Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness

Ugg. Bleah. Argh. Mostly photos.

2012-01-29T17:39:00.001-07:00

Here is the whole article with the recipes. You'll have to enbiggen them to be able to read them.

I slept very badly last night. Not sure why. I sure didn't feel like doing a spin session, or go for run, or even do the spin AND a run. Linda had wanted to go up to Cross Iron Mills to check out a particular store. I had never been there at all. At least I don't think I have been, and nothing I saw today was familiar. Yet my memory is suspect, and Linda is pretty sure I've been there.

These sculptures are by my friend Jeff de Boer. Let's just say there's a bit of a western theme to the mall. All 1.4 million square feet of it, which is about the same size as Chinook Mall. It just seems bigger because it's all on one floor.

I really liked this clock. The workings are visible and and you can see them move. I have a short movie I can post if anyone requests it.

Overall, I see no compelling reason to go back.

Now I'm off for a house errand involving plumbing. Let's hope this goes well...

Update. No leaks and successful flushes mean I saved over $150. The company fixing the fan exhaust from the guest bathroom (for what I think is a reasonable price), also gave us a quote for replacing toilet innards. Once I found out what the parts cost, and watched a video, I was astonished at their quote. Even considering my time at the rate I bill out to Talisman, I still saved money. Yay me!

I feel much cleaner now

2012-01-28T18:23:00.001-07:00

First was a nice 6:30 am dip in Talisman pool. Wondering what's going on because there was lots of cars in the parking lot. 1.5 K in 29 minutes nice and easy and relaxed. Puttered around a bit with some dolphin kick and had to work out a hamstring cramp. Once that was gone I did some pull and kick and a bit of drill. Finished up with some water yoga and stretching. My low back was really tight at the end of the 1.5 K. Out of the water after just over an hour.

The hot tub is fairly nice, but not as good as Renfew. Still, it was nice to relax in it for a little bit. From there I wandered up to see what was going on. There were some swim clubs in the pool, with the coaches yelling at their kids. But the main activity was synchronized swimming qualifiers. The girls would do a particular figure, and the judges would hold up their scorecards.

I'm always a bit suspicious of judged events like this, but the judges seemed to be fairly consistent. I got to chatting with one of the parents, and was astonished to discover this was an expensive sport. I knew pool fees wouldn't be cheap, but hadn't known that it's paid coaches, not volunteers. Myself, I'd choke on a $300 swimsuit.

When I started watching they were about half way through a group doing a set of individual figures. After they were done there was a bit of a break, then another group of girls moved into the pool. Some of them were doing some laps to warm up, and I'm afraid I laughed. They are graceful and athletic doing the synchro figures, but most couldn't swim worth beans.

Once home I puttered about. Today was the day for tackling the paperwork infesting my storage unit drawers. My way of dealing with paper that comes in the mail is to stuff it in a drawer. When the drawer is full and it's January, I sort things out.

There are 4 piles. Things to shred. Things to recycle. Things for storage downstairs. And lastly, things that are more or less permanent reference, or something I might need soon.

I shred everything that has my name or address on it that I don't need to keep anymore. Line of Credit statements that show a credit of 14 cents. Old receipts. Old phone lists. Work job reviews from 2004. Stuff. I shredded two full containers worth. Here's the pre shredded pile.

There was lots to recycle. And some stuff to go back into the drawer. Like a bike fit and lactate threshold test done in 2009 that shows my wattage to be (hangs head) 163. Clearly I've improved since then, as long as both tests are calibrated to anything close to the same standard and are comparable.

One of the other things I found was this. Why?

This. Here, for all those that wanted it, is the secret recipe for my energy drink that I use for longer rides. Of course, I make it slightly different.

If I were one of those Shit Triathletes say guys (Julie's is the funniest) I'd be only using reverse osmosis water, fair trade organic tea picked in the early morning before the heat of the day, organic honey where the bees are part of a registered trade union, sea salt that was harvested with no dolphins or shark fins damaged, and non pesticide orange juice. Sometimes, just to mix things up, I'll toss in a Nuun, the Wildberry goes better than the other fruity flavors. Not that we have much choice up here.

Recycle is everything anonymous I don't need. There was lots.

Stuff I need to keep is mostly things like bank and investment statements. It turns out there was 3 years worth of stuff, so I put it all into one pile. From here it goes into a white plastic bag, and downstairs into a big storage tub downstairs. I have periodically had to go through these bags to find a particular piece of paper, so it's worth doing. I'm considering a system where all receipts go into one place, in date order. There are times one needs old receipts, for warranty claims mainly. That's why I like Apple and emailing a receipt. It turns out they store it in their own database, so even if you lose it, they'll still know. If I was really organized I'd just take a photo of this stuff.

While I've been writing this I'm also importing more CD's into iTunes. It turns out song 5000 is Since the Last Goodbye, on Ammonia Avenue by Alan Parsons Project. The wine is Sagiovese. The meat is the last of the roast lamb on a nice onion bun, with double smoked cheddar cheese. Salty chocolate caramel tart for desert.

I've had a couple comments not show up, and I don't understand why. No links to put them in the pending file, they aren't spam and don't show up there, one shows up in the iPhone mobile view. I will have to post them manually I guess.

10 watts makes a big difference

2012-01-27T20:32:00.001-07:00

Now, where was I after being so rudely interrupted by Blogger eating my big post? Oh yes. I'd talked about my Tuesday bike.

Wed was yoga. At the time I didn't think much of it, but my tree was really strong, waving only slightly in the breeze.

Then Thursday morning I was in the pool and my balance was shite. It sounds odd to talk about balance in the water, but it was off and I could feel it. I was working a bit harder to maintain my pace and wasn't getting clean air for breathing. My roll was slightly out of time with my stroke, and it felt like my feet were dragging. Did several 100 m intervals on 2:15. This is coming around. 40 minutes in the pool.

Friday I was on the bike again. Sorry about the numbers. (no I'm not) Warmed up and some spin technique. Then 5 minutes at 175 watts to really get my blood flowing. 5 easy. Then 20 minutes trying to stay between 190 and 195 watts. My breathing was regular and deep, heart rate stable at low to mid 130 bpm, cadence about 86 to 88, legs feeling good, and sweating hard. This was a good effort, and I could maintain this for quite a bit longer, I think. It takes a little bit of focus to maintain the pace but I'm not fighting for every watt. Then 5 minutes easy.

Now the hard part, upping the brake setting a level, same gear and cadence, trying to maintain just over 200 watts. This takes work to maintain. If I don't look at the display my legs tend to slack off. Breathing is hard. I can feel the effort in the legs. I lasted 6 minutes and dialed it back. I could go longer if I really want to push, but I'm not sure if I could go 20 minutes. I am sure my legs wouldn't be happy with me, but I think that's going to be what it takes.

It's surprising how quickly the limits close in at such a small increase in output, only 5%. That takes me from steady state to over the edge. At least I know where I am, and now I can go through the book and start doing some of the other tests and calculations to figure out what I need to do to improve.

The weather sure looks sweet for next week! 12 C (53 F). That's practically a heat wave. You can bet I'll be out for a run or two. I may even be in shorts and short sleeved shirt.

2x11. Again

2012-01-26T20:04:00.001-07:00

The first time Blogger eats a post, it's a huge one. With cut and paste from two separate blogs. Links. Photos. Maps. Graphs. Spreadsheets. A movie. Grrrr. So I'm starting over, and you might not see some of that stuff. Unless this glass of white wine inspires me more than I think it will.

Both SUAR and Xenia tagged me with the recent 11 thing. Since I get an amazing number of readers from SUAR's blog (Hi guys, feel free to comment and say hello!), and Xenia once sent me a Popener just because, I figured I had to respond.

Da Rulz.

1. Post these rules
2. You must post 11 random things about yourself
3. Answer the questions set for you in their post
4. Create 11 new questions for the people you tag to answer
5. Go to their blog and tell them you’ve tagged them
6. No stuff in the tagging section about you are tagged if you are reading this. You legitimately have to tag 11 people!

I'm picking the 11 people by whoever is at the top of my blogroll when I finished this, unless it's one of the above, or someone that has already got their 11 things up on their blog. Unless I think they would enjoy being tagged again.

11 Random things about me. The really great one about my dissolute youth where I won a game of 10 pin bowling, lost my virginity, and did not get into a drinking contest, all on the same night, is gone. And I had it worded so carefully. Sorry guys, maybe another time. Blame Blogger.

I have now lived in this house longer than every other house put together. Without even trying I can remember living in 11 other homes (how's that for a coincidence!) Talk about putting down roots. The book collection is right out of hand. There are times I think we'll never move again, just because of the books. And the wine too, of course.
I've lived in two countries, and in 4 Canadian Provinces. I have not yet visited PEI or Newfoundland. Or any of the Territories.
One of the sounds that most reassures me is to hear airplanes flying overhead. Jets are ok, but it really should be a prop, and especially an old radial engine. It makes my day in the summer if I hear an old radial engined airplane flying overhead.
My go to comfort food is a peanut butter and honey sandwich. Organic crunchy peanut butter. (The Co-op gold brand is really good.) Unpasteurized honey that has crystalized. Fresh whole wheat bread. I got the taste for honey that way because my maternal grandfather kept bees. When visiting we had home baked bread, milk fresh from the cows, the honey, and lots of garden fresh veggies. I didn't know how good it was.
There are 4882 songs in my iTunes collection. The most recent that I know of off hand was recorded in 2011. The oldest was first played in the early 1200's. There may be some even earlier, that just happened to be the first CD I found.
The thing I most want to shout out at people is "Walk faster!"
I like to make lists of things to do. Often I don't get to all of them. Some things have been on my to do list for years.
There are rules about facial hair for men. A beard shall be full, lightly trimmed for neatness and hygiene, complete with mustache. A mustache alone is fine, neatly trimmed, and not sculpted into weird shapes. Anything that isn't one of those two things is out. Especially out are: goatees, soul patches, the thin thing outlining a jawline that isn't there, mutton chops, handlebar mustache, just scruff underneath a jawline and clean shaven above, and anything that involves spending more than 1 minute a day maintaining. Women, I admit, the grow in period is pretty tough, but there are creams for soothing inner thigh rash. And then, after a while, considering always neatness and hygiene, delightful things can happen for you.
Cats, polar bears, and sharks are special. There are not enough of these, and too many humans these days. One day soon I want to travel and visit the polar bears and sharks. Preferably not the same day.
Shaping molten glass with only some wet newspapers and basic tools is fun. There are some wines the exact colour of molten glass as it cools.
I have often thought that current sporting events are pretty boring. What follows are some suggestions for livening them up:

Golf. Tee boxes should be moved closer to the greens, and point both ways, so a course can be played forwards or backwards. A tournament starts with a foursome on each tee box, some going forward, some backwards. They start at the same time and play on through. Final score is number of strokes times number of minutes to complete 18 holes. Extra points for passing another foursome. Only protective gear on the head allowed. It would be permissible to have one me member of the foursome to have unlimited shots as a way of assisting his or her team mates to play through the opposing teams, but they can have only as many balls as they can carry or scrounge.
Triathlon, providing the polar bears agree to cooperate. The bears enter the water 30 minutes after the last swimmer (Ironman distance). They can eat what they catch, but aren't allowed to cut corners. I wonder if cheetahs could be trained to chase down bike riders?
Baseball. A bunch of weenies. The game should be outdoors. Once started, a game shouldn't be stopped for any reason at all, up to and including tornados. There should be a pitch clock rule, obliging the pitcher to throw the ball within a certain number of seconds after the catcher tosses it back to them. Say 5 seconds. There should be a rule about possession of the ball and bodily contact.
Basketball. Make the height of the basket variable for every game, ranging between 12 feet and 15 feet, say.
Hockey. Get in a fight, you're gone for a season's worth of games. Double that for nasty stick work. Forfeiting your salary, of course. And really, since it's a team sport, each player ought to be paid a certain base salary. From there a portion of their additional salary is based on skill at playing or negotiation. But at least half the salary should come based on the number of points the team gets. Win the game, and your team gets full salary. Tie, and you get half salary. Lose, and you don't get that portion of your salary at all. That ought to take care of players calling it in during the season. Plus, only the top 8 teams go on to the playoffs.
Swimming. Enough of the endless discussion about swimsuits and how much they contribute to records. Everybody swims nude.
Speed skating, cross country skiing. I'm sure there is a way to work polar bears in there somehow, but haven't figured out the details.
Ski jumping. Much as I dislike subjective judging criteria, I think ski jumpers should be given extra points for flapping their arms as they jump.

From SUAR, because she was first.

In five words or less, tell me your most embarrassing moment (example - mine would be boyfriend, toilet, overflow). party, booze, pee, not pants.
What’s one habit you need to break? I am helpless in the grip of cookie lust. I really should do something about that, but it's easier to ride or run for hours to make up for it.
What’s your favorite book of all time? Damn you SUAR! This is brutal. I've read tens of thousands of books, and I have to only pick one??!! Have a heart. Dancing Aztecs by Donald Westlake. It's probably the funniest book I've ever read. Honourable mentions to Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold, anything with John Dortmunder in it (hint, Westlake again), most of the Regency romances by Georgette Heyer (surprised you, didn't I?), early Larry Niven. As a bonus, the writers I would most like to write like are Isaaic Asimov, and E. B. White.
Have you ever cheated on a test or a partner (don’t need to tell me which one)? No. Been tempted though.
If you weren’t doing your current job, what would be your profession? Giver of Advice.
Do you think Bob Harper is gay? I don't know who Bob Harper is. I know of a Stephen Harper, although I'm pretty sure he is not gay. He's being a big dick lately. Does that count?
What’s the best compliment you’ve ever received? The night Linda agreed to put up with me for the long term. We were in bed when I proposed.
Would you be able to run further or faster? I can't conceive of needing to run further than 42.2 Km, unless something with big teeth and slow paws is chasing me. I can hardly run slower, now, can I, so I anticipate being able to run faster.
What food gives you gas? Beans are about it. My guts are pretty well behaved.
Ever done a cleanse or had a colonic? No, though I'm on the list.
What’s your dream marathon? Finishing, still running.

Now Xenia, because she was second.

Which movie/tv show/character most resembles your life? I honestly don't know. Linda says the doctor in Northern Exposure.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? It's only money, and it's easily replaceable. Time with family and friends, irreplaceable. Time spent doing what you think is fun, irreplaceable.
What was your ultimate dipshit moment (so far)? There's been a few times I've gone over the line at work in terms of providing feedback. Sometimes my mouth and parts of my brain get me in trouble.
Marry, f*ck or kill: choose either group – (a) Val Kilmer (current, not young version), Kevin Federline and Russell Brand; (b) Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. No brainer. Kill them all. The world will be a better place. Kill those standing next them too, while you're at it.
Which country would you most likely be arrested in and/or shot at and why? Any Islamic country. I have no respect for a religion that treats women like they are not even human. I don't have much respect for religion in general, as I think it is an atavistic holdover from an ignorant and barbaric past.
Which person (alive or dead) would you most want to bitchslap? Stephen Harper. He's fucking up a country I love.
Which special talent or skill do you wish you had? Invisible bitchslapping. There are lots of people on my list after Harper.
Who or what would you consider to be your archenemy? Fate.
Pop or soda? Ick. Don't drink either. Tried flat coke at the second last aid station at GWN, and nearly threw up right there.
What’s your favorite holiday? Plaid day.
How would you prefer the apocalypse to go down? Swiftly, if it must at all.

Last, my questions for the tagged.

What moment of your life, if captured on video, would go viral?
What do you most want to shout out at people?
How old were you when you lost your virginity?
Related to #3, did you respect yourself the morning after?
What is your comfort food?
If you couldn't live in your current country, where would you live? (Assume they would let you in.)
What book do you most want to see made into a movie, and who plays the lead roles? Alternatively, what book should never be made into movie?
What movie should never, ever be remade? Yes, I know it's too late for the Italian Job.
Is there anything conceivably better than hot, willing, twin red-heads, with whipped cream and chocolate?
What is one thing that "they say" is bad for you, that you will not give up?
Would/do you clean your house before the cleaning services comes over? WHY?

And the nominees for tagees are:

- Kristin
  Panic Attacks
  39 minutes ago
- Deb Tris (nope, she's done it already)
  Our bodies are meant to move
  2 hours ago
- XLMIC Taking It On (nope, she's done it already)
  Who needs a doorknob and some string ...
  4 hours ago
- Haute Runner
  ~Two Things Thursday~
  5 hours ago
- Shut Up and Run! (would it be fair to tag her back? I think not. So SUAR is off the hook
  Get a Battery Life
  7 hours ago
- Staying Strong and Positive!
  Gluten Free Pizza
  12 hours ago
- Steve in a Speedo?! Gross!
  'Sh*t Triathletes Say' & My Half Marathon Plan
  13 hours ago
- James Ironman 101
  Worst Run Ever
  13 hours ago
- DC Rainmaker
  Fitting it all in: Work, Run, Fly, Blog
  19 hours ago
- The Blonde Runs...
  …the base miles
  23 hours ago
- Diggin' It (Same reasoning as SUAR)
  Tag and release
  1 day ago
- Climbing those hills (nope, she's done it already)
  Foam Roller - Friend or Foe?
  1 day ago
- Run. Race. Repeat.
  Anatomy of a bad run
  1 day ago
- Endurance Isn't Only Physical
  We grow because we struggle, we learn and overcome.
  1 day ago
- Glaven, Trying Again
  First Annual State of My Anus Address
  1 day ago
- Lily on the Road
  Wordless Wednesday
  1 day ago

It arrived!

2012-01-24T20:42:00.002-07:00

This is a book that has to be read with a calculator in hand. I can see myself setting up an xl spreadsheet just for the things I'm interested in. I just browsed through it tonight, reading little bits and pieces, and I'm very impressed. Thanks for the tip Darryl!

On the bike for 1.25 hrs. Good warmup with some spin drill, then 4x5 minutes hard, 2 minutes easy, cool down.

And I've been tagged. This will take some thought.

Relief

2012-01-23T19:00:00.003-07:00

One of the tasks on the weekend was to round up all the recently bought books, document them, brand them, and herd them all into the basement library. Except for a couple that are in progress of course. Here's the mound, and of course just like always, I missed one, hiding in the spoor on Linda's desk.

It warmed up today, which made an enormous difference in the attic. Almost all the frost buildup is gone and it doesn't have that humid feel. It's supposed to be warm again tomorrow, and that should finish it off. Now if only the trades company would call us to set up an appointment, all would be well.

But that was after the swim, which after all, is the important part of the day. 1K 19:10, actually feeling a little bit clunky today. Lots of kick and pull. Even a 100 m interval in 94 seconds, strong but not all out, just to see where I am. In the water just over 45 minutes.

Running to disassemble a hard drive

2012-01-21T18:08:00.001-07:00

The intent was to walk to the pool after work on Friday, and Linda would pick me up afterward. However there was a domestic issue that was at first thought to be a plumbing problem in the basement. Turned out not, and thanks to Cam Corbett Plumbing we found out the real problem. Over the last bunch of years the exhaust fan for the guest bathroom has been venting directly to the attic. This hasn't been a problem as it isn't used all that much, Calgary is bone dry, and our house didn't have a humidifier. Now it does. So when Cam looked in the attic, (it's a long story), he found hoar frost all over everything up there. But the description at first was a bit alarming, and once I got up to look it didn't appear anywhere near so bad.

The words "inches of frost or ice" were what I was told at work, and I envisioned *thickness*. All over everything. Waiting to melt. Turns out it was a thin layer of frost, extending inches *along* the vent stack for the plumbing. So we are in the process of getting someone in to fix the exhaust vent and check all the other vents just in case the humid air also came from somewhere else.

Here's a couple of photos. The first shows the exhaust vent pipe lying beside the fan enclosure, with the black plumbing vent stack in the background. Note the lack of frost buildup on stuff. Imagine our relief. The second shows just above that, with the frost buildup on the underside of the roof and the vent stack.

I put a piece of plastic wrap over the bathroom vent cover to keep any more warm moist air from rising through the fan, so if that's the only source, I am hoping that the coming warmer weather will sublimate the frost without it turning to water.

As promised Saturday did warm up. I ran about noon, even though it was still about -10 C (14 F), and I overdressed just a bit. I can sure feel the lack of regular running lately. My legs felt very clunky, so I only went about 45 minutes, with a couple of walk breaks right near the end.

The fun part of the day came later. Non-tech-geeks can skip right down to the comments.

For a long time I had a 250 GB drive as a backup. First to the cube, and then to my current iMac. Having the backup saved my bacon once, a year after buying the iMac. The hard drive failed about a week before the warranty expired, and I managed to get a Time Machine backup just before it went bad. Apple was great, replacing the drive complete with a newer version of the OS, and making sure I knew how to restore from a backup. It all went like clockwork.

A little while ago the backup drive failed. No surprise really. It kept starting and stopping as backups were needed, which is hard service compared to running all the time. When you think about it, hard drives are an amazing piece of technology. In the mid 50's, a mere 5 MB was the size of a dishwasher, and weighed a ton. No, really, a ton. Here's a photo you may have seen. My first hard drive was for an Atari 1040 ST, was 10 MB and the size of two large pizza boxes stacked up. (The ST wasn't even my first computer, I had an 800 XL before that.) I seem to remember the drive costing $700.

When I was at Skystone, a buddy of Linda's disassembled a mainframe, and because she knew I'd like it, she brought home parts of the hard drive. The discs became coasters for the board room table. The reader became a paperweight. At one time I've no doubt it was extremely expensive, and it amused me to think it was now modern art.

Skip to today. Just for fun I decided to take the drive apart to find out what it looked like. I had been amused by a discussion I found on some board about destroying hard drives. Really, the paranoia in American society amazes me, but some days I begin to see why. They seem to think there are agencies using their black SUV's and black helicopters flying in formation scrounging for discarded hard drives, and then mounting space age efforts to recover the data. One person said, in all seriousness, that the only way to be safe was to grind the disc to iron oxide, and then demagnetize the oxide. Good grief.

Think about how a hard drive works, and you'll realize that taking it out of it's enclosure is enough to render it essentially unreadable, and using a hammer on it is overkill. So I took some pictures along the way. Here we go!

I think this cost me about $400 in the late 90's, but I really don't remember. It had stopped working, and would only make clunk clunk clunk noises. Since I had everything on my current drive I didn't care about recovery.

I even had all the screwdrivers in the correct sizes and shapes to take it apart without any improvisation. I was almost disappointed.

Here we are at the moment of truth, ready to break the seal.

Sort of like getting a tire off the rim. I was surprised it was so hard.

Ah! That's why. A secret screw.

Treasure! A gold disc.

It took a while fiddling with it to get the discs out and remove the controller and arm.

I knew it couldn't be very big, and here it is. Turns out the enclosure could have held another disc.

All they are now is shiny circular mirrors.

Here's the promised photo showing the controller from an old mainframe. It weighs several pounds. You can see that it's the same sort of idea though.

I've had this AOL CD for a very long time acting as a coaster for my desk. Time for a new one now. I'll take the other one to work and use it there.

The new back up hard drive is 2 TB and was only about $250. Two Terabytes! That's about 3200 of the old-fashioned CD's. Yes, I know, I could probably have got the same drive space cheaper, but didn't want to fool around with formatting it. I'm a plug and play sort of guy. I'm having some trouble comprehending how much file space that is. In round terms that's 2000 GB, and 45 minutes of video is 1.4 GB. So I could put 64,000 minutes of video on it, or 1071 hours. With no efforts at file compression. I don't think I'm going to have a problem with file space for a while.

No workout stuff segued into a rant

2012-01-19T20:31:00.000-07:00

The cold snap is almost over. I've been sleeping like a rock, barely able to get myself out of bed in the mornings.

Our friend Gail lent us a ton of books when we visited over Christmas, and Linda has been chewing through them. I've been chugging through this one.

Overall I liked it, but he did go on and on at some points. I was getting a bit tired of it by the end. His idea is there are 6 reasons why the West dominated the rest of the world over the last 500 years:

Competition between states and corporate entities. Europe had relatively many small entities competing vigorously for advantages.
The Scientific Revolution. I think this is the main one. As long as people are repressed by backwards religions or governments nothing can ever change, since change hurts those in power.
The rule of law and representative government. Mainly meaning property rights and enforceable contracts. Which have now become a tool of oppression in some places.
Modern Medicine. It's hard to argue that a society isn't doing the right things when it's people live longer, get fewer diseases, and most children survive till adulthood.
The consumer society. The demand for more and better and cheaper goods, beginning with textiles. Which leads to a trap.
The work ethic.

One thing that he overlooks is climate. When all the days are the same, and you can always go pull fruit off a tree, or find something to eat by looking around, there isn't much incentive to save up for a rainy day. But when you live in a climate that has winter, you know that you have to make plans for that. Food, shelter, fuel for heat and cooking, a water supply, and warm clothing are just the start, and the consequences of a planning failure could be freezing or starving to death. When you don't know exactly when winter will come, there is incentive to get stuff done now. Today.

There is incentive to have a store of wealth to trade with other people if necessary. On a small community level makes sense to store like goods against theft, spoilage, or other loss, in a few central places, rather than in many little depots. Having a temporary excess also means methods of tracking who owns what, or is entitled to how much, which is the foundation of the banking system.

One thing that is interesting is how fast empires can fall. Depending on exactly what you measure, the Roman Empire collapsed in the west within a human lifetime. The British Empire went down the tubes in less than two decades after WWII. The Soviet Empire was only a few years from the pullout of Afghanistan to the collapse.

How quickly will the American Empire fall? Fairly quickly, I suspect. They are deeply in debt, their military is overstretched, their government has become venal and corrupt, to say nothing of incompetent and moribund. They've only lasted this long on the market's force of habit in treating them as a safe refuge. Eventually the world will figure out they are not just financially bankrupt, but morally bankrupt as well, and act accordingly. The President used to be called "Leader of the Free World" (yes with capital letters) but now he can't even lead his own country.

In fact, that word free is interesting. The USA can no longer be described as a free country. People have to show their ID papers to travel. Citizens are encouraged to spy on one another and report odd behaviour. The President can order anyone at all to be killed or tortured, for any reason or none. Anyone can be "disappeared"; held in prison indefinitely without trial, without having to state a reason, without access to a lawyer. The various agencies routinely spy on citizens and violate what little remains of their civil rights. Their property can be seized without effective recourse. The laws have become so complex that nobody knows what they mean, and people are coerced into pleading guilty because the alternative is to go bankrupt paying court and legal costs. The wealthy can buy all the justice and medical care they can afford. Everybody else goes to jail or goes bankrupt. You can't even escape medical debt through bankruptcy. The "justice" system is barbaric enough to execute people for imaginary crimes, especially the poor, the black, the mentally ill.

What civilized country in it's right mind would:

seriously consider Mr. Santorum or Mr. Gingrich as candidates for the highest office in the land?
do anything but laugh at the Tea Partiers, railing against government spending by saying "hands off my medicare!"?
let the right wing religious nut bars have anything to do with making government policy?
let the wealthy write the laws so as to make them more and more wealthy by stealing from the poor and the middle class?
let corporations be considered people, complete with free speech rights and the power to buy government officials?
even bring up for discussion the idea of making birth control a crime?

Eventually the USA will get what every other empire in the history of the world had coming to it. I'm torn on this issue, because I know many Americans and they are wonderful people. Many of the ones I don't know are wonderful people. It's a pity their country has been stolen from them and has become a vile place that is unworthy of respect in the modern world. I fear as their empire crumbles more and more, faster and faster, that Canada will be dragged down with them. I'm just not sure what we can do about it.

On a lighter note, more distraction arrived today. We think we watched all the episodes, and we think in the right order, but aren't sure. But we didn't watch the extras, no time. This ought to be good. I desperately want to know how much James Callis offered to reduce his salary when he found out it involved having Tricia Helfer draped all over him.

Best yoga class (crack!) in a long time

2012-01-18T21:38:00.001-07:00

Into the pool, not sure how I felt about it, but it ended up really good.
1K 19:15 working a bit, but not struggling.
lots of kick and pull drill
intervals, getting down to ~45 or 46 seconds per 50m, still on 1:15 though, for a little while
drill
cooldown
Swam 50 minutes altogether, and could have gone longer. The swim mojo is getting stronger and more relaxed.

Getting from the pool to the office was brutal. Slow. The destination parking lot, the one with an indoor walk to my office was full. Then I was trapped in traffic to make a slow loop back to the one we usually park in. A very slow loop. Then a long walk, only half indoors, to the office. I really didn't mind the extra distance.

Then coming out after work, it had warmed up substantially. I didn't even bother to zip my jacket or put on my hat. Only -23 C (-9 F) and very little wind. I really wanted to go for a run, but had to save myself for yoga.

It was a great class. We were doing this one shoulder thing and something in my back and shoulder cracked so loud F turned and looked at me. It was a good crack though, and my shoulders felt better. That's not all. Lots of forward bend stretches. All good. Another Ying shoulder stretch supported on a couple of blocks that was just lovely. An armpit stretch that felt really good. There was another stretch that as I was getting into it, there was another deep subtle clunk, low in my back or hip. Not sure what that one was, but it was good.

Someone, I won't mention her name, was snoring in Savasana.

Just finishing up The West and the Rest, will write about it tomorrow.

Even my inner polar bear knows better

2012-01-17T21:16:00.001-07:00

I don't mind running in cold weather at all. But this is a bit much. Just a bit.

Here's the kitchen window. Frosted up even before we started dinner.

Here's me after about 20 minutes of shoveling the driveway and sidewalk. A 30 minute run would probably have me carrying a pound of ice on my face. No thanks. Yes, my face was beginning to go red. A minute of handling a metal key ring outside had my fingers going numb. Running outside is a stupid idea, even though I'm wanting to run. Yes, that hat is warm. Just warm enough.

Instead I got on my bike for a short intense workout. Warmed up. 5 minutes on, 3 minutes easy, increasing the brake in between each set, which drives up the watts by about 10 or 15 w at the same cadence. The 4th one was getting towards the retaste zone so I backed off. Cooled down I guess I didn't wait long enough after dinner.

I'm seeing strong improvement in how long I can stay at less than peak effort, but the curve drops pretty dramatically, as illustrated in this fancy high tech graph. (I can just see DC Rainmaker covering his face with his hands.)

Working to push the Now curve over to the right. Lots over to the right. And up too, that would be good. Advice from my readers please and thank you. I know what wattage the bend in the graph happens at. Should I be spending my time at the bend and pushing to maintain it longer, or should I spend it closer to the bottom of the graph where I can only maintain the effort for a few minutes? I realize I need to do both, but what's the balance between them?

Here, this will make most of you feel better

2012-01-16T20:39:00.001-07:00

See? -30 C is -22 F, in case you were wondering.
No, I didn't run tonight, though I walked briskly to check out my neighbour's house while they are away.

Normally when I swim in the morning, I don't put on socks, and wear my suit underneath my pants. Typically I don't even button up all the buttons. I figure why waste time in the locker room? I was regretting the no socks thing this morning. Briefly. Not many other people were there so I got a spot close to the door.

The hard part is walking into a warm moist environment after being out in a very cold, bone dry environment. My glasses instantly ice over. Days like this I regret not having the laser surgery. Pity I can't even read about it without scrunching into a little ball of fear.

Though it's not as bad as the bar fight I sort of got into one day, many years ago when photo-gray lenses were cool. It was a very bright day, these were the dark lenses, and this was a very dark bar in between dance sets. No, not ballroom dancing. But you don't want to hear about my dissolute youth.

45 minutes minutes in the water, struggling a bit, not feeling smooth at all. Swim, kick drill, pull, intervals, drill, cool down.

Going back out to the car was really cold. I even wore a warm hat.

Long hard spin as it snowed

2012-01-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

In Calgary you never know what you'll get for weather. Yesterday was clear, sunny, and about the freezing point. In the evening it got much colder and started snowing. Well, it started snowing here. As we left our friend's after dinner there was barely a flake or two, and it stayed that way most of the night. It was snowing hard at our house, and about 4 or 5 cm fell altogether. Throughout the day it snowed very lightly, and was fairly cold, about -18 C (0 F), and with the windchill it was closer to -30 C (-22 F).

This morning I saw a herd of 6 runners churning by. This was the very first time I've seen such a large group going past the house, and thought it was an odd day for such a thing. After running yesterday I had no guilt at all about heading into the basement for a good spin session.

I put on a movie, set up my drinks and snacks, and settled in.

30 minutes easy warm up with some spin exercises.

30 minutes about the middle of my aerobic range, with some harder bits, and some standing.

5 minutes easy.

repeat the 30 hard 5 easy twice more, trying to stay closer to the top of my aerobic range. Sweating hard. The last 10 minutes were real work for me as I was trying to stay strong, spin smoothly, and not quit early.

20 minutes cooldown, and some stretching after, for a total of 2.5 hrs.

I can say without fear of contradiction that the credits for Chronicles of Riddick are much, Much, MUCH longer than for Adam's Rib.

This was right up there in terms of effort and duration on the bike, and I'm really pleased. I felt strong and comfortable. This is good.

This coming week is supposed to be cold and snowy. So I guess winter has finally arrived. I may even run at Talisman, more for the novelty of it than any other reason.

First run for the Calgary SUAR fan club

2012-01-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

I weenied out of my swim this morning. What with a really poor sleep, being up really early to feed the Mammal that Meows in the Night, relieved several kinds of bio pressures, I went back to bed and fell asleep. I figured this was better than trying to swim while feeling cranky.

Here we are, almost ready to run. As far as I know we are the only two members of the Calgary chapter of the SUAR fan club. Those being defined as owning shirts. There's a couple other people here that I know read her blog, but I don't know who's bought a shirt. They are great shirts to run in, btw. We've been buddies quite a while now, and are just getting around to running together.

I added a long sleeved tech shirt, and S from The Mama Runs added a jacket, since by Calgary standards for this time of the year, it was really warm. Just above zero (32 F), and a beautiful sunny day. We ran almost exactly 6 K nice and easy, in about 45 minutes. I didn't wear my watch, and we had a lovely chat. The view of downtown is pretty spectacular from the ridge. I haven't been up there for many years, and there's been lots of changes. Next time I'll take her through Fish Creek.

Afterward was more chatting, fondue dinner, and yet more chatting. Their child is delightful.

On the way home it was just starting to snow, and by the time we got home it was snowing pretty hard. For the first time in many, many years, we had to go through a Checkstop. Right on Crowchild near 26th. They didn't want to talk to us. Glad to see these out and about.

Broke the Thursday jinx

2012-01-12T21:04:00.001-07:00

The last bunch of Thursday's I've been a slacker. But not tonight. Home. Changed. Inserted a movie in the computer. Pitch Black, if you were wondering. Spin.

20 minutes warmup. 45 minutes steady at 1.7 to 1.8 watts per goal Kg. 10 cool down.

I've had harder workouts, but I'm trying to get more consistent, and stay caught up on sleep.

Relaxing swim. Relaxing yoga. A Loonie.

2012-01-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

The new pool is a bit more crowded these days, but still not bad compared to the old one. I'm still working to get used to the cold blast of air across the lane I like to swim in. Which lane is that? The one where I can see the time clock after pushing off the wall. That helps me keep on time.

This morning I wanted to play a game. Every lap had to be faster than a minute, preferably about 58 seconds. I'd keep going without looking at my watch until my lap times started going up. That turned out to be 1K in 19:15. Then some kick, some pull, some sprints. Then some relaxing stroke, trying to feel the water way out in front of me, working on the very first parts of the catch, trying to slice into the water as perfectly as possible, and pulling as smoothly as possible. This was totally NOT a strength thing, it's all feel, communing with the water, feeling my balance, working with my breath.

Which as a good precursor to yoga. Normally I pant in yoga, breathing from the top of my chest for most poses. Tonight I managed to relax in the Warrior 1 and 2 poses, and breath slowly and deeply. It makes the pose much better, more relaxing. I think I'm beginning to get the hang of this yoga stuff. About time.

One of the things about getting old is that the money keeps changing. You get used to something, and it changes. The other day I was digging some change out of my pocket and this really bright coin with lots of weird stuff on it showed up. Everything was sharp and clear on it so I think it was quite new. I'd never seen one like it before. It almost looks Egyptian. I actually took a picture of it. Back when they introduced the dollar coin, I thought they were nuts to put a loon on the front. Why would you do that when you could legitimately put a polar bear on it? If people would just take my advice life would be ever so much better.

Turns out it's to "celebrate Parks Canada’s 100th anniversary. Features stylized land, air and aquatic fauna, varieties of flora, as well as a symbolic park building and the silhouette of a hiker framed by a snow-capped mountain range."

Felt like a broomstick had been

2012-01-09T20:45:00.002-07:00

No broomsticks during the swim. 750 m, then water run, some (kind of) sprints, water run, some drill, and cool down. Fairly pleased with it.

The broomstick happened during the spin this evening. It felt like someone had taped it to my right thigh, from the outside of my knee to my hip bone. Weird. That whole muscle felt like a big solid lump moving slightly out of time with the rest of my leg.

Warmed up 20. 10 medium, 5 easy, 10 harder, 5 easy, 2.5 minutes really hard, 10 easy to cool down. Trying to concentrate on spinning, when my legs wanted to go up and down.

This is the first time in what seems forever that I've swum and biked the same day. I ought to sleep well tonight.

Here's the promised whiteboard christmas drawing. It started with the tree. Then some ornaments were added. Then the cat. Then some presents. The star. The fireplace, with detail gradually added. Then the words, which were filled in. Music. The banner. Ribbons and bows. I'm not sure when the little train set was added. Artists, LT, JH, KC, and SJ. Or so I'm told, I only know which are my bits.

Most recent reading. Although I disagree with the author's ideas. For a polar bear life is very simple. There are only two kinds of things in the world. Things to eat. Things to play with. Humans can be either, or both.

This is my current read. This is similar to books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I like this kind of thing. Sometimes it's very small things that have a large effect, and once ahead, it can be very hard to catch up.

instead of going out for anniversary dinner

2012-01-08T18:46:00.002-07:00

After such a busy day yesterday, I slept in till almost dawn today. The sunrise was nice so I had the phone capturing time lapse images, but it didn't turn out well, so I won't bore you with it.

Shortly after I ran easy 40 minutes, with a break every 10 minutes to walk briefly. My hip flexors were killing me. My feet were fine. It was windy enough to push me around, and make crossing some of the melting ice something to be done very cautiously. I did a good stretch before and after.

Part of the day was spent cleaning out and organizing my clothes drawers. There are still a few things around from my fat days, and somethings from before then. Here's a beautiful buffalo wool jacket I bought in Jasper in the very late 80's. I wore it a bunch of years and then I got too big for it. It's been in a storage box in the basement since the mid 90's I'd guess. It fits perfectly now. This pic is after coffee and before wine, so it's not me out of focus. Somehow, Linda's shots of me are often out of focus. No idea why.

One of the consequences of losing weight is buying new clothes. Another consequence of wearing clothes is that they wear out. There are some T shirts I really really like that are no longer fit to be worn in public, unless it's to mow the lawn or other work. Mostly the neck has frayed away, though many of them have holes. Sigh.

There are two bright yellow (well, not so bright anymore) that I bought in Grande Prairie during a work trip mid-90's, and they're still in great shape even though I've worn them lots. The only problem is that they were a bit big then, and they are huge on me now. I created a pile of clothes to go to the Sally Ann.

One of the things we used to do to celebrate birthdays (not that I've had one for a while) and anniversaries was to go out to dinner at a nice place. When I wasn't working that was an obvious place to economize. Well, we've lost the habit. Linda can cook at least as well as the chefs in the fancy restaurants, and it's way cheaper for us to buy the nice cuts and organic veggies for ourselves, than to buy them cooked and subject to the vagaries of ill-paid wait staff. To say nothing about the effing exorbitant prices that restaurants charge for wine! Holy crap, it's supposed to be wine with dinner, not the other way around, but you'd never know from their prices.

Probably my favourite thing to barbecue is rack of lamb. I picked this up during my errands yesterday. It's huge. In that photo below, that's a regular dinner plate that the marinade container is sitting on. Not sure how much it weighed, but it cost $57. Free range, grass fed, no antibiotics, organic certified. We will get 4 meals out of it, so it's not that expensive really. (Oh, L and S, if you're reading this, 3 guesses what I'm bringing for lunch tomorrow.)

Linda tosses a bunch of goodies together for the marinade and we let it soak for a while. This is what it looked like just before going to the barbecue.

Some people have seen this already on Facebook. It smelled heavenly! It was nice drinking some wine outside while tending the barbecue, since the wind had died down and it was almost warm. We had it with rice and corn, fresh buns from Yum to mop up the juices with, and a salty caramel tart for desert. Wonderful. Better than what we'd get from anyplace in town.

About the only other thing of note was taking down the Christmas tree and getting our living room back again. I think I'm getting soft in my old age. I used to be a capital B H, Bah Humbug kind of guy, but this year I enjoyed Christmas. One of the fun things was the evolving Christmas drawing on the whiteboard in the next office. If it's still there tomorrow I'll try to remember to take a photo of it, and that will be it for Christmas.

Settling into 2012

2012-01-07T20:07:00.001-07:00

Wed was the first yoga class of the year. Our regular instructor is still recovering. I survived.

I don't even want to think about Thursday. Friday was better for several reasons. My family doctor looked at the non-icky medical imaging, and agreed that I didn't have a stress fracture. He seemed to be under the impression he had ordered the tests, and was a bit puzzled he couldn't find the notes. In any case, he also cleared me to run, carefully.

It was also good in part because of this. New computer toys are always good. So much better than the two small monitors. Now I can see all the Sharepoint admin pages, and get a reasonable amount of working real estate.

I didn't spin in the evening like I had planned. This was waiting for me when I got home. Plus wine. Can you blame me? (I don't know why the pic unrotated itself.)

We ended up watching a movie made in 1949. Yes, more than 70 years ago. No, I wasn't around to watch it when it first came out, smartasses. One of the things I LOVE about the old movies is the short credits. I should have timed them more exactly, but the front credits can't be any longer than a minute, and the end credits are about 30 seconds. I don't care how big a movie buff you are, nobody cares who the caterer was.

The movie? Oh yes, Adam's Rib. It's showing its age, of course, but who can't enjoy watching Tracey and Hepburn do what they do best? Plus, all the hidden assumptions buried in the film. They had a servant. Their apartment is huge. The roads (in New York City) are essentially empty with the occasional huge car. People taking dictation. People dressing formally for a dinner party. And of course, the central driver of the movie, the roles of women in society. Men too, though they didn't realize that when they were making it.

Today was a busy day. Here's a quick summary. You'll to read from the bottom up. So sue me. Googles, tri shorts, Nuun, Parmesan Reggano cheese, pasta, salty chocolate tarts, buns, bread, rack of lamb, chick peas, kidney beans. You guess what came from where.

I was awake, so I headed off to Talisman and was in the water very shortly after 6. I was alone in the pool. Nice. Swam reasonably well for 750 m and then it fell apart. Kick, pull, drill, backstroke rounded out the swim part. Stretched really well doing water core and yoga. Hot tub, though it's not as nice as Renfrew. I'm going to have to ask why there is that blast of cold air blowing in from just above the door to the training pool.

Lots of the guys have tattoos, and I remembered last week I saw a guy with a huge parking meter tattooed onto his chest. I'm just not sure what that means. Surprisingly few M dots, though maybe I'm just swimming at the wrong times.

Zoomed around in a big circle, taking a slightly scenic route picking up various goodies. Waved to Kris and Sophia as I passed their house. I could swear I saw a sign for Illuminati Staffing at one point. I was amused watching someone try to deal with their car at the Kingsland Market. I didn't think he was going to get out of the parking lot. Back, forth, back, forth, frantically wrenching the steering wheel each time. Here's the route, done calmly and efficiently, except for the guy behind Tri It. (my fave triathlon store) who signaled left, and mostly turned left, before changing his mind and turning right to nearly hit me. Blue dots are where the stores are.

I was amused by a number of things today. Yum bakery at the Calgary Farmer's market is simply astonishing, but the line up is a bit of a gong show most of the time. Today, for instance. One girl had been peering in at the cabinet with her buddy. Believe me, the cabinet is well worth peering into! She picked out something for her buddy to get and said she'd wait in the aisle, and then stood up and turned around. We ended up nearly nose to nose. I hadn't realized she was that tall (wearing flat boots), and I don't think she was expecting anyone to be standing there, let alone anyone she couldn't loom over. We did that little side to side dance, then she was gone.

One guy at the pool was doing 25 m in 14 strokes and about 20 seconds. Could have watched him swim for a while.

As a guy, I'm liking the recent fashion of a shirt or sweater over leggings or yoga pants. It's a very good look for some women. But let's just say that a sweater short enough to show off leggings that are stretched enough to make it clear the undies are white and full cut, is not a good look. That's what mirrors or friends are for.

The south entrance to Kingsland is a bit of a hallway, with a left turn a few steps in. I've talked about this before, but what IS IT about doorways? Several people walked through the doorway in an acceptably purposeful fashion, then stopped without signaling their intent. I ended up wading through them.

Most people hold the door. Gender doesn't matter much. One pauses and holds the door for the next person, if they're only a few steps away. It makes me Grrrrrr when person one holds the door for person two, who slithers through quicker than a kid after a cookie or a boy's first time, letting the door close behind them. It's like they think the door has cooties. There I am number three, clutching at a door closing in my face. It's people like them what cause social unrest.

The roads and stores were actually much quieter than I expected. Maybe people are all shopped out.

Not a workout

2012-01-03T19:48:00.001-07:00

No workout today. At least not so far. Maybe later. Thing is, I feel like going to bed now. So here's some other stuff.

The following is two things actually. One sees bizarre stuff during the festive season. This map shows the gas bar for our local Co-op. The blue circle show shows where cars line up and turn right to go south. The red line and arrow shows where a guy in a big-ass pickup barreled past us, going out the in lane, headed straight across 3 lanes, up and over the curb for the median, and accelerates hard going north. Idiot.

The markup was done in an iPad app called Skitch. It takes a photo, a map, a screen shot, and gives you a bunch of tools to mark it up, and you can save it a couple of ways depending on what you want to do with it. It's lots of fun to play with.

I walk through City Hall on the days Linda goes to work. You never know what's going to be there. It's the 100th anniversary of Calgary Parks and Recreation this year. This sculpture is a bunch of hockey sticks screwed together in a rough J shape. I also took video of it and will post that if there is a demand for it.

Just on the other side of a pillar is this sculpture that I think is really neat. It's from a Sistership Calgary Dragon Boating association, representing a symbol of teamwork, exercise, and survival to commemorate anyone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Here's my latest read. I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes, and loved it. This is like a visit back to a beloved place. It's not quite the same, but it's pretty darned close. The story is told by Watson, in a style very similar to Conan Doyle's, with the theory being that Watson really wrote it and had it hidden for 100 years because it was "to monstrous to appear in print". Many of the characters show up, Mrs. Hudson, Mycroft, Lestrade, the Irregulars, one old "friend" in an unexpected role, and some new ones as well.

It's a fair mystery, in that if you've paid attention you'll be able to solve it before the end. And really there are two mysteries, so you get two tries. The atmosphere is pitch perfect. I really enjoyed it. If you like Holmes you'll like this. It's a fair addition to the canon.

Things can only get better from here, right?

2012-01-02T18:31:00.003-07:00

Even though I was tempted to have a drink for a buddy who couldn't drink on New Year's Eve, I went to bed early. Short weekend and all. I'm not sure why, but my left hip flexor and some associated muscles have been really tight just recently.

On Sunday I was trying an easy spin to see if I could get them to relax. Not. My legs felt like wood, and I called it after only 45 minutes. Stretched a little bit before and a bit more after, but it didn't do much form me.

Monday I was in the pool again, with the lifeguards messing with my head about which pool was open for how long. I was really creaky and sore. My whole left side was unhappy about walking, and feeling the same about swimming. Clunky and cranky, out of breath, and little water feel at all. Some kick, pull, finger tip drag, fist, backstroke. Some struggle, flail, and thrash to go along with it.

At work I was trying not to just sit all day. I was looking forward to the desk drop races (I'd figured out a killer handicap) but no, not today. Maybe first thing tomorrow.

By the time the day was over I was feeling much less creaky and did a good stretch and twist session. My hips are still tight.

Bed early tonight. Things will be better tomorrow.

My inner shark likes the new pool

2011-12-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

The water feel is coming back! I had a few days out of the pool. You know, Christmas, Boxing Day. Minor distractions. Then Wednesday I had a few good laps.

It didn't quite work out to swim in the morning, but I walked from Talisman (the company) to Talisman (the pool) after finishing up. I was pretty pleased. There was something that I thought was going to take all day and be prone to errors, but I figured out a way of doing it in less than 2 hours, with much less chance of errors. Yay me!

The pool was a bit more crowded but still I had a lane to myself. Right from the start I relaxed and had the feel. I can see the digital pace clock after turning, and was keeping a pretty steady pace. There was no plan. I relaxed, and chatted with my inner shark. He liked some of the scenery, and definitely likes the new pool. I didn't really think about time, other than noting that every 50 was quicker than a minute. I didn't think about breathing, because I wasn't breathing hard. I didn't really think about my arms working, because they were just going around as my body slid forward. There was no effort involved, just catching the water, relaxing, and going with the flow. There was some thinking about prey, but that's the inner shark talking.

After a while I wondered how long I'd been swimming, since Linda was coming to get me, and I didn't want her waiting long. I looked at my watch and realized I had one more lap for 1000 m. There had been a couple moments where I was starting to lose it, but I managed to relax and get the flow and feel back. The 1000 took 19:25, and felt easier than all the previous swims for the last couple weeks. Even Wednesday I struggled and barely did 500 m before things started falling apart and getting slow and sloppy.

So I'm a happy puppy about that. It's still well off my pace from earlier this year, but the feel is more important than pace at the moment. After the K, I did 5x 50 on 1:15. Last week that turned into gasp city and struggling to be any quicker than 55 seconds. Today they were all under 50 seconds and the fastest was 45 seconds. Yes, I'm happy about that too. Progress. A little bit of dolphin kick and some backstroke and cool down finished it off.

We watched Inception tonight, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Recent "action" movies bore me. In fact, almost all Hollywood films bore me because they are so predictable. This wasn't boring. It's an interesting story, and you have to pay attention. I sort of assumed it was all going to come out ok, but the road to get there was fascinating.

First movie of 2011

2011-12-28T19:56:00.002-07:00

Up early this morning. Crappy sleep. No idea why. I was headed towards the pool by 5:45, and in the water by 6:15. Swam 45 minutes and did some stretching and core. Somehow my swim is working my low back in ways I don't remember. Water feel is coming back, now if only the swim muscles in my back would get with the program.

Quiet day at work. I get to break in a new office roomie on the 3rd, but it shouldn't be too bad. Got lots done in the peace and quiet, and left early. It's weird to be coming home in daylight.

From there we wanted to run some errands, and we ended up at the new Sherlock Holmes movie. We quite enjoyed it, though the price of the tickets was a bit of a gasp. I'm almost positive this is the first movie we saw in the theatre in 2011. Mostly we are rent the DVD kind of people.

The four wines of Christmas, and a bonus whine

2011-12-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

Great Christmas food goes well with wine. Or is it the other way round? I can never remember.

The Tannat was bottled August 2010. It's a rich slightly spicy red wine that goes well with rich or spicy meats.

The Gentil was bottled July 2008, and is a beautiful gold color. It's developed a very fruity character that can hold up surprisingly well with all sorts of food.

The Grenache is one of my favourites, bottled November 2007. It's good to drink just by itself, or with lighter foods, such as organic range fed chicken marinated in a specialty Linda sauce and then BBQed.

The Tempranillo is from Spanish grapes grown in Australia, bottled June 2009. Good with everything, and I'm starting to run low, more's the pity.

We had a wonderful little stay-cation. Linda is still off. I have to go in for the next 3 days, mainly because I need to have some stuff ready for early January. I don't anticipate working full days. Go in, move some stuff forward, consult with some of the stakeholders, and bail out. The stakeholders are all going to be in, hoping the migration goes well.

I ran this morning, only a half hour till my hip flexors started complaining a bit. I was really working on running from my core, and trying to be light on my feet. Everything feels good. During the really good stretch session afterwards, I was playing with my left toes. What used to hurt when I tried to curl them under doesn't hurt nearly as much. I think the break from running did some good.

The whine comes from visiting the mall today. I needed new pants. Just to piss Susi off, it took less than 20 minutes to figure out what size I needed for two different styles of pants (business casual black pants, and jeans), try on about 4 different pants before I got it right for each, stand in line, pay, and get out.

Just lately I think my biggest complaint about people is that they walk so darn slow! Seriously. I'm not whining about people with kids, or about geezers that can't move any faster. They have their own problems and walking slow is the least of them. Or the physically handicapped. I'll cut them all the slack they need and more besides.

I'm whining about adults all slack-jawed with the intellectual effort of deciding where to go next. Or so it appears. It makes me nuts when people shamble along like half slaughtered sheep, not knowing where they are going, or why, or what they will do if they ever get there. They plod along in bucolic herds, getting in the way of those of us that have some place to be.

Every now and then someone ahead of me, but behind the herd (I'm not talking about The Herd) will pull out and try to pass, just as I'm about to. Typically they don't signal their intention, and several of them have nearly been trampled. Or they'll decide to go somewhere else at random, just to mess up those of us who like orderly traffic patterns.

What don't these people understand about walk right? If you must gawk, then pull over and find a safe place to do so. In a mall there's lots of these chairs put out for the geezers. That's as good a place as any. But to stop in the middle of the mall where people are walking is a declaration of stupidity. Pity there isn't a bounty on them. And really, what in a mall is there to gawk at? Either you know where you're going, so go there. Or you stop, and look at a map so you know where to go. There is no in between.

I have less problems with oncoming people. My path is easy to project because it's a straight line, and I'm looking in that direction. I'm on the right. Self preservation usually has people swerving though sometimes at the last minute. The lobby doorway at Banker's Hall is so badly designed. Sigh.

But it turns out that the problem often arises even before the walking. I really don't like going places with a group. Even something as simple as a group of people in a small block of offices going to lunch is all too often a gong show. Someone doesn't know where it is. Someone forgot their coat, or has one more email to send. Someone can't or won't walk fast. One woman I used to work with didn't seem to grasp what an open elevator door meant. How hard can it be? Jacket. (Scarf, hat, mitts, boots if necessary.) Go. Stop when there. This isn't even talking about deciding where to go.

Add in bikes, or running shoes, or other workout gear, to say nothing of weather, and the problems are compounded. That's why I like to do my workouts alone. I can go when I'm ready. Sometimes that's NOW. Sometimes it's waiting a bit to see if it warms up, or to see just what that dark cloud is going to do. Or waiting for the poop fairy. Adding in some high maintenance triathlete fussing about drink bottles, or going on about pace, or the workout plan, or someone that can't decide what to wear ruins all the fun.

Oddly enough, I think of myself as a patient person. When I need to wait, I can do so, and even better if I have a book, or my iGadgets. But when it involves people trying to think about that next footstep and the smoke from the grinding gears is getting in my eyes, I'm not so patient. Maybe I should work on that this year. Perhaps a short range tranquilizer dart gun is the thing. It would be so much easier to step over recumbent bodies, than to try to dodge around erratically moving ones.

Under a minute to decorate the tree

2011-12-24T19:54:00.000-07:00

This was a nice Christmas Eve. For once I had no shopping to do. It was weird, and relaxing to have started and finished my shopping nearly a week ago.

We had a very leisurely start to the day, reading papers, drinking coffee, and cuddling the furry mammal of the house. Once that was done I was on the bike for 1.5 hrs, doing a variety of stuff, sweating hard. No pool smell, though, I think my run yesterday got it out of my skin.

Today is tree day, as I think of it. In our house we decorate the tree on Christmas Eve. There are times in the past I have thought of this as a chore, but this year the grinch in me is a bit subdued. I was looking forward to it, though I'm not sure why. It's something we do together, and I was planning to take a time lapse movie of it. Some of you might remember I did video last year and chopped it down to a reasonable length. This is about 50 seconds. The amusing part is watching Amelia watching us for the first little bit. Hmmm, you might need to widen your screen to see it all.

Here's the other side of the tree when we were done, showing the little diorama that Linda likes to make.

We don't have big plans for the day. Essentially we're going to open our presents, and hang out for the day. I'll probably watch some video. It will be a rest day, so no workout for me. It's supposed to be nice so maybe we'll take a walk down in Fish Creek.

Tonight we're going to work on another glass of wine and watch Love Actually.

Something for everyone

2011-12-23T19:01:00.000-07:00

Lots of stuff for the blog today; in one sense it's a bit of a catch up, since there's a photo from earlier in the week I want to share. But most of it happened today.

Here's that photo. I love Bosc pears. LOVE THEM!!! They are so juicy and have such an intense pear taste that I don't eat any other kind. Here's a photo of my adventure in eating the most recent one at work.

That was just a bit tricky, since I had to dry off my hand before digging the phone out of my pocket. Good thing I noticed the label before taking another bite. You have to eat these over a plate or dish or something, or else you have to wipe up all the juice after.

Except if I turn you all on to these pears there will be fewer left at ~~Coop~~, I mean at the store we do our shopping. What I really meant to say was these are terrible. I don't know why I took a pic of it.

I'm on a swimming streak! Three times now in a week. Swam 45 minutes, with minor shoulder complains and tired arms. I'm beginning to think the water at Talisman is just a little thicker than the water in other pools. It can't be because I'm weak and feeble from being a swim slacker, can it?

My Facebook buddies know this already, but I discovered a new way to make coffee taste bad. After the swim, shower, change routine, I got a coffee on the way out. A muffin too, if you MUST know. It was good. What with juggling coffee, muffin, and swim bag, I sloshed coffee all over my hand as I was getting into the car. I licked it off my hand. Ick. I won't be doing that again.

Work was work, and I bailed out early. It was such a nice day! Pity so many drivers on the road were idiots. I was nearly hit twice. The geezers were out in full force at the Farmer's Market and Coop. Standing there, like they haven't been in a supermarket since wartime rationing. Still, I was calm, patient.

As I was carrying several bags of groceries and a bundle of flowers out to the car, my doctor's office phoned. They got the disc with the bone scan, and he wants to talk to me. Now I'm nervous again. It's tough to juggle bags, flowers, phone, and try to remember an appointment. I have been known to take a note while on (the old fashioned land-line) phone, hang up, and be unable to find the pen or the note. But I remembered this time. I might have to go look at the scans again.

Once home I realized how nice it was, and decided to run. Doctor's call and all. Yes, something I haven't done for a bit over a month. I let my legs decide how fast, and just tried to keep my feet light and turning over quickly. I ran 5 K in just over 30 minute, but I didn't start my watch, so I don't know exactly. Thorough stretch before and after, especially rolling the little ball on the soles of my feet. As of a few hours later my feet feel fine. If anything, my hip flexors are talking to me.

I found a great new app for the iPad. It's called Skitch, and lets you quickly and easily mark up photos, screen shots, maps, anything really. It's fun. You can put circles and arrows and text and other stuff in the starting image using your finger, and send it to twitter (like that does me a lot of good!), email it, send it to Evernote (and there's another app you should have) or save it back to the camera roll. Here's the first thing I tried.

Which is more or less the route for one of my 5 K runs. The one I did today in fact. That blue dot isn't quite where we live. It turns out a finger is a bit big and hides what you're looking at, so if I was going to do a real version of this I'd use the stylus. I'll probably spend some time playing with this over the next 4 days of not working.

I'm sure liking the trailer for The Hobbit, and Prometheus.

Zite is another app on my iPad I look at a lot. There are some delightful surprises every now and then. Here is one.

I guess you'd have to be a fan to know that one in the middle of the bottom row is a blog I follow, SUAR. I love it when she posts a new one, since you never know what you'll get. Even more so than me, versatile as I am.

As a follow up to the rant about the medical system still being in the medieval era, I got a note from the doctor that ordered the bone scans, (not the family doctor that wants to talk to me). Things aren't as bad as they seem. In fact there is such a system. I also got a note from a blog buddy indicating she had used that sort of system here in Alberta. There's just a peculiar circumstance here in Calgary.

I just finished the Red Green book, How to do Everything. So true. So much good advice. Guys, get it, and don't let your significant other read it. The book I just started is Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, all about the various adventures with gravity. Very interesting.

Linda is watching the Borgias. Someone just sassed the pope and interrupted him twice. I predict he won't be alive long.

Tonight is the start of 4 days off. Yahoo! That photo of Tannat wine on my Facebook page? All gone now.

Deep thoughts

2011-12-22T21:46:00.002-07:00

Or what passes for it, anyways. I was tagged by TriMOEngr to come up with at least 5 deep thoughts. About me, no less. Here goes.

1. This blog started out being an exercise blog. Mostly training notes, and a few race notes. Over time and more than 1050 posts it has expanded to include all sorts of stuff that interest me. Wine. Books. TV or movies. Thoughts about life. Photos or my little movies. The rants seem to be the most popular feature. Essentially I'll write about whatever happens to be interesting me when the time comes. I'm not much fussed about it being interesting to you. Either it will be or it won't be, and I don't have any control over that. I figure if you like it you'll read and you might comment. Or not, though I'd prefer if you did. But then all of you are busy and sometimes I'm very wordy. I can picture someone wanting to get a quick amusing blog hit, opening mine, and being horrified by the wall of text. But then sometimes I keep it short. There are several posts under a half dozen words. Sometimes I'm witty or amusing in a wordy way, but rarely funny. You never know what you'll get with me. I'm versatile like that.

2. One of the things I've talked about every now and then is what good fortune we've had to be alive here and now. And by here I mean the more civilized parts of the world. Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and a few other places. We live in one of the safest societies yet created, that allows us more personal freedom than most people can cope with. We are free to choose our occupations, our friends, where we live, our leisure activities, our marriage partners, and much else. The advances in medicine are such that someone dying at 70 is regarded as being cheated. Our entertainment choices are endless. Anybody that wants it can be educated in almost any subject to whatever level they like. Our society and choices would boggle the minds of anyone alive much more than 100 years ago. And yet too many people claim they are bored. In all seriousness I say that whenever you hear someone saying "I'm bored", you need to treat them like they are saying "I'm really really stupid" and run far away. It is my good fortune that I'm interested in lots of stuff, and have the means and willingness to indulge my curiosity. I'm versatile like that.

3. It's coming up to the end of the year; a time normally given to reviewing the year past, and looking forward to the year coming. 2011 was a really good year for me, all things considered. I worked all but 6 weeks. Considering the last couple years I didn't work as much as I wanted to, it's beginning to balance out. I'm working at least until March, so that's a good thing. I didn't do as much on the exercise front as in 2010, but I could hardly do more. It was good to dial back and work on a more reasonable life balance. I started the year with a painful right knee and having just begun to get treatment. Massage, Active Release Therapy, and Prolotherapy shots had a wonderful result. I guess I should mention all the various exercises and stuff I as doing too. Just recently I've been feeling stronger on the bike than ever before, which feels really good after it sucking so bad last year. The run was good over the summer. I haven't run for a month waiting to see what the issue was with my left foot, and I've been cleared to run again. Cautiously. My swim started the year awesome! I did a great swim camp, and shortly after swam 7 K at once before pooping out. Over the year I didn't swim so much due to scheduling issues, but I'm getting more regular in the pool now. I'm sure it will come back quickly. 2011 is my first full year for being on Facebook. A mixed blessing. I'm in touch with cousins, and friends in a way that is new to me that I like a lot, which is great. I'm also still a bit disturbed by Facebooks cavalier attitude to privacy. I'm careful with what I put on Facebook, and have it locked down pretty tight. If you happen to be wondering why I've never responded to anything to do with any of the the games or other applications, I don't trust them at all. I block all such requests and any info to do with third party applications. Facebook has exposed me to lots of different points of view, new information sources, and all sorts of neat stuff, which I like a lot. I try to contribute my share. I'm versatile like that.

4. It's hard to explain what I do for a living. Business Analysis covers a lot of ground. I'm a bit of a geek, in that I have worked closely with developers and database administrators, but I'm not either. In the software world I do requirements gathering, documenting specifically what the software should or should not do, testing whether it does it or not, software administration, and training users. I have also worked closely with techs and engineers from various fields, but I'm not an engineer, or vessel inspector, or pipeline integrity tech, though given some of my writing and stuff I've edited you could be fooled into thinking so. At several jobs I've been the bridge between those groups of people, since typically they don't speak each other's language. I love playing with data, and finding patterns, but I'm not a database modeler. At the moment I'm working on an SAP implementation project, building forms for requesting Master Data updates, helping people document the processes for doing so in an orderly fashion, and helping administer a Sharepoint site that we think will make that whole process a lot easier. We'll find out in a few days. I never cease to be amazed at how people can mess up what ought to be a simple thing, or find new ways to crash or break software. People are what make my jobs fascinating and frustrating all at the same time. But I don't get too fussed about it. I figure there's lots of ways to make a living and if one way doesn't work out, I'll find another. I'm versatile like that.

5. Even though I think of myself as just a little smarter than the average bear, I remain fully aware of my deficiencies. Music, for example. My former office roomie knew everything about music. I know nothing. I can confidently state that I never ever would have invent the Walkman. (anyone remember those?) Nor would I have invented the iPod. Even had been in a position to invest in them on the ground floor, I wouldn't have. I know this. All the time I see people wandering around with their earphones in. Even when they are swimming, which is a perversion to me. I think it shows a disconnection from society that is troubling. Everybody wants their own soundtrack. But I'm old enough that I remember transistor radios being new. I had silence as a backdrop for what I remember of my early life. I had piano lessons when I was a kid, and didn't like them, even though I'm told I was good at it. So music never really took with me, and I rarely have the earphones in. I still think of the Beatles and Rolling Stones as new music, and most rap is an obnoxious noise. Same with TV. I still remember the day a television showed up in our house. I was in Grade 1 or 2. It was smaller than the monitor I'm looking at now, and it was a fuzzy black and white picture. Aside from the odd bit of Ed Sullivan that caught my attention, I don't remember much of it before Star Trek came on. I've never owned a TV, and it's only very, very recently that I've come to accept that some stories on TV can be really good. But I still don't pay much attention to it. Back then I'd rather go play outside. Right now, I'm writing this with the only background noise being Linda watching The Borgias. Now, in a general sense, I'd rather read, or workout, or drink wine, or visit friends. I'm versatile like that.

Buddy water running

2011-12-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

So there I was this morning, wandering into the pool area at Talisman. Some of you know that I'm really, really short sighted. So I peer around, trying not to bump into anyone, or trip over anything, and hope nobody thinks I'm being a perv.

I could see someone water running, and wondered if it was my buddy Katie. Sure enough, before I had to get all squinty-eyed and risk calling out, she yelled out my name. I slipped into the water beside her so as to not splash the 'do, and started running along with her. She'd been at it since shortly after they opened, and had a half hour to go. So I ran with her and we chatted, and chatted and chatted. We hadn't seen each other for a while so there was lots to chat about. Good times! That water running is hard work.

After she left I swam a bit, nice and easy, thinking about my stroke. Then I went to work. It takes about 25 minutes, no rushing, to get from the pool, shower, shave, dry off, dress, walk to the car, drive to work, park, and walk into my office. That's a good number to know. Then I can eat breakfast.

This evening was yoga and I clicked my back in a wonderful way after doing some pigeon pose. Things are in that odd sort of feeling as they get used to being normal again.

Shopping is all done, which is a record for being early for me. I'm sort of missing the last minute rush. Maybe I'll go get some stocking stuffers or something. I'm sure I can hear an LCD TV calling me. Or maybe it's the cookies.

Good news non-icky medical images

2011-12-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, good news! I was a bit nervous about being told I was going for X-Rays in addition to the bone scan my doctor requested for me. In my world, X-Rays are for teeth and suspected broken bones. But here we are! This is a side view of my foot, looking from the inside. There is fancy language, but note the slight spur for the achilles tendon and where it hooks into the plantar fascia. There are interesting striations in the bone structure that are good. There's also a bit of a build up under my big toe pad, but nothing to get worked up about.

Heres the pay day image for me, my left foot as if I was looking down at it. The metatarsals are all there, hooked together right, and nothing broken. Yay! There are some whiter bits indicating some build up of bone, especially on that arched bit, but nothing to worry about.

Here, people, is what a bone scan looks like. Picture me lying on my back, toes up, with my left foot on the right side of this image. The whiter spots indicate biological activity. You can see the white spot on my left foot under my big toe pad. Not the middle toe where it is sensitive.

This is me lying on my right side, with my left leg further back. The white spots show the little spur on the achilles tendon, and on the keystone bone (whatever it's called) where the X Ray shows a bit of build up.

This is the same position, only showing my knees. Odd that the left one is much whiter than the right. But all looking good.

In the end, there is nothing astonishing in all the images, given my age and recent activity levels. Doing barefoot running, or even in a minimalist shoe is right out. I'm to be in a well padded shoe, and replace as needed. Which tells me I need new shoes for walking around, as the ones I use now are scuffed bare and no padding left.

I can swim my brains out, (keeping an internal eye out for my shoulders), bike lots while being careful building to peak stresses, and very cautiously, run again. Lightly. Not too much to start, not too long. Paying attention to how it feels. Lightly. Which for a big guy like me is going to be a bit of a challenge. But there are things I can do about that. I am a guy. I can change, if I want to. I guess.

Once home I was on the bike for a brisk hour spin. Good warm up, then 95 rpm while backing off on watts to a high moderate level, well aerobic. Then some easy, then 105 at one gear easier, slightly lighter effort. Then some easy and a few minutes at 85 rpm but several gears harder to start exploring a new watt peak. Focus on spin, and scuffing my feet across the bottom and back up. Cool down.

Stretched after, twists, bends. Rollered the bottom of my feet with the ball and that felt really good. I'm a happy puppy with all this info.

My business analyst brain is horrified by these images and the whole process. Why? Because to view them my doctor had to boot into Windows XP because the viewing software doesn't run on Windows 7 or Vista. It turns out that of the four major labs in town, they each use different software. That is madness. Even on my new Mac I couldn't view the images, but then I remembered last time I had X Rays. My old computer still has that software, on an older version of the OS. It took a minute for it to chug through all the data, and another minute for me to remember the interface, but that's how I got the screen shots.

I'm astonished that I had to bring the discs to my doctor. Why can't he securely log into their network to view the images, screen shot the appropriate ones for my file and to review them with me, and log out? In fact, why did he have to fill out a paper form (PAPER for crying out loud!) for me to carry to the clinic? This is essentially a medieval technology.

Now picture the process if something terrible happens to me. I get wheeled to a clinic or the hospital. They take images. They have no idea what's normal for me. For any time over the next couple of years maybe, the images I got today are probably relevant information. For that matter, the ones of my elbow, and maybe even the ones that my dentist has could all be of value in determining just how badly I'm injured. Yet none of these are available. In fact, the only info about me they know is what's on my Road ID (don't leave home for a workout without it), and who knows how long it will take to get through to someone at one of the numbers. While it's nice they get hold of Linda, it could be crucial to get my medical files. Why aren't all our medical records in a secure database available to medical staff Canada-wide?

So while I'm at it, if any of you in Calgary are having problems with your knees or feet, Dr. MacDonald specializes in knees. And runners, with a side of triathletes and motocross athletes. His clinic offers a number of services. I'd be happy to tell you how to find him.

50 m almost all to myself

2011-12-19T19:31:00.002-07:00

Over the last bunch of years, all my swimming has been done in a City pool, unless I've noted otherwise. A couple swims at Talisman, a couple at Mount Royal or SAIT, a few open water are the exceptions. Overall, the City pools are pretty good, especially Renfrew. I really liked swimming there. The staff are great, and there's a good dynamic in the patrons. Mainly older European or Chinese people the times I was swimming, but the entire time is full of Guten Tag, Cho San, or Bon Guorno. I met and got to know a bunch of people there, Lynette, Deb, Lori, Todd, Jarret, Jamila, Justin and his wife Lisa, Brenda, Ms Backstroke, the two Italian dudes, Lana (a para-olympian, which I hadn't known at the time) and a bunch of other people on more casual terms. The only thing, ONLY THING I don't like about Renfrew is that the pace clock is essentially unusable to the people who want it the most, since it's lined up with the floatie lane.

Plus, the hot tub there is amazing.

Yes, I meant to have those 7 words be a paragraph on their own. The tub is that amazing.

The other pools are somewhat less desirable. Canyon Meadows occasionally has the men's shower room smelling like something crawled into the drains and died there. But otherwise it's good, with the pace clock in the right place. Plus it's the closest, and I know a few people there too. Glenmore is nice, aside from the locker room guy that creeped me out. It's just a bit tricky to get to. Inglewood is a funky old pool, very shallow at the shallow end. No, really, very shallow. As in, you'd better have your flip turn nailed. Bob Bahn grossed me out. Three drunks peeing put out more fluid than the showers. And the patrons there were pig ignorant about sharing lanes.

Swimming at Renfrew really worked out transit wise, since I could drop Linda downtown, hit the pool, and then proceed on to whichever job in the NE I happened to hold at the time, or head home if I wasn't working. Over the last year it hasn't worked out quite as well, and I've been a bit of a slacker.

I used to swim at Talisman Centre, back when it was called Lindsay Park, back when I was working shift work in the mid 80's. It was nice then, and after the renovation it's really nice now. It's just expensive compared to the City pools. But it's nicer, and has a track, and all sorts of fancy-pants weight equipment I'll never use, and gyms, and I don't know what else all. Well I do know about the 10m dive tower but I have better sense than to go off it.

So I finally bit the bullet and got a pass. Today I shared a 50 m pool with 3 other people at most. I only swam 45 minutes, and it was a bit slow, but I wasn't pushing it. Lots of kick, and pull, and some fist drill. Such a nice pool. And close to work. Let's see how this works out.

After the swim I went down for the bone scan. This is a two part deal. The first part is a preliminary scan and an injection of radioactive goop. The green glow hardly shows at all, and my work peeps were polite enough not to mention it. After a few hours I went back for the second part, 5 or 6 scans of my feet and knees. She asked if I had pain in my knees or any issues with them, so they picked something up. She took a couple shots of them in particular.

Then they sent me across the hall to the x ray machine, and had three done on my left foot. As it turns out, they only put the 3 x rays on the CD, and now I have to go back and get the bone scans put on there as well. Which is what my doctor really wanted in the first place. I was hoping for the news of what's happening in that foot, and I suspect with them wanting x rays, that there is something broken. Which would be bad. But I am remaining positive, till I get told otherwise.

In other news:

My yoga teacher's entourage is taking good care of her. That got real exciting for them for a while but seems to be getting better.
My contract at Talisman (the company) has been renewed until the end of March. I sign the paperwork on Thursday. Yay!
The first episode of The Borgias was really good. We'll be buying the season's worth of DVDs.
I am looking forward to putting up the Christmas tree. There are times I haven't. The plan is to time lapse movie it.

A quickie, and a Christmas card rant

2011-12-18T15:58:00.000-07:00

The quickie was today's workout. Only an hour on the bike, plus some stretching. Warmed up, 30 minutes steady at a sweaty breathing hard pace, then cool down. Felt good.

The unquickie part is Christmas cards. Linda has a bunch of really nice ones, classy even. That went really well as we worked through my address book. Then the computerized world stopped and Linda went looking for her notebook that has a succession of names and addresses. Let's just say that some of her sisters move a lot, and leave it there. That notebook is nowhere to be found. Like many other things, a great many other things, it's in the house. Somewhere. Cuddled, no doubt in amongst other papers excavated from a surface in preparation for something or other.

So a bunch of Christmas cards are in the mail. If you get one, all is well and good. You will know who you are. Things are more complicated if you don't get one. I could draw up a nice little Visio diagram to document the thought process you could go through to decide if you are upset with me. Essentially it comes down to the variables of have you sent a card, and whether you expect a card from us, and do we know your address. With me it is entirely possible I know where you live, and yet not know the address.

Christmas cards themselves trouble me. Families are increasingly living away from each other. I have family in Ontario and BC. I have friends and acquaintances throughout Alberta, many places in BC, Saskatchewan, Ontario, California, Oregon, and Washington, as well as some less likely places, such as Georgia and Tennessee, South Africa, and Germany. One couple moves around a lot; they could be in Canmore, or any number of places in Mexico or Central America.

I stay in touch with some of these people via email, Skype, Facebook, or my blog. There is still one person more old-fashioned than me (she's 92 for crying out loud, so I guess she's allowed) who occasionally writes real letters on paper. My brother recently discovered FaceTime, and has been having fun with it. I can safely say, dear brother, that 3 am UK time does nothing for you at all.

In spite of that Christmas Cards still come. I don't know if it's a sense of tradition or what. So far the web versions of them are dreadful. Let's look at the sequence of personalization here, short of an actual visit for hugs:

Personal, handwritten letter. This is the real deal. You know it's them, and you know they put a lot of thought into it, over a fairly significant period of time. Unfortunately, as anyone who has received one of these from me knows, it's not exactly an easy means of communication. My handwriting sucks so bad even I can't read it if I write quickly. If I'm taking notes, on paper, I'm printing.
Personal, printed letter via mail. Assuming there is significant personal content adding up to a coherent whole, this is almost as personal as the handwritten letter, and certainly more legible. As the degree of boilerplate goes up, you get -
Non-personal printed letter in the mail. This is good for a mass update of what you've been up to for the last year, sanitized for public consumption. No juicy comments here about the presents your spouse sent back to you when he's been working in the field for too long. Children might be reading.
The traditional Christmas card. Which might include the non personal printed letter and a photograph.
E-mail greetings. This might be personal, or another in an ongoing conversation. But somehow it's not quite right for more serious occasions like Christmas. Which is why people send cards, I think.
Various "things" delivered over the web, demonstrating that some people have entirely too much time on their hands, and should be put to useful work.

At what point does one draw the line for Christmas cards and not send them? Some say only send them to the ones that sent them to you last year, but who has the organizational ability to keep track of that? It's all I can do to order coffee before we run out of beans. And really, how meaningful is getting a card? Am I telling a dirty secret here by saying we production line the thing? How much thought actually goes into the average Christmas card?

Meanwhile the card companies recycle their designs and continue to kill trees by the forest load. Do we really need a mass produced piece of paper to know that someone is thinking of us? And really, how much does one think of our family, friends, and acquaintances on a day to day basis? There are studies showing that people can keep track of 150 other people in a meaningful way. I suppose that tools like Facebook made it easier to keep track of people, but still, the real limitation is in our brain. At the moment I have 126 Facebook "friends", some of whom are rarely ever on. Plus some email and blog buddies, to say nothing of some real life work colleagues and I'm probably around the 150 mark. You'll notice I didn't include Facebook in the above list. I simply don't know where a status update saying "Merry Christmas, ho ho ho, bah humbug" belongs, but I suspect below email.

What about a blog? The cognoscenti reading this could infer a few names from my text, so it's personal to that extent, even if I don't know if they will read it. Does it make you happy to know that if you're reading this, and we were in person, you'd probably get a sincere "~~Bah Humbug!~~", I mean Merry Christmas and all that"? Some would get a big hug too, and you know who you are. In between glasses of wine and the snacks of course.

So. How many cards did you send out? How many did you get? So far. What does it take to get on, or off your list?

Regularity is hard

2011-12-17T16:26:00.000-07:00

Particularly when it comes to Thursdays. I'm not sure why, but Thursday evenings seem to be my nemesis lately. I get home intending to get on my bike, yet somehow the evening vanishes without me on my bike. In some ways it was easier during IM training. There was something to do almost every day, often twice a day. You just did it.

Now I'm trying to be a bit more balanced about it, and it's harder to do a little bit of exercise regularly than a lot. At least for me. Your milage may vary. Especially since the bike is the only real exercise these days. No running till I get the images of my foot. No swimming till I renew my City membership, or actually buy one at Talisman. Monday should be the day for that.

Today was two hours on the bike. Easy warmup, a steady workout but not over the top. Watched another few episodes of Sanctuary. I've still no idea why the second disc is fine and the first is not. Maybe the computer sees a scratch that I can't.

I've got my holiday reading all picked out. The Game of Thrones books. Packing for Mars, How to everything by Red Green, Civilization the West and the Rest, and Canadian Pie by Will Ferguson. That ought to keep me out of mischief for a while.

Going into Costco they have the displays of TV's right near the front. I actually wandered through and looked at them. We bought a plasma TV on Boxing Day 2002, so just about 9 years ago. It was a great deal at A&B Sound for mumblty thousand dollars. Plus a theatre in a box DVD player and speaker system. We got the extended warranty, which we usually don't, and it paid for itself through two repairs. The plasma is still working just fine, but I was astonished at how cheap they are. Our's is 40" in a 4:3 ratio, and the prices now for 42" widescreen plasmas are about one sixth what we paid way back then. Just amazing. No wonder everybody has two or three of them, and you see ads for 80" TV's. For the record that's nearly the size of our King bed. I'm just saying.

What got us into all this was the closure of many DVD rental places nearby. In fact, we haven't rented a DVD since the Rogers closed sometime during the summer. Nor do we subscribe to cable, and we don't want to. What a scam to buy so much crap to get so little you actually want. I'd love to get some shows through the internet, but neither the TV or the DVD player talk to the internet or to the iPad. So far my theory is to buy individual episodes to see if we like a show, watch it on the computer (a paltry 24" screen) then go on line to buy the season at the cheapest place we can find. It's getting harder to find regular DVD's since they are all migrating to Blue Ray. Our normal thing was to rent discs, unless we were sure to want to watch them again, but that isn't so much of an option anymore.

Eventually the plasma will die, which could be years, and then we'll go get a new one. Probably at half the price of today. Maybe if I buy the right box of cereal one will come in it.

Where do you get your visual entertainment from?

Oh, and after I posted this, the sunset was amazing. Starting from the South East, moving to the southwest, and then a panorama of it.

My tree grew roots

2011-12-14T21:38:00.003-07:00

Yoga tonight. This was one of my better nights when the poses just seemed to work for me. Tree pose, in particular. I remember the first time I tried it. The instructor covered her eyes. It was bad. Tonight, as I shifted my weight to one side, I could feel myself settling in, even though I wasn't hunching or curling up or anything. Then slowly putting the other foot just below my knee, feeling stable. Turn the knee out and flatten the hips. Then hands up, and letting the shoulders settle. I could feel the muscles in my feet and legs working, but rather than a frantic set of spasms to correct imbalances, it was a gentle series of contractions helping to keep me stable. I think this is the first time it's really happened like this. Nice.

The other poses were mostly relaxing and felt good. I'm glad I did the stretching and core session last night. I think that tonight would have been pretty bad otherwise.

My foot is feeling better, but next Monday will come quick enough.

It's getting to the point where I will have to think about Christmas shopping. Soon. Cards are being organized for a big push tomorrow night, except that neither of us really feel like doing cards. I'm thinking of doing a real time lapse movie of us decorating the tree, unlike the clunky movie from last year.

Work is funny at the moment. My work is coming in little spurts, with some calmness in between. One of my co-workers was over the top swamped, but I couldn't really help her. I think today she got to a point of calmness. The contracts for two other co-workers are up real soon now, and they are essentially checked out now. There's some transition stuff we have to do together but that's about it. People on the larger team are sort of in the state "we've jumped off the dock and it's too late to wonder just how cold the water is". Either that or it's a fatalistic acceptance that we're all doomed and there's no point struggling anymore. In a few weeks we will find out how well a year of intense effort is going to pay off, and just what has been overlooked.

The Heart of the Beast

2011-12-13T21:12:00.002-07:00

The Occupy movement had a bunch of tents set up in Olympic Plaza for about 2 months. As protests go it was pretty civil. Nobody got tear gassed, or tased, or beaten on. Some Calgarians were somewhat inconvenienced by the protest, in that some groups had rented the park, and ended up having to share it. I honestly don't know how much of an inconvenience it was. To the tune of about $53,000 all the taxpayers were inconvenienced, since that's what it will cost to clean up the damage done to the plaza, or so says the City.

I walked past the encampment twice every working day. It was a pretty motley bunch of tents. In one sense I support what they were on about. Our society is becoming more and more unequal, with the richest few percent getting more and more wealthy at a faster and faster pace. Almost everybody else is losing ground or just barely holding it. Clearly the benefits of a free market economy are not evenly distributed.

Nor should they be, entirely. Some people take larger risks with their money and time to provide goods or services that they hope will be popular with the public, and reap commensurate rewards. I don't think that many people begrudge the wealth that Steve Jobs accumulated. There are any number of people who are richly rewarded for their efforts, and who's to say it's wrong? It's not like anyone forced you to buy the Harry Potter books, or records by the Beatles (back when they sold records), or buy tickets to see Leo and Kate almost go down with the ship.

Then there are the scumbags that steal from you. They run banks, investment, insurance, and many other kinds of companies. They create complicated trading instruments that nobody understands, selling out their own clients in search of a way to internalize profit for them, and externalize all the costs to society at large. Their companies sell you cheap and shoddy goods made by slave or near-slave labour in China and other more obscure places, containing products that are not subject to materials testing because the only criteria is that they be cheap. Which explains why toys contained cadmium, and powdered milk contained melamine.

They own the government to subvert regulatory standards, and have laws changed to favour them and hinder their competitors. They own media companies to control the news. They control their own armies, and have hooks into the police and national armies, via that control of the government that I was talking about. In the USA, corporations are people, legally speaking, and can spend any amount of money to influence elections. Their only reason for existence is short term profits. Such people and groups are a blight on the free market system, a cancer that needs to be cut out.

It's a sad state of affairs, and I can totally understand why people are protesting. Eventually they left in the face of a court order, but they left a neat sculpture behind. I saw it Monday morning on the way into work, and it had been taken away by the time the work day was over. It's a handsome piece, quite well done as far as I could see. I'd like to see it put back, if there's a way to display it safely. I'm not sure how strong or durable it is. I do not want to see it hidden away in a warehouse somewhere. The elites need to be reminded that our society has to work for everyone.

Here's a pic. Well, crap, that didn't work. There is a nice photograph on Flickr, taken by Robert Thivierge. You can see it here. I tried to leave a comment or send a request to use it here, but effing Flikr!!!! Grr. It insists I have an account. Which I don't. And I can't get rid of it till I log into it. Which I can't. And it won't let me log in any other way. So that's been a bunch of Grrrr this evening.

While I was looking for another photo I could put here, I found this. I am thoroughly amused.

On another front, the heart of my beast has been a bit sluggish lately. The massage on Sunday wiped me out. I was a mess after. There was all sorts of tender bits. If JL lived closer I'd have had her come back next week. I should have stretched on Monday evening but I didn't.

Tonight I did a good stretch and core session, mainly trying to work out the tightness and get some mobility back. Then on the bike for an hour, doing mostly easy spin, trying to get my blood flowing. Then some more stretching after. It feels pretty good. It helped ease some of the frustrations from work. I don't think SAP is good for my blood pressure, or at least how some people are dealing with it is.

Well, at least it isn't a stress fracture. Yet.

2011-12-11T12:03:00.001-07:00

Thursday was the day for ART, though we didn't spend much time on my knee. I had him look at my left foot, and talked about what it's been feeling like. He poked and prodded and applied pressure in various places and asked me to describe the pain. There are a few spots that are actively painful when pressed even fairly lightly, though I didn't scream, and lots of spots where I feel varying degrees of discomfort.

There is a spectrum between a perfectly healthy bone, and one that has a stress fracture. Some of the bones in my feet appear to be closer to the fractured end of the spectrum, but not there yet. At the moment there is no telling what it would take to push that bone over the edge, and I don't want to find out. There are several people that have described the pain involved, and what they had to go through for recovery, so I'm quite happy to take their word for it, thank you very much.

On the 19th I'm going for a bone scan, and that should give me the skinny on what is going on in my foot. Until then, I'm not going to run at all. While it didn't hurt to run, there was some ache involved, and it's easily the highest impact thing I do. I will also be careful when doing flip turns.

It turns out that the pad under my foot bones has shifted towards my toes a bit, which is a common thing to happen to runners. I found that mildly amusing, since by my runner buddy standards, I barely run at all. If I should start real running, that pad will probably migrate down my toes and over top.

Saturday I was a slacker. I hung out at the house, puttered around a bit, and ended up watching 3 movies. Second Hand Lions, Four Weddings and Funeral, and Repo Man (the original). On Friday I watched Prizzi's Honor, and got a real kick out of it again. One of the things I really enjoy about contemporary movies is the things that are taken for granted. Dial telephones, and pay phones. Smoking (ack, choke). Photographs taken by a photographer and developed in a studio. Cars and home furnishings. Even the mechanics of the movie itself. I'm thinking of the pacing, at the moment. By today's standards, Prizzi's Honor is very slow. There are lots of scenes that would be cut out to speed it up.

Today I was up and got on my bike reasonably briskly. I was disappointed to find that my old Cube computer set up beside my bike doesn't want to play Sanctuary Season 2. It was happy enough with Season 1, so I'm a bit surprised. I might need to fuss with it a bit, but didn't want to before the ride.

I went through a couple of TED talks while riding. Borders and contemporary history. Interesting. Easy warm up. Then 1 hour fairly steady low to mid zone 3, with some standing, some faster spinning, and spin technique focus. Cool down. All in all it was 1.75 hours, and felt pretty good. Stretched after.

Soon JL will be here to give me a massage. I confidently expect to be a bit of a puddle for the rest of the day.

Drunken flesh-eating yoga

2011-12-07T21:22:00.001-07:00

I supplied the drunken part. There was an after work social for my contracting company. 350 people were confirmed. It was pretty full. I swilled down two drinks chatting with buddies, then headed out. Linda had been waiting at the library, and she drove. I was in no state.

There was just time to nibble a quick snack, change, and head out to yoga, over the wails of a cat convinced she was being abandoned forever. As our yoga instructor was taking off her jacket we noticed a huge, enormous, bulging bandage on one shoulder. There had been some issue and a medical practitioner had been digging in there with a spoon or something to get it out. We all sort of assumed it was flesh eating disease or something like it. Personally, I was waiting for a tentacle to spring out and start doing the various poses. No such luck.

Fortunately there was no really tough balance poses. Just as well. After class I felt great. Time for bed, it's ben a long day.

One of my readers noted an issue with disqus about replies and email. Maybe I missed it, but there is now a way for readers to subscribe to email on comments, so they get all replies to their comment. Since I'm now replying to all comments, you will find out what I said. How cool is that?

forgot a title, and it was so good

2011-12-06T20:37:00.001-07:00

Firstly, my bow to the season.

Now, back to the regularly scheduled "Bah, Humbug!"

Oh, I guess, while I'm at it, here's another. Corrupted, that's what's happened to me. This sculpture appeared today on Stephen Avenue.

Ok now, Bah Humbug for real now.

I did get on my bike. One hour. Easy warmup, then some brief intense bits trying to spin easily and smoothly up to 120 rpm pushing progressively harder gears. Cool down.

Finished season one of Sanctuary. Not much of a cliff hanger though. I cheered when the Ashly character was captured and hoped for torture, but no. She annoys me. I'll start season 2 in the hope she stays dead.

It was 10 C (50 F) here today, briefly but by tomorrow afternoon it's going to be about -18 C (zero F) or so.

Ok, one last photo to make you smile. Does anyone know what kind of plant this is? They are in the planters at City Hall. I think they're real.

Hydrating on coffee and wine

2011-12-04T18:26:00.001-07:00

Book club was at our house today. The book was the first one in the Game of Thrones series, but you have to understand our book club isn't a typical one. I've been friends with BJF and LK for about 20 years now since we worked together at the Nova bunker. LK worked in the next cubicle. Then the four of us got together in a hospital room one evening and had more fun that I had ever imagined possible, and we've been friends since. We get together about once a month and chat about stuff in general, but we always talk at least a little bit about the book. That's why it's nominally called a book club. There are other members, MK is another refuge from Nova who shows up every now and then, and GS when life isn't happening, and some of BJF's friends every now and then. It's fun and we pick good books.

Linda had made a ton of yummy stuff, and we really had a good time. I drank a bunch of coffee, and since BJF wasn't driving she and I got into the wine just a little tiny bit. Yes, just a bit, though now that my day is almost done, I'll pour a little more. We don't want it to go bad, right?

Before they came it had snowed all night so I was out shoveling after I slept in. That's 45 minutes I would have counted as core and cardio, if I was still keeping track of that, but I'm not. Mostly it was light fluffy stuff, about 12 cm worth, but the bottom of the driveway was wet and heavy.

Once on the bike I settled into easy spin, trying to stay in the 90 - 100 rpm range, easy gear. This was just to spin out my legs, think about going in circles, and work on a stable core. Did some speed work and a bit of standing work, but not in a really hard gear. I kept it fully aerobic and managed to watch some DVD's. I got through the last of the Sarah Conner Chronicles, more's the pity it was cancelled. Summer and Lena are so much fun to watch. I'm also back into Sanctuary. Love watching Amanda, though it's weird to see her with dark hair and hear a different accent.

Some core afterward. Plus, here's another T shirt photo. Linda says I look scary, but it's because I was just awake and hadn't had any coffee yet. Most of you know the story behind this shirt. If not, look around my blog, I'm sure you'll get the idea.

The colourful photo yesterday was indeed of the furnace and hot water tanks. Here it is with some annotation. It was taken with my iPad in the Photo Booth thermal image setting. However, it's not a true thermal image. The hot copper pipes are, well, hot, and the cold ones are (duh) cold, yet they show as essentially the same colour. What it's actually doing is showing the amount of light bouncing off the surface. A lightbulb itself is a bright red. The big green blob is the air ducts above the furnace, and the yellow line heading off to the left is the furnace exhaust.

No spin, but

2011-12-03T21:10:00.001-07:00

An interesting photo to look at.

Any guesses? Come on, at least give it a try.

Friday afternoon I went to a bar after work. This does not happen very often at all, but one has to do these things for a well-liked office roomie that isn't a roomie anymore. Her work term ended, and my office is a lonelier place at the moment. We went to Bottlescrew Bills, and drank, and ate, and talked, and laughed, and generally had an all round good time.

I was there till 10, and my rule about knowing when to leave a party worked well. When they start arguing about what shooters to order, it's time to go. One either bails out or stays till the bitter end. I don't know when that was, but I hear one of the party, the one who has a wife and baby currently in a different country, is regretting it somewhat.

Other than being a bit dehydrated, I was fine, consider I'd put away more booze than any other occasion in recent memory. Those in the peanut gallery who have comments about my memory can suppress yourselves. You will not be surprised I slept in.

Oddly enough my legs felt like I'd run a tough 10 K yesterday. They were not happy about walking over for the morning papers. I didn't really feel like getting on my my bike today. Instead, I dressed for success in a ratty old T shirt that I happen to really like, but is well past it's time.

The sign the bears have propped up against the garbage can is "will tango for garbage". I felt sorry for the nice bears, reduced to such a state. I was wearing it because I decided to tackle more of the vapour barrier project. This is certainly a messier and more tedious project than I had anticipated, but it needs to be done. I've only got a few more I can do before I need to start moving stuff away from the walls. Standing on a ladder, reaching overhead, and twisting around to get the caulk gun into the tight places is harder work than it appears to be.

My inner shark pays a brief visit

2011-12-02T07:11:00.001-07:00

It was Warrior Wednesday at yoga. My legs were tired afterward, but it was what they needed after the tough spin on Tuesday. I think I fell asleep during savasana.

Thursday I came home from work just beat. I'm not sure why, but I sure didn't feel like getting on my bike. My legs were tired in a way they haven't been for quite some time now. It's a good feeling in a way, but since I don't have a coach exhorting me these days, I had that second glass of wine.

Actually, I do know why I came home feeling all beat up, but that's ok. None of you want to read about work.

This morning I was up early, ready to swim. The only problem is that none of the pools in the City are open at 3am. Why is that? I suspect a centrally located pool open all hours would do steady business in the night. Lots of athletes work weird hours and would love to swim when most people and all children are asleep. Either that or are DRIVEN athletes (and the ones reading this blog know who they are) who want to get their fix. I wonder if you'd be allowed to operate a pool that had no lifeguards during off hours, and relied on video surveillance of the pool for security.

So I had to wait around till 5:30. Oh, the agonies of early morning Facebook, blog reading, dealing with email, and deciding what wines to make next year. I will have to consult with TOIC, whom I think has already made her choices, but I'm leaning towards the Spanish Toro, Australian Shiraz Voignier, Argentine Torrontes, and an Italian Nebbiolo.

We froze our asses off waiting for them to open the door. Usually the outer door is open, and we can wait in the vestibule till the appointed hour. Today it was outside, and they were late opening the door. There were some grumpy comments from the small horde, but we were amused by watching someone take 5 runs at a parking spot, in a completely empty section of the lot.

The swim was good. 45 minutes swimming, and another 15 in the dive tank doing core and stretching. The water feel is coming back, and I'm getting back to my old cruise speed again. Pity it doesn't last long. There's a couple guys that split a lane and do the same workout, and go pretty good. I used to be able to keep up with them, but can't quite, yet. During the pull set my inner shark showed up briefly to swim along, then went off to where ever it is that inner sharks go. He's glad to see me back in the pool.

Tonight has the potential to turn into a bit of a runaway. My office roomie's work term ended on Wednesday, and her NON-buyout is tonight. I know most of the people coming, and it could be good. Who knows, I may end up making a midnight visit to Tubby Dog.

Swim camp

2011-11-29T20:09:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time I thought I could swim pretty well. Thinking back, I was young and strong, and was powering through the water. Then I didn't swim for a long time. Then I started again. It took a long time to come back. Then November 2009 I got a chance to get my swim stroke video taped at a Mercury Rising swim camp. Here's the story. Part 1. Part 2. Followup. Then January 2011 there was another camp. That blog has some video of the bike session.

I am completely serious in saying these camps were key to my swimming faster. Sara, Clint, and Carrie put on a super camp, and I highly recommend it if you want to improve your swim. Something about actually seeing your stroke, warts and all, has an enormously motivating effect. Here's a link to check out the details.

We're waiting for the snow here. Rain, turning to freezing rain, followed by 10 cm of snow, winds gusting to 70Kph tonight and tomorrow morning. The drive into work ought to be entertaining, crossed with terror.

While waiting for the snow I got on the bike.
30 minute warm up, with some speed work and technique focus.
45 minutes 2.0 watts per goal Kg at 88 rpm. Standing every now and then to give my butt a break. Sweating like a stuck pig, breathing pretty good, heart rate about 132 to 135 bpm. Toward the end it was getting harder, and really had to focus to maintain the output, but I ended strong, with the last 3 minutes picking up the rpm, and for the last minute going one gear harder and picking up the rpm. It felt really good.
15 minutes cool down and easy spin. Stretched a bit after.

I think I'm at a place where I need to stay for a little while, pushing these watts till it gets a bit more comfortable and I can go a bit longer. Then up it a bit. Some of the sets will be more intense, to start getting my legs ready for it. Really pleased with the bike progress.

peaceful swim groove

2011-11-28T20:02:00.001-07:00

Once again it was a quiet Monday at the pool. Maybe because people were busy picking up after the windstorm yesterday that qualifies as a hurricane. The LRT wasn't running through downtown, which turns the whole LRT system into something that starts with cluster and rhythms with truck. It is very, very good at doing this, much better than moving people, which is the ostensible purpose of the system.

Meanwhile, I was having a peaceful swim. I wasn't thinking about time or pace or stroke count or any of that. I was thinking about renewing my friendship with the water. Learning to feel it again. Working on my body position, and trying to get streamlined again. Trying to make my flip turns elegant and tight, rather than a frothing sloshy sloppy mess. It all went pretty well. Warmed up. Did some dolphin kick with fins, and did lots of pull. This really helped get the feel of my stroke back. I think I've been letting my legs droop a bit. Only a half hour.

Much as I'd like to go for an hour or so, I'm not quite there yet. Soon. Maybe. Which is something I'd better work on, if I want to start swimming at Talisman. That's much more convenient to downtown, but as always, there's a problem. I always swim in the fast lane at Renfrew, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the regulars that swim faster than me. That will sooooo not be the case at Talisman.

That darned Facebook! One of my buddies posted a video of my favourite band, which I hadn't seen, so I had to watch it. And then a few more, then some faves from the late 70's, and a few more from fairly recently. They're still so good. I wish I'd gone to see their Sgt. Pepper show in Vegas when it was on. I am speaking of Cheap Trick, of course.

Once I got that out of my system, for now, I went down for a brief, but intense core session. Included plank and pushups and other stuff. I decline to state how long, or how many. Let's just say that some of my lower core muscles weren't quite with the program the way I'd like them to be. And sadly, that's not because I ate too much over the weekend. It's because I've been a slacker.

Genetic consequences

2011-11-27T18:13:00.001-07:00

Balancing personal and collective rights has never been easy, and it's about to get a lot harder. Up till now we've struggled with the limits of free speech against hate/slanderous/rebellious speech. Religious freedom vs freedom from religion. Privacy vs sharing information to plan social spending. It goes on and on.

Recently we cracked the human genome, though we're still working on actually understanding exactly how much of a role genes have in determining what diseases we will get, our lifespan, our intelligence, and even our behaviours. Costs for sequencing a genome are falling at a rate that makes Moore's Law look like a slowpoke. Even now, anybody that really wants it can get their DNA sequenced. There are some useful things they can learn from this. Soon, I suspect every newborn will have their DNA sequenced at birth. (Child support laws will never be the same.)

We already suspect that we might be able to prevent the onset of some diseases, and may be able to mitigate or delay the effects of others, and we'll only get better at it. We will be able to better match tissue sample for organ transplants, and we are on the verge of growing new organs on demand. It may be that a full understanding of our genetic code may dramatically increase our lifespan.

However, there is a downside. Lets look at alcoholism for example. There is much research trying to determine of much our genetic heritage contributes to alcoholism, how it contributes to the vulnerability of of our organs to alcoholism, and how much is learned behaviour from our parents or other adults. So far, research indicates there is no one "alcoholic gene", but rather a complex mix of genetic factors that appear to be contributing to the disease.

Let's imagine for a moment that researchers figure it out, and come to understand that a particular genetic make up contributes in a certain way to a person becoming an alcoholic. Maybe not with certainty, but a strong understanding. Now what do we do with that information? From sequencing a newborn's genome we find out that they have this genetic vulnerability. Do we tell them or their parents? I would assume so, but then how much control do we put on that kid when they become a teenager and want to start drinking, just like their buddies?

One alcoholic told me he became an alcoholic the afternoon he took his first drink. One drink. He couldn't stop. If someone knew they had say, a 75% chance of becoming an alcoholic on that first drink, based on a genetic test, would they take that drink? (Yeah, I know. Teenagers. Duh.) Given the consequences of alcoholism to themselves and their families, to say nothing of the innocent people in the oncoming car, do we have the right to stop them from taking that first drink? And if so, how?

Now that you've digested that, lets go onto a hard one. Lets assume that the cost of sequencing DNA becomes so cheap that it's a routine test as part of an annual physical. You and your sweetie want to get married and have children. Some research tech somewhere takes a look at both your DNA structures, and starts testing for genetic defects in the combinations of your DNA. (It's only computer time, after all, and if we don't set computers to tasks like this they start thinking about taking over the world.) Then they find that your children will almost certainly have a genetic disorder. Maybe it's something trivial, like colour blindness. Or maybe it's something much more serious, like Hemophilia, or Sickle-Cell disease. Maybe it's something quickly fatal, like Tay-Sachs disease.

Where do you draw the line? Is a 25% chance of your child having Tay-Sachs enough to prevent you from having children altogether? Should society prevent you? Is a 50% chance that they will carry the genes to potentially pass to your grandchildren enough? Who decides? Does it matter if the family is wealthy and lives in the USA where you can have all the health care you can pay for? Does it matter if the family lives in a socialized medical system where we all share the costs? Does that give the rest of us a say in what genetic conditions are brought into the world?

Suppose we find the medical techniques to prevent or cure Tay-Sachs, is it then right to cure all those with the condition? A few years ago I would have said yes, without question, but then I discovered Deaf Culture, and the debate about Cochlear Implants. I was astonished to learn that some parents of deaf children saw that implant as an assault on their culture, and did not allow the operation. It taught me that things are more complicated than we think.

That hypothetical cure for Tay-Sachs, what if that knowledge also enabled us to "cure" other genetic "disorders". Who gets to define which genetic issues are "disorders" and get treated. Suppose that that person or committee has a thing for blue eyes, and decides that everyone should have blue eyes? Or that red hair is the mark of Satan? Or that everybody should be 1.75 m tall, plus or minus a few cm?

Who would have thought that sound waves would have led to a huge population imbalance? I'm talking about ultrasound. A medical technique designed for any number of legitimate purposes is now often used to determine gender. In some parts of the world that leads to daughters being aborted. I can't imagine what they think they are doing; if everybody is wanting sons, who are those boys going to marry and how will you have grandchildren? If we knew this would happen, should we have restricted the medical technology to places where it would be used for a benign purposes? Alas, that genie is out of the bottle.

What will it do for human society if we can fairly easily learn that having children with one particular partner leads to them having a shorter lifespan than having them with a different partner? What happens when the insurance companies get their money mongering paws on your genetic information, and know more about what diseases you'll get than you do? What if part of getting life insurance involves submitting a genetic sample? What happens to the whole concept of medical insurance?

Many people think that having more information is better than having less. Maybe so, in some cases, but until we learn how to evaluate that flood of information, it's a mixed blessing at best. A little while ago I listened to a breast cancer specialist talking about preventing breast cancer. For years they thought that better images was the solution. Then they realized that better images gave them more information than they could cope with. Those two tumors that are almost, but not quite identical have very different pathologies, but it takes an expert to determine which is which. And there are all the new things the image finds, someone has to determine if those tiny irregularities are cancerous or what. With more detail it takes longer to make an assessment. Meanwhile, some poor woman who felt a lump is walking around wondering when they will call her with the results. Very recently, medical associations have announced that at least some of the screening that is happening now shouldn't be done anymore, and the screaming about this has only begun.

Our growth in knowledge is outstripping our ability to cope with it. Any doctor working full time, and they count themselves lucky if that's all they work, simply cannot keep up with advances in their field. Yet someone with Multiple Sclerosis goes to see them and wants that surgery they heard about. Odds are the doctor may have heard of Dr. Zamboni, since he's been in the news, but probably doesn't know the details. Multiply that by the advances in the research on innumerable diseases and conditions.

It's certainly clear to me that our medical system cannot go on the way it is now. I've no real idea what it needs to look like, but one thing I do know for certain. Hang onto your hats, it's going to be a wild ride. I hope within my lifetime to read the headline, "Everything we know about medicine is wrong."

Would you get your DNA sequenced, why, and what would you do with that knowledge?

movie and good bike

2011-11-26T15:39:00.001-07:00

Actually, the movie isn't of a good bike ride. When I got up the dawn was looking really nice so I set up my phone for a time lapse. This one isn't what you'd call dramatic, though the colours of the sunrise are pretty good. The clouds are ok, but there is lots of other stuff happening. The shadow of the streetlamp makes a great hour glass. There are interesting reflections, some of which I understand, and some I don't. There is snow melting, and people walking by. At one point a city truck pulls up, and a couple people cover over some graffiti on the street lamps. Enjoy

While it was going I was on my bike, pedaling hard. This was one of the best bike workouts I've ever had. You have no idea how good this feels after the many crappy workouts last year. Here's the highlights:
45 minutes at 1.8 w per goal kg, at 85 rpm. Breathing good and steady. Mid zone 3 or so.
15 minutes at 2.0 wat 83 rpm. This is working a little harder, but still aerobic. I'm not sure how much more I could have gone.
5 minutes at 2.3 w at 90 rpm. This is getting into zone 4 and I was beginning to feel the burn a little.

In between all that was some speed work and focus on smoothing out the jiggles at 120 rpm. Total of 2.5 hrs.

I've looked at the video a couple of times more. I really should wash the outside of that window, and tilt the camera up and face a bit more south.

Now, before the sunlight goes entirely, it's BBQ time! And wine, though not sure which one.

I think that's single longest blogging break for me

2011-11-24T20:56:00.001-07:00

Monday since I last blogged. That's a long time for me. On average, over 1489 days, I've blogged every 1.4 days. Well, 1.41271347 days, if you want to get picky. Don't make me go to hours, minutes, and seconds. I've got a calculator and know how to use it.

Tuesday was a wipe out. I came home. I ate. I went to bed. I snored, or so I'm told. I am dubious.

Wednesday was yoga, and I was looking forward to it. Often we are dragging our tails before class, but we go because we've paid in advance, and we know we'll feel better after. And we usually do. About half way through class I totally lost focus. It was right in the middle of this long asana. Not hard, but it just went on forever. Personally, I think our teacher put an extra loop in there. I went from doing yoga, and working the poses, to just looking like I was doing the poses. If you've done yoga for a while you know what I mean.

Thursday I did a bit of stretching and got on my bike.
30 minutes warmup with some fast spin, and focus pedaling drill.
30 minutes at 1.9 w @88 rpm, quite steady, focussing on smooth and steady pedaling, trying to keep my upper body still, and my breathing quiet. It mostly worked, though towards the end I was starting to breath harder. It was never out of control although I was sweating like mad. There was a steady drip off my face.
10 minutes easy and some fast spin
5 minutes at 2.1 w @85 rpm, and that was starting to get out of hand right at the very end, so I picked it up for the last 15 seconds.
15 minutes cool down and easy spin. Stretched after.

I'm really happy with that. Since I got the power meter I've been a lot more focussed about the effort I'm putting in, and I think I've made some improvement even in the short time I've had it.

Not that I talk about work much, but holy cow. It's really hitting the fan. The end of the year is coming fast. Many people that have been head down shoveling for all they are worth for a while now are beginning to surface. (I'm one of them. I actually had time today to tidy my desk, in anticipation of another flurry of stuff.) Others have made some terrible discoveries, and I hope it all works out ok.

And speaking of terrible discoveries, I found out today there are still people so rude and ignorant as to smoke a cigar on a public street. I got a lung full and nearly spewed right then and there. Cigarette smoke and smokers are bad, but this was horrible.

I didn't hear all of it, but CBC sent a 17 year old girl into various convenience stores to buy cigarettes. At 5 out of 10 places they didn't even checked her ID, and at another 2 places checked her ID (her real ID), and then sold her the cigarettes anyways. Grrrr!!!!!!

The only way we are going to stop this scourge is to prevent kids from starting. I'd like to see it made uneconomic to sell tobacco products in anything but a specialty store. This should be easy with business tax regulation. Want to sell tobacco? Pay the current tax. Want to sell any of the other many other products and services on the market? Pay the current business taxes. Want to sell tobacco AND any of the other non-tobacco related stuff? Pay double, or more. Make the specialty store check the ages of purchasers. Register purchasers with the government and tie our health care benefits to smoking or the lack thereof.

I see no reason why it shouldn't be made a restricted product, and made considerably harder to get. In fact, the same rules about selling booze should apply to selling cigarettes. After an educational period to publicize the rules, whacking huge fines should go into effect, for both the clerk and the store owner.

I worked in a Mac's Milk store when I was in high school, and remember a pack of cigarettes costing much less than a dollar. People used to say they'd quit if they got to a dollar, then 2 dollars. I've no real idea what they cost now, but there are still lots of people smoking. I suspect the price has already weeded out everyone that it's going to weed out.

I'm not sure why people start smoking. Maybe it's the cool, or rebellious thing to do. Or they do it because their parents do it. There needs to be a campaign to tell kids not just that it's stupid to smoke, but THEY are stupid to be smoking. People need to point and laugh at smokers. Just like they sometimes put a smashed up bloody car in front of the high school to warn about the dangers of drunk driving, they ought to be plopping a cancer ridden lung on the desk for the kids to look at. Show them video of medical operations dealing with cancerous growths. If the kids aren't throwing up, we need to find more graphic videos. I'd like to see the little camera in the fiber optic cable going down the airway of these kids, and showing them the difference between the kid that doesn't smoke, and the one that has just started.

Land that will grow tobacco can probably grow other crops. I wonder what incentives would be required to encourage land owners to plant those other crops? That has to be cheaper than medical care for all the smokers.

Ineffectual fluke waving

2011-11-21T20:11:00.001-07:00

That was me in the pool today. I'm glad it was almost empty, so nobody could see how slow I was swimming. If that's what you want to call it. Or how little of it I did before hitting the hot tub. That's what I get for not swimming for almost two months. Still, the first time is always the hardest. I love the hot tub at Renfrew.

Spin this evening for 1.5 hrs. Mainly working on 90 rpm or so, trying for a reasonable watt output, but not trying to kill my legs. Stretched after, and did a little bit of core.

I was a total slacker yesterday, with IMAZ on in the background I mainly read and surfed all day. After sleeping in, and before going to bed early.

It was easier to keep going

2011-11-19T18:25:00.001-07:00

Some of you may have noticed my comments are looking a bit different. I had always liked how Wordpress did comments, with the ability to reply. Then Leana found Disqus. There was a brief moment of panic during installation, in that I thought my existing comments had all gone to Never-Never Land. But all was well.

Mostly I'm liking it, especially being able to reply to comments. Most of the time the indenting shows which is a reply. When I reply on the computer, I show as Keithcartmell since that's what I gave as my ID. But when I reply on my iPad, even if I'm logged in, I have to use my email address, so I show up as keith. Or as Disqus. I have to put in my name and password for each comment. I'll have to work on that a bit more. Maybe Disqus isn't as iPad friendly as it could be.

There have been a couple of times where the indenting hasn't worked, but that could have been my bad in replying. It offers lots of choices about comment controls, profile management, and letting you know who is commenting. There's probably other things it will do that I haven't discovered yet.

I was feeling a little bit creaky this morning. Not sure why I didn't sleep well. We had a lazy Saturday morning, though it was a bit frosty getting the morning papers. I wasn't sure what I was going to do for a spin session, even as I was getting on the bike.

It turned out to be:
20 minutes warmup, including one leg drill and a bit of speed work
10 minutes 1.7+ w @ 85 rpm, getting a nice sweat and completing my warmup
3 minutes easy
25 minutes 1.9 w @ 85 rpm. This was one gear harder, and I got totally into the groove.
7 minutes easy, mopping off all the sweat
5 minutes 2.2 to 2.3 w @ 85, one gear harder.
5 minutes easy
15 minutes 1.8 to 1.9 w at 90 rpm
15 easy spin and cool down.

That 25 minute segment? It went by in a flash. I've had this swimming, where I'm in the groove, and it's easier to keep going than to stop. That's what it was like here. I didn't know how long I could maintain that power output, but was hoping for 10 to 15 minutes. But at that point I was wondering why I should stop, so I didn't. This is a first for being on the bike. Sweating hard, standing every now and then, breathing good. Legs felt great. Progress is happening. Love it.

First tusk pic of the winter

2011-11-18T19:28:00.001-07:00

Here's the weather page when I started my run.

I would have thought it a bit warmer than that, but ended up dressing just about right, or maybe slightly on the warm side. There was just a skiff of snow on the ground, not even 1 cm. Very little wind.

I had a nice run, going one hour, covering 8.85 K. Started really easy, took about 15 minutes to warm up, ran 2 parts quite a bit quicker, really working on turnover and trying to stretch out my stride a bit. Ran the last bit easy to cool down a little. It was a super nice night for a run, just as the sun was setting.

Cool down is tricky at these temperatures. This isn't particularly cold, but when you're wet and it's dry out, it's easy to get a chill. Stretched afterward, and did the feet in the air thing for quite a while.

Linda had made a wonderful lamb stew, with yams in it. (Control yourself Julie!) That and a glass of wine, followed by some cookies were a great post run meal.

This was the first cool/brisk run of the winter, and I hope it's the first of many more. Oh, and I almost forgot. Here's the obligatory tusk picture. I've had better.

Hastyzzzzzz

2011-11-17T20:03:00.001-07:00

A quickie tonight. First, last night. So much fun with these people.

No need to name names. If you know their names, you know who they are, and if you don't, telling you their names won't help. At least 4 of them are famous. You are looking at about 2 dozen Ironman race finishes here. Sorry about the poor quality, I'd forgotten to turn the flash on, and had to play with the photo a bit. We were at the Highwood for dinner. So yummy!

I was nicely full after. Rack of Lamb was pretty good, but I can do better on my own BBQ. The other courses were super. Duck foi gras. mmmmmm. There was so much chitchat and laughing and having a good time. Slept like a rock once I got home.

Tonight I'd planned to get on the bike, but we were late getting home. Plus it was so weird. My office recently has been just the right temperature, or even slightly warmer. Nice. Today mid afternoon, I started feeling cold. I wrapped my scarf around my neck, and was thinking about putting on a sweater. I was feeling a bit headachy, and just wanted to end the day.

So when I finally did get home, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to spin, and I didn't. I had some comfort food, tried to give our cat a lap and WAS SPURNED by the rotten mammal. Washed dishes and knowing my faithful audience was waiting eagerly for me, pounded out this blog. It's about 8:10, and in about 10 minutes I'm going to be in bed.

Calgary is going into the deep freeze for the first time this winter. Check out THIS forecast you temperature weenies! -20 C is -4 F. And that's the HIGH.

I'm planning to run tomorrow. I'll post a photo of the 'mo tusks, if they develop properly.

I've missed the ice and snow

2011-11-15T20:24:00.001-07:00

I like running in the snow. There. I've said it out loud in front of everyone. Why? Because if there's snow it's cool out, so overheating typically isn't a problem. Plus, the possibility of ice hiding under the snow that your neighbour's haven't shoveled off the sidewalk means you have to run well.

I like snow anyways. Not so much the idiot drivers that can't cope, but I don't blame snow for that. Sunny but cool days (say 0 to -10 C) are perfect for so many outdoor things in the winter. I'm going to try to get outside for more of them this year. Snowshoeing for sure, though I've been saying that for a couple of years.

If you run by sticking your leg way out in front, or with great long loping strides by pushing off with your toes, you're going to have a problem with ice. The trick to it is to land with your foot squarely under your centre of balance, and pick it up as your centre of balance moves forward. You have to be aware of your balance and posture. You have to be controlled, but relaxed and ready for anything. In short, you have to pay attention.

Tonight I went out for an easy run, the equivalent of an easy spin on the bike. I wanted to keep my turnover fast, and my feet light. I kept my breathing easy, and wasn't working too hard. Because of the possibility of icy sidewalks and crosswalks in the dark, I was running like every step was on ice.

There was some stretching and joint warmup, then 45 minutes easy running, and a few minutes walking to cool down. A little more stretching after. It was nice out, maybe -8 C (18 F) with very little wind. Long sleeved tech shirt and a light jacket, toque, and gloves.

No yoga tomorrow night. I'm going to play with some of the buttons at the bottom of the blog to see what happens.

Fate

2011-11-14T21:11:00.001-07:00

The snow finally arrived. Well, sort of. I missed it falling, though I heard about it from co-workers. Not much snow, all things considered, a cm max on the driveway. So little that I didn't even count shoveling it as part of the workout.

I got on the bike a little bit later than anticipated, side tracked by blogs, and writing a really long, really creative comment. Blogger and the stupid character limit on comments totally broke the flow and made me post it in two parts. So if I don't win, I'll blame Blogger for breaking the mood.

One the bike. 20 minute warm up. 2x10 min at 1.9 watts, with 5 minutes easy in between. 15 minute cool down. Felt great!

I've been thinking about the life map metaphor I brought up a few blogs ago. We go through life blithely making decisions as best we can on incomplete knowledge. Some of them we recognize as big decisions at the time, and some not. Sometimes small things have big consequences that we only understand in hindsight. Once you get to a certain age you start thinking about the what ifs'. You might be perfectly satisfied with how things have turned out, and still wonder about those paths you didn't take.

Life is so fragile. There are so many ways we can die, and that's in modern day North America, which is one of the safest societies ever to exist. Sometimes, even worse, is almost dying. Lingering on in a coma, or after a bad stroke, to become mentally incapacitated in any number of ways, to become a prisoner of the medical system seems almost worse than dying. I earnestly hope when my time comes that it's quick and painless.

The medieval Norse society had a strong belief in fate, that our destiny was decided by forces beyond our control. Twist and turn as you might, you couldn't escape your fate. Oddly enough, this did not lead to a passive acceptance. They took the attitude that if you're going to bite something, bite deep. This led to great ferocity in battle, under the assumption that if it was your time, it would happen, and if not it didn't matter what risks you took.

I sometimes wonder about this. Are there other possible worlds where people very like me are living lives perhaps very like mine, or perhaps very different? Are there worlds where different decisions led to different lives, or do we share the same fate? I think about that poor woman who was killed under the wheels of a truck while riding her bike. What would have happened had she driven; would she have been run down walking from the car park to the store? Or walked the entire way; would she have had a heart attack or some other fatal accident? What about the driver of that truck? If it hadn't been her, would it have been someone else? It's a certainty they didn't plan to kill someone. Their life must be hell right now.

It hurts now to read about bike crashes, or bike collisions with cars. People have talked about getting a flat, or hitting a patch of bad pavement, or losing their concentration for a moment, with a variety of outcomes. Riders have done everything right and still been killed or injured. I've been faster than 90 Kph (56 mph) several times on my bike, and it's a complete exhilarating rush. It's also likely to be fatal, or at least extremely painful if anything goes wrong. I just make sure my bike is as mechanically sound as I can make it, and that I'm totally focussed on the task at hand.

There are many fictional stories about people being told of an outcome of an action, taking action to avoid it, and yet still succumbing. Perhaps the most famous example is A Death in Samarkand. We don't choose our lives really, we essentially make them up as we go along. And would we make better choices if we could see the future better? I don't know. Would I really get on a bike, knowing I was going to crash no matter how careful I was, and maybe also knowing I'd meet my one twue wuve (per the bishop in Princess Bride) during physiotherapy? What if I was already married? Or would you get on the bike knowing that the training would take you to the age group podium at Kona (or the Boston Marathon, or whatever) but you die young alone and childless because you didn't go for a walk instead of the bike ride, and therefore never met that right person who would take of you?

So many choices. Maybe it's better we make them blind, and don't know about the other choices turn out. All I know is that my choices so far have led me to a life that I'm enjoying. And appreciating my good fortune, because there are sure some times it was that and not good management on my part. I've done some very stupid things in my life, but that's another blog.

What are your thoughts about fate, or Fate? Have you been lucky and you know it? Whats the story there?

A brief moment of panic

2011-11-12T16:20:00.001-07:00

The much anticipated snow never arrived. It was a actually a nice morning, though it clouded over during my spin session. I was down into the basement in good time, after coffee, newspaper, and breakfast.

Easy warmup for 20 minutes. I've pretty well got myself calibrated on watts, and this was to test it out. The watt numbers are watts per Kg for my goal weight.
20 minutes at 1.7. Breathing easy, legs liking it, heart rate low 120's, light sweat. The limiter here is how long my butt will hold out. 5 minutes easy pedal.
15 minutes at 1.8 Working harder, heart rate high 120's, moderate sweat. Could have gone longer. 5 minutes easy.
10 minutes at 1.9. Working hard, not quite maintaining 1.9, breathing fairly hard, legs feeling it, sweating a lot. 5 minutes easy
10 minutes at 1.8, having to concentrate on staying up to the mark, then 5 easy
10 minutes at 1.7, feeling relaxed, legs feeling tired.
15 minutes easy spin cool down.

That should be 2 hours of good solid bike workout. You have no idea how happy I am about this, after so many crappy painful bike workouts last year.

I've noticed it doesn't take much variation in cadence to produce a bit of a swing in the watt numbers. Keeps me honest. My plans now will have the warmup building up to 1.5 watts or so, with the last bit at 1.7. Then get stuck into learning to put out 1.8 watts consistently, with some time at 1.8 and 2.0 to build intensity.

I really appreciate reader comments, and have been responding to them more by commenting myself. However, the original blogger format just sucks for that. Leana (note the new URL) found Disqus, which is essentially a comment engine that plugs into many blog platforms. It looked neat so I installed it. The brief moment of panic was when it looked like all my comments had been eaten, but there is an import feature that took about 15 minutes to run. So you can look for me to respond to all comments now.

Thanks for the comments on my foot question, if you haven't commented yet, feel free to do so.

It looks like I had to open up comments to everyone to have it work properly, so I may have to start filtering out the spam again. I think I've got it set that people can flag suspected spam, and it sends me an email.

Oh, and here's a recent sunrise, just because.

Feet. Toes. A question.

2011-11-11T18:29:00.000-07:00

I consider myself fairly body aware, in terms of how I'm feeling during a workout. I can usually tell my heart rate within a few bpm, and I'll know a run time to less than a minute either way. But every now and then, something sneaks up on me.

When I bought the most recent pair of shoes I noticed that the middle pad of my left foot seemed a bit tender. I just assumed it was getting used to new padding in the shoe, or that the padding was a fraction thicker than in the old shoe. My shoes are quiet loosely laced. Since then I've noticed my left toes do not like being curled down towards the sole of my foot. I nearly shrieked one night at yoga when we were doing the roll the toes under the foot thing because I hadn't expected it to hurt that much.

It doesn't bother me to bike or run. I can put all my weight on that foot, even raising my heel and standing on the balls of my feet, though if I go high enough the left starts to complain about it. I can poke quite hard at various places on the middle pad of my foot, and I would describe the sensation as uncomfortable or tender, but not as shooting pain.

Before my run today I spent a bit of time warming up my ankle and foot, exploring what ached, and the limits of motion. I found it hurts more on the top of my foot, right here.

Sorry if I've set off anyone with a foot fetish there. That toe and the next smaller one are very sensitive right there. There's a few sensitive spots further up the foot as well. Has anyone ever had this sort of thing? Any suggestions as to what it might be? I figured as long as I could run and bike, and there wasn't any actual pain, it couldn't be anything too serious. I thought maybe I'd strained something. But it's been a while without improvement, so I think the time has come to start doing something about it.

As I said, before my run I warmed up my ankles and feet much more than usual, and stretched a bit. I started easy and fell into the groove fairly quickly. It was nice out for running, maybe 4 or 5 C (40 F) and I ran my C shaped route out to Anderson and Wood something. It's 5.5 K. Running easy, mid zone 3 or so, but not working too hard, it was 34 minutes out, and 36 minutes back, running a bit easier as I got sloppier. Lots of thinking about form during the last part of the run. I'd get into the groove for a little bit, and fall out again. Much of the time my feet and legs felt light and happy.

All that was after a busy morning. My brother and I had arranged a FaceTime chat since he just got a new iPad. That part worked just fine. Our friend Vicky showed up during the call to drive out to the Millarville Art Market with Linda. My phone rang during the chat, and I ignored it, but it turned out to be the furnace guy. We asked them to come over to check out some fan vibration. He was phoning to see if he could come earlier, and he ended up arriving at the same time as Vicky. So I ended up cutting my call with my brother short. We'll have to try that again.

Turns out the brand new furnace has a fan that is out of balance and they have to replace it. The first time it fired up with the guy there he was shaking his head, saying it was noisier than it should be, and I was telling him this was quiet. So that has to get done when the part comes in next week.

Since I'd already had to set up FaceTime I spent part of the afternoon going in and updating software, and playing with settings to better reflect what I'm doing with my iStuff. I'm trying to fix a problem with Mail logging out on my main computer whenever I check my mail on the iPad or iPhone.

Dinner was a simple affair, pasta and wine. Yes. We are settled in for the evening, waiting for it to start snowing. Tomorrow we don't have to go anywhere.

Sleep sweet sleep

2011-11-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

I was more than a little cranky on Tuesday because of work. Still, I had a really nice run, and headed off to bed at a reasonable hour. I was up a couple hours later, thinking about work. A couple things with work. One of which was really annoying me, and another that I couldn't figure out what I was going to do about it, and another thing that is out of my control but affects me.

At least I gave a cat a lap for hours, as I read and surfed the internet. About 4 I turned the light off and snoozed in the chair, only to be woken up at 5 by a puking cat. It was a really long day at work, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Good coffee, and a really good home made carrot cake made me feel better.

Still, the day lasted a really long time. I wasn't really in the mood to go to Yoga, but we did anyways. I was a total slacker through it. I fell asleep sitting up during the meditation, then again during Savasana. Linda says I snored gently, but she wasn't sure it was me. I won't deny it, but at least nobody else complained. I went to bed nearly instantly after getting home, and slept like a rock.

Thursday was a slow start because I was still sleepy. I could have rolled over and slept more. At least it was a quiet day at work. And so warm out! I was putting on my scarf and jacket when someone told me it was 12 C (53 F)out, and I'd look like a wimp walking down the street as if it was winter or something. It supposed to be warm tomorrow as well, so I might be able to run in shorts and a tech shirt. In mid November people! What's not to like about Calgary?

Once home I nibbled a little bit, put on a DVD, and hopped on my bike. I'd been feeling a little creaky so I did a good warmup gradually building. Then into a 25 minute set at a steady cadence and watt output, with only one short break standing to stretch my legs a bit. Then some easy spin and cool down, for a 1.25 hr ride. Stretched a little bit after.

First run in the dark in a long time

2011-11-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

Except it wasn't really dark at all. There's a nearly full moon in a cloudless sky. But I still dug out my reflective vest, and wore a white toque. I was trying to think of the last time I ran in the dark. It might have been March 2010, but was probably January 2009. I've missed it. Running in the moonlight is peaceful and calming. It's quiet. There aren't many people around, and fewer dogs. It's all good.

The only other runner I saw had a headlamp, but was dressed completely in black. I think they're missing a bet. I'd far rather have other people able to see me from lots of reflective stuff, than rely on one little light.

Plus it was nice and warm, right on 0 C. (I hope I don't have to tell anyone that's 32 F.) I started easy, trying to convince my lungs to open up and breathe. My back is kind of cranky today; I've been hunching over at work, which I do when I'm really concentrating on stuff. Crunch time is coming.

Once I got going, the going got good. I ran down into Fish Creek, where it really came together from the bottom of the 37 St hill, to the bottom of the 24 St hill. That felt smooth and effortless, breathing well, and it seemed like I was running really fast. It ended up averaging 7 minute per K pace, which seems about right.

The point was to run easy and get the creakies out, so mission accomplished.

Short and sweet

2011-11-07T20:21:00.000-07:00

Easy spin, 45 minutes. Just enough to sweat lightly. Concentrating on round and round.

Then some good stretching and core stuff. No plank or pushups so don't get too excited. One has to work up to these things. All in good time.

The carrot cake Linda made is really good.

JL is back!!!

2011-11-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

Yes I am excited about that. You would be too.

My book at the moment is The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje. When I decided to read it I found it for two very, very different prices. $25 something via the e-Google bookstore, and $9 something from Amazon/Kindle. Guess which I bought. No need for a question mark on that sentence. This is the first real reading experience on the iPad, and I'm liking it. I can't really read it standing up on the train the way I see people with Kindle's or Nooks, or the other readers. I'm enjoying the book.

One of the things he said when talking about a painting, is a reference to a map of a person's life, seen before they lived it. This concept quite struck me, being phrased that way. It is common to speculate about the future of a person, or the road they've traveled, but I had never really thought of expressing a person's life journey as a map. What landmarks would be on it? What unexpected twists and turns would there be? What little incidents would be marked that seem like nothing at the time, but turn out to be important later?

This is one of the reasons I like reading so much. I like to be exposed to different world-views and different viewpoints. Another reason is that nobody can live long enough, or possibly survive all the mistakes that can be made, so reading about the mistakes of others can enable one to avoid them. Some writers have a way with dialogue and words that makes your brain happy when you read them.

I was up early this morning, and was reading while it was still dark out. This probably led to a more meditative frame of mind than usual. I got thinking about what the map of my life so far might look like, and what's to come. I don't regret the choices I've made, but there are a couple of points where things could have gone very differently, and I sometimes wonder how they would have turned out.

As it started to get brighter out I looked out, and ran outside with the phone for these two photos. They are even better than seeing it for real, what with the camera seeing things a little differently than a human eye. Again, totally untouched from the camera to your eyes.

Shortly after I stretched and dressed for a run in -10 C (14 F) weather. It's clear and cool, so a nice day for a run. My feet felt a bit heavy at first, and it seemed my lungs were working harder than I expected. Mostly I chugged along, enjoying being outside. Toward the end my legs felt better and wanted to run faster. For a little bit I tried to stretch out by leaning forward. It was ok, but I ran out of lungs way too quickly. Walked to cool down, and stretched after. Only 35 minutes running, though as I'm writing this my legs want to go for another run.

The high point of my day is finding out that my massage therapist JL is back till next May! Well, not back in Calgary, but in Drayton Valley. She is planning to come down to Calgary every month or so and do a bunch of massages. I will eagerly accommodate her schedule. I'm very happy with how she works on me. There was lots of creaky and sore bits today, and it feels great afterward. I had first thought that she was just back for a short visit, but no, her life has changed a bit, so it will be 6 months here, and 6 back home. Now, I just need to figure out what to do for massage next summer, but at least now I have lots of time to think about it. Her phone number? Eh? What's that you say? I can't hear you.

While she was working on me, the most amazing smells were percolating into the room. Linda had baked cookies, was working on a carrot cake, and had popped dinner into the oven. Just before I started writing I took the pottery dish out of the oven. I won't tell you what's in there right now, otherwise we'd have a lot more people for dinner. You'll have to tune into tomorrow's blog.

This. That. Resonance. Sympathetic vibrations.

2011-11-05T17:10:00.000-06:00

Several photos for your enjoyment, one of them the problem (this) and one being the solution (that). I thought I'd let you guys decide which is which in the comments. On the way home Friday we stopped by the Superstore to buy the only things we buy there. Dark chocolate chunks, and hazelnuts. So here's all the photos from the last couple days.

The morning started well, not rushing the get out of bed thing. I slept in till about 7, which is very late for me. From there I was moderately brisk about doing some stretches and getting on the bike. A few Facebook friends noticed and I got a couple nice comments there. Thanks guys!

30 minute warmup, gradually increasing spin speed and effort, and including (gasp) one leg drill.
then 3 sets:
15 minutes at 1.7 to 1.8 watts per goal kg,
10 minutes at 1.8 to 1.9
and 20 minutes at 1.7 or so.
These felt strong, with my breathing easy, heart rate a bit higher than expected, and legs feeling good. Sweating a bucket, as you can see in the one photo. In between was some easy pedal, some standing, and some fast spin. My old bike computer topped out at 199 cadence, and I was sure I was going faster than that, and sure enough, I can! Briefly. Yay me. Finished up with 10 minutes easy spin to cool down and stopped at 2 hours. I thought of going longer, but decided not.

My legs felt a little clunky to start, not sure why. It seemed like the left crank was longer than the right one. I've been noticing that I've got a rough spot right around 120 rpm. The bike shakes a bit and there's something about the resonance that gets the little bit of back fat I have jiggling. It used to be front fat, leg fat, calf fat, arm fat that all jiggled, so there's been some improvement. I spent some time there working to smooth it out. Spent lots of time during the main sets trying to go round and round.

Overall this was a good solid spin session. Stretched a bit after, and walked the scenic route to the 7-11 for the morning papers. I was thinking about going for a run, but will probably do that tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to a massage tomorrow, since JL is back from New Brunswick on a visit!

We had one of those energy audit's done a little while ago. You have to do this to qualify for the rebates. Good thing we'd already planned to replacing the furnace, since that was the single biggest thing we could have done. The furnace is all installed and passed the City inspection on Friday. We're going to be looking at replacing the outside doors next, to get something that looks a little nicer and seals a little better. Anybody have any recent experience with getting doors installed in Calgary? Who did you use?

One of the issues is that the vapour barrier in the basement just sucks, and has since the house was built. Several cats that liked to leap up there didn't help. Paying someone to do this is expensive since it's fussy work. I bought some of the vapour barrier material, and a few other supplies, and got started today. It's a bit more of an adventure than I thought it would be, but there were no injuries. I think I'm going to take it slow and steady, try to get several done every weekend and gradually work my way through them. Some of them are going to be very difficult to get at because of all the crap we have piled up down in the basement.

You can see the first couple that I did. Not as neat as I'd like, but I"ll get better. With any luck the ones visible to anyone going downstairs will be much better. Not that any one will look at that, when there is wine and books to be looked at.

So, which photo is the problem, and which is the solution?

Well, that went off the rails but produced a new word

2011-11-04T20:33:00.000-06:00

Thursday after work was my ART therapy appointment. My knee is feeling rock solid these days, but I like to get it checked every now and then just to be sure I haven't done anything to it as I build effort and training time. So far so good. There were some minor clicks in my knees and ankles as he worked on them.

His appointment usually also includes a bit of adjustment for my back and hips, since there is some tightness and stuff that contributed to the knee injury. I have trouble relaxing for this, which makes it harder, and leads into a spiral that doesn't go anywhere good. What he does typically leaves me not wanting to run, or do anything afterward. Which is ok.

Friday was a bit of a slackasserization though. Let's see what happened. Thursday at work was actually pretty productive, as was Friday morning. The big secret was bailing on a bunch of meetings, and getting stuck into some process diagrams and documents. Then Friday afternoon was working (playing) with SJ to set up a SharePoint site for our team. I know the process, and she knows SharePoint better than I do. So we've been putting it together, and we're in geek heaven as we try to bend SharePoint to our will. I actually stayed at work longer than I intended because it was so much fun. (Yes, I know, you don't have to say it.)

Here, let me get you a cold compress and a nice cup of tea to recover from the shock.

Then I come home to a dinner of duck breast on a bed of wild rice with a sauce of something that would make cardboard edible. And wine, let's not forget that. Then when I settled into my chair to finish my glass of wine, our cat hopped into my lap and settled in. Plus I had my iPad to hand, and next thing I know it's almost bedtime, and the important thing not done.

I refer to blogging, of course. Much of my steam has been robbed by a one MG as he posted a provocative thing on Facebook about the medical system. I got the wind up and barfed out a bunch of stuff. It isn't up to my usual standard, but I think I'll post it here, completely sans context, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a rant.

I have ideas about the medical system. Some have been on my blog. The biggest single thing is to stop the doctors from being the choke point to the system. We need to have someone like a registered nurse, but not exactly, set up in strip malls everywhere, more common than 7-11 and Subway combined. Every adult that wants to get medical services registers to one convenient to their work or home. At regular intervals, say monthly or bi monthly, a person drops in. They get weighed, blood pressure done, look in eyes ears and throat. Breasts and balls (depending on which you have) palpitated. A sample of blood is taken and sent for analysis of lab tests appropriate for that person. The intent is to build a history of what is normal for that person, and to catch changes early. Really early. When something changes that person is the gatekeeper to see the appropriate specialist. The key of the whole system is to prevent disease from happening, to treat it while it's small. In a truly connected world, it wouldn't matter which one you went to, your medical records would follow you everywhere. Make an appointment, or drop in.

The system shouldn't have to seek permissions for organ donations. If a person meets some standard criteria for brain death, whatever organs can be salvaged for transplant should be harvested and used. That person doesn't need them anymore. I don't accept that religious objections should prevent saving someone's life.

There ought to be major tax breaks to encourage people to be healthy. Say, oh, I don't know, completing an Ironman before the cutoff should be good for taking $1,000 off your taxes for that year. Every person should get a medical statement every year, showing what they used in medical services, compared to the average.

I'm not sure I accept that the elderly are the biggest driver of health care costs. After all, there aren't that many of them. But there are a lot of people in their 40's and 50's with expensive diseases like diabetes and cancer. I'd want to see the numbers. At some point we have to draw the line and say we aren't going to do massive intervention to save lives. The focus should become managing pain and dying with at least some shreds of dignity.

Another thing driving the medical system, (no pun intended) is automobile collisions. There are no accidents. None. There is only driver error, for all intents and purposes. The exceptions are a trivial number. We should be treating these collisions like airplane crashes, to determine exactly why, lay blame, and assess costs. Some people should be insuranced out of driving because they are bad drivers and a hazard to the rest of us. This distracted driving law is nonsense. Really, they should just say that if the cell phone records show you were driving while using the cell phone the insurance companies need not cover you, and you become fully liable for all costs of any accident you caused, even if technically it's the other person's fault. Everybody ought to be getting a drivers test every 5 years. Defensive driving refresher courses ought to be mandatory every 10 years. Let's use this computer simulation technology.

Hard ride followup

2011-11-02T22:01:00.000-06:00

As you will recall I pushed the spin a bit yesterday, working pretty hard for a short ride. It took a little while to drop off to sleep, but then I was out like a light. This morning I could feel it in my hip flexors, and oddly enough, in the ball of my left foot. That foot has been a bit stiff and tight lately.

I discovered this during yoga a couple weeks ago when we did the pose where you stand on one foot, and slowly roll your toes under the other foot and lift up so the stretch curls your toes under. That actually almost hurt. Which means I should do it more.

After work (another brutal day, in case you were wondering, and thanks for asking) I was almost thinking about going for a run, but restrained myself. I could still feel those hip flexors, and hoped that yoga class would have something for that. It did.

Our regular teacher was off doing whatever it is that yoga teachers do when they skip class. Our sub teacher had us doing some different stuff, which was very refreshing, including one good stretch for the hip flexors. Very good.

You may note some new people in my blogroll. So far I haven't trimmed many people off the bottom of the list, but it is getting long, and at some point, one has to assume that they've given up on blogging. I'm thinking about some changes to the blog, so stay tuned.

No Slutty Girls!

2011-11-01T20:13:00.000-06:00

I realize that title is the kiss of death for many blogs, but I'm running a wholesome family blog here, right? Right? Ah, guys, wholesome family rated blog, yes? Ah Sheesh. No way I can compete with SUAR in the poop department, and I KNOW you aren't coming here for my good looks. Maybe it's the rants.

Last night was All Hallow's Eve, so I was busy dealing with the little trick or treaters. There was one group that put a little song and dance routine for their trick or treat. I liked them. We had 70 kids overall, and we gave away 3 Kilo's of candy from a big plastic bucket. That's 42.85 grams per kid, but I know that a couple of kids got more and it wasn't even to the slutty girls that you perverts think would appeal to me. As I've said, to my astonishment, there weren't any of those unlike the last couple years. I'm sure that one girl was going to pick up more than candy. But there were some very cute costumes, and I rewarded them with more candy.

The kids started at 6:30 and the last were 8:30. The most popular outfits were the Scream mask, and related reaper costumes. A few kids were essentially in no costume at all, and they got hardly anything. As a workout, I'm going to count as core all the bounding to my feet to get the door. That, and trying to reassure Amelia the Cat. She spent most of the evening in the basement.

I didn't have one single piece of candy. No candy at all, not the day before, not for sampling purposes to make sure it's ok for the kids. Not the day after, since there wasn't even a lot of candy to say no to at work. The other thing there wasn't was coffee for a morning meeting. I don't know who screwed up, but there was a full SAP implementation team meeting first thing in the morning. They actually had real food there, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and hash browns in addition to the normal muffins and fruit. But they didn't have coffee. None, not till the meeting was well underway. So I don't have any idea at all what was happening then, and probably just as well.

Things went downhill after that. Yes, I know for some of you that it's inconceivable after a no coffee meeting start, but it did. So I was thoroughly grumpy when I got home, an hour later than usual. Oddly enough, this made me more determined than ever to get on my bike.

Warmup 15 minutes.
Fairly hard steady state at 1.7 to 1.8 watts x goal weight for 20 minutes. My lungs were fine, my legs were starting to get tired, and my butt was getting sore.
Easy 5 minutes
Hard 2.5 watts x goal weight for 5 minutes and working hard, relying on the tunes to pull through.
Variety easy spin and cool down 20 minutes.
Stretched a little bit. All of it felt great! And I'm in a much better mood.

Now that I've blogged, I can go cruise other blogs, and leave comments. Speaking of which, I'm announcing a new blog comment policy. My blog stats have been thoroughly fubarred by the spam bots hitting the main page dozens, even hundreds of times per day, which leaves a link in the traffic sources, hoping I'll click on it. Don't. But now I don't have even the least of ideas how many people are actually reading my blog, or any idea of what posts are popular. Not that I'm fussed about that, since I'm writing this for me, and I'm pleased it amuses other people.

So I'm really happy when people leave comments. To encourage that I will now try to respond to comments. Wordpress is better at that, but oh well. I don't promise to be immediate, and I'm sure not going to write another blog in the comments. But now you have a reason to look at the comments again, because I might be talking to YOU!

Katie's cupcakes

2011-10-30T19:27:00.000-06:00

No seriously, it was warm out, almost hot even. The weather web page said 16 C (61 F), and I think it was warmer than that. Shorts and T shirt weather! Love it. We had lots of days in July and August that weren't this nice. Maybe I should have rearranged my day and gone for a bike ride outside.

But then Katie would be bereft or something, thinking I didn't love her, or her cupcakes anymore. We can't have that. Spin actually went really well, lots of interesting stuff. I was on the bike 2 hours, and I think the time has come to replace the shorts I did IMC. Let's just say there was some rubbing, and a slight bit of chafe in a couple of places perilously close to taint.

But the spin was smooth, which made me happy. For a long time at spin sessions it was all about survival and not puking. Then I got to where I could get through them mostly in one piece. Then I had a bad stretch where I struggled. Now the spin is going good and I'm enjoying it.

In the end I didn't run off the bike. I did the 2 hours, then spent some extra time stretching, then moving into Katie's Killer Core session. Many many pushups. I got the first 5 done regulation, and the other 50 or so were from my knees. What else was there? I don't remember. There is a hazy recollection of side plank, but it's all a sweaty blur after that.

Well, there was yummy cupcakes, with chocolate chips in them. That's important.

Ranting, in spite of fabulous weather

2011-10-29T20:50:00.001-06:00

This is another week of the best season in Calgary. Generally sunny and cool during the day, colder, but still not cold at night. Today was a beautiful day for running, about 8 C (46 F) with a bit of a wind. My concession to the cooler weather was to put on a long sleeved tech shirt.

After a bit of stretching I ran an hour even about mid zone 3. It turned out to be 9K almost exactly. The goal was to keep my feet quick and light. I checked my turnover several times and was right on 88 steps per minute, counting every time either the right leg touched the ground. Sometimes I count when it's the left leg, but not both. If you do the math, taking 85 to 90 steps per minute works out to 5100 to 5400 steps per hour. However, the pedometer said I took 9100 steps during that hour. I am baffled. I could understand the pedometer reading 10,000 to 11,000 steps by counting each time one of my feet touched the ground. 9100 "steps" per hour works out to 151 or 75 steps per minute, depending on what exactly it's counting. I don't believe either of those numbers. Anybody have any experience with pedometers that explains this?

A little while ago I was reading about efforts in the USA to change the laws around abortion. And birth control. And miscarriages. Here's the article. These fruit loops want to classify birth control as abortion. They think birth control causes abortions. And abortions (any abortion, at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason) are bad. And since abortion is the destruction of an embryo, then miscarriage, which is the same thing, is a crime too. The Christian Taliban don't care how it was caused, they just want a chance to snoop into someone else's affairs to accuse them of a crime. And we all know how keen the USA is to prosecute and punish crimes, especially against the poor and black.

I'm so appalled I barely know what to think. For almost all of human history, women have had little or no control of when they got pregnant, and had to put up with astonishing mortality rates around child birth. A pregnant woman, and one with small children was traditionally tied to the home delivering child care. Since there was no effective birth control, she was at the whims of her husband about how often they had sex and she got pregnant. Very few women survived till menopause given the primitive medical system until very, very recently. It's probably the single largest waste of human potential. But then they weren't real people, so what did it matter?

That there are men who want to regress to this world I can at least intellectually understand, since it gives these neanderthals control to make up for their lack of stature out in the real world. Tying a woman to a small child is just about the best control mechanism there is.

But that there are women who want this change leaves me dumfounded. Why? The only thing I can think of is that they assume they themselves will not have to get on that pregnancy treadmill, but don't mind their sisters or daughters having to do so, in order to satisfy some weird control kick. I don't know.

There are already 7 billion humans on this planet. We don't need more. We need less, way less, since we cannot sustain our living standards much longer. We need to help countries get their birth rates down. If we don't, eventually the Four Horsemen will. Every country that has increased funding to educate girls and women, and help them with family planning have seen their family sizes drop, and the standard of living go up. Hans Rosling has some amazing presentations on this.

The USA might be the first, and hopefully only, first world country to test the reverse. Obliterate the right to birth control, watch family sizes grow, watch the GDP fall even more as women contribute less and less to the economy, and watch a very bad situation turn even worse. And they will have done it to themselves.

What makes it harder to understand is that they are willing to let big corporations police themselves, even knowing they will foul the environment in the singleminded pursuit of internalizing the profits and socializing the costs. Why do they insist on controlling the wombs of the world, that never did any harm to anyone, and not control companies with established records of pollution, human rights abuses, fraud, and many other crimes?

I blame the right wing religious fruit loops. They are all about exerting control, and using whatever stick comes to hand to regain control over society, with themselves at the top of a new theocracy. They have been attacking science as a whole, with the individual fronts on medical research, climate change studies, teaching evolution, dumbing down text books in general, and more that don't come to mind this instant. Any resistance to them is met by hysterical outrage, again, using whatever cheap debating tricks come to hand first.

Including outright lies. Their big one is that the USA was founded as a "Christian" nation, when it was no such thing. If anything, the Founding Fathers were clear they wanted a nation where the government couldn't meddle in religion, and vise versa, because they believed that everybody ought to be free to worship as they pleased. There are many more.

Voting rights are also under fire, and not just for women. The Republicans have been trying, and recently succeeding more and more to disenfranchise the poor, the mobile, the black, the Latino, the immigrants, the atheists, the sick, the military, and anyone that has ever been in prison.

The USA is already one of the least egalitarian nations in the world. I just saw a great TED talk on this. Go take the 16 minutes to watch this. I'll wait till you come back. In fact, I'm going to watch it again too. He has some great graphs that show how much of an outlier the USA is. As I've said, some inequality is good, but too much is very bad. Too much led to the French Revolution, and led to a great deal of social unrest the last time it got to these levels in the USA.

I think the OWS movement is the start of a new wave of unrest. If the elites don't get off their cloud very soon, and realize their drive to have it all is going to lead to a situation where nobody has anything, including them, that realization will be forcibly brought home to them. More and more people in the USA, and growing numbers in Canada, are being pushed into a place where they no longer have anything left to lose, no attachment to society around them, and a burning rage towards the people they perceive as having caused the problem.

Such people are dangerous. Protests and marches will get bigger and bigger as more people lose everything. The messaging will get louder and louder as the elites ignore them. The problem is that it tends to get out of hand. The police start trying to enforce the will of the elites, and scuffles turn into struggles turn into running battles turn into outright warfare and cities burn. As we all know, the USA is awash in guns.

In recent decades, we have seen many revolutions. As long as the police or the army are willing to fire into a mob, the people commanding them will retain power. For a time. But we see revolutions where the police don't fire into the crowds, and that government is finished. Even tyrants that seem strong can be overthrown in the historical blink of an eye.

I don't know which way the USA will go, but I suspect starting fairly soon, the police will be firing into crowds, and it will go on for a long time. Many politicians are former military, or come from a legal prosecution background that tends to look down on most people in the system. Almost every governor routinely signs off on executions. Going from that to ordering the militia to fire into a crowd of protesters is only moving from retail to wholesale murder. Not such a big step. Anyone who wants to know what happens next need only read the history of Rome, or 18th century France, or modern day Iran.

For much of my life, the USA has been the self proclaimed "City on a Hill", with the President "the Leader of the Free World". They claimed the moral high ground in all the many, many conflicts they inserted themselves into. As I've learned more and more history, I see more and more the difference between what the USA says, and what it does. I think it's this, more than almost anything else that has led to the decline of the USA. Until they get their shit together, the decline will continue, which will affect us and everybody else.

Lest you think I'm only pointing south, Canada has lots of warts too. We have problems with what we say, and what we do, especially where Natives are concerned. Our corporate elites have a nasty habit of selling out Canadian companies to foreign interests, who then (understandably enough) manage the company to suit the owners, rather than the people who built it, or live down wind. Our political elites have a nasty habit of skimming off the top and creating rules that favour them if it's good, or penalize other people if it's bad. Many of the rules that apply to ordinary Canadians don't apply to the people that run the country, and that's a bad thing.

Most of all, people being passive only encourages the vermin in power to carry on with their theft. We need to be an active populace watching the government, and making them watch the big corporations and other organizations that are trying to make a world that only works for them. It isn't just voting, or writing letters. I think the time has passed for that. It's time for people to work together to form Non-Governmental Organizations to multiply our influence. To get standing before the committee meetings, the public hearings, the Royal Commissions, and other places where public policy is decided. We need to start getting ordinary people into political power, and ruthlessly remove them from it when they demonstrate they have been swallowed by the system.

Lots of changes needed. Who else will I see trying to make those changes?

I'm glad that week is over

2011-10-28T21:50:00.000-06:00

And I think that's about all I'm going to say about that week at work. Just so you know, I'm working on a big glass of wine. Well, two glasses.

Thursday was a rest day. Friday I was thinking about going for a swim first thing in the morning. Thinking about it was all I did. I really should have. Maybe tomorrow.

At least I did get on the bike for 1.5 hr spin in the evening. What's interesting about this is that this is the first time Amelia the cat has come downstairs when I'm on the bike. The old trainer, I think, to her sounded like the breathing of a big carnivore or something. She never came to visit. Tonight she crept downstairs and watched for a while.

Spin was good. Long warmup, though. It took a really long time, but I didn't rush it. After that I had several sets at mid zone 3 sort of effort, working on smooth spin. This was a bit of a struggle today. I didn't push it too hard, I was happy to chalk up a reasonable workout.

I have been musing about a rant lately. Politicians, mainly, and why we let them get away with the shit they get away with. But there are other things in the mix too. I'm not sure what will come out when I finally start typing. Stay tuned...

Yoga brutality

2011-10-26T21:39:00.001-06:00

I think Fiona is trying to make up for starting us off easy this term. Either that or she is really optimistic about the progress we've been making, and what we're up for. Tonight's class was really hard, even if it didn't have any side plank. But it did have Tree. And then Folding Tree, or as I think of it from my experience, Tree Toppling in High Wind.

What it also had was Warrior 1 out the wazoo. Exulting warrior. Triangle. 5 pointed star. Side body. Cross body. Various lunges. And some variations along the way. Chair, then chair with legs crossed ankle to knee. There was a fun little pose where we used an orange block to prop up our hips, and then fold our knees to our chests to relax. Sort of like an upside down Child Pose.

Which, as I think I've said before is the hardest pose for me. I can't relax, I can't breathe, I feel all constricted, and want it to stop. So I don't do it anymore. Both Fiona and Helen think it's just a bit perverted of me, and unnatural.

I was beat by the time Savasana rolled around, and yet couldn't relax. I'm thinking of a Sharepoint process I'm designing, and need to talk to SJ about if it will do a particular thing that will be handy. Rather, will it do that without doing a lot of programming and add ons.

Plus, I was thinking about my workouts over the next few days, and wondering if I can get myself up to the max hours I'm allowed to bill by staying a bit late and then running home after work one day. Like tomorrow, or maybe Monday at the latest. I've ridden home from downtown any number of times, and have a couple routes depending on how I feel. I'm just not sure how the shortest of them would work for running, being not entirely sure if there is sidewalk in certain places, and if the construction on Elbow Drive right near one particular bridge would mess me up.

So, I had an unquiet mind during Savasana, so it's no surprise I had an unquiet body. I was also thinking about how my hip bones were pressing into the mat, and how my hip flexors were not relaxing. That's a lot of thinking, isn't it?

Do you ever have times when you can't stop thinking? Your mind goes around and around, like the gerbil in Susi's brain, and no hookah pipe in sight? I find the only thing that works for me is to start writing down the various thoughts, especially the to do's. Once I do that I stop thinking about them. What do you do to quiet your mind? Besides drink wine, of course.

Teenaged hormones

2011-10-25T20:27:00.000-06:00

No, not me. Not even close.

I was totally grossed out at the pool today. Those of you who know exactly what I did when I worked for the City of Calgary all those years ago will understand how hard it is to gross me out. But those kids succeeded.

Just like there is football season, or basketball season, there is a swim season. All the local high schools get the kids in the pool twice a week, and have a competition at the end. Every pool has the kids from the local high school coming in so you can't escape. This goes on for about a month. I can't remember. Today was the first day.

It's fun watching the kids swim. Some of them are very, very fast. Some, well, lets just say they need all the practice they can get. So this morning I'm doing my lengths in the lane next to them. They swim a bit, then stand in a group in the deep end to listen to their coach yell at them. It's not quite chest deep on me. There I am breathing to my left, looking at all the legs, and a funny shaped bum. I take another look, and there is a pair of them. They are funny looking because this couple has their hands down the back of each other's swim suits. Well down, if you get my drift.

I was trying to do a flip turn and not gack at the same time. I'd never thought of such a thing in a public pool and all. This was beyond hair, or bandaids, or even snot floating in the pool as far as the squick factor was concerned. I was thinking I should complain, but I'm sure they'd just deny it, and I really had no idea who it was.

The rest of my swim was uneventful. 1K in sometimes choppy water, a little under 20 minutes, working on form. Then hustling in to work. Sigh. I miss the long swims when I didn't need to rush out of the pool.

Then after work I hopped on the bike for 1.5 hour spin. During a good warm up, I actually did some one leg drill, just to see how it felt. Just to see how long before I had to quit. Mumblety seconds. Katie would shake her head and give me a sad look. Most of the spin was a little faster than normal at a middling effort. I was trying to spin the legs and work up a bit of a sweat, but not overdo it. I wanted to work on the circle thing. It's coming back.

25! or, a very full yoga class

2011-10-24T20:52:00.000-06:00

My plan for tonight was to do a good core workout, and maybe a little bit of easy spin before or after. But then Linda (TOIC) reminded me I had missed one yoga class next week, and I'm going to miss another in November. Dinner that night will be so yummy it will be worth missing a yoga class. Helen, the yoga studio owner, is very good about allowing people to make up missed classes by attending other nights.

So Linda urged me to attend a beginner yoga class tonight. I've taken several classes from Helen, and she nearly killed me each time. The poses are held for the better part of eternity, or so it seemed back the. Linda very earnestly pointed out I was doing much better at yoga, and that this was a beginner class.

I decided that might be for the best. At least I should try, right? Things were going good, as people filed in. And in, and in some more. There are about 27 or 28 mats laid out around the room, and there were 25 students, plus the instructor. It was kind of full.

And then the words side plank came up. SIDE PLANK!!! In a beginner yoga class?? I was beginning to get heart palpitations. Katie had us doing side plank at KBRCC and that was a failure for me. Then I realized the pose was starting with front plank, and my dread was complete.

Then it got better. Helen was telling people this was an intro pose, and they were to do it from their knees. Ok. Then I thought about how I had been going to do core tonight. So, while doing front plank I did a really slow pushup. One. Then side plank, on my elbow. I even raised my foot. Then front plank again, then the other side with the foot going up a couple of times. These felt like long side planks, but were probably only 30 seconds. There I saw one girl doing side plank on her hand, body straight as a, well, plank, other arm up, one leg slowly going up and down. Wow.

Now I need to go pack for my swim tomorrow morning.

I had hoped for a much more dramatic sunrise

2011-10-23T19:29:00.000-06:00

Appliance repair people. Can't live with them, can't live without them. It turns out our oven needed a new igniter. We had called earlier in the week, and were assured, confirmation number and everything, that a repair person would be out Friday afternoon. On Friday they called to say they had overbooked and the repair person would not be appearing, but maybe Saturday. Then they said Saturday afternoon. Then Saturday about 5.

In the mean time some friends called. They were picking up their little boat from Glenmore Landing, and asked if we wanted to go out to dinner. Sure! They arrived. No repair person, and by now it was 5:30. We had phoned and complained, and tried to reschedule. Just everybody had their shoes and jackets on the repair guy arrived.

Our buddies played with their kid in the park for a bit. Then as the repairs were finishing up I sent them off to the British Chippy, and stayed behind to pay and see the guy out. That took a little longer than anticipated, but I got to the restaurant just as the food arrived on the table. I mean just. The waiter was in the process of putting plates of fish and chips on the table. They were pretty good too. I suspect we'll be back, though I won't have the canned Guiness again.

Something about the seating made my back feel wonky, and then I had a dreadful sleep. Though I can't really call it sleep, since I didn't really. Even the night before I was up early, then snoozed in my chair with a cat, only to be awoken from a sound sleep by a phone call. When I finally got out of bed this morning, I was an achey creaky grumpy mess. On Friday I had managed to bang my wrist at work hard enough that I was icing it that evening. That's one of the things that contributed to the poor sleep.

The sunrise was looking quite promising, with a gap in the clouds that I thought might under light them in a very pretty way. However, it didn't work out. This isn't the best time lapse movie in the world, but it does show today's dawn. I suppose I should have had it tilted up a bit, and facing a bit more south.

Here's the direct link.

I slowly got it together and decided not to inflict myself on my friends at spin class. Just because my day didn't start well is no reason to inflict it on anyone else. A little later in the morning I went down and did some careful stretching and twisting. There was no great and shuddering SNICK of my back going back where it belong, but things did feel better.

A little after that I climbed on my bike and got stuck in. Good warmup with some fast spin once I was ready. A little bit of standing, and a few minutes of hard effort. Then 20 minutes at what I think is mid zone 3. Breathing easy, sweating lots, legs happy. Easy spin. 15 minutes at a bit harder, up at the top of zone 3. Heart rate was stable and breathing was still good, sweating more. Easy spin. Then 5 minutes hard, up around 200 watts. Sweating a ton, breathing really hard, legs beginning to feel it.

So it appears that at 90 rpm, about 160 to 170 watts is sustainable till my butt gets tired, 180 to 190 watts is sustainable for a little while anyways, but 200 is not sustainable for much over 5 minutes. This gives me a nice baseline for training efforts.

I was on the bike 1.75 hrs altogether, then did more stretching afterward. This felt really quite good. Rollered my legs. There is a tight spot on each quad. And I was right, this was not as much fun as KBRCC, though I am getting caught up on DVD television. I've still got another season of Sanctuary, the last few episodes of Dollhouse, and a season of Leverage to go. Anyone seen Boardwalk Empire, is that any good? What else is good for television on DVD?

Running in the fall

2011-10-22T17:17:00.000-06:00

There's something special about running during autumn. At least for me there is. I love the colours, the temperatures, the smells, everything about fall. We don't get the bright reds of the maple trees, but we do get an amazing variety of yellows, russets, light oranges, and golds from the changing leaves. I love running through the wooded areas, and I guess I have to included our neighbourhood as a wooded area, since there are lots of trees. For a city plopped and sprawling across the bald prairie, there are a lot of trees.

I ran in shorts and tech shirt (the SUAR one, if you were wondering) today, and it was perfect, maybe 10 C (50 F), light wind, mostly sunny. I wish all my runs could be at that temperature. Cool enough to go hard and not get heat stroke, while warm enough to not have to worry about what to wear.

Today's run was a little quickie, a kiss and promise run. We have friends coming over (someone from my blogroll, quick, guess who it is) and we'll go out for dinner. Plus there is an appliance repair guy supposed to be over, and they are running well late now.

When I got the scale last week they also included a pedometer. Now, I don't have much faith in these things, but I tucked it in my back pocket during my run to see what the number after was. So, after a 7.75 K run, in 50:20, nice and relaxed, the pedometer said 5840 steps. or 116 steps per minute. That is one weird number, and I don't understand how it got that, or what it means. I know I run pretty reliably 85 to 90 steps per minute. There were no breaks, and I ran pretty steady, even for me. I reset it just before the run, and looked at it as soon as I finished. I'll maybe try a couple more times to see if it does any better. Perhaps I'll tuck it in a waistband, or in my hat or something. Though they did say it was meant for walking, and didn't work for jogging. But I'm running. I hope.

The run felt really good, my feet were light and happy. Mainly I was trying to keep my feet light, and my steps quick, and it mostly worked out that way. Breathing was regular and I could have chatted with a running buddy.

I went down through Fish Creek and saw a small herd of deer a few feet from the path. The people walking and riding by didn't seem to bother them at all. They were browsing through the old farm that used to have the horses that did the Christmas sleigh rides. They moved the horses out before the floods a few years ago, and they've never returned. I liked saying hello to them as I ran. I sometimes wonder where they got to.

My floating elephant theory is a big hit with some of my team mates. We have found it a very useful technique for dealing with one of the issues facing us.

Lets see

2011-10-21T21:06:00.000-06:00

This photo. The one with the funny blodges of light. What I was trying to do was take a photo of the blank concrete wall outside office. There were interesting reflections of light on it, from my office buildings. I was thinking of making a time lapse movie to see how the light patterns changed during the afternoon, and figured I'd try a regular photo, just to see what happened.

You'd think the light reflections would be rectangular to match the windows, but no. I guess the glass is subtly warped, and the concrete surface probably isn't any too flat, leading to the odd shapes of the reflected light. I'll still try to get a time lapse movie done.

There are some interesting mirror effects here. My desk is closest to the office window, and the window is to my left. All I did was turn to look out the window, put the camera near it, and take a picture of the light reflections. The concrete wall looks a lot closer than it is.

Now, take a closer look at the photo. You can see my wedding ring where it always is, on my left hand ring finger. How on earth am I holding on to the camera? It's a mirror image. Somehow, the photo sort of looks like it was shot from outside the building, but it's really a mirror image. I really don't know how I got the sense of depth, since the phone was right up against the glass.

Wednesday was totally blah. I didn't even go to yoga. I iced my wrist and went to bed early. Probably best for my co-workers.

Thursday morning was a swim on the way to dropping the car at the service shop. The swim felt kind of clunky. It's like odd bits of me were poking out in to the water. This was not a smooth swim, but it was better than the big guy in the next lane gently waving his flukes. With fins and hand paddles, and working at it, he was still moving too slow to share a lane with. The girl in the next lane was cooling down so I shared with her. After 20 minutes and some stretching, I was into the hot tub. After work was picking up the car and going for dinner at the Clay Oven. Then bed shortly after.

Friday was back on the bike for an hour. Lots of warm up, as I was feeling kind of heavy and plungy pedalish. Meaning I wasn't spinning as smoothly as I'd like. During warm up I worked on that, and periodically throughout the spin. 2x10 min at a comfortably hard pace, one I could maintain longer than 10 minutes, but I'm still training my butt for the saddle time here. I think I've got the watt readings dialed in now for how hard I want to be working. Some easy spin, but it was still feeling clunky and I didn't want to push it. Bed fairly early, and hoping to sleep in tomorrow.

Spin Studio

2011-10-18T21:12:00.000-06:00

The new furnace is all installed, which means I could put my little fitness area back together again. You can see Estela all set up and ready to go. My old computer is up and running, ready to play a video. There is an iPod player between the keyboard and monitor. You can just see the corner of the interlocking floor tile I put my yoga mat on.

Even better, I rode, while watching Sanctuary. I wasn't so impressed with these two episodes. 1.25 hours, mostly easy spin, but also doing some work to figure out where the top end of my aerobic range is. Then some stretching after.

Even knowing what this photo is, and how I did it, I'm surprised at how it turned out. Not at all what I expected. I'll give you a hint, I was in my office at work. Anybody want to speculate?

Thanks for your kind words about the sunrise photos. It's not like I did anything special. I just leaned out the car window and fired away.

First KBRCC of the season

2011-10-16T17:57:00.000-06:00

Katie's spin classes are lots of fun. She keeps it moving and there's lots of good stuff. I'm still figuring out where my fitness is, trying to match up effort, watts, breathing, heart rate, and how my legs feel. Once I get dialed in I can start building.

We rode 1:45, with a good mix of stuff. My legs are doing well so far, no complaints from my knees, and I pushed fairly hard today. Then a 20 minute T run. My legs felt a little bit heavy throughout this, but moved well enough. Then the dreaded core, starting with 15 pushups. Sheesh. And plank. My fave of all time. Yeah.

Just for fun, here's a couple photos of the sunrise when Linda was taking me to work on Friday. No I wasn't driving. The sky was actually a little bit grayer than the photo, but the contrasts were just as dramatic.

Crime and Punishment

2011-10-15T21:22:00.001-06:00

Once upon a time I believed that punishing criminals was a good thing, generally the more the better. Then they'd learn and they wouldn't do that anymore, would they?

Then I grew up.

Before I get stuck into my rant, I ran for an hour today, up to the reservoir and back. Mostly nice and easy, but with some faster bits. Thinking a lot about good running form. There was hardly anyone else out on the paths, which was weird. It was beautiful out, 5 C (41 F) sunny, and hardly any wind. I wore shorts and a short sleeved shirt and it was perfect. My feet were a bit tender after. I think these shoes have a bit less sole than my old ones.

Now for your irregularly schedule rant.

I started reading more about our justice system, and the many failures attached to it. I started reading more about corruption in the police and legal professions. I was on a jury once for a trial involving firearms offenses and what a gong show the prosecution case was. I started reading more about what actually happens in jail, and after one gets out. I began to realize how expensive it was to keep people in jail. After many years, I began to get a better sense of human nature.

Now, this is not going to be a rant that talks a lot about the dollar values attached to various options. Those numbers can be hard to find, especially when the current government is not releasing them, last time I looked. This is going to be more a rant about right and wrong, and the various failings of imperfect human beings.

Lets start with the big one. Capital punishment is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Why? The fundamental principle of our law is that a person is innocent until proven guilty. There are numerous safeguards in our criminal justice system because the history books are full of examples of people highly placed in government abusing their powers at the expense of the average citizen.

We make the prosecution go through hoops to prevent the punishment of innocent people. We make them go back and touch second base just to be sure that they can actually prove a particular point. Without that, it becomes too easy for the prosecution arm of the government to pick a likely victim and say they did the dirty deed. All too often the victim is from a visible minority group, or holds unpopular political views, or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even with these hoops, hoops that the unwashed say protect the criminals, there are several examples in Canadian jurisprudence of the police manufacturing evidence, the prosecution hiding or stonewalling on evidence favourable to the defendant, and the justice system dragging it's feet on recognizing DNA evidence. The names Steven Truscott, Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard, Thomas Sophonow, Ronald Dalton, Greg Parsons, and Randy Druken are proof of that.

There are many people that say we coddle the criminals and abuse the victims. I say, the first problem is to understand who the actual criminal is. Eye witness accounts are notoriously inaccurate. Police lie and fabricate or hide evidence. The legal profession seems to like to take the easy say out. Many people say it's too hard to convict criminals, and I say that's just fine. It SHOULD be hard to convict criminals. People shouldn't be going to jail and ruining their lives, and the lives of their families because people are too lazy to do their jobs.

If we don't know, or can't prove it, then we shouldn't be convicting. I like the Scottish verdict, "Not Proven". Essentially, the judge or jury is unconvinced that the suspect is innocent, but has insufficient evidence to the contrary. This verdict is sometimes referred to as "not guilty and don't do it again".

Jail is a horrible thing to do to someone. The loss of freedom is just the beginning. There is the violence from gangs, rape, drug addition (and if we can't keep drugs out of jail how on earth are we ever going to keep them off the street?) and perhaps worst of all, diseases like TB and polio are coming back in prison. Those will have a huge impact on our health care system. Then there is the post jail stigma. Who wants to hire a con? Nobody. If they can't get a job it becomes really easy to understand why they return to crime.

Given the horrible outcomes involved, not just for the people involved, but for society at large, it makes sense to try to prevent people from turning to crime in the first place. Trying to prevent the injuries caused by the criminal justice system is the right thing to do. That fact that almost everything is cheaper than putting someone in jail is almost beside the point.

So, how do we keep someone from a "Life of Crime?"

I want to take a little bit of a diversion first. Bear with me. I'm not going all religious mumbo-jumbo on you when I talk about a soul. I mean the part of us that knows right from wrong, recognizes that other people are people too, and that some actions cause anguish for other people. There are some people who apparently don't have one. I'm not sure if they were born without one, or they somehow lost it. In either case, these people are gravely ill, and are a mortal danger to the rest of us. They need to be recognized young, and will need special care. In what follows, I'm not talking about this group of people. I'm talking about regular folks that just happen to be falling into the cracks (lately they are more like gaping chasms) in our society.

Science is getting better at understanding what is going on in our heads, but we have a long way to go. Our minds and brains are the most complex things that we know of. Much of what we think we know is probably wrong, or at best incomplete. All we can do is keep working on it.

But what we can do is recognize when systems like school are failing some kids. I don't mean failing in the grade sense. I mean failing in the sense that the kids aren't responding to the situation. We need to get better at teaching kids. We know much about what engages the attention of children, and how they learn. We need to support that. In some cases, we have to work a lot harder to reach some kids. Maybe they are challenged somehow, or they are not quite ready for what's coming, and need a break, or a different approach. We cannot label kids and discard them. We have to find a way to reach every single child, and help them learn to deal with our ever more complex society.

One thing we have to do is weed out the poor teachers. Out. Fired. Whatever you want to call it. Seniority be damned, they have to go. If they don't love, or at least like kids, they probably shouldn't be teaching. If they can't be professional about doing what has been demonstrated to work, regardless of their personal beliefs, they are in the wrong profession. There should be lots of ways to help them find the audience they can relate to. Maybe they need to deal with older or younger kids, or the challenged or the bright. But if after a reasonable period, and reasonable attempts to help them, if they can't made the grade (pun intended) they should be out. They don't need to be infecting kids with their shortcomings.

While I'm on about it, religious education has no place in school. Teachers can believe all they want, but try to infect the kids with it, and they should be fired. I'm still amazed the Roman Catholic Church in Canada is allowed to run a school system.

I would stop lumping kids together by ages, and feeding them a formula of courses culminating with a standardized test. Kids learn at different rates at different ages. We have got to be smarter about education time. Here's a link to the Kahn Academy. He's got some great ideas about using video to help kids learn. Whatever it takes, we've got to do it.

Adults too. We've got to be smarter about education standards, and understanding what knowledge a person really has. It is a complete waste to have an engineer or a doctor with foreign credentials driving a cab. We should be putting those people through some form of customized course work to ensure they meet Canadian standards, without making them take all the courses all over again. It is madness that a teacher in one province has to go through major hoops to become certified in another.

That leads to my next point. Employment. Paid employment. Pay that lets one raise a family. A society that is unequal enough to let people take risks and reap rewards for doing so, but not so unequal that the financial classes gain mega-wealth by manipulating the system against everybody else. Henry Ford made history when he paid his assembly line workers more than he had to, because he recognized they were the perfect market for buying those cars, and spreading the word.

Money works better when everyone has some. It works better when it stays local, circulating between people and businesses. People need the understanding that work will be compensated fairly regardless of the status of the job.

Lately it seems that so called blue collar work isn't respected. You call a plumber when needed, but you don't want your kid to go to trade school. One of the reasons plumbers are so well paid now is that there aren't a lot of them.

There is no such thing as a criminal type, at least I don't think so. I am not making the argument that if we had more blue collar or trades jobs for people, there would be fewer criminals. Conrad Black is the refutation of that argument.

But I do think that if it is more possible to find and keep reasonably well paid employment, we will reduce the number of people driven to crime out of economic necessity. There is a huge change needed in our working society though. Jobs have status. Some more than others. Less status usually means less pay. Often these lower status jobs are harder work, sometimes manual, sometimes menial. None the less, they need to be done, and the person doing them is worthy of respect.

Which leads me to a digression. Two digressions. One of the best ways to decide if you want to hire someone, is take them to lunch, and see how they behave towards the wait staff. Your potential hire might be kissing your ass, but if he or she is a jerk to the wait staff, they are jerk, period. Easy hiring decision.

Another digression. Part of the effort in educating the young has to be the recognition of people prone to addictions, and preventing it. The so called war on drugs has been a failure, unless you're a cop or a drug supplier. We need to keep people from becoming addicted, not just to illegal drugs, but tobacco, alcohol, and prescription medications. I confess to some uneasiness about this. Imagine for a moment we had a genetic test that could with 100% accuracy identify someone who would become an alcoholic with their first drink. We're nearly there. What do we do to prevent that person from drinking, and yet allow them the freedom to make their own choices?

So what do I have so far? Better education that is geared towards a person's particular strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully that would lead to training that lets people understand what they are good at, and what they would enjoy doing. That might be advanced education to become a scientist, or vocational to become a plumber, or any other specific education for specific fields.

In the past one of the things that was done to young males that nowadays seem to be most likely involved in criminal activities, was to send them off to a war out in the boonies. That was a good outlet for hormonal urges. But Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Africa, and a few other local hot spots aside, there aren't many wars going on anymore. In fact, this is one of the more peaceful times in human history. Peaceful in the sense of few wars going on, and peaceful in the sense that crime rates are low and falling. Most of us don't need to particularly worry about street violence from criminals. We are more likely to face economic violence from white collar criminals and abusive government.

So as a replacement, I suggest we put people in an organization like the army, but one dedicated to public works. We provide food and housing, and a modest salary. They do stuff like hump sandbags during floods, clean up after natural disasters, help maintain public assets like buildings, parks, rivers, various infrastructure, and generally supplement volunteer labour when it's needed. It might be picking up garbage, or shoveling snow for seniors, or planting trees, or being the actual army reserve, or helping to clean up industrial messes. It could be anywhere in Canada, and maybe even overseas to aid after earthquakes. There are no shortage of groups looking for volunteers, and if the work is benefitting Canada as a whole, maybe these people should be provided as a labour source. The idea is to keep them active, and give them some structure.

Some might call this work for welfare, but I tend to think of it more as an advanced education in real life. They will pick up social interaction skills, organizational and project management skills, and may just find out what they want to do with their lives.

I take the position that crime is a wake up call. What's been done so far hasn't worked. So we provide whatever is needed to figure out what needs to happen. Maybe they need to be supervised 24-7, either via a GPS monitor, or by a group of the public service group.

Clearly, removing criminals from society and immersing them in a jail culture does not work, so lets stop doing that. Much like the Insite harm reduction clinic in Vancouver decided to try something different, lets immerse people in society. Rather than a few dozen or hundred hours of volunteer service, maybe it should be thousands of hours. Lets try different programs to help the criminal and document it so we know what works or doesn't work.

Canada is a country with small population. We need as many productive people as possible. Losing people needlessly to jail, or disease, or crime, or anything else is a waste. Finding out how to help people be healthy and happy in society is essential. It would be wonderful to have us all be productive, but I'll settle for avoiding destructive behaviors.

Updates

2011-10-15T08:03:00.000-06:00

One of the joys of living with computers is that every now and then one must update the software. Now, don't get me wrong, I like using computers, but they are a tool to get stuff done. I want them to work without me fussing with them. I'm willing to putter a bit to tune, customize, tweak, and jump through a hoop or two in order to have it work the way I want it to, but I don't want to be going under the hood to get all filthy and stressed out.

Which is one of the major reasons I started buying Apple stuff a long time ago. Generally, it works. It does what I want, when I want. There have been some frustrations along the way, but I'm very pleased. So far I haven't had any difficulty in using the Windows world at work, and the Mac world at home. At least until Vista came along. Vista. Sigh. And the network at work is so slow, I'm always thinking I missed my click or something, but no, the stupid little circle is spinning.

Over the last little while I picked up an iPhone 4 and and iPad 2. Generally I like to stay an upgrade back, so as to let other people find the unhappy surprises. Which means that when upgrade time comes, there's a few more steps involved. When Snow Leopard came out I was meh. Then, when Lion came out, it turned out you needed Snow Leopard to get there. Oh well.

I suppose I should have done Lion first, then the new software for the phone and iPad, but I did it the other way round. Each took a couple of hours. I started Lion last night and finished it off this morning. Totally painless, except for the Steermouse software that makes the Mac mouse actually functional. I had to upgrade that.

Now I'm learning the various new things. I've discovered that if I want, I can use the iPad as a trackpad for the computer. That might be fun. I use the phone or iPad as a remote control for the music. There are new ways of getting at my stuff, and new icons to play with. So far so good.

I also got one of those fancy-pants Tanita scales that give body fat and a bunch of other numbers. My weight has been creeping up lately, and my pants are getting a bit snugger. So I think a daily reminder will be a good thing. I'm not fussed about the actual numbers, more the general trend. I played with it a bit last night, and got a bit of variation in the numbers, but I suspect that it is probably pretty sensitive about exactly how your feet are placed in relation to the sensors. I may put some yellow stickies on it to make sure I'm in the same spot each time, and see how that works out.

The first scale I looked at was $99.99. That was better than expected, then I got a rude shock that shipping was going to be $106.99. WHAT! Then I saw the little button that said free shipping on orders over $100. OK, so I went looking for the next most expensive scale. They all do pretty much the same thing. I found one for $109.99, and sure enough the free (ground) shipping button showed up. I've lived this long without a scale, so I didn't mind a few days travel time. That's exactly what it turned out to be, along with $46 in various customs fees. It was double boxed and arrived intact. Set up was a breeze. Must remember to have a note pad handy to note the numbers.

That seems to be the only option. The Fitness Depot website said there were some in store specials (sale price more than what I paid), but the in store people said it was a web offer only. I hate runarounds like that.

It's been quite a week. Tuesday was the energy audit, then a new massage therapist came over. That worked out pretty well. The first couple times with a new therapist are a bit of a learning experience for both people.

Wednesday was a bit of a blah right after work, and yoga, but I've talked about that.

Thursday was my ART appointment. All is well there. One of my long time blog readers contacted me about my old spin trainer. His dad was looking for one. A few emails and a visit, I now have only one spin trainer again. I hope it serves him as well as it did me. Thanks JK!

Workouts, I hear you saying. Where are the workouts in all this? Well, true, it's been a bit of a gong show week, and I can hear the new spin trainer calling me. And the pool. So after the trainer and the new owner left I got my swim bag all packed. Even better, on Friday I got up in time to get to the pool.

I had a lane to myself till the last couple of laps of my 1000M. This was a relax and warm up swim, working on form, not trying to set any new records. The first half was good, and the second half I could feel I'd lost the edge and was slowing down. That's ok. As I was finishing someone else joined me, and when I stood up another person hopped in the lane. I decided I didn't want to cope with that and went off to the dive tank for some deep water core. I haven't done that for some time, and worked through all the various moves. Nice.

In the evening, once I'd got the Lion download started, I put Sanctuary on the old computer, and settled in for an easy spin while watching Amanda Tapping in a submarine. Not the best episode. Spin was good, more experimenting with resistance settings, and seeing what that does for watts and my gearing. So far so good!

Yoga breathing

2011-10-12T21:23:00.000-06:00

After the big day in the life on Monday, I took it easy Tuesday, till my new massage therapist showed up and pummeled me for a while. That was good, working on my left shoulder mainly, but a bit of both calves too.

The energy audit guy showed up during the late afternoon. As expected, the big news was the need to replace the furnace. This was not a surprise and will be happening early next week. That the 3 outside man doors leak badly was no surprise either. One has warped, one is not square since we thing the house settled a little bit, and the most sheltered one is where they put the exhaust fan. He pointed out several other things we can do, and we get the full report in a couple weeks. This is all in aid of getting some government rebates that cover part of the cost of the audit, and a bit over 10% of the cost of a new furnace. Which, since we had to do it anyway fairly soon, is a good deal.

If I'd been ambitious I would have gone for a run after work today. But I was feeling kind of blah most of the day. I moved offices again. This is my 4th one since starting mid February. Fortunately I don't have much to move. My office roomie and me don't like this office as much. We used to have a sliver view of the mountains, now we get a concrete wall from the next building. Plus we think the lighting is a slightly different colour, or darker, or something. Perhaps in time we will settle in. At least the rest of our immediate team is all together now.

Yoga class was interesting. Most of the time my breathing has nothing whatever to do with whatever it is that we are doing. I'm usually panting a little bit. Sometimes a lot. Tonight, during a kneeling lunge thing, where you breath in, lunge the one leg forward, spread the arms open and do a bit of a back arch, I found I was actually breathing in time with the motion. Slowly. Relaxing. Peaceful. Except for my knees not liking when I kneel on them, I could have done that for a while. Maybe I'm beginning to get the hang of this yoga thing.

A Day in the Life

2011-10-10T19:35:00.000-06:00

Beth of SUAR fame tagged me. So here you all are.

Today being Thanksgiving, I slept in. It being Thanksgiving, I knew I had to include some photos. I am crushed to admit there are only 16. Not twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was. I'm sorry. Put me on the group W bench. At least I'm not facing blind justice here. (The young pups with no kulture that don't get the reference can email me.)

Here I am a few minutes after getting out of bed putting coffee in the microwave. Yes that is the right time. You don't want to see what my hair looks like. The last few mornings I was up at 3:30.

After some blog surfing I noticed the sun coming up, and tried to capture the frost on my neighbour's garage. I'm not sure how well that turned out.

I'd made a to do list for the weekend. A couple things have been done already so they have been removed. I'm really liking Notes Plus as an iPad app for capturing hand written (printed) notes.

Here's my desk, middling messy. I like to try to keep it tidy, but it doesn't happen that much. I also had to clean up and organize the tax paperwork from tax season. That's what the big mound of paper is. There was some other paperwork to be tidied too. The shoe laces are from the new Brooks. Now that I've done speed laces, I can't use regular laces for my running shoes. Note the medals hanging in the top left corner, where I can see them. Yes, I'm a Mac guy.

Here's the after. You'll note the AOL CD that I use as a coaster. I'm not sure how long it's been there, but it's about 10 years. It works really well. Once upon a time when I worked at Skystone Engineering, I brought in a bunch of old mainframe hard drive disks to use as coasters. Same idea, I like to use and reuse where ever I can. It's the way I roll. That's an old HP 11C. I love RPN. The extra cable is to synch my phone and iPad. Soon I won't have to worry about that.

After the desk I was out tidying the yard for winter. We could still go months without snow, but that's not the smart bet. One year we had a huge dump of snow on Labour day, and it never really let up. At the moment the forecast is calling for some snow next weekend. It supposed to be warmer than last winter, but that isn't saying much. As long as it's sunny, I don't care about the actual temperature. But when it's cloudy I get moody. Which, Susi, is why I don't live in Vancouver, and, V oh favourite cousin o'mine, why I don't live in the Fraser Valley.

I mowed the lawn it one last time, emptied the water barrel onto the flower beds, pulled a bunch of weeds and generally tidied. I also managed to talk to 3 of my neighbours, which is always nice.

One of the things about making your own wine is that periodically, no matter how careful you are, some of the bottles end up with some residue on the inside. As a routine thing one has to remove the labels and clean them, and that's a soothing activity. But once the residue builds up you have to get a bit more drastic. I'll dump some bleach into the bottles, and add hot water, with a bit more bleach in the bucket and let them soak a bit. Then I'll put in some small ball bearings in each bottle and whoosh that around. A bit of scrubbing and rinsing generally takes care of any film or deposits. But some of the crud is made from sterner stuff. I dump in some straight bleach, the ball bearings, maybe scrub with a bottle brush, and whoosh that around for a while. That always works. Rinse it all, and they are ready for the next batch of wine. Which we should be ordering in a month or so.

Here is a typical before shot. I don't know how well the film will show up. This is why I use clear glass rather than green. One look tells you if it's clean. The only reason to use green glass is to protect it from sunlight. Since my basement never sees sunlight, I'm not worried about it.

Here's an after shot. Clean and ready for more wine.

Like I said, it is Thanksgiving. Here is the chosen wine for the meal. I bottled this December 4, 2004, and this is the last bottle. It's very good. There were several wine diamonds on the cork, and a huge one with a bit of sediment at the bottom.

Naturally, there has to be a bird. There's just two of us, so even the smallest turkey is mega overkill. We'd thought of ordering a Turducken, but left it too late, and even the smallest of them are still pretty big. This is a Guinea Fowl, with carrots, potatoes, dates, rice, shallots, wine, and fresh herbs mix good for poultry. Here's what it looks like in the pot.

Here's the the plate. It was every bit as good as it looks. There are also 3 containers made up for lunch next week. I could go on here about how we appreciate what we have, and the life we lead, but that would just make you all jealous. Fruit flan for dessert, and I've previously posted photos of them. No need to drive you all mad again.

One of the tasks is to move stuff away from the furnace and tidy up the fitness stuff. Now that I've got a new trainer, I've got an extra trainer. I can give you a really good price on it. Any takers? More of the summer fitness stuff was put away, and the winter stuff was dug out. I'm really looking forward to the next run in -35 C (-31 F) weather.

After dinner we went out for a nice walk around the neighbourhood. Here's the view from the top of the berm just beside 37 St, looking south.

From the same place looking south and west. The mountains really are there, but they are hard to see. Mornings are the best times for mountain photos.

At the south end of Woodbine is a place that overlooks the west end of Fish Creek. This is a panorama shot using Photosynth. We really enjoy walking around the neighbourhood, and with all my training I haven't done much walking lately. Normally I have a few routes I like to run, or I go down into Fish Creek and run through all those trees. It's a great park, and one could run for hours and not run on the same path. It takes me about 40 minutes to ride my hybrid from the west end at 37th street (just to the right of this photo) to the Ivor Strong Bridge at the east end.

After the walk I was downstairs doing some gentle stretching and core. The elbows to opposite knee thing sort of works, but I can really feel the deep core muscles just below my belly button protesting. They are still tired from the run last weekend.

As you can see, my to do list is much shorter now. I'm feeling very accomplished. I think it's time to pour another glass of wine, and maybe put on a DVD. Perhaps Buckaroo Banzai, I'm sort of in that mood. Or maybe the Fifth Element.

And Beth, don't hold it against me that you don't have a shirt my size. Should I win, I will give it to the girl that coached me last year. She is TOTALLY a Shut Up And Run kind of girl, and would love to wear your shirt. I'm totally loving mine. It's my go to running shirt, and has had several compliments.

Tacx Flow Review, or -

2011-10-09T17:02:00.001-06:00

If I'd known it would be that easy I'd have filmed it.

As a followup to the Big Dance yesterday, I'd like to give a huge shout out to buddies Jill, Lorraine, and Jennifer. They all had a great race in hot conditions. As well, blog buddies Ulli, ELF, and a few other people who are friends of friends. Glad to see everybody had a great day. And what a race for Chrissie Wellington and Mirinda Carfrae! Less than 3 minutes apart over not quite 9 hours. Wondering if Mirinda could catch her. That is amazing. They both proved they are champs with a capital C. Let's not take away from the next 3 girls coming in over the next 10 minutes. I think the top echelon of female triathlete competition is going to be very interesting over the next few years.

Today turned out to be cloudy and cool, so I gave up on the outside bike ride. Sigh. Fall is here at last. Some of you may remember one particular experience last year with me trying to get the trainer tire on. I'd just as soon not go through that again, so I prepared carefully. After I got the old tire off I gently warmed up the trainer tire using a heat gun until it was warm to the touch. Then I scuttled over to the rim, and worked it on, carefully pushing in the tube and getting the tire onto the rim. I got down to the last few inches and much to my surprise the tire popped onto the rim without even having to work it very hard with my hands. I've had to push normal tires harder. So I'm thrilled!

As I said yesterday, there were no instructions in the box. I found this site with good instructions, and followed them. I could wish some of the sketches had been a bit clearer, but it all worked out. About my only complaint is in where the cords attach. The data cable, and input from the cadence sensor plug into the bottom of the roller unit. How hard could it have been to put them where they were easier to see? I was pretty careful draping the cables so they wouldn't get in the way. This might get to be a bit of a pain to take the setup to KBRCC every week.

I got the rest of the computer gear on the bike. Setting up the Tacx computer was a snap! It was easier than some of the regular bike computers I've had. Even tweaking the roller tension to zero took only two attempts. Maybe I got lucky. I was up and pedaling before I knew it. The controls are pretty simple. I've got the basics mastered, and plan to take another run through them to see about some of the other functions.

My current bike computer, a wireless Cat Eye, is still hooked up, so I did a bit of comparison. Cadence was right on. The Tacx updates quicker. The speed was about 1 Kph difference, and I forget which is reading higher. I've futzed with the Cat Eye calibration enough that I might have the wheel diameter wrong or something. The Tacx readout is huge, which makes it really easy to read. That is a huge plus for me. At the moment I've got time at the top, cadence in the middle, and watts at the bottom. There are lots of ways of tweaking the display to get what you want. I didn't get the heart rate strap, so I'm still getting heart rate numbers with the Timex.

This is the first indoor ride in some time, and during those last rides I was still having knee problems. So today's ride is a bit of a self calibration exercise. I certainly do not propose to bore you all with numbers all the time. (But I know Julie is a bit of a freak for numbers, so I'll email them to her, just to make her happy. The things I do. hahahaha! )

The incline can be adjusted from -4 to +9. After a bit of poking around I set it at +1 for most of the workout, and -4 for easy spin cooldown. The +1 seems to be about the resistance of my last trainer, though I don't think the comparison is linear.

Last year, if I was on the big ring, and in the 3rd biggest cog, I could pedal about 27 Kph, 85 to 90 rpm and find a stable place for breathing and heart rate somewhere mid zone 3. Today, same gearing, heart rate about 128 to 130, breathing deep and regular, but not gasping or panting, I rode 10 minutes, trying to stay around 190 watts. The watt figure actually moves around a bit compared to cadence, so I'm guessing that calculation happens faster than the cadence numbers update. That felt pretty good. I could keep that up longer.

I stood up for 1.5 minutes, pedaling hard, in the hardest gears, at about 245 watts, and that sure got my heart rate and breathing up. I suspect if I want to do standing work, I should change the incline settings to make it a bit harder.

Later on I tried to pick one gear harder to maintain 200 watts for 10 minutes, and made it to 7. I think I could have gutted it out till 10, but certainly not much longer. This got my heart rate up to 133 or so, and breathing a lot harder. I was beginning to feel a bit of a burn, so I backed off.

For some high cadence easy gear spin I topped out about 180 rpm, (briefly), but spent some time working around 120 to 130 rpm, where I'm getting a bit of bounce and back fat resonance, to see if I could smooth it out. This is a major improvement from where 115 rpm would have my knee screaming.

Near the end of the ride I wanted to find out how loud the trainer was. I pushed gears and cadence up till I was about 425 watts. It was quieter than I thought it would be, more like a strong whirring fan noise than anything else. It certainly would not interfere with listening to music or talking to someone. Not that I can maintain that power output very long! Linda was reading upstairs, and couldn't hear anything but the brief peak, and even that wasn't loud. I'd be able to do a spin session while Linda is sleeping.

Of course, these watt figures are only valid on my bike and trainer. I have no idea if they are comparable even to other readings from the same trainer model, let alone other ways of calculating watts. I'm just going to use them as a baseline for me, and not get too carried away about them as a number. If maintaining 200 is at the high end of my performance now, and at the end of the season it's at a higher number, then I'll know I've improved. But without knowing a lot more about exactly how much resistance is involved, and exactly how the unit calculates watts, I won't be able to say anything for sure about how much I've improved. I'm going to look up some info about training when you know your watt output. If any of you have any material you'd like to share, I'd be happy to read it.

The ride was 1.5 hours long, and felt really good. My legs felt strong, and my spin fairly smooth. The ride is more stable than the old trainer. For a first ride, I'm really pleased, both with how my knees feel, and how the new trainer is working. Anyone want a gently used basic CycleOps trainer?

Some new stuff

2011-10-08T18:08:00.001-06:00

Today was not the day for a day in the life. I've been tagged, but today is not typical. I bought stuff. That's rare for me.

Normally Saturday morning is an easy wake up, reading the papers and drinking coffee and petting the cat. But today we were out of the house and heading up to the far NW to visit Bow Cycle. I've decided the time has come to get a better bike trainer, one that has a power meter. After some shopping around I decided on a Tacx Flow. I couldn't justify the extra cost for a Bushido because it really needs a computer for the video display.

I managed not to look at any of the bikes, but you'll note I didn't go into Speed Theory. Their website says they've got an Orbea Ordu for an amazing sale price. If I actually saw it, I might be tempted.

Assembling the trainer was a bit interesting because there was no assembly instructions at all. I ended up finding some on line, and just as well, it was not obvious how it goes together.

With any luck tomorrow will be nice enough to ride outside. If so it will be the last time for me. I'll put the trainer tire on and get the trainer computer all set up. I've got KBRCC starting next Sunday!

I've also got a used trainer for sale, a CycleOps, basic model.

I've never really been happy with the latest New Balance shoes, the 980 or something. I'd really liked the ones I had before that, the 767, so the 980's were a real disappointment. They were heavy and somehow they made me want to run on my heels. They got beyond filthy at the trail run, and I decided it wasn't worth trying to clean them.

So here are the new ones.

Brooks Adrenaline. I took them out for a nice 5 K run this afternoon. They feel very light and comfortable on my feet. Much better than the last ones. This 5K was 31:30, not working too hard, mainly just checking out my legs to see what they think. No complaints.

I tried Fitness Depot for a scale to read weight and body fat, but they didn't have the Tanita. There was an el cheapo that didn't work right. Looks like I'll have to order on line.

In between stuff I'm watching the Big Dance. Chrissie is now in second, and Mirinda is maybe 5 minutes back. This is shaping up to be good! So far my peeps seem to be doing well in the heat.

Zoom!

2011-10-07T05:53:00.000-06:00

I've been dragging my body around this week, just a bit, but am mostly recovered from the race. At least enough that I was thinking about going out for a bike ride last night, if it hadn't been raining, and wasn't cold. Yeah, I'm such a weenie. The weekend is supposed to be nice so I held off on the trainer tire struggle, just in case I can fit in one more ride outside.

Any advice on bike trainers? My buddy Cath loves her Tacx Bushido. I'd like to get one with a power meter, which of course means it comes with all the other goodies. What's your experience?

Yoga on Wednesday was a painful experience. My low back was still very tight. By the time I was getting into the poses, the rest of the class was getting ready for the next one, and it's not like F was going fast. Oh no. It was me being slow.

Work has been thoroughly zoom. The deadlines are closing in. Our team is frantically getting our deliverables ready to fling over the wall. So of course, yesterday me and another team member were in an all day course for ProVision. I'd had an intro class so I was all set up, but that intro class had been a slit your wrists experience. This one was much better, and we actually learned something. It still seems to be going 3 sides around the square to get to where you want, and I don't like the printed output, but I don't have a choice in these things.

Plus, we lose a day moving offices. Normally office moves are a domino chain of events, but my office roomie and me swap with another office. Nothing else. Just a swap, and we both end up further away from our team leaders. Plus, we lose our tiny slice of the view of the mountains from between two buildings. Our view is a blank concrete wall now. Sigh. At least it works out for my schedule, since I had to leave early that day anyway.

Saturday is Kona! There are several people I'm going to follow, but I don't know if I'll do it the same way I did last time. Here's who I'm following, hope I didn't miss anyone. And what a pain that list is to work with. Idiots at IM that publish it that way. Grrrr.

127 Uli Bromme

404 Jill Kirker

1170 Lorraine Churchill

1472 Elizabeth Waterstraat

1479 Jennifer Mansell

1275 Darin Hunter

1699 Michelle Milot

I'll be cheering these people on throughout the day, and hope it's the day they dream of.

Plus of course, Chrissie and Rinnie. I hope they have the best day ever, and THAT should be a race we'll be talking about for years to come.

Deeply saddened

2011-10-05T18:50:00.000-06:00

RIP Steve Jobs.

You are one of the few people who can say they truly helped make the world a better place to be. Not just for a few people, but many, many millions of people.

I think I'm being hit on by a bot

2011-10-03T19:56:00.000-06:00

I got home from the race to discover this in my stats page.

This is an astonishing peak! Even if someone had discovered my blog, and avidly devoured the pages as fast as they could read, I don't think it would produce a peak like that. And the referring URL looks kind of strange as well. I tried to follow them, and they all lead back to "ebookseeking.blogspot.com", and then it turns itself into advertising. Just on principle, I'm going to go clean my cookies. t.co is something twitter uses. Don't know about the others.

Anyone else have this happen to them?

I'm feeling pretty good about the race. My hamstrings are still a little grumpy with me, but my hip flexors have mostly forgiven me. I've done some light stretching and a bit of rollering with the stick. Planning to get a good night of sleep again. That will help. Yoga Wed. Then see how I feel about an easy spin, or a swim.

There is a rant brewing about how Harper doesn't really care about victims at all, except as how they advance his frighten almost everybody and put the rest in jail agenda.

The only race of 2011, muddy wet and all

2011-10-02T19:31:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time it seems forever ago now, I trained my tummy mostly off and did IMC. I got through it by the skin of my teeth, having my body crap out during the last peak of the training. I found out later than I'd actually done the race with a partially torn meniscus in my right knee. I was in pretty tough shape.

My priorities over the winter and spring were to try to get my knee back into shape with prolotherapy and ART, and lots of specific exercises. Even though I'd struggled with the bike for most of 2010, it was the running I wanted to work on. And oddly enough, running didn't particularly hurt my knee, though it would if I went too hard, or too fast, or too long. Biking is what made my knee hurt. Which is weird, I know.

Early on in the year I thought I'd make this year a run focus. Trying to learn to run better. I also did not want to jeopardize my knee recovery. Plus I was working a busy full time job again. One that likes scheduling early morning meetings, so it was difficult getting to swimming. Plus, I was enjoying being unstructured. There were a number of workouts, or rather proto-workouts, that had I been on a plan, going for a big goal, determined and all that, I would have pushed myself through it. However, many of them I rolled over and went back to bed. It was nice taking a mental break from a full on training schedule.

The consequence of being a bit of a slacker showed up this weekend. I thought a half marathon would be a nice distance. One that would let me gauge my fitness and running ability. I didn't want to do Calgary Harvest, way too many people involved. But I heard about a nice little race in Fernie. I pictured running through the trails along the river, enjoying the mountain views, listening to the Elk River, crunching the leaves under foot. I could see it in my mind. When I signed up, there was only 4 other guys in it, and I thought that 3 out 4 was excellent odds for a podium finish.

Plus, my buddies Cath and Jason live in Fernie, and it's always nice to see them. And I had an opportunity to stop in the windy pass to get the salsa from Julie. But she was out training. MG was asleep, so I visited with Peanut for a few minutes, then we headed out. MG will never know how hard I looked for an NDP sign.

Reality struck this morning. Big time. I got a good look at the course map, which included an elevation profile that I hadn't seen before. The first 4 K or so are a nice flat warm up, then it turns into a scramble for the next K or two, straight up the mountain. That's the way it looks anyway, and Jason assured me it wasn't far from the truth.

The drive down had sporadic rain. Saturday afternoon was nice. Package pickup was quick and painless, and for a nice surprise, I got our house number as the race number. I thought that was a good omen. We walked back into town to have a late lunch, then down the road to Beanpod Chocolate for a snack. They make their own chocolate! It was wonderful! (J&N, just go there next visit, you can thank me later.) That will be on the list of things to do next time we visit. Cath was talking of snow shoeing, which I've always wanted to try. So I guess we're going down there again in the winter.

We woke up to rain. Rain rain rain. And just cool enough to dither about what to wear. There would be no leaves crunching under foot. I ended up going with tights. Most of the women were in capris, and most of the guys had shorts on. You could just see your breath on the air.

Sure enough, the first 4 K was flat and then headed up the mountainside. By then I was well back in the pack, so it was a slippery, sloppy enchilada going up there. Just after the 5 K mark I found my legs, and it was nice running till about the 9 or 10 K mark, then it started to hurt. It sort of varied between light and hard rain, then about half way through the race it stopped and started to warm up.

The rest of the course was pretty flat. My support crew showed up en masse under a bridge about 10 K to cheer me on, which was very nice. My hip flexors had been talking to me about this experience, and they were not terribly happy with me. Except for the scramble up, my breathing and heart rate had been just fine, but my legs were not in the running mood. At some point in the teens I started walking a few steps just to give the him flexors a break. There are some tricky bits on the path, what with tree roots and mud, which are never a good combination, to say nothing of a cold river RIGHT THERE.

I'd figured out pretty quick this wasn't going to be a fast race for me. The bottom of my feet were getting tender what with all the rocks and stuff. The course had only water to to drink, being handed out by partially-trained beings less than half my height. One time I'd pointed to one little guy and was aiming to take his cup. His buddy, between me and him, tried to rush in and force me to take his cup instead, as if that was the competition or something. By then I wasn't in the mood.

The late teens were a bit of a sufferfest. I was trying to limp on both feet. The problem with walking is that it catches stones that go into your shoes. I had to stop a few times to dig them out. In the end, I think the course was short. All the K marks came about when I expected them, up till 20. And then really quick, and I know I wasn't running that fast, there was the finish line.

It was nice to sit and fold up for a little while. Back at the house I showered carefully (just a touch of nipple chafe), and used the ball on my feet, and the stick on my legs. The drive back I stretched out and relaxed, and tried to snooze, and it was really good till I tried to put my shoes back on just before getting home. My left hamstring cramped really badly. Ouch.

It is clear unstructured training doesn't get the job done. I weighed a bit more than I thought I did, which didn't help the legs. If I'm going to do well in the planned triathlons next year, I've got to buckle down and get serious about the core work again. The base is mostly still there, but I need to work on muscle strength and endurance. And getting the weight down.

Now, I'm sure you'll pardon me while I go pop an asprin and put my feet up.

Here I thought yoga would be easy

2011-09-29T20:23:00.001-06:00

I did not sleep well at all on Tuesday night, no idea why. Eventually I gave up trying, and got out of bed to read for a while. At midnight almost exactly an ambulance with lights flashing pulls up in front of the house. They peer at me, then pull forward in front of my neighbour's house. Ok.

A minute later a fire truck with it's lights flashing pulls up behind the ambulance. Now I'm getting a bit freaked out. I can hear Linda snoring so I know she hasn't called anyone. They hop out of their truck and walk up my neighbour's driveway. I poke my nose out and sniff for smoke, and check the one window that looks out on their house. All seems fine.

I still nothing but figure the neighbour's wife must have had a problem or something. She can't speak any English, so if it had been him on the floor, the cops would have come too, given that they would have had no idea what was going on. Unless there is a Cantonese speaker at 911. I keep on reading and eventually they go away. Eventually I go to bed, and still don't really sleep.

So by the time yoga class comes around, I'm really dragging my tail. Our instructor had been in an auto collision earlier in the day. Some inattentive dimwit drove into the back of her car. I don't know if they were on a cell phone or not. So she was feeling a little beat up, and we were encouraging her to do a class working on breathing. Preferably while lying down. She didn't go for it. The class was a bit of a workout in fact, and I discovered something new.

It used to be when I bent over to touch my toes I didn't get very far. Prior to 2008 I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I touched my toes with straight knees. Now it's pretty routine, though I have to ease into it. Last night we were doing a chest to leg thingie, and suddenly I found that my tummy sort of tucked itself in, and my abs could pull my chest closer to my leg, to the point my ribs were touching my quads. That is a first!

Another, unhappier first, is to find out a little while ago that a friend of mine is in the hospital, in a coma. LM was in a "bike accident" a couple weeks ago. They took her off the ventilator earlier this week, and have moved her out of ICU. So she must be better, but her injuries must have been serious to be there in the first place. I'd done a search through the local news shortly after, looking for news of a bike car collision (I can't call them accidents anymore) but didn't find anything. It seems that this year has been a bad one for bike injuries, or maybe I'm more tuned to it. I'm getting more and more nervous about the short chunk of 37 st I have to ride on to get to 22X. Drive and ride safe!

We are currently shopping around for a new furnace, and spoke to the first of three people tonight. What fun! Anyone have any experience with replacing a furnace that they would care to share?

The taper is going well. I like tapering, contrary to what most bloggers say. Maybe that means I don't peak hard enough. Weather is looking nice for the weekend, and I'm looking forward to the run.

Yahoo for swim mojo!

2011-09-27T21:16:00.000-06:00

I think my swim mojo has been off at the shark vacation resort. But it was back today. After the amazing shoulder massage yesterday, I figured the swim today would either be very good, or very bad. It turned out good, which is good.

There was no rush to get into the water. I appreciated being back at Renfrew, and chatted briefly with a buddy that has done several ironman races, very quickly. He's just off from foot surgery and has just been cleared to swim. Biking and running will be a while.

After a few strokes with no complaints from my shoulders, or anything else, I relaxed and got into the groove. The guy in my lane was really good about letting me past. I think he was trying to draft but that didn't last long. This was nice, I was back about 21 strokes per length again and feeling relaxed in the water. 500 m was 9:30, 1K was 19:20, and 1.5 K was 29:25. The very last couple laps got a bit sloppy, and I totally blew a flip turn.

But still, last week it was a struggle to get the 20 minute K, and this week, going that few seconds faster per 100m felt easier. I know my stroke was better, and I wasn't working as hard. Funny how that is. Improvement is happening.

Nothing else, just the straightforward swim, thinking about my elbows. I think I need to get back to doing my flip turn exercise. They are very sloppy right now.

Totally by accident I missed another night of LRT shenanigans. They closed closed down part of LRT avenue right before rush hour because of a gas leak, stopping train service completely. At least it wasn't another case of suicide by train. Meanwhile I was in a bar having drinks and networking courtesy of the company I contract through. Chatted lots to my buddy Sean who is now at BP, and one of his current co-workers, who knows some of the people I used to work with. Small world some days.

The massage workout

2011-09-26T20:33:00.000-06:00

An entire hour working on my shoulders. I've never really had my muscles twitching and jumping like that. It's a distinctly odd feeling. Normally I get worked on all over, but I really needed the shoulders, especially the left. oooh. Can't wait for the hot tub after the swim tomorrow.

I was out for a short walk at lunch time, and was surprised at how crowded the lobby and mall was. There was an extremely loud spin session happening in the lobby. Lots of people were walking through with their fingers in their ears. I watched for a few minutes. Now, bear in mind I have no idea how long these people had been on the trainer. Several of them looked like they were ready to keel over from heat exhaustion. None of them looked like they were having much fun. Glad I wasn't doing that.

The mall was full of people strolling around, and lots of people sitting their watching them. The watchers piss me off. I see that street most mornings and it's filthy. Cigarette butts everywhere, some garbage strewn around, and yet I know for a fact that street is cleaned daily at the very least. There are people dropping butts and stepping on them, rather than reaching a few feet to put it in a receptacle designed for the purpose. I'd love to see a bylaw officer give them a ticket and slap them upside the head for good measure.

The other day grocery shopping I was behind a LOD (Little Old Dear) paying for her groceries by writing a cheque. I haven't seen that for years, many years. I was actually kind of astonished that anyone still does this, but the clerk assured me she gets a couple a day. I suspect that in what will seem like no time at all, I'll be the old one, trying to pay through a smart phone autopay app. The people behind me will look on me with amused tolerance (I hope) at the quaint display. They, of course, have a bio chip installed that does all that for them and barely have to break stride leaving the store. It's called progress, and sooner or later, I'll fall off the trailing wave. It's a good thing I don't have any kids waiting around for their (nonexistent) inheritance, and wondering how soon they can put me on the ice floe for the polar bears. If any are still left alive then.

Maybe last nice day for biking

2011-09-25T18:37:00.002-06:00

Even if it was a bit windy. I left about 10 oclock, and it was already nice out. It never really got hot during my ride, but then I was only out for 40 K or so, for 1.5 hrs. Warm enough to be nice, windy enough to stay cool. A great day for a bike ride, possibly the last day to be nice enough for a bike ride in shorts and shirt till next year.

I saw a ton of other people out on 22X. My ride was mainly to spin the legs and keep the blood moving. Plus look at the scenery. It isn't the fall colours of Ontario's maple trees, but I love the gold and yellow and russet colours here.

After the bike ride I showered and we headed out to the Interior Design show. Linda was stood up by a buddy, so I went. We are mainly interested in furnace stuff, since our furnace was installed with the house in 84. No trouble with it, but we have been assured we are on borrowed time. Plus the government is offering a rebate program. We are also looking at roofing and siding, but that need isn't so urgent.

One of the things I sometimes enjoy at these trade shows is watching the hucksters. You know, the ones selling the veggie slicer thingies, or super-duper mops, or pots and pans, or who knows what all else. But today the demo that caught us was the Vitamix girl. TWSS! I was watching carefully, and in several demos she did not throw in anything that produced a nuclear green mix. So that was a big plus. We ended up sampling a juice, a soup, and some ice cream, though it was really more like a gelato. All were good. The demo was impressive. Buuuuuutttttt, we didn't, in the end. We have a food processor gathering dust.

After that was BBQ chicken, which was a bit of a struggle. The wind really picked up. With Yams, and wonderful blackberries for dessert.

So, blog buddies, your input is wanted here. How many of you have a Vitamix? How often do you use it? What is your favourite mix of stuff? Worth the $$$?