was to drain the salsa we had to make it a little more dense and less liquid; I think that worked out well. Turkey bacon was used, so we did have some turkey for Christmas.

what followed post-prandial was making the figgy pudding. This was a fairly involved process to me; fortunately John helped out with a few of the steps like beating the egg whites and separating the yolks. We used the recipe that is up on wikipedia. There were several firsts here for me having never cooked with figs before or cooking in a water bath using a roasting pan and a pyrex dish for a sort of poor man's bain-marie. The recipe calls for baking the mixture for four hours in at 325 degrees. This did not end up working out too well for the whole dish as the top and a bit of the sides burned. However we were able to cut away the burned and overcooked parts and salvage quite a lot of it.

While that was in the oven, I went for a 6.5 mile run. I've been having a little trouble with the hamstring on my right leg being overly tight and today was no exception, but I've been trying to do extra stretches for it and that seems to be helping some. It was quite warm and humid today, but at least the mosquitoes seemed to be taking a holiday like I was. I ran through the small park near us and there were four early twenties women out walking around in the park. One of them made a comment about my choice of a bright red shirt for doing my running for Christmas, a choice I hadn't really made consciously.

I relaxed a bit after the run before staring in on the dinner menu. We were making a couple of recipes from a cookbook that John's dad and step mom gave us, the Christmas in New Mexico Cook Book. We made the Turkey Enchiladas recipe but used chicken instead of the turkey. It's got a lot of green chiles in the recipe but there ended up being not a whole lot of heat in the dish; it did turn out quite yummy, even when i forgot to put in the milk that the recipe called for... We also made a red chile potato recipe that also tasted quite good. The whole set for dinner took quite some time in the kitchen, though, a fair bit longer than I expected.

Still it was a nice food day and a good way to spend Christmas.

I hope everyone had a happy holiday and will have a great upcoming New Year!

Question for the hive mind: What's a way to change that recipe for the figgy pudding to avoid the burning? I think using a shallower dish and more water in the bath would help, but John isn't so sure.

Current Mood: accomplished

no more twitter for now
After thinking about it some more and getting feedback, I've decided to stop cross-posting from Twitter for now.

twitter cross-posting
Someone who did not login left a comment about cross posting:
"Do you fond tweets interesting? Your earlier posts were on things you thought. These tweets are on things you did. Tweets seem more frequent, but less personal."

I'm just wondering how other readers of my LJ feel about my tweets. I can certainly turn off the cross posting in which case new thing probably won't appear very often in this LJ, although I don't think that is particularly a problem.

Anyway if you have an opinion, post here.

I certainly don't care much one way or the other if things get cross posted as I read both sides anyway.

Current Mood: curious

daily tweets

16:09 Sign @ the auto repair/tire place nearby had the word "penis" on it last night. Not too surprising that it is not there today. #

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daily tweets

13:00 yummy breakfast tacos at Lankford Grocery; J tried the migas, declared them good. I'm glad tried it; I knew he'd like the place. #
13:01 cool thing on the corner across the street from the restaurant - an obelisk with the streets names on it. #
13:02 Also we noticed the tiles inlaid into the curb on the corners with the crossing streets name and address/block number, cool little detail. #
20:18 Good food day; now at Hobbit Cafe on the patio for dinner with J. Smaug's Delight, yum #

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daily tweets

14:44 gotta love Texas weather this time of year. fairly cold one day, almost blazing the next. 85 degrees right now here. #
22:10 6 mile run, trip to T-bone Tom's for BBQ (it's finally reopened after Ike); finally some Ben & Jerry's to finish, all with the sweetie. #

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daily tweets

09:17 Annoying wait at dealer for 60K service on Prius today. #
14:32 why can't insurance coverage be a straight forward thing? nailing down insurance for the house we're about to buy and getting frustrated. #
14:32 in particular sorting out what is covered and what is not is not an easy task. :( #

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