Last Run8.6 mi 01:07 /07:44 pace Colder & better for the second leg. Started too fast under 7:00 splits which was sustainable through the first exchange but not indefini... posted 18 hours ago
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An utterly brilliant day here. Wet fuzz and I braved the sand sharks this morning, then later the Team Hevelone-Byler diaspora ran a total of forty-eight(!) miles, generously averaging out to a sweet sixteen each. As month number two comes to an end, project three sixty-five rolls on with photos thirty-two to fifty-nine. Thanks to everyone who left comments along the way this month – they really are motivating and do rather make me happy. Cheers!
The first twelve hours without a phone leaves me grasping at other forms of connectivity. If you don’t see my shared items in google reader and don’t subscribe to the quasify feed or feeds from those other sites you might be interested in a link blog I set up at tumblr that aggregates most of the crap I generate in a nice little package (it has it’s own MEGA MASTER FEED). But, not all. Man I need some other hobbies, or something. PS: this is done. Red Sox at Athletics Plaza Level Sec. 205
My wireless contract is over, and I’ve been playing with the idea of getting an iPhone. The little dorks seem to like theirs and given my neighborhood it can feel like having one is mandatory. That said, I do suspect getting one would help some already bad habits further manifest. There’s an interesting article in the Globe Magazine on our collective failure to ever disconnect from the tubes. A few of the character flaws mentioned there hit a bit close to home, particularly this part.
I identify with that. So while I love me some baby-niece skype and can’t seriously imagine cutting back on email at work, today is the first day of Lent. And while forty days of self-deprivation is too punitive for my lifestyle (given I’m seeking more rather than less happiness), I do think steps towards connecting more with my local, physical surroundings and moving away from 24/7 virtualization is a worthwhile objective. So, as an experiment, I’m going to stop using my cell phone whenever I’m anywhere out and about. No more mobile email, internets, texting or calls. It’s going to either just stay home or turned off on the bottom of the bag. I’m expecting great improvements in my attention span and overall coherence. And maybe I’ll finally finish my book. I was looking at a cake my mom made for her pre-Mardi Gras party, which reminded me to look back to last year’s Allston King Cake CNSMHB and I made for SJH’s birthday. This puts bad thoughts in my head, like, hey, I ought to make another! While I can’t in good conscience eat an entire one of these suckers myself, maybe a delayed Fat Tuesday is a better idea, pushed back to sometime in March when the houseguests start rolling in. Particularly if they bring their yeast master stock with them. If I remember correctly each of the three braided strands was stuffed with (pineapple?) cream cheese. Delicious!
Well crapola. I don’t know why I’m bothering to post these, considering how horribly things went for my prognostifications. But, for posterity, the results of our little (tiny) Oscars pool. Congratulations to yjp. 1) yjp (88) In brighter news, I made cupcakes. Only a minor disaster in that everything went everywhere, the apartment filled with smoke and now I have a more cupcakes than friends problem.
 And myself as well. In total, 18 miles on foot today. I think we’re going to bed early.
 Sunday is the Academy Awards and since no one else has mentioned it I’ve decided to run an Oscar pool. To the winner go modest bragging rights and/or the lifetime earnings potential bump that comes with smug superiority. To play in the pool just click hyar. I left out a few of the who cares categories (best lipstick, pimpingest catering truck), and those that are left will be weighted to sum to a nice fat 100 (specifically: 14, 10, 10, 10, 8, 8, 10, 6, 6, 4, 2, 2, 2, 4 and 4). Feel free to cheat by using picks from Nate Silver, the HSX derivatives market, or the Large Hadron Collider Earth Destruction Tool to fill out your bracket. Submit anytime between now and the start of the show. I’ll post my ill-informed choices before the broadcast to quell the inevitable insinuations about my ethics. UPDATE: my picks
The number of regular or semi-recurrent readers of quasify is in the low double digits. Which is why it’s weird when some mostly unfunny inside joke get a Universal Hub link and we end up with 1200 people stopping by (which helps me learn of others solving the same problem with snakes – yes thanks, but no thanks…). Progress has been slow since the dual kill on Day 1. Two days ago (Day 8, 3:30 in morning) I was awoken by what could only be described as loud mouse-sized dance party coming from under the kitchen counter. I over-optimistically hoped the remaining humane traps had gotten one of the buggers, but no. Everything went silent when I flipped on the light. When I came home tonight (Day 10), this was the crime scene in my living room:
If you can’t tell that part on the left is where the mouse gets suckered into eating some trans-fat free peanut butter only to be locked in by the bit on the right. Since the dog is (naturally) blameless, my years of watching forensic anthropology television shows had led me to induce that a R.O.U.S. is in play. The dance party noises were them increasing the size of their access tunnel to accommodate the new dog-sized beast who tore the trap apart with his mighty molars. Maybe he acted to rescue one of his brethren – there is no corpse so no fatality can be confirmed. Either way, I’m sleeping with the bedroom door locked tonight.  I had this long, detailed nightmare about trip preparations to Italy for some reason. There was much debate over details like when exactly the flight was, and what city exactly did it leave from, and who owed who what as checks were being exchanged (with animus) between myself and family members to cover ticket costs. There was panic about the broken TX1 and not having space to pack the big camera. Almost gratuitously, my subconscious threw in some angst about meece infestation and not having homework assignments turned in. It only ended when I finally came slightly out of REM to tell myself my passport is expired so I’d just have to stay home. I don’t think anyone should have to do math in their nightmares. No one deserves that.  In the past I was a big proponent of ING Direct, encouraging several family members to join to get a $25/$10 sign up bonus. When I first started using them, it made logical sense to keep cash there since the savings rate was well higher than my student loan rates. A few years ago, they were somewhat comparable to my mortgage rate, removing incentive to pre-pay that loan. But, as you can see above, there’s been declining reasons to bother keeping any money with them for a while now as their rate has fallen well below rates on my credit lines. So while I’m grateful they haven’t gone bankrupt, I still have the inconvenience of having to wait 10 days(!) for ACH deposits to clear, without the benefit of either a solid rate or a physical bank presence. So in that context, I’ve recieved an email saying my debit card number has been exposed, and they’re just going to be employing a strategy of “actively monitoring” it, rather than canceling the cards and replacing them? What?! This is my checking account people. I’m having enough trouble sleeping these days without worrying about my cash money paycheck being put at risk.
This isn’t cool. New plan of action. Step 1: Cancel debit card. Step 2: Start the long process of switching various auto-payments from ING back to my credit union. Step 3: Find some other bank with a better rate. Step 4: Bury remaining pennies in an undisclosed location. Step 5: Fail to register for Bay to Breakers in feeble protest.
the course goes right friggin past my house, just short of mile 12. Literally, I could toss water balloons on their heads from my couch if I weren’t running it, and if I had a couch. How can I just sit there and watch people run by without trying it myself? Ok, so odds are good I’ll sign up and proceed to get injured sometime between now and then. I know it has a fairly high probability of happening, it’s how my ankles work. But really, I’ve got to at least get to that point, no? What was the point of getting that ankle MRI to clear any tears if I don’t feel free to subsequently use and abuse those tendons? After all we’re talking discrete, achievable objective #1 here. Let’s just remove any semblance of free will from the decision, absolving my common sense and it’s logical objections. If I don’t really have a choice in this, it is what it is, and it’ll be great. July 26, 2009, a good time to visit San Francisco.  I have the day off, but it’s still really obnoxiously rainy out and cabin fever is setting in. Leaving dog to her own amusement, I walked up to the coast in a fairly heavy downpour to get to what I thought would be a good spot for stage 2 of the Tour of California road race that went through San Francisco this morning. Then there was another half hour of waiting along the road while various cops and race officials went by. Then, wham, the pack/peleton flew past, on the downhill stretch from Golden Gate Bridge into the Richmond District. They were going so fast, the whole thing was over in less than 30 seconds. There was literally no time to pick out specific faces in the crowd – Lance Armstrong* and Floyd Landis I could have recognized in super slo-mo but not in real time. I think next time I go to an event like this I’ll pick a nice steep uphill area (preferably at the top of a mountain, and in France) to watch them struggle. I put a few other pictures up on flickr but given the rain/speed combination, they’re not exactly what I had hoped for. *People were discussing Lance’s bike getting stolen before stage 1, which I had not heard. But would have known had I looked at his twitter feed.
8:38am Phone vibrates me awake. I assume she’ll fill in the gaps eventually.  Who amongst you is really loved? Valentine’s Day seems as good a time as any to assess our popular metric of true love, tagged photos.
Huh. Well being at the bottom of the siblings category there is a big honking suxXor. And while it may feel egalitarian that no clear favorite among them baby nieces has broken from the pack, if we age adjusted Lily-monster would be dominating the big girls. Just for fun, here’s a quick check on the four possible combinations of baby nieces: Victoria/Isabelle (30), Isabelle/Lily (2), Lily/Victoria (1) and all three at once (12). That’s it? What the frick ya’ll? Clearly there’s room for improvement on some of those big girl+baby combinations. Alright. My puppy valentine & I are off for a run to the ocean. Hope all ya’ll bicorporal types have fun and food and flowers and so on (ad nauseum) today. Old new ride, meet new new ride. Now if I could just get the TX1 fixed my life would be perfect.
Friday the 13th! It’s the first of a rare two-fer (March 13th also falling on a Friday this year). We won’t have another pair of months with Fridays on the 13th until 2015. This can only happen in February and March, which means the first of all double 13/Fridays will occur the day prior to Valentine’s Day. Clearly today is the less scary day of today and tomorrow. As I was born on the 13th (a boring Monday, unfortunately) I’ve always had an affinity to this number – growing up I would divide the year into birthday fractions, giving me random excuses to celebrate days like today (happy 5/12ths!!). So while I can understand a rational dislike for a number (particularly primes), maybe we can all band together and make the controversial case that Fridays themselves are not so terribly awful. So cheers, happy day, happy Friday the 13th! UPDATE: Oh, and match #2 of Layer Tennis is happening now too. Double score. Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless is playing today.
SAS Global Forum is in frigid (and cherry blossom-free) Washington DC next month. It’s only $925 for the full early registration, $239 for the flight and four nights at $272 a pop for a hotel. A cool $2250 to listen to people talk about SAS. Not counting the extra 35 bucks for the Franc D’Ambrosio Experience. It’s a little sad that I’m actually interested enough to consider it. Hmm, oddly enough, that’s the same weekend as CNS here in San Francisco. Instead of admitting my (closeted! tempered! highly conditional!) fandom by watching the Longhornz whup up on OSU tonight I decided to watch (thx Z!) the Westminster Kennel Club working group finals. The good thing about being a sled dog fan is you’ve got three shots at winning. The husky best of breed (Merlot) kinda left me eh (despite red/white goodness). The Samoyed was an stunningly beautiful dog, but sedate, not feisty enough. The Malamute though, gorgeous, romping, placed third behind the Giant Schnauzer and someone unimportant. Her name is Kimmy (and/or Nanuke’s Still The One). The Malamute breed judging is online here if you want to see. In the finals, we had a seven-afro’d standard poodle, the unfortunately-named scottish deerhound (Tiger Woods), a (peeing?) scottish terrier that’s a little too reminisent of Barney to be cheer-for-able, a rasta-tastic Puli, a sussex spaniel with ginormously michael bolton ears, a tiny toy pug-like thing and the aforementioned giant schnauzer. The sussex spaniel won in the end, provoking mad-ambivalence across the land. The only good thing I’ll concede is I like an old dog winning – the sussex is 10 years old, leaving the door open for mmmja to storm the scene next year… UPDATE: Deadspin on one of the (non-finalist) Samoyed handlers…
 Fuzz one has been limpin’ around all gimpy tonight and it finally motivated me to knock down her crate, prompting many dirty looks and exasperated sighs. That dog would literally spend 23 hours a day in that box given her own free will. There’s no possible way to maintain healthy joint structure with exposure to the kind of tweaky torsion I’ve seen that critter put on her lower body. She’s also under additional stress as it’s clear she’s only the second most exciting animal in the house as my mouse has grown more bold and daring this weekend. I stopped leaving dog food down and that bugger is scavenging in ever larger concentric circles hoping to find a new holy food source grail, presumably to feed his thousand tiny baby meece mouths. He may be faster but I’m exceedingly patient and it’s only a matter of time – enjoy your little theft-based lifestyle while you can til the Chloe comes calling all claws and furry fury. Definitely related posts: Still seeking solace in the cave, Charasmatic Home Invasion Fauna |
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