In normal household, bulbs are forced for the holidays. In Pecchia house, bulbs force you.
I had these in a paper bag in the basement and planned to plant them next Summer, but they decided to sprout anyway. If they bloom I will post.
Later finally came and I made the desk top: As has become routine with Ikea, there were missing parts--one of the two T-legs was nowhere to be found. I kept all of the boxes in one spot so there is no chance it was misplaced. I checked the receipt and we did indeed pay for two legs. The only conclusion I can come to is that they didn't give us all of our boxes.
I was tempted to drive all the way down to Stoughton today and get the part, but it is an hour each way and another task awaited me right after noon and this would wipe out the first half of the day. Eh, we will order it after the new year and just say "no" to an hour (each way) to get the part.
Instead of the big drive I...
The lag-bolts are hidden under the flanges of the coat hooks and counter-sunk because the hooks are solid metal in the back.
Given all of this, it was with supreme dismay that this evening, at the height of making dinner while my wife was at karate, the faucet sprang a leak. Visions of my last weekend before Christmas spent in miserable frustration danced in my head. Or really, more like clogged on my head. What was especially galling was that I just put the thing in a couple of years ago and if you have ever purchased a faucet you know that they all come with 10, 15, 25 year or lifetime warranties--so it shouldn't be malfunctioning in 2 years! Plus, plus--I just threw away the box after having it sit in the basement all this time. That is where the documentation needed for free replacement would be, so I would pay for a new one and get the fun of putting it in.
Figuring I had little to loose, I set about taking the faucet apart. I got to the very bottom of the thing and found a plastic ring out of position. I adjusted it and then reassembled the thing: Voila, it works now! But I've got my eye on it.
I would like to thank each of my five readers too, but really five is a guess--it could be three. Either way, thanks! I hope to write something you will find interesting soon.
But no. All the shots came out blurry!
After running a few miles (less than normal for a Sunday and slower) I did finally reinforce the stairs to the basement. One of the the angled 2x8's was badly cracked and would flex whenever weight was put on it--like whenever I went up or down the stairs. This has been a problem for all eight years we have lived here. Today, I rummaged-up a 2x4 and nailed it to the inside edge of the weak beam. It is noticeably more solid now and took all of 10 minutes. Why I waited 8 years? Can't say.
It was a day filled with little things: Cleaning dishes, cooking, taking the eldest daughter to CVS for her Christmas shopping etc.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Not surprisingly, people will default on loans where they owe a lot more on their house than it's worth. A couple of thoughts come to mind: If you could afford a $500,000 loan when you purchased a house, assuming that you still have the same income, you should still be able to meet the payments If it drops in value to $250,000 this has no bearing on the affordability of the payments. But why would you do that when you could default and then rent or buy the house across the street, which now only costs $250,000 and is just as nice as the one you are in?
A few of the people in the piece were offered slightly better mortgage terms from their lender, but nothing close to as good as just walking away from their home. So the banks end up having to sell a house for $250,000 that they're owed $500,000 on.
Here is a proposal which would help everyone: The bank decreases the principal on the above home to $225,000. The owners now have every motive to stay and the bank is more-or-less in the same situation as if there was a default. Here is the added twist: The terms of the agreement are that if the house is ever sold, the bank gets the first $25,000 of profit plus 50% of any additional gain. The 25k is to recapture the 10% equity granted to the homeowners (the house was valued at 250k, but principle was reset to 225k). The remaining 50/50 split incents the owners to stay put for the long-term and yet allows the bank to recapture some of its losses if the house ever regains value.
It seems win-win to me: The owners save the trouble and expense of moving and a hit to their credit and still get the lower monthly bills they could get by defaulting and then renting. Banks initially loose about as much as they are loosing anyway, but they have a long-term chance of getting a bunch of it back instead of no chance of getting it back.
Crikey! I should patent this!
Roger J. said... I am curious about why one would even want to listen to an "acceptance" speech for an award that was not deserved and proffered only to make a political point about a previous administration. (From Althouse)Now that is out of the way here is some selected commentary with the caveat that I am only looking at a couple chunks of it and am not up for a full Fisking. Indeed, there are many parts of it that I like. So, here goes:
But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 43 other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.Clearly what he means is that we did not seek war in Afghanistan but did in Iraq. I think this is an artificial distinction: In both cases a country was offending us in some way, we made demands which were unmet and we responded by invading.
Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe that the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. (1)That is why I prohibited torture. (2)That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. (3)And that is why I have reaffirmed Americas commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions.(1) The previous administration did not allow torture either. There are different definitions of torture, but for the record, nothing defined by the administration as torture was ever allowed. (2) King Canute ordered the tide to stay out as well and with as much effect, though his point was the opposite of president Obama's. For the president it doesn't matter that the prison remains just as open now as it did when he ordered it closed. Words, actions, what's the difference? Incidentally, I was listening to NPR commentary on the speech and they actually misspoke that Obama had "closed Guantánamo," I guess words and actions have no distinction with NPR either.(I added the numbers since I want to write about each of these things)
(3) The United States has never renounced the Geneva Conventions. The view of the previous administration was that conferring the benefits of the convention to enemy combatants who do not abide by any of the rules of war corrodes the Conventions. That is, why should any group sign the treaty when they already can expect all of the benefits without having to follow any pesky rules themselves?
We know that there have been vast changes in climate in the past, most notably ice ages and periods of warmer climate in between. One would presume that in the absence of mankind, these shifts in climate would continue. Now, if one can encapsulate a general philosophy of environmentalists, it is that they think Man should have as little impact on nature as possible.
The current issue of man-made global warming (AGW) would seem to fit into their philosophy well: We are causing the planet to warm due to our use of fossil fuels and therefore should take efforts to counteract the changes we are causing. Here is the rub: The data are unclear about warming*, but let's offer a hypothetical--What if there was unequivocal data indicating that the Earth was cooling? By this I mean such clear-cut evidence that there was no doubt in the mind of anyone that the planet was cooling-off by a lot. Whatever the actual cause, does anyone doubt that conservationists would be utterly convinced that Mankind is to blame and that therefore we should take (economy-crushing) steps?
In other words; any detectable change will be opposed by the pro-nature crowd and yet this would seem to violate their basic philosophy. They would have the Earth locked in amber, as if this period in time just happens to be the perfect and ideal climate--when what is natural is for the climate to constantly shift over time.
*Warming or cooling seems to depend a lot on what the baseline is. If you start at the end of the little ice age 1850, then we have been warming. If you start in the warm year of 1998, then we have been cooling etc.
I just found out that the Boston Marathon closed its registration in the middle of November, so it is awfully lucky that I signed up early!
On the other hand; my injuries are not healed and it is unclear that they will heal in time for me to train for an early Spring marathon. So, I may have spent a lot of money for nothing.
We shall see.
Update: Wish I remembered my bathing suit too. They have a great indoor pool--the cleanest I have ever seen at a hotel. They have trunks on sale in the gift shop but two things: They were expensive and I have maybe half dozen at home, so it is not as if I would get much use out of a new one other than today.
Well, I am interested out of pure curiosity. But how to do the experiment? One could fill a strong tank with juice and yeast, then close it up and keep track of how high the pressure gets. One possible complication is that the yeast may run out of sugar before the pressure stops them. Or the alcohol may get so high that this kills off the yeast. Or the Carbon dioxide in solution may cause the pH to drop to levels that kill the yeast. A couple of these things can easily be eliminated, depending on what happens: Let's say the fermentation slows to a halt at 200 psi. We relieve the pressure and then close-up the system and it again builds to 200 psi. This would show that the alcohol is not too high and the sugar is not limiting. What about the pH? When you vent the reactor the CO2 will leave and the pH should be able to climb. The only solution I see to this would be to have a neutralizing agent in the mix, perhaps a bit of Sodium bicarbonate for instance.
Part of what interests me about this is that I don't have a good feel for the relationship between delta G (or the energetics of a reaction) and pressure. Surely it takes energy to generate pressure, so at some point the reaction would stop at some pressure. There are also concentration effects in chemical reactions. We have Sugar going to Alcohol + CO2 and this reaction gives-off energy. If neither the Alcohol nor CO2 harmed the yeast then at some concentration, the mere excess of either of these would slow and then stop the reaction from moving forward. This is Le Chatelier's principle.
I like my hard cider to be bubbly, so I do the fermentation in the original bottle with the cap on tight. One must remember to relieve the pressure fairly often so that the bottle does not explode though!
The first batch was going well, so when it was close to being done I started a second batch by pouring a little of the first batch into the new one.
I was relating all of this to a few of our younger guests (high school and college aged) and suggested that when this last apple batch finished, I planned to inoculate a bottle of white grape juice. It was purchased for a party, it didn't get drunk and our kids don't like it--so it seemed like a good way of getting rid of it.
"Wait"! One of the young guests said, "You can ferment grape juice"? He may have regretted the words before they were fully out of his mouth: Not due to me though. I am gentle on youth. I said something like, "Yeah, sure you can". rather than the title of this post. And yes, I did think of the mean answer before I replied.
It was a bowling party in "mood lighting". Hence the psychedelic picture.
The verdict: I pronounce you both guilty! Of being delicious, that is. They were different of course. The oven version, cooked mostly breast-side down @ 325 F. was very juicy and really as good as one could hope for. The grilled one I cooked breast-side up the whole way since the coolest part of the grill is the top and the breast requires the least heat. The meat was a little bit less moist than the oven one, but it was reasonably juicy and one can put extra gravy on it. The main difference was that it had a strong but pleasing smokey bouquet.
The verdict, based upon which one got eaten-up the most is that the oven one won. Deep down I know that really the grilled one is better, so like a climate "scientist", I'll just water-board the data a little and come with a new verdict: People are good and as such, they naturally wanted to eat up the less desirable turkey to leave the best for others. That's the ticket!
Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.
If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.
The injury spun out of control for a bit: My calf hurt so I favored landing on my heel--which then got a deep, deep blister. This caused me to compensate by thrusting forward with my good leg which caused it to get sore too.
I still ran, but slower. My experience is that injuries can take months to heal and if you stop training all that time you will be back to square one. So I ran, but I couldn't run very fast--till today. I actually set a PR for the below run. Not by much and with lots of pain still, but this is much better than pain + slowness.
Update: I paid for yesterday's exuberance: Today I ran a mere 4 miles at greater than 10 minutes per mile. I swear, some little old ladies with walkers zoomed past me but I can't be sure since it all happened so fast.
There is actually more work to be done but the Rubicon has been crossed: My wife performed her first work-day in the room. There is no going back.
All it really needs in order to become an office is for me to move the internet connection to the room and then put desk, chairs and computers in there. A while ago we thought it would be a good idea to have some built-in storage too and so we purchased a truck-load of Ikea stuff. The cabinets are not really required for office use but it would be a pain to do the work once all our work-things get put in. For almost a year all the Ikea boxes were stored here:
All of the boxes fit into the lower shelf on the left where there are two boxes remaining.
As one can see, they take up vastly less room in the boxes than when they are assembled.
If you can follow the cartoon instructions then the furniture looks good, functions well and is very solid. The problem I had was with missing parts. There were two missing parts in the first cabinet box, one of which was the instructions. I got fairly far before I realized that I was missing another part, so I opened up the 2nd box and eureka! It had directions and an obvious other part the first box lacked. I cannibalized from the 2nd to complete the first, and then from the 3rd to replace the missing part from the 2nd which had gone to the 1st & etc. In the end I think there were two sets of directions in 4 boxes and two missing hardware types. I checked with the Ikea site and in order to get replacement parts you need three things: The receipt (which we have thanks to a super-thorough wife), you have to go to an actual store (the closest one is an hour away) and it has to be 90 days from the time of purchase (it was about a year ago). I wouldn't have wanted to drive all that way when I could probably improvise something.
If you use your gray-matter, you can tell two things from the above picture: Which cabinet has the missing part and what the missing part is.
How could you know?
Obviously, the last wall unit will be the lower one since with this L shape, the logical place to start would be on the right side and then work your way left, with the lower left one in last. You can tell from the picture that there is more light coming from the low one. It would have been a darker one if I had used luan plywood instead of sheet-metal. The other missing part was the mounting brackets--I used hinges that I already had as a replacement.
All of this was 9 boxes: One for each wall unit and five boxes for the unit sitting on the floor (base, two sections, drawers, doors).
The center of the earth is millions of degrees? He is only off by about three orders of magnatude, but what do I--a mere non Nobel prize-winner--know?
Other schools in our town allow Christmas themed gifts, so it is not as if this is some kind of rule from "on high". It is just the whim of the Byam principal, nothing more and is entirely typical of her ways. One incident in our daughter's class illustrates the point exactly: There was some rule against PG movies, but the teacher got permission slips from every child in the class' parents and still Gilmore nixed the movie when she found out about it! We have put three kids through that school and have a million stories of her blind adherence to rules and control-freakishness.
The most common advice I get when I talk of injuries is that I should just quit running until I am healed. The problem with this is that it takes from six months to a year to heal and if I stop running all that time I will be back to square-one when I resume. So, I will do what I have been doing the last few years: Run, but not as hard; use lots of ice-packs and eat a lot of aspirin. Oh yes; and learn to accept that my calf is going to hurt when I run and most of the rest of the time too.
I've got to keep things in perspective: I don't have a life-threatening disease--just a bit of pain when I engage in a hobby (a hobbly?) that I don't even much care for.
Most of the trees have lost all leaves, but sometimes you come across one that is a little tardy.
This natural area is called "Lime Quarry" but the only rocks I notice are made of granite.
Along the way I got the idea of trying to make cider. The unwashed apples should have plenty of native yeast on them and the acid of the juice would tend to suppress bacterial growth, so I figured that all I had to do was put the juice into an air-tight container and wait. What I used was a plastic juice bottle with a screw-on lid and I just let it sit in the garage until I noticed some swelling from internal pressure. I would loosen he lid gently to relieve most--but not all--of the pressure every day or two. I kept doing this until the fermentation slowed down to a crawl and then gently poured the cider into a fresh clean juice bottle, leaving all the sediment out. A couple more rackings and I put the cider into wine bottles and was done.
In the intervening years, my wife and I have gotten hooked on hard cider, especially the Woodchuck Draft Cider -- Granny Smith. The stuff is good, but it is pricey and so I have been of a mind to try my hand again at making cider. The only problem is that the cider you purchase in the grocery store is pasteurized, so if you don't add yeast it will just sit there. I began looking into yeast and there are no brew shops very close to where we live. I could order some on-line but I hate the idea of buying something for a buck and then paying five dollars for shipping, so things remained so until last Saturday.
We were up in Nashua a-clothes-shopping for the oldest girl and on the way to Old Navy, we went past a place that looked like a brew-shop. Not wanting to loiter in a clothes store, I dropped-off the wife & daughter and went back the half-mile to the brew shop. The shop turned out to not be quite what I expected: They were a place where you do brewing. You pay something like $200 and they supply all the equipment and supplies as well as help for their customers to brew beer. Then you come back in two weeks to bottle your 6 cases of 22oz beers. So they didn't offer to sell me any champagne yeast, but did give directions to a place about five miles further up the road. The directions were long and complex. While listening to them, I was thinking to myself, "There is no way I'm going to even try to find that place, I'll just bag-it till another time...". But I hadn't heard from the girls and the thought of standing around in a clothes store was daunting, so I set-out in the direction given and figured I could turn around if I got lost, or a call from my wife. The directions were perfect. The shop and the shop-keeper were perfectly charming. I got my yeast for 75 cents and even picked up a fancy 24 ounce beer 9.5% EtOH by volume for about 5 bucks.
I'd rather pay $5 for a fancy beer than for shipping. You can't drink shipping.
After that, my wife wanted to run the leaf grinder--to deal with leaves in places I cannot mow, like flower beds. Given my bad experience with gasoline-powered devices, I approached starting the leaf shredder with dread. It got going on the first pull, not bad considering that it hadn't been used since last Fall.
Since I had reached the back of the garden shed I figured I may as well pre-position the snow blower to the front of the house. It too started right up and it still had old gas from last Winter in it.
Just for the sake of completeness, I should have seen if I could get the chainsaw running. It is a good thing I didn't think of this: If I got the saw running I would want to cut down a tree (lots of them need to be cut down) and this would have just created a lot of work for myself. It was already Sunday afternoon and I had the rain gutters to clean still.
Getting to the start:
The marathon offers transportation to the start, but what they offered me was the Staten Island ferry at 5:30 AM. From where we stayed on Long Island, it would be easier to drive to the actual start than to the ferry terminal in lower Manhattan. The problem is that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge closes at 7:00 AM on race-day and so you've got to be there early enough to get dropped-off and still have time for your ride to get back to the other side. In addition, we had never driven there before and were not sure how long it would take. As it was, we missed a turn and ended-up taking a longer way than we had originally mapped-out. The missed turn was due to the car needing gas and the first station we found just happened to be at the intersection we were supposed to turn at--we didn't notice the road sign because we were so intent on the lit-up Shell station instead. We crossed the bridge just after 6:00 AM and there was a drop-off lane right at the end of the bridge. We kissed good-bye and then I wandered into the athlete's village, wondering what I would do with 3 hours and 40 minutes till the race.
It was drizzling lightly and so I made for the first pavilion I could find. There were lots of people already there but I found a patch of grass to lay down on. Just about every body else had thought to bring an old sleeping bag or blanket but I was warmly dressed and so, while I would have loved to have a blanket, I was reasonably comfy. I tried to sleep and maybe did drowse for a bit, but also looked around and noticed the people around me. Next to me was a tiny Asian, or perhaps South American woman, sleeping in a thick warm sleeping bag. Later she woke-up and began munching on a rice-ball wrapped in sea weed--lending odds to the Asian hypothesis. Just on the other side of me were two young ladies spooning under a quilt--seemed as if everybody else did better pre-race planning than I did. In front of me was a group of Dutch guys who were full of pre-race bonhomie. One guy was putting his name label onto a black nylon bag. The race is very specific about requiring only the clear plastic bags they issue being dropped-off, so I wonder if the guy ended up with a big hassle later. Last, I struck-up a conversation with a French man who was very nice. He thought his English was lacking, but it was really very good--he had an accent but could be very easily understood. He was there with a group too and it came out that he is an engineer with four children.
Around 9:00 I decided to make a move: I wanted to find out where to drop off my warm-up clothes, find the starting pens and so forth. Almost as soon as I got to the center of the village, a female voice came on over the PA: "The starting corrals are open for the first wave, please report to your starting corral, now." I have italicised "now" but that does not come close to conveying the emphasis and command the announcer placed on the word. It was cold and once I turned-in my clothes, I would be wearing a tank top and skimpy shorts in that raw early morning weather and yet I felt compelled by that voice, to obey. I'm glad I did. I got to my starting area at around 9:10 and was going to stop outside to adjust my shoe but the guard at the gate said, "you'd better get in here, I'm going to close the gate in 5 minutes." He wasn't lying. The gates soon closed and they walked the whole first wave up to the starting line, a good quarter mile from where we assembled. They were probably assembling the 2nd wave in the pens behind us before the first wave began to race.
The Start:
The national anthem was sung, there were a few words from mayor Bloomberg and then we started to the sound of Frank Sinatra singing New York, New York (of course). The conditions were perfect: Low 50s, overcast and only a light breeze. With 3 waves and three parallel starts, there was hardly any crowding. I think I did around 8:15 for the first mile and a lot of that was going up-hill on the bridge. The view was great too: Helicopters overhead, fire boats down below-spraying into the sky and off to the left, the skyline of lower Manhattan. Once over the bridge, we were in Brooklyn and the first block sign I noticed was in the high 80's like maybe 86th street. We stayed on this same road until the blocks ran out, so over eighty blocks on one road! The street was lined the whole way 1-2 deep in some places and in others more like 6-8 deep. It seemed as if every block had a band or rock group playing. It was all very festive. I tried to maintain a quick pace, but was careful not to push too hard--the last thing I wanted was to burn-out around mile 15 like I did in Boston. (I did a reasonable time there but it was miserable for the final ten miles) In the early part of the race I took liquid at every opportunity and drank all that I was given. Experience has taught me that by late in the race you can only stand a little sip without inducing a gag reflex, so it is a good idea to bank fluids early.
We hit the half-way point just before leaving Brooklyn and I was doing 1:39:31 which put me about 5 and 1/2 minutes ahead of my goal of staying under 3:30 for the whole race. I felt pretty good: I had not yet started to breathe hard, my legs were starting to get sore and yet they felt strong still. When we crossed into Queens, it seemed pretty much like Brooklyn, at least the parts we had been through. Most of mile 16 is on the Queensboro Bridge crossing over to Manhattan. It was a weird experience. There had been cheering crowds the whole way and now we were on the lower level of the bridge and no spectators were allowed in that part. Just the sound of breathing and footfalls on concrete. As you get to the end of the bridge a distant roar can be heard--huge crowds in Manhattan! This was the best part. All three parallel starts had converged in the middle of Brooklyn and the course was crowded--not to the point where it slowed you down, but one needed to constantly pay attention to the runners around you. Now in Manhattan, the road was about twice as wide--three lanes in each direction plus a bus lane on each side. I had a whole traffic lane to myself and so I punched-up the pace a bit and did my last sub-8 miles of the race.
The crowds slowly petered-out as we got further and further North and when we crossed into The Bronx they were the thinnest of the whole course. Upon crossing back into Manhattan, the crowds resumed and became thicker as we moved South. We stayed on 5th Ave right past the North West corner of Central Park and ran along the East side until the Guggenheim came into view, then we turned in to the park itself. The park had some of the only real hills I remember from the race but there were only two miles to go so I didn't let that or the increasing pain in my legs get to me. The crowds in the park and the rest of the way were massive and noisy. We emerged on Central Park South and 5th Ave and went along the southern edge of the park to Columbus Circle, the finish is in the park about 800 meters away at this point. This final distance flew-by and I crossed the last sensor gate.
The Finish
They keep you on your feet after the finish. You pass by where they hand out finisher medals, then mylar sheets are handed out and someone comes by to tape them shut to form a cape. Next, goody bags with water and food in them and finally a long walk to the UPS truck with your bag of clothes, phone & etc. Each truck covered 1000 numbers, so the first one was for 69,000 to 69,999. I was in the 13 thousands and so had to walk to the 56th one in line. This was about a mile. The finish is about even with 67th street and I exited the park at 82nd. I walked back to Columbus Circle to meet my family.
A picture my middle daughter took when I met them at Columbus Circle. Lots of runners brought cameras along on the run with them. They probably got some nice shots but I would really get tired of keeping my camera with me for 3 and 1/2 hours.
Added note: I met a guy at the start and we had around 20 minutes to chat. His name is Dave, from NJ and said he is 42. It turns out that was enough information to find his time from the marathon results page. That is totally cool! It is nice to know he did good!
It just kept getting taller and taller. That red stick which is supporting the stem is a broom handle. The total height of the plant has got to be around 6 and 1/2 feet.
The Japanese Maple behind the Dahlia shows how late in the season it is: This is November 5th and we live in a suburb of Boston.
Slowed down by the climb up the height of the bridge and the crowds.
nyc 2nd 5k 3.1 22:46:00 7:20:39
Not tired and trying to make up some time. This would end up being the fastest split.
nyc 3rd 5k 3.1 23:45:00 7:39:41
Getting a little tired.
nyc 4th 5k 3.1 24:17:00 7:50:00
Getting more tired.
nyc 5th 5k 3.1 25:38:00 8:16:08
God. Will Queens never end?
nyc 6th 5k 3.1 24:39:00 7:57:06
Manhattan.
Crowds eight-deep, wide roads, yeah I had the energy to speed up a bit.
nyc 7th 5k 3.1 26:29:00 8:32:35
It gets old the further North you get, till the low point in the Bronx.
nyc 8th 5k 3.1 26:39:00 8:35:48
Can smell the finish. Too tired to actually speed-up but am able to not slow down as much as my body would prefer to.
3:28:41 is the final time. I should slack-off every time. I feel much better today than any other day after a marathon.
This is a bad and disconcerting time to be ill. I have a marathon on Sunday and things are not looking up. It is in a distant city and so there are logistics to contend with, the weather is forecast to be rainy and now I'm feeling under the weather--plus there is the usual lack of proper training for such a distance, old age & etc.
Looking forward to Monday. Big time.
Today I did more:
--I ran 11.8 miles for my last longish run before the race.
--The whole family decided it would be fun to all walk into the town center for some ice cream. It is two miles each way on the bike path.
--Once we got home, I ran the mower over fallen leaves for a little more than an hour.
I wanted to do some plastering today, but I'm done.
Yesterday's efforts...
The apples in the foreground were right on schedule and we picked them a couple of days ago. The roses appeared two days ago and are very late for New England.
This dahlia is still not all the way open, though the plant is around 6 feet tall. I think it put all effort into height rather than waste its time on a bloom.
I still have time to recover before the race and while this run was no confidence-booster, it probably did me some good. Anyway, it is done and there isn't anything I can do about it now.
Just by chance, I got my bib # for the NYC marathon yesterday: 13658--Orange Wave #1.
I insist on one candle for each year. As you can see, it is quite an inferno. I suppose it is fitting that as each year I get closer to an eternity in fire, the fire on my cake becomes a little larger too.
This is October 18th and the 2nd time it has snowed this Fall!
So, what is it? Below are images and please bear in mind that the effect is stronger with moving pictures or especially in reality-space.
If you, like me, find these things a little creepy then that is Uncanny Valley at work. It seems that if things look sufficiently non-human, then we judge them as things. Beyond a certain thresh hold, when they start to look more human than not, we start to judge by human standards. The odd way they move, sound and look strikes us as repulsive. That is the valley.
Kind of cool that something noticed in passing turns out to be an actual field of study.
We found a place with all the required amenities nestled along the Merrimack river in Tyngsborough MA--not far from where we live. We picked a half bushel of really great apples, ate some doughnuts and let the kids play on bales of hay. It was mid-afternoon by the time we got home.
I had hoped to get Surenna to come with me on the bike path for an 8 mile jaunt, her on a bike-me running, but she was tired and wouldn't agree. My wife wanted to take the dog for an outing, so I went with her on that and we jogged for about a mile at the end. Feeling, if not invigorated, at least warmed-up; I set about running over fallen leaves with the lawnmower. About 2 hours later, the yard looked fantastic and I was ready to bake.
While I was outside, wife and Jemma mixed together 7 pie crusts--I think they would have made more but ran out of butter. I turned on the TV and settled in for apple peeling and the other steps to make apple pie. By the time I had to knock-off to grill lamb chops for dinner, there was one medium-sized pie baked and four others assembled and put into the freezer.
Am tempted, even though bone tired, to make a few more pies tonight since the 1/2 bushel bag is more full than empty at this point. We shall see.
Me: Sure. Did you think they invented dairy cows just since then?
Jemma: I think that there were cows, but they just didn't know what would happen if they did...(makes motion like milking a cow)
Before I left, I made some bread dough. Part of the reason was that pizza would make a good dinner tonight and the other part was that I was killing time hoping for the rain to stop--which it did.
I got on my work-out clothes and banged off a 6-miler at a high 7:30's pace. Not particularly fast for that distance but not so slow as to feel bad about it either. It got sunny and warm early in the run but then the last 5 minutes were a downpour.
Had to shower and dress in a hurry since we were meeting wife's parents for lunch. We got to the place at the same time they did. While eating, the sky cleared and it became (temporarily) a cloudless bright Autumn day.
After lunch, I ordered a 3/4 violin for Surenna, then baked two crusts for pizza and one pan of rolls with the remainder of the dough. After that I worked on the new office till dinner time. I was nailing up corner pieces before plastering the beams. At first I thought I got far too few pieces to complete the job, but then just when I was ready to knock-off, I discovered another tranche of material and had just enough to finish--an hour later.
Pizza for dinner with the in-laws.
Special bacon day! I had eggs and bacon for breakfast, bacon wrapped scallops salad for lunch and then mostly for completeness, I sprinkled bacon onto one of the pizzas. It was good in all of its settings. There is nothing bacon can't do!
--Glycogen: Stored mostly in the liver, it is a source of energy. It may not completely run out but it certainly does become scarce. The body has to switch over to fat metabolism. This is an essentially bottomless well of energy, the problem is that fat cannot be converted into a directly useful form quite fast enough.
--Dehydration: I do not bring water with me on runs of any distance and can easily loose four pounds of water weight on a long run. What happens is that as a person becomes dehydrated, it causes the blood pressure to drop. (One of the main classes of hypertension medications are diuretics) When the blood pressure drops, the heart must pump more rapidly to accomplish the same circulation. Respiration seems to go hand-in-hand with this. What I find is that toward the end of a long run, I cannot maintain my starting pace without becoming winded. The drop in blood pressure is not due entirely to dehydration, so even in marathons that have hydration stations, this is still an issue.
--Will power: As exertion continues, the will to maintain it becomes depleted too. It is too bad since all of the above things make the need for will-power more acute toward the end.
In a race, much but not all of the above issues are at least of smaller concern--at least (with a marathon approaching) this is what I tell myself.
My wife will go for the classics of mope-rock, like this:
Lots of people find this deeply creepy. We always would consider it a hallmark of authoritarian places that they would have billboard sized posters of their leaders in public places. In the West the leaders were often in military uniform, in the East they would go for the more bland look. East is East and West is West & etc.
As if to answer the concerns, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, trotted-out footage of school kids singing some kind of pro-President Bush song. On a very superficial level this would seem to indicate that we live in a big country and you are bound to find pretty much every conceivable thing taking place. Hence, the songs for Obama mean precisely nothing. Not so fast!
I never got the impression President Bush wanted to be worshiped and I didn't see much evidence that many on the left thought that either. Plus, given that the education, entertainment and news media are almost monolithically to the left of center, it is not realistic to think any Republican could achieve cult of personality status, even if they wanted to.
Another question occurs to me: Why wasn't video of children singing the praises of GWB seen before now? That is, why is it only shown now and only as a counterpoint to the Obama videos? Obviously, because it didn't say anything "interesting" back when Bush was President. A huge number of things happen and they can't all be on the news. Nobody worried about a Bush cult of personality back then or it would have been in the news for the purpose of bolstering that meme. Why else put it on? It might seem odd that schools dominated by Democratic teachers would allow/lead students in a pro-Bush song, so there is a whole man-bites-dog angle but I suppose nobody thought of it till now...
Taking on a major new constitutional dispute over gun rights, the Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to decide whether to apply the Second Amendment to state, county, and city government laws.
It never made sense to me that the 1st has long been incorporated while the 2nd hasn't. The first amendment is written in a more limiting way: "Congress shall make no law..." while the 2nd is more general: "...the right of the people..." The first would seem to be a limit on what Congress can do while the 2nd is indicating a right that all the people should have.
In the younger daughter's class the teacher was talking about the pattern: a_e where a consonant goes into the blank spot and creates a long a sound. The kids would group words by whether they make the long a, a short a or something else. "Make" would be long a, "have" would be short a and so on. Mentally, I decided that it would be interesting to find words that were only three letters long and satisfied the rules: "Axe"--short a, "Ale"--long a, there are lots of three letter ones so coming up with these two on the spot is looking less and less impressive.
As soon as I was done, I realized how much a waste of time it was: The thing is so deformed now that I doubt any play can be had from this toy. Unless you count the puzzle game called, "tangle-up the slinky and then figure out how to untangle it".
Now I am writing about that and sort of halfway considering getting some,- point of lay hens. It is probably a bad idea since we have coyotes, foxes, raccoons, hawks, owls and our own little dog--all of whom would love to eat or at least chase chickens.
On the plus side, it would give me a lot of material for blogging.
After they get the bomb, there will be new and more compelling reasons to do nothing.
QED. Iran will have the bomb.
Food for thought: However bad the options look now, don't they look infinitely better than the inevitable prospect of what our options will be soon?
She was reading the blog and asked about the "Why vote for a lesser evil" post and one thing led to another...
She was by herself for a while since the wife was out with the other two girls. It is a pretty scary story, but it was a nice sunny day so I think she was fine.
S. was aghast. "Boys are crazy" she said, "Girls would never do this kind of thing". She was also kind of surprised that boys would go to such effort to build structures which must have taken much time and organization to complete. When the kids play capture the flag and it is boys against girls, the girls always win. She explained that the girls make plans while the boys just make their plans as they play.
A couple of thoughts began to percolate in my mind, but it took a while for them to fully form.
Boys are not fearless and they really do not like to plan everything out ahead of time, but they can ease their way into both things. The way I envision it is that they started with a small jump that could be made with a fallen log and some rocks and dirt. Now they were used to making things and the thrill of a small jump, so they progressively made bigger and more elaborate jumps and became inured to the risks gradually as jumps became more elaborate. We just saw the end of a long learning curve--they just didn't decide out the the blue to spend weeks building a suicidally high jump and then have the nerve to use it. They got there in a gradual and natural way.
A President was killed the last time right-wing hatred ran wild like this September 18, 2009 9:10 am ET by Eric Boehlert That being John F. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, of course.
I was born around the time of President Kennedy's assassination so I am in no place to opine on "right-wing hatred" of that era, but I don't see how such hatred could motivate a Communist like Lee harvey Oswald to act against the target of the "right-wing hatred".
Kennedy may have been liberal for the time he lived in, but he was without a doubt an anti-Communist cold warrier. That is a much more obvious reason why a Communist like LHO wanted to kill Kennedy.
This piece had all kinds of harsh things embedded in its surface like nails, hammers & so forth. One could only notice this on closer inspection.
Manhattan from the head of the Statue of Liberty
A view from the ground
Our reflection in the stainless steel walls of the atrium. (The camera was at our feet and I used the timer)
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