noattentionspan

So, on Sunday last I took M, C and his girlfriend H up to Grouse and we did the Grind, first time this year.

It was H’s first time and that gave us all the excuse to go a bit slower than what we otherwise might have

But, an hour and thirty minutes wasn’t bad in a group including a 9 year old and two 16 year olds (and an old fat man).

The heat was high, and the 800m climb over 2.9km was tough through the first 3/4. The last 1/4 though just went by like it didn’t exist, truly a blast.

It was so fun that I picked M and I up family passes for the year since we’ll be doing it together at least once a week when she is over here, and I’ll be doing it once or twice a week when she isn’t.

Two days later M and I were going to go up again and she wanted to invite a friend. Her friend M is also in great shape for a 9 year old and I figured ’sure’! Then her friend C wanted to come and since I didn’t want to be an asshole I said ok.

1:15 to and from the first 1/4 mark. I had to pull the plug at that point and bring us down. C wasn’t going to be able to go much farther.

Still, we covered 3km overall in travel distance so it could have been worse.

Two days later again, and M and I are going up once more. This time the other C (14 year old, not the 16 year old) son is going to come with us. Younger C is in fantastic shape. Soccer superstar, baseball player, runner. He did his first half marathon last year at 13 in the 1:50 range.

Anyway, this is his first time doing the Grind and his soccer coach is getting the boys out so that they can build up their running strength.

So, M and I are off at a mellow pace and C goes blowing by with his friends. We wind up kicking in a respectable 1:14 time to get to the top and find that the boy has done a 51 time for his first!

Only 3 minutes slower than my best time of 48, ug.

Anyway, I’m proud as punch of C, C, M and even H, M and the other C for their efforts on the Grind this past week. It’s going to be a year of a lot of trips up that mountain, developing strength and power. And bonding with my kiddos. That’s even better.

I’m still building up my running, slowly. Because of this there was no way I was running Vancouver this year, although I did think a few times of doing the half (it would have been stupid).

After the rather successful Sun Run I started up with my old run group on Saturday mornings and they’ve been kicking my ass solidly as I build up my distance.

Up only as far as 15.5km though, there is no way I was running at the marathon today.

Linda Wong put out a call for last minute volunteers on Friday night on Facebook. Not having a life, I said that I’d be happy to help out and figured that I’d be doing something like folding blankets or putting the medals together.

Saturday morning after my run I went down to the expo site and presented myself ready to do whatever. It started with loading trucks, moving fences, carrying tables. Basically the type of dirty hand boy type volunteer stuff that happens the world over.

While on a quick break to grab a hotdog I was asked if I was available on Sunday. About 10 minutes later I found myself with a supervisory gig the next day working under the guy who basically taught me to run when I started at Rackets & Runners, Michael Campbell-Burns. And 10 minutes after that I found myself spending the next 2 hours being the asshole telling folks they couldn’t park ‘there’ or ‘there’ or they’d get towed.

Saturday night I enlisted the help of S to help out the next day and went to crash on her couch for the night to keep the early morning from being even worse.

By 7:15am we were standing in the Starbucks at Cornwall and Yew with no clue what was going on next.

The captain I was replacing had jammed out at the last minute and hadn’t contacted any of her volunteers. Because of this I was left with 6 people to man (woman as it turns out) 16 barricades. Clearly this wasn’t on, but we made a valiant effort anyway.

2 of my volunteers bolted after about 30 minutes (with safety vests) leaving me with 4. I wound up running the 1km from end to end of the zone checking on things, bringing lunch, cheering on runners and generally having an awesome time.

End of the day I had seen most of my friends that were running (Ray with his Boston Qualifying run of 3:14:57!!!, kick ass!), gotten myself a bit too much sun, cheered on thousands; talked to, walked with and run beside hundreds of individuals.

If I can’t run, I’ll volunteer. But I’d rather run even though the volunteering was awesome.

Oh, and a shout to Valerie (Go Val!) who was up from Houston with Team in Training. I spent about half a km walking with her and talking to her shortly after 36km when she was hurting pretty bad. We even spent a couple of hundred meters walking backwards to help stretch out and relax her leg muscles (it works).

I hope you finished with the same determination you had when you passed through that next water stop.

S

It’s possible that God shares my disapproval for those assholes who plan kids sports on family gathering days like Easter Sunday.

A look out my window at the curtain of rain that has canceled my son’s baseball game (moved from 3pm to 12pm first, canceled entirely second.) certainly seems to indicate the plausibility.

Hopefully the planning of a baseball game on Easter Sunday isn’t the same as the general decline of society that led to Noah and the big boat.

On the chance that it is though, I’m going to get some swim practice in today.

S

Kids play sports. This is a good thing.

Over the years the kids have played soccer, rugby and baseball. And over the years, on every big family gather time weekend, some jack-ass event organizer has decided that there should be games during my family dinner time.

Seriously, what the fuck are they thinking by having a baseball game at 3pm on Easter Sunday?

Sure, I could be an ass and apply pressure to keep the kid home from the game to have a gathering of all the children (or as many as can be found), S and myself while we cook up a ham with cheese sauce and some other stuff (I only care about the ham and cheese sauce). But that means him letting down the team, making himself apart from the other kids who do get to play, and it leaves me with a sullen teenage boy who’d rather be playing ball than having family dinners anyway for the most part.

I look forward to these big family gatherings starting the day after the last one. Even when S and I were together it was utterly rare that we would have all the kids in one place for dinner at any one time. And we rarely ate with the kids in the kitchen anyway. So these big family gatherings were a chance to catch up and be together.

Now that S and I are not together, there is even less opportunity for family gatherings, although we have managed a couple. So I really do look forward to these. Not just for the ham and cheese sauce, although, it really is amazing just how good the ham and cheese sauce combination tastes. A chance to chat with the kids, laugh at silliness, spend hours cooking (I love that part).

But no, some asshole plans a game in the middle of my family gathering, some asswipe who probably doesn’t have kids, or if he does have them doesn’t want to eat with them, or perhaps he doesn’t do Easter for religious reasons.

And do I care about the religious reasons for Easter? No, I don’t. I care about the family gathering times and religious holidays are a great excuse to have those times.

I’ve posted about Easter and ham before, I’ve laughed along with 3 Dead Trolls in their The Lost Scrolls of Frosty (yes, that’s 5 links, one for each of the Lost Scrolls, yes they were downloaded legally from deadtroll.com, no I didn’t ask permission to host them myself, but I couldn’t find them for easy download today, so tough shit). I’ve wondered about the perpetuation of western religious holidays through family gatherings, and concluded that I’ll have family gatherings on other religious holidays right after I learn about them and find out if it’s still ok to do Ham with Cheese Sauce.

I’m just pissed that one of so few family gatherings has to be threatened by a stupid fucking baseball game that they could play on many other days. The end result, of course, is that we’ll do the dinner on Monday instead of Sunday. At least one of the kids won’t be able to make that, but S has already said that she won’t attend on Sunday so she can go to the game (–editor’s note, that was taken back the morning after), so it’s better to lose one kid than the ex + one kid.

bah.

S

Rocketboom makes me smile, has since I first saw it while working at DKT. From the lovely and talented hostess with the beautiful voice, the the geek cornucopia of fun that the episodes are made of.

Today’s episode just rocks. The guys at Makerbot are currently my heroes.

Rocketboom - Makerbot Industries

This is beyond cool.

S

It’s easy to forget the years as they start passing faster and faster. It’s even easier to forget how long a friendship can last when the years are zooming past.

Back in 2003 or so I hit a dry spell at work and wound up going back to school to do some upgrading. I went to a local CDI College to study programming, not a great divergence from my career in QA. While there I wound up meeting a trucker turned network admin who’s been a friend ever since.

Our worlds have changed drastically since we met and neither of us are working in what we were studying. J went back to trucking and recently wrote paper for his own truck. I went back to QA and now manage a team. Not as cool as having my own truck

Through all the changes though we’ve kept in touch and been there to chat to as needed. 6 years later and we get together irregularly, but we did manage to get together for a dinner tonight.

J and his friend M and I met up at the Cactus Club on Lougheed. In addition to amazing food and great service the scenery was mind blowing, something not lost on three men who had to choose between the food and the servers to drool over.

Our meal went well, the company was fantastic and the chance to catch up was priceless.

As we parted company and were shaking hands in a very manly fashion out of doors, a younger man who looked down on his luck approached us and asked if someone would buy him a meal at the Tim Horton’s that was next door. With barely a pause J stepped up and said sure, that he would.

Watching J and M walk over to the Tim Horton’s with this young fellow I couldn’t help but think that there went someone who was having dinner with a friend, mine.

S

Daughter G has a new dog like thing.

It resembles a dog, no doubt there, just smaller. It did bark once when I stopped playing with it, but not really a bark and certainly not a yipe.

It isn’t a cat, but it might have been crossed with one somewhere back a few generations. You can just see how that would happen after the dog poker party. The guys head out looking for some action, head over to the other side of the tracks, one of them has a little too much to lick and BOOM a few months later there’s a new nipper in the house. It might not have happened that way, but it might of, you just can’t be sure.

Anyway, it’s really cute, it didn’t yipe at me, and it loves playing.

I still have a hard time calling anything that would fit in a handbag a dog, but what do you do, eh?

S

Well, oddly enough, the folks who are selling you dinner say it of course.

I’m an idiot, err, no, I’m addle minded, err, no. I’m, uh, how should we say, absent minded. The blog didn’t get it’s name randomly, my lack of attention span is legend in my own mind. Conveniently I’m generally quick enough to hide this fact from others around me. Or at least I think I do that. Perhaps people just humour me. You wouldn’t humour me would you?

Anyway, I had a rather full day planned for today. I wanted to golf, run, swim and drive out to visit G and take her for dinner. I packed my bag this morning with run gear, swim gear (minus a towel, they were in the wash) and golf equipment. Off I went.

S and I hit the Central Park Pitch and Putt for a rousing 18 holes (29 over par!), my first game of the year. We had a lovely time wandering the course and chatting in the sun. Before we played we even took a moment to check out the model boats that were cruising around the water, very cool.

Once we were done I changed clothes (and the problem with the wallet can all be traced to this innocent gesture), put on the Garmin and went for a 5km run in the park. I missed a turn at one point though and only wound up doing 3km. Oops. Not a crisis though, I didn’t need the run today I just wanted to get out and stretch my legs on my own and check my pacing (15:37 for the 3km).

I grabbed C from the house and off we went to Canada Games Pool for a quick dip and laze about. Another change and presto chango we are in the water. While C was lazing about I knocked in 1km in a pyramid (50, 100, 200, 300, 200, 100, 50) and was dogging it through the entire swim. There was an older guy swimming in the lane with me who was leaving me sputtering regularly.

So it’s now 3:30pm and I’ve accomplished most of what I want. All I needed now was to pick up a USB cable for G that she left at the apartment and head out there. So, back to the apartment, switch into my regular shorts, grab some chips (I’m starved by now) and out to Mission I go.

G and I chat for a bit, pick a restaurant and get ready to go in when I realize… my wallet isn’t in my shorts. You see, when I changed after golf I put my wallet in my bag knowing that I was going to be changing a few times. My bag, of course, was 50km away in Burnaby, in my apartment.

So, off we drive on a rapidly emptying tank of gas chatting all the way.

It ended well, we didn’t run out of gas, I did get a chance to chat to the kiddo for a longer stretch and grab some Japanese, I did get to swim with another kiddo and relax in the tub chatting for a bit, I did get to golf with S and spend a great couple of hours in nature smacking a little white ball around and pretending I knew what I was doing, and I did get a nice and quick little run in the park.

I had my wallet in the end so we didn’t have to wash dishes, and I’m home safe and sound with a full tank of gas.

Another great day at the end of another great weekend.

S

The Shadow knows….

Lately at night I’ve been plugging my Sansa Clip mp3 player up to my light stand (it has speakers) and listening to old time radio shows.

I am constantly surprised by just how many people do this and listen to them. There are a number of websites to get them from (OTR is a great place to start) and a lot of people trade them around (legally, of course).

Chatting with folks at the office I have found a few others who spend their evenings listening to the Adventures of Buck Rogers, X-minus 1, The
Shadow, Richard Diamond, The Saint and many more.

I’ve moved into the mid 50s myself with X-minus 1 which should take me through the next week or so

Damned cool.

S

I have a headache.

I’m not overly grumpy which is nice, but I’m tired, low in energy and my head doesn’t feel very nice at all.

I know it will take a week or so before I’m back up at 100% and that’s fine, but the next 10 days are going to be a bit of a bitch.

Went running with the guys from the office today at lunch and it was conscious effort to just stay running normally. Ah well, this too shall pass.

One more step towards a fitter, healthier me taken

S