Wanderings.

Yesterday evening I took the ferry across to Anderson Island to visit David and Belen. I forgot to ask if they have cats, and they do! This is one of those rare occurrences where the cats are actually tolerable and are not exciting my asthma so much.

Belen picked me up in their big green suburban And drove me across their picturesque island through old growth forest to their place which is the only house on their cul-de-sac. It gives the impression of being on several acres. It’s 70 degrees here usually, or thereabouts, and the air smells sweet from the forest.

They taught me how to play Race for the Galaxy. Actually it was very confusing yesterday evening, but when we played it again tonight, it was fun. Last night I won partially by chance for the hand I got, and because we were playing with cards down and David was helping me to play. It’s a card game with different phases where you explore, develop, settle, consume, and produce. You’re all trying to take over the galaxy. Pretty fun.

This morning, I slept in. Belen and David like to do breakfast after they have worked a bit, so they do that from 10-11. Belen made her famous breakfast burritos with egg and sausage and other goodies. We talked a bit and caught up more on the past few years.

My phone is running out of batteries, and I don’t really care. :-) I’ll get it charged in San Francisco. Until then I can just turn it on for a few minutes here and there to see if I missed messages, calls or texts.

I ran this, and swam 170meters in Lake F3 mile run to the swimming hole and back:

http://www.mapmyrun.com/route/us/wa/anderson%20island/505127922195569921

Then after I came home and chilled out while David and Belen were working, I ran 6 miles:

http://www.mapmyrun.com/route/us/wa/anderson%20island/464127927701839189

It was so amusing to hear David and Belen working today. They would both get on calls and one would walk to another room. They both sounded so much alike to me on the phone in conversation, but talking about *completely* different things.

Dave and Rebbecca came over and David made a pizza from scratch including the crusts. So so delicious. We sat out on the deck and took in the fresh air. We played more of that card game.

I’m writing some boring posts. I should probably take smore more pictures and put those up so I can tell a better story. I hope to swim in the sound tomorrow and get in some longer swims.

Yay.

Last night I took a Southwest flight from Houston > Austin and then Austin > Phoenix > Seattle and had a conversation with Norman and Belinda who were going to Seattle to visit their two grandkids who is with the kid’s mom. They hadn’t seen them in about a year so they were excited. They are from Lubbock and are at least semi-retired. Norman and I had security in common. IT Security for me, and he did prison security. He says he’s done with security. :-) I guess I might be to after 30 years.

In Seattle I got on excellent Seattle mass transit in the form of a lightrail which took me through the mild 65 ° F.

Walking from Westlake to the City Hostel Seattle at 2nd and Battery. It’s an art hostel, check out some of the cool art on their site! Amazing soups a few doors down.

City Hostel Seattle
2327 2nd Avenue, Seattle, WA 98121

This morning it was still about 65 °. I went for a glorious 6 mile run. In the process I found REI, Whole Foods, and some other places. Had a great conversation with one of the owners of the hostel, Lee, about Vibrams and barefoot running. He might get some and get back into it. I hope he does!

Off to have breakfast at this cool vegan place called BAng Bang

Swam 8 laps and 4 laps after work.

I did 11 miles on the bike followed by 1.1 mile run, a short visit with Jarrett, Kyle and Alex and then another 1.1 mile. I used the computer on the bike for the first time. I ranged between 17-20 mph. It maintains an average, but I didn’t check.

I watched the last episode of Season 1 of “John Doe”. This was a show that played in 2002 or 2003, and actually was a lot of fun if you like scifi. This was the first I had seen of it and I was disappointed that it wasn’t contiued. It ended in a cliffhanger, and was discontinued. I found that provocative and frustrating. I want to know what happened, but…it didn’t.

Well, I did what i said I was going to do, and signed up and did the first tri of the year. It’s also the first of five in the Texas Tri Series http://www.texastriseries.com/. I got there just in time to get set up at the transition area, get my chip, and body marking. This tri was at Texas Ski Ranch and featured a 300 meter swim in the waterski area. This was the first time I’d seen a facility like this where water skiiers and wakeboarders can hook in to a cable that will drag them around the course so they can ski or board without a boat. Several of them skiied after the tri, and it was fun to watch. They were having a blast.

I ran into Randy Whitten and his girlfriend. She was doing the triathlon and he was there with her. Really good to see both of them, and it made the tri more fun.

I’m happy to have followed through. I did between 8-9 minutes on the 300m swim, averaged about 15mph on the 10 mile bike, and ran about 9 minute miles on the 2 mile run. I think I finished in 1 hour 13 minutes. I’ve been recovering through the day. My training consisted of sitting at a desk the week before. :-) That’s not entirely true. I have run maybe once or twice a week before last week, and have been swimming more often. Also, I have tried to do Bikram yoga once a week and am usually sucessful with that. I did it on Saturday and it was quite a challenge. I’m so glad I did it before the tri though to loosen up and get the blood flowing everywhere after a sedentary week.

Coming from Austin to New Braunfels for the tri, I thought I’d give Clarence a call in Seguine. He was available and so we went and had lunch across the street from his place at the mexican food place, which also happened to have been the clinic where his grandfather, Dr. Friday, practiced medicine many years ago.

It was good to see him. He has been struggling to find a job. I hope the substitue teacher thing works out, because I think it would be such a good fit. It would be something he would be good at. Some kids might actually learn something, he gets paid, and gets a step closer to getting his license to practice medicine as a P.A again.

The drive back to Houston was long. I got tired and had to pull over and walk around for a while. Once at Bucee’s and once at Katy Mills.

Mom, Dad and I had an interesting conversation about the latest Prairie Home Companion and an article in the July 2007 issue of National Geographic that had a story about Swarm Theory, and computer models based off of it that have applications in the human world.

Bikram yoga on Saturday was cathartic.

This is the last day before work starts full force. I’m looking forward to a busy and productive month. and when I say productive I mean in all areas of life. And I wish the same to any friend reading this!

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of the year. Sleep well!

It was a full and rewarding weekend. Friday after work, Dave Lisa and I met at the 24 hour fitness in Round Rock right off I35 at 79/Sam Bass. The salt water pool was in good shape and we both got a good swim in. I went out later that night and checked out a bar downtown which was not very happening, but Mike told me so. I think I crashed pretty hard after that.

Saturday I probably straightened a bit more. Mike and I went to see Star Trek at the matinee around 2pm at Westgate Stadium 11. I enjoyed it and liked how they stayed consistent with other storylines. We went to Amy’s rdirectly after and got mexican vanilla frozen yogurt. First time I had had their yogurt before. It was light and nice. No extra ingredients really, just frozen yogurt..well and I added hot fudge which was totally worth it. There were some dads there with their kids explaining to them how the “old” Star Trek was and. The kids and parents all liked it. We remembered Star Trek to each other the way it was when we were growing up. I had an *amazing* powernap. the kind you get when you set your alarm for 20 minutes and keep hitting 5 minute snooze after that, and every time sink back into REM sleep and dream. what lasted an hour actually felt like 2 or 3. I ran 2 miles, showered, and had a nice close shave to renew my baldness.

I met Mike at the draughhouse and met his friend Teresa. It was her birthday and we celebrated with beer and italian creme cake. Met some of their friends and had good fun. there was Heffeweisen. We got hungry and left for Zen. we went to the Zen on 35th? I think that’s where it is. If not, then close to there. Afterwards, spent the night at Mike’s. He showed me the renovations which are going well. Watched SNL with Will Ferrell guest starring. Lots of it was dumb, but he does dumb so well. The Harry carry part was probably my favorite of his. I don’t watch much hi-def, and this was the first time I watched SNL this way. I was impressed with how much detali you could see in people’s faces. The camera doesn’t hide near as much as it used to.

Sunday we got up and had tea. I got to see the renovations in the light of day. What a great view! Mikes neighborhood is very hilly, so the drive there the night before had been fun. And now from the back patio, I could see out over a hill, and the new windows in the soon to be complete bedroom looked out over same. Mike has a yahama guitar that doesn’t get much play, and a piano. I played the guitar a bit and sang. Mike read the paper and later took ot the piano and I sang while he played. Then I played piano for a while while he read. Prem and I met up for late breakfast at Bouldin Creek Coffee Shop. It was quite tastey. We ate later than we had planned. I got the lavendar mocha and a breakfast with 3 eggs and cheese, tortillas, and some smokey tasting black beans which I recommend. After visiting for a while we opted to go to Once Over and had some espresso. Once over has a patop in the back which you wouldn’t know about unless you went back to look. It isn’t visible from anywhere. It’s secluded and backs up to Bouldin Creek. Quite nice. On the way to the gym from my place, it occured to me that I had eaten too much and had too much caffeine before my workout. I had lots of water, and opted to go into zen to get some soy sauce packets. I downed 3 of them. Helps my blood pressure to stay up if I’ve had too much caffeine. Seems like if I work out too hard with coffee in my system, I get light headed and have to rest more. I had another excellent workout with John Rogala. Did more circuits with bench, clean and press, squats, and various other things he worked in. The eggs and caffeine didn’t sit well. I thought they might not later into the hour long workout, but I think the salt helped. Had an excellent nap and showed up to see Mike play soccar with his team, and reconnected with people on the team a bit. Titus the Dog was there and was totally awesome as usual. I decided I’d go by home before going to Rain with the team. Perfect timing to take a call, as I was on call this week, and resolve it by phone with Prem and over email. didn’t get any more calls, and later confirmed by email that stuff got brought back up. First time to Rain, and I thought it was well put together. 3 or 4 bars? Enough. Good music, lots of people, and there was BBQ, which i was really ready for. After hanging out a bit more we took off and I came home to play some Tuba and Guitar. Got about 2 hours in on that and sounded better.

The weekend had more in it that most. I was always engaged in something and the balance was good. Not thinking aobut it, just doing it and living life. Great weekend. i want my whole life to be like this. :-)

On Saturday I stayed with Diana’s family near Killeen, TX. The view from their backyard was very pretty and I very much enjoyed spending time with her and her 9-month old McKarthy. We went to the mall and had a fun adventure with a 17 year old Gap gift certificate, and played…

McKarthy crawling and smiling

Happy Diana!

Huh?! Really?!

Also enjoyed talking with Diana’s Mom and learning some Vietnamese, and of course the Vietnamese sandwiches and Mung bean sprouts. yummy.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday!

I got to spend the day with Mom and Dad. They gave me a car for my Birthday/Christmas. Mom and Dad would not normally buy me such a big present, but I have seldom actually “cashed in” on a lot of the presents they would have given me when they told me to go get something and they’d pay for it. Usually during Christmas and birthdays past, I just don’t have anything I really want. I really needed a car lately as mine was quickly expiring faster than it could be maintained….I’ll post pics later.

We also had a wonderful meal at an Argentine place here in Austin called Buenos Aires Cafe. Empanadas, red wine, good salad, snapper on crepes in a creamy chile lime sauce with shrimp and several sauces, Chocolate Creme Burlee, Quatros Leches, and some other kind of dessert crepe. Mmm.

Oh, and Dad and I got to see the inside of my condo. the floors and most of the fixtures are done. It’s exciting to see now that I know where I’m going to put the furniture, etc.

I’m going to try for 60 miles today. Leaving in a few minutes. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t convince Google Maps that I didn’t want to go to Dallas first, but whatever. Go clockwise, and instead of turning left on 360 and going to Plano, turn right and go back home.

View Larger Map

Mom and Dad came down this weekend and we had a very pleasant weekend. They got lucky and got a room at Austin Motel at the last minute when someone else cancelled. Angela F was in town, but I totally flaked out and didn’t get to hang out with her/them!

Erika said she was going to go do Sacred Harp too! I can’t wait to hear what happens.

I have had significant trouble getting to bed consistently around the same time each day, so I usually don’t know what my natural rhythm is going to do next. This week though, I found a routine. I went from getting to bed around 3am to gradually getting to bed at or before Midnight and sleeping through to a realistic time.

Few things are important enough for me to loose sleep over. I have been setting my alarm for an early time, like 5 or 6 am, but not getting to bed until 1am or later. So I end up waking up to the alarm (or not), and then hitting snooze for hours. It feels *great* to snooze, but really what kind of rest was I getting?

I got to ride my bike to work *every day*! It is about 8-9 miles to work and then of course the same distance back. Erika got engaged , and Diana had her baby in the same week as well!

I’ve already called them – well, I called Erika. I tried to call Diana but that didn’t work. And that’s totally just fine. I’d rather she spend time with L’Enfant,

Significant things happened at work. Unfortunately, I don’t get to automate all that I wanted to, but very fortunately, 2 members of my team have been key in working with me to produce a more realistic approach. This is at once frustrating, because I need to be identifying and doing these things, but also gratifying and necessary. And we are working as a closer team as a result. We get to be a bit more real and call each others bs whether we knew it was bs at the time or not. All of this in mutual respect. yay.

I believe we played Rock Band on the PS3, *every single day of the week*, which was most excellent indeed. Steve Babin got a PS3 recently and then bought Rock Band which may contribute to my undoing. It brings me indescribable joy to play Rock Band. It has spurred on a serious need to listen to songs by the band Boston. Rock Band has Rock, punk, etc from several decades, but there’s something about Boston that takes me to my happy place. :-)

Oh, and Scott Crain called. Used to work with him at UH. He’ll come to Austin or at least to San Antonio. Looking forward to catching up with him and with any luck also playing Rock Band. As Luck would have it, he’s getting to play Rock Band for the first time with Nephews today. That ought to be cool.

After work, David Benavides had a birthday party at Fleming’s. The meal was splendid, and meeting new people and old was fun. I sat next to Kevin’s wife January, and across from Blake and Fabian. All three of us had Triathlon in common. Fun times. We laughed together.

Home was not appealing. A change of scenery and a more social environment around me is more to my liking tonight, so i’m at Ruda Maya’s. Nice loud band, and some cool stuff to work on. Ubiquitous wireless makes things easier.

I went swimming in Lake Travis Sunday, then went to Berryhill’s, a restaurant on 360 very close to the Pennybacker Bridge that takes 360 over Lake Austin.

I was about to go biking and Fish Tacos sounded good, so Berryhill’s seemed like the way to go.

Ricky was the Bartender and we talked about Houston a bit. He had worked Berryhill’s in Houston and had moved fairly recently. I had noticed a Balalaika standing up next to the door. There were a couple of people at the end of the bar and they were complimenting the food as was I.

I noticed he had a Russian accent, so I figured he and she were probably the owners of the Balalaika and other instruments at the front door. This turned out to be the case. They were Zhenya and Leeann of Gypzee Heart.

They turned out to know Greg Harbar. Zhenya said he had had a heart operation lately but was doing fine. Greg is one of those people who will be young no matter how old he gets.

Anyhow, when they used to live in Houston, Zhenya played with him. I’ve played with him a couple of times around the holidays on tuba. We traded stories for a while and they invited me to Antoine’s tonight. They suggested if I can play Dark Eyes, I could sit in with them for a song.

So I took out the Tuba after work today and played a bit. This one was helpful, and I thought they’d probably play it in a style kind of like that. But they both play several instruments and sing.

I’ll catch them later. They play Sunday brunches there at Berryhill’s. That would be a fun time to sit in, since it’s not a schoolnight, etc. Well it actually is a schoolnight, but brunch won’t have me out too late.

Later I biked from Brodie Oaks shopping center to the 360 bridge and looked out over the city and terrain from the cliffs to the west of the bridge. It was windy and inspiring. clouds were blowing in from the south, but the sun was constantly poking through. The hills got kind of touch biking back.

No, I’m not turning Innertube into an adjective (sorry Nicole Boyd. Of course Nicole may not create adjectives from all nouns anymore, but it’s a habit that has stuck with me even today).

There’s a little Tubby in all of us, I think. When fast-paced-microwave-society life or anything for that matter scares or frightens us, we may even lash out at those who are trying to help us.

Say “La Vie”.

Tubby was an allegedly three legged, paraylized Cocker Spaniel dog who bit potential rescuers shortly before plummeting to his death inside the only car on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 shortly before it’s dramatic collapse. Tubby was the only casualty in an unusual disaster which is possibly the the only example to date of a bridge collapse due to torsional mechanical resonance of the 2nd mode in civil engineering history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge#Tubby_the_dog

Have a nice weekend!

Today I’m going to go bike 360 . Chicago Triathlon is only 7 days away, and the Austin Tri is 2 weeks away. I’ve decided just to focus on time and distance rather than speed. I’m concerned about the distance of the Austin tri, as it will be my first Olympic distance triathlon.

So this should be fun. It’s a bit hot today, though. Definitely bringing the camelback.

I can relate to Mike Hon’s post about only needing internet cable.. I have gotten the same reaction to only having cable internet and to not having a TV. Pretty funny.

It made me think of a book I have started reading which I am borrowing from a friend. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television was written by Jerry Mander (yes, that is his actual given name).

He was an advertizing executive in the 60s and early 70s, and was very very good at it. This makes his work speak much more loudly as he had so much exposure to using Television both as a commercial medium as well as for social purposes. He holds that technology is not neutral. That some technologies will inherently only be good for some things.

Highly recommended reading even though I have only just started it. More as it develops.

At HEB, I went shopping on Sunday and got sweet Bartlett pairs and other fresh fruits and vegetables. HEB is close to my place and of course cheaper than Central Market and Whole Foods. I saw some bright red Sun Dried Tomatoes that looked especially tastey. For between $2-3 you can get about 12 oz.

So the next day at work, in the afternoon, Angela mentioned something about my snacks and I remember the sunflower seeds, pumpkin seed and dried tomatoes. So I take them out and we start munching.

They are ripe and red, and (at first) tasty. A bit salty though, and not quite as sweet as others I have had. So I’m munching away and talking about doing karaoke on Thursday with Angela and some others perhaps, and I read the label:

Product of Turkey.
Ingredients: Tomatoes, Sulfur Dioxide.

Hmm, i think. These tomatoes wouldn’t pass emissions. Wikipedia has an article on Sulfur Dioxide that mentions it’s use as a preservative.

At any rate, Richard said it didn’t sit right. It made my head feel funny. Today, Angela reported having headache last night.

I don’t recommend Turkish sundried tomatoes at HEB. Tell your friends.

I’m missing it this year, though lots of friends are going. I’m really pumped about next year though. There is a friend of mine who was into BBS in the 80′s and really just the whole scene that DEFCON stands for, but he has never been to a DEFCON.

I was blown away when he said, that yes he’d go with us next year! Totally stoked. I’m so happy he is going to get to go. He’s had a lot of hard knocks, so to hear that things are going well and looking up, and that he’ll be able to afford to take the time and money to go and do something like this makes me happy.

There was a time in my life about 13 years ago when I was really depressed. And I just happened to get that way after I had ben running a lot every day and not eating enough. So it kind of turned me off of running for a long time.

Well for the first time in about 3 years (the last triathlon), I went for a run and really enjoyed it. Now, some of my more recent runs have been OK and enjoyable, but this one really felt right.

My running had been really awkward with a weaker right leg and just a lot of wierd asymmetries I couldn’t put my finger on. Kind of like when you learned how to ride a bike and before you got the hang of it, you couldn’t quite put your finger on why you kept falling off.

Anyways, I ran about 15 minutes to warm up and it felt like nothing. Well, not nothing, but it just felt good, and I was running with good form. I didn’t feel anythign like I had a celery stalk for an arm and Patrick Duffey for a leg when I ran tonight. After 15 minutes, I ran a mile pretty strong in 8:30. That’s pretty quick for me. The last time I ran it was more like 10 minute miles. This was after 18 miles on a bike on the veloway about an hour earlier. That workout took an hour.

Yay! running is fun again! Can’t wait to swim tomorrow.

None of these options even come close to what I had in mind…

This is my first weekend living in Austin!

I woke up this morning in my own bed in my new place, and went to the kitchen to get something to eat. I missed a lot of my workouts this week, so I really felt like a workout this morning. Also I have some triathlons coming up. One of them is kinda triath-long for me because it’s going to be my first olympic distance. I need to pick up the pace!

Anyways, I remembered Stephen, one of my roommates and the owner of the house I’m renting a room in wanted to get back into rollerblading, so he said he’d go with me to the Veloway when he got up this morning.

After a short fiasco with the car, first emptying it (Thanks for the help Steve, it was kind of packed!), and then finding out that the battery was dead, we took Steve’s truck. Kieth or Pat (other roommates) noticed that the interior light was on. And thanks Pat for helping me push my hunk of metal out of the driveway and closer to the curb.

The Veloway (Bottom of the page) isn’t too far from the house. It’s 3.17 miles of paved trail winding around typical central texas terrain, with some hills of differing grades.

Only bikes and rollerblades are allowed, no runners. There are lots of tight turns and variety. And not at all crowed. You usually don’t see anyone, though there were more peole out saturday. And with the trail being 23 feet wide, there’s always plenty of room to pass.

I had a great workout. I was doign intervals today, but I didn’t have a timer, so I used the map at the head of the trail and the landmarks on the first time around to figure out where I would start and stop the intervals.

Steve got to go around twice (6.3 miles about), which I thought was good since he hadn’t been working out lately. Still, there has been a lot of rain lately, so a couple of light showers caused some of the natural streams that run through the veloway to wet the trails.

The streams actually cross the trail a few times as both the trails and the streams wind around a bit. It was hot and humid about halfway through, but not quite like like Houston. Working out in the heat is good practice anyways. It feels good to be conditioned for hot and humid conditions, and it makes just about any weather feel good when you are accustomed to heat.

If you come to Austin to visit, and you want to bring your bike, we can go there. It’ll be fun.

I just completed the Couples Triathlon in Austin, TX! My first tri was 3 years ago, so this is my second. I’m off to a good start this season, and now I’m excited to train for the next one.

Couples is a 800 meter swim / 11.2 mile bike / 3.1 mile run, which makes it a sprint distance tri. It was at Walter E. Long park at Decker Lake here in Austin, TX this year.

I was 478/706 overall, and completed the race in 1:42:07. I’m happy with that. My goal was just to complete. We had a deployment at work, so I was there the night before. So 5 hours of sleep before the tri wasn’t ideal, bit really it worked out OK.

Triathlons are fun! You get to go do something physical, see other triathletes – over time you meet more people and it’s a pretty close community of people, families and businesses. Accelerade, and Clif Bar were there, and a Doctor and his people doing a type of therapy related to massage. I don’t remember what it was called now, but it was like active stretching or something like that.

It’s so worth it for the sense of accomplishment, and the high you get after you recover a bit. You meet some motivated friendly people who are good at lots of other things in life too.

Everything went well and was pretty comfortable. The run was brutal. Must have been 100% humidity/ 90 degrees. The course was fun though. The water was warm at 80 degrees or so, which I really liked. It was just really comfortable. The roads were shut down for the bike, so it was just us out there going up and down hills in typical Texas hill country terrain. And the run was on grass, so it was easy on the body. I had to stop a few times on the run as I was starting to overheat.

Now I’ve got to get with Matt and plan our trip to Chicago for the next one! Matt inspired me to sign up when we were crossing the finish line at the MS 150 this year. How’s the training Matt?

Anyone who is a massage therapist has probably had an experience like this one where the client comes with more on their mind than getting a massage. Not safe for work, but if you are a therapist, you should give this “Best of Craig’s List” a read:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/jax/353293242.html

This guy, Rick Garlikov, taught first graders binary arithmetic in 25 minutes on a Friday afternoon 2 weeks before the end of the school year, in May. Actually, they taught themselves:

http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html

The experiment was to teach only by asking questions. Class size was 22, and 19 were fully involved. They understood it and were excited and inspired about it the whole time. Afterwards, they continued to talk about it until school was out.

It’s natural for us to explore and learn and grow and discover. Imagine what it would be like to fan those flames in the classroom for every subject.

What might a school be like if we could teach in such a way that ‘excellence’ and ‘achievement’ fell by the wayside and actual learning could happen? I assert that we learn by making mistakes, asking questions and pressing forward, rather than by avoiding mistakes in search of a perfect score which represents only itself rather than mastery of a subject or persuit.

Ah yes, the 8th day. One week isn’t enough. So lately I’ll slip another one in somewhere. Thursday has been a good day recently, but this week it’s happening on Tuesday night. Thursday’s past, it translated to a 13 or 14 hour work day which allows me to travel and basically take Friday mostly off.

Today at work somewhere around 3pm I came to the powerful realization that all the things I took on are not getting done. Powerful because what I am doing now isn’t working. I will have it work. I will do 3 triathlons by the end of August, the last of which I have already registered for in August. I will meet objectives I’ve set for myself at work, both written and agreed upon as well as the ones I set for myself. I will do all the things I said I was going to do. Period.

So at 3pm rather than get sleepy (it was already happening), and basically get that feelgood feeling that comes later in the day when you decide to forget, (or at least when *I* decide to forget), most of what is going on in my life and drift into the silent reverie that is the lie. The lie that says the day is almost done, and because I have put in a good effort, that I can safely rest.

It makes me remember a scripture that goes something like this – “A little folding of the hands to rest and calamity decends on us like a heap of burning coals and a 7 headed dragon”. Ok, I embellished a little, but folding of the hands and consequences were definately involved.

So I decided to move on from one thing to the next accomplishing as much as possible. I will not fret about being absolutely sure my priorities are all correct. We could be here all night for that to happen, and nothing would get done.

Better to identify from the whole pool of things I’m going to do, if the next random thing I pick falls into the pool of “top third”. As long as that’s true, it couldn’t be that bad. And there are enough things to do that that really is responsible. And conducive to flow.

So I looked at the texas iron workouts I received from Jamie, settled on a workout for the evening, then changed my plans a bit when I foudn out Burch, whom I work with was going for a run. Always preferable to me to run with someone than run alone. Same with biking, though not as critical.

So after I got a good start installing my dev workstation ( something that doesn’t happen in Tech ARch on my project – until now!!!), I followed Burch as we drove over to Town Lake here in Austin.

We ran mostly and walked a bit, the 4.1 miles from mopac to first street and back around. Inspiring native plants and limestone, majestic bigger than life Cypress trees, perfect surreal Agave that looks like something from Phantasia. It was a spiritual breath of fresh air. I thanked Burch for having me a long and pointing out Austin sites along the way.

Then I went ot the gym, got in a good swim, and then did some weightlifting. I did some deadlifts, clean and jerks, and some handstands. Handstands are getting better. I almost did 3 handstand pushups without support, but still needed a little support. Trying to open up my sholulders. They are really tight, but the weightlifting and yoga and everything else I’m doing is helping. In between sets I did some good deep stretches of my shoulders and neck. I can actually *see* a difference now! My neck looks way too long for my body when I’m doing these streches, but I think that’s just because it looks new. But then again I do have a large head and a long neck for my height. Yay me.

So now I made my way with box of external hard drives over to Epoch where I am copying, consolidating and backing up (won’t go into boring details here.)

With any good fortune, I’ll get a good start on my multi-pronged approach to save the financial disaster that is my house from further loss and attempt to not only keep it from plunging me 2-3 years behind my financial goals, but to see if it can actually *make* me money.

I have a financial mentor now. His name is Brady Johns, and I have homework to do. He helped a co-worker to get on his way to financial freedom which will allow him to retire young and retire rich. The book by that name is part of my homework. I’ll get to some of that tonight.

I’m about to identify my council person and put together a plan for beautifying my neighborhood, particularly my cul-de-sac. If the neighborhood is more valuable then so is every house. I’m thinking of putting together some kind of website or booklet that has all the great things about living at 6343 Limestone, and why a buyer, or lease-to-owner, or what have you would want to live there.

I’ve learned from this house, and my roommates. I’ve learned that loving friends has nothing to do with my responsibility to stand up for my interests. Getting a $125k house rather than the $40k condo made no sense whether or not roommate #1 wouldn’t have roomed with me if I hadn’t. A little loneliness never killed anyone. Better to be lonely and rich than lonely and poor. And in the end I kicked out roommate #1 because of a complicated turn of events.

Also, considering compatibility and roommates: Erika is a dear friend, but she likes privacy and there is a sanctity to her space. So when I agreed to room with her, I was agreeing basically to communicating anyone who would be at the house to her. It’s only fair really.

But Erika has a life of her own. So again, I was lonely in my house with no one there usually, because she wasn’t there, and neither was anyone else including the neighbors. All my fault. Shame on me.

That’s just an expression. I’m not ashamed.

Nothing wrong with any of this or anyone involved. Everyone is still a friend. What I’ll change in the future is to pay attention to my own interests before I consider anyone elses where $$ are concerned. Truly, if anything comes before my financial freedom, I am enslaving myself.

So here I am at Epoch, a wonderful vibrant coffeeshop in Austin, TX. Austin is quickly becoming my home away from albatross-house, partially because of wonderful places like this one. It’s 12:53am on Thursday morning/ Wednesday night…(who am I kidding – it’s day 8!!), and there are lots of people talking and visiting. Laptop to person ratio is pretty high. About 10-20 on and open. Wireless of course. Epoch never closes. 24 hours 7 days a week.

Well, I’ll stop writing now and continue with other things. Peace out! Peace in!

The original video, to which I will not link here, rattles around in my head like OCD thoughts. I was so pleased to see Erika’s homage to this silly song, with a large voluptious dromedary camel looking back over it’s, well, humps.

Her last post has inspired me to put Alanis’ version here, as I enjoyed it so so much:

Michelle’s blog lists her recent accomplishments. I was happy to see “Made Mike Hon Giggle”, and “Wrote a Fugue” in the same list. “smiled at a stranger and made him run into a bench” was pretty fun too. :-)

Thanks Michelle.

I missed Erika’s point in her post on safety initially when I was commenting, but I spun off onto something that had meaning for me.

I quoted the bit about Aslan being good but not safe to Erika. When I think about trusting a Good Lord regardless of what consequences, I think about this song which seldom fails to inspire me. It’s by Iona, and a sample can be heard here. The sound of the song is as expansive as the sea upon which we sail, and having met the band at Cornerstone Festival in 1996, I can say that at the time they wrote the song they were inspired. So I feel connected to The Spirit by this song and it is special to me:

Beyond these shores
Into the darkness
Beyond these shores
This boat may sail
And if this is the way
Then there will be
A path across this sea

And if I sail beyond
The farthest ocean
Or lose myself in depths below
Wherever I may go
Your love surrounds me
For you have been before
Beyond these shores

This morning I had breakfast with Mom and Dad. It’s a Haynes family tradition on Saturdays, that we go to Le Madeleine’s in the Rice Village and have breakfast. This time I had just come back from Denver and will most likely not be going back up for the project I’ve been working on.

I just got my results back last week from National Geographic’s Genographic project, which I highly recommend for reading at http://www.genographic.com. It includes an atlas of the human journey, and lots of other cool stuff to read that gave me a sense of connection to humans and history. Best evidence suggests that there is a ‘Mitochondrial Eve‘ who lived about 200,000 years ago, and an ‘Y-Chromosomal Adam‘ who lived about 50,000 years ago who we can trace as humanity’s most recent common ancestors.

At any rate, you can pay about $100 for a kit which the project will send you in the mail. You take two cheek swab samples and send them back. You may test either your mitochondrial DNA or your Y chromosome for deep ancestrial lineage. That’s probably the topic of another post, but suffice it to say we had fun talking about heridity, geneology and genetics at breakfast before coming back to parents’ house.

I installed their “new” wireless router which I bought them on ebay because it’s just a better router than what they had and because now they’ll have a wireless router which I can use anywhere in the house. yay. :-)

So once that was done, and after we finished talking about other things of interest, I got vmware working to my satisfaction under linux. I got my laptop back and was pleased to find that sound worked. :-) This means I can use my work laptop image in linux and experience no significant difference (knock-on-wood) from using it natively, and I’ll have the added bonus of a

The load is reaonable… I tried opening a test project and compiling it. The loading actually took the most resources and didn’t take too much time, and the compiling hardly took anything at all. I couldn’t take my screenshot fast enough to get the shot before the proc went back down.

Bottom line is. I feel productive and happy and flowing in the Csikszentmihalyi sense of the word flow.

Yay! Now I’m going to go clean up the disaster area which is my desk at home, and attack taxes. Somewhere in there I’m going to work out, but I’m not feeling the whole planning thing right now.

69

The piano is about halfway done! It’s been restrung, and a small crack that wasn’t noticed before has been repaired in the soundboard. The soundboard is actually the thin piece of wood and doesn’t take any of the tension from the strings, but is responsible for resonating and putting the sound out to the air where we can hear it. (Tension is taken up by different mechanisms in the piano, and can be up to 20 tons in modern grands. Mine is an upright, but it is taller than most, so will have more tension on it than a shorter upright.)

Next is getting the action right on the keys and continuing to bring the piano gradually up to pitch.

My piano skipped a generation. It was given to my Grandmother (Father’s Mother), Athleen (Frasier) Haynes by her father Jack Frasier probably in the 1920′s. It was made in 1898 which makes it a late American Victorian piano. I’m really looking forward to playing it.

David Geiger is working on it presently and will have it ready sometime this month. I am really looking forward to playing it. When I get it back it will have been restrung, had the hammers replaced, new felts, new keytops, new dampers, and it will have been regulated and had the action adjusted.

For any of you who read my blog, you can now sign in with OpenID (what’s this?)

Usually, an OpenID is just your blog’s address. So if your blog is at http://myblog.livejournal.com, then you just put that in, and you’re logged in, and can comment without typing in your stuff everytime! If you choose, you can stay logged in so you never have to login again from that computer, or you can choose to type it in any time.

Another cool thing is, you don’t have to have a different login wherever else you leave comments, you can just login with that URL. I like this a lot.

The only catch is that your blog has to support OpenID. Livejournal does this and I believe others do as well. More will support it soon.

Just click on “login” on the right side, and you’ll have the option to login with your OpenID, or find the blank just above “login” and type it in there. (you may have more luck with the login page though)

“As in her big brown eyes”

(heads up: If you haven’t seen the show Dead Like Me, this post won’t make any sense at all.)

I enjoyed watching many consecutive Dead Like Me Episodes with Polly a few months ago, and we enjoyed a character called “Dolores” who is hard to describe unless you have seen her. She’s like an Office Space character, except a lot more developed.

Anyways, this morning when I was getting ready for work, I flipped on the SciFi channel and started watching this show about a teacher who was telling her class goodbye for the year, and actually goodbye for good. We learn from the teacher and from the kids that there has been some kind of “Dark Rain”, which is the title of this Outer Limits episode. There seems to be something wrong with people’s reproduction in this world, and they must be the youngest generation to be born before a disaster happened which made it impossible for couples to have viable infants.

So through some turns in the plot, she gets pregnant by her husband and goes to a local clinic where she and her husband get taken to a government run facility where tests are run, and where after the normal child is born they aren’t allowed to leave.

Well, one of the nurses is played by Christine Willes, who later played Dolores! It was pretty funny to see her as a doting nurse. Later she looks ominous when the couple tries to escape. But later still, she helps one of the NRA (good guys in this story), help the couple escape, and she looked just like she did when she was “bending the rules” for George. It made me smile.

I guess for the rest of the day I’ll be “Getting Things Done with Dolores” (The title of Dolores’ highly task-focused internet only TV show on Dead Like Me, where you can learn how to iron, file, do laundry and many more seemingly trivial every day tasks much more effectively.)

Well, my friend Bill, is a composer among many other talented things, and sometimes when using LINUX I think of him. He chooses Mac over LINUX for obvious reasons I won’t go into here. He comes to mind, because he was succinct about highlighting how ridiculous LINUX is as a desktop machine.

I use LINUX as a desktop machine. :-) Usually I use windows, but I’m comfortable with LINUX, and sometimes LINUX is just easier.

Christmas Revels happened in December, and I went to hear them. It was really wonderful. I would choose that over the Nutcracker every Christmas, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is hearing it at the Moore’s School Opera House at University of Houston Moore’s School of Music

There was one song that, in the context of the performance really caught my ear. It sounds simple and almost dry here, though you can still hear some of the weight of this old Russian folk song, “Mlada” from the shores of lake Onega (оиега). You need to listen to it with good headphones, or with speakers that have enough bass in them to hear the low bass singer.

Since I don’t do enough recording to use the ProTools setup Bill sold me very often at all, I use smaller tools. Usually I use audacity on my laptop, and can easily work with that on my server since audacity is released for windows and GNU/LINUX both.

RedHat Fedora Core (LINUX) in particular is great for music because CCRMA at Stanford puts out PlanetCCRMA which is an easy way to turn LINUX into a digital audio workstation.

Anyways, one day I was riding home from Denver on the plane when I decided to write down some of this song so I could play it as a tuba trio.

Then later one day this weekend I thought, what the hey, I’ll typeset it and play a verse of it to see what it sounded like:

The results are a lilypond source which is adequate for importing into a TeX source for typesetting, or rendering as a pdf or ps or dvi as well. the pdf of the score, the .ly source file and the trio I recorded (only 30 seconds of it. c’mon, it’s only a sketch!), are available here.

I wrote about Parkour on July 29 in this article. I have since found that American Parkour is probably the best all around site for Parkour.

It has forums, detailed explanations and videos or pictures of exercizes, good quality responsible stories and articles offering howto information for building tools for training, how to take care of yourself and avoid injury, etc.

Colorado Parkour is also very good and is focused on the community in Colorado. More local sites are cropping up across America, so if you are interested in Parkour, just look around. The scene will be small, but it’s there and it’s growing, thanks to the dedication of the hardworking people running these sites and contributing to the community.

One hard thing for people to overcome here in America is that when Traceurs are seen overcoming obstacles in an urban environment, security guards, Police and concerned citizens tend to see these people in the same light as they would vandals, miscreants, skaters etc. I think the biggest obstacle Traceurs have to overcome is that they are very young, usually being teenagers or young adults, and people see that as a danger.

So it is important for Traceurs to be conscious about the environment and try to leave places in a better state than they found them.

Ericka inspired me to write. Go Ericka! She is focused on healthy living and doing what’s right for her physically, so I thought I’d share what I’ve been doing lately.

I have been frustrated with some physical issues myself. My right leg is a lot weaker and stupider than my left. I had an injury to my hip flexor among other things, years ago and compensated and that has caused some problems even in my back and shoulders. Maybe no one would notice, but I do.

So, I’ve really been enjoying the benefits of Crossfit lately. The workouts have been challenging. I stumbled upon them after looking into Parkour and finding the community a bi hard to find and train with. The type of fitness Parkour and Crossfit both emphasize is really very similar, with Crossfit being more heavy on the weight bearing stuff. They define fitness in 100 words:

Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, C&J, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.

That’s pretty clear. Thats what you do. But behind this simple description of fitness, you’ll find a lot of thoughtful, very workable stuff on the site, from how to start, and detailing all the exercizes with short movie clips and or slide shows to intelligent writing on various fitness related and exercize related topics in the CrossFit Journal. CrossFit Journal is a pay-for service, but they do have a free sample on their site that is a really good read to give you some straightforward solid background about fitness principles behind crossfit. Examples might be, why you might want to have a good all around fitness level rather than specializing in endurence, or strength or size. Or, how short intense workouts can figure into better fitness for you.

So what does it look like to keep up with a crossfit workout? You don’t have to make many decisions really. You can just follow the Workout of the Day on the front page, and post how you did when you finish. People who post are supportive and answer questions about the exercizes. You can modify the exercizes to make them easy enough for you to do, or do them as they are.

Crossfit goes 3 days on and one day off and just continues to alternate that way. So it doesn’t line up with a week exactly. That tends to throw off the routine a little as well, which I like.

If you have a complex question or concern, you can check out the forums. I’m impressed with the level of discourse there. Everyone keeps it very clean and focused and on topic. You can contribute and learn.

Give it a try! Good luck!

Mercury Cafe
www.mercurycafe.com
2199 California St
Denver, Colorado 80205
(303) 294-9258
8pm->
(open mic goes 7pm – 1am)
(click map for directions)


I’m playing at the Mercury Café open mic night tonight, but I don’t know exactly when. I’d suggest just coming after work, as this place is a bar and restaurant, and we can get some drinks and possibly dinner and socialize a bit.

I’ll try to get as early a spot as possible, but that will probably be 7:30 or so. Please don’t feel pressured to stay to hear me – I understand we don’t all want to stay out too late!

This is no grand performance! I have been putting off playing in front of people for too long, so I’m just putting an end to that tonight. Some of you were interested, so I decided to extend the invite further so we can all have an excuse to go out and have a few drinks. And maybe next time, Jeb will play??

I’ve included a couple of pictures so you can see the place is very casual (click the first image for an album):