Wait, hold up.  Week 11?  What happened to weeks 9 and 10?

You don’t want to know.

Um, in fact, yes.  Yes, I do.

*Sigh.* Week 9 started well.  I had four runs scheduled, of 4, 7, 4, and 12 miles.  And the first three were just brilliant.  And then all the mental and physical anguish of my move (and that little impending semester thing) kicked in, and my long run went out the window.

Well, sure.  I can see how that would happen.  But what about week 10?

Week 10 did not take place.  There was zero running during week 10.  There was, however, a comparable quantity of work in the way of carrying large heavy boxes up and down various flights of stairs.

But.  Wait.  I’m looking back at week 8, and you missed your long run that week, too.

Yeah.  Thanks for pointing that out.

So you missed three long runs in a row?

Yes.  Three long runs of 8, 12, and 10 miles respectively.

Good grief.  So how did this week go?

I thought you’d never ask.

Mileage for week:  24 (was meant to be 26)

Number of run days:  3 (was meant to be 3, so HA)

Long run for week:  14 (was meant to be 16)

Aches, pains, complaints:  Physically, I feel fantastic.

Physically?  But otherwise…?

I’m a little freaked out.  There are not enough weeks left between now and the date of the intended marathon for me to feel confident about boosting my long run by another 12.2 miles.  14 was mighty hard, as it was.  So I’m trying to scale back my expectations, figure I’ll keep training between now and then, and just see what I can do.

I just received this via my pals at Educause:

BLOGS MOVING INTO ACADEMIA
On a number of campuses in the United Kingdom, blogs have begun to migrate from the technology fringes to the mainstream of educational tools. At the University of Warwick, more than 2,500 students and staff have signed up for the university’s blog service, making it one of the largest academic blogging operations. John Dale, head of IT services at Warwick, said, “We believe that blogging may open new opportunities for students and staff.” Robert O’Toole, a Ph.D. student at Warwick, said his blog has allowed him “to speak to academic communities across the U.K. and [to gain] knowledge from strangers. Blog[ging] has allowed me to write in a single place almost daily and develop things in fairly

cohesive fashion.” Esther Maccallum-Stewart, a history researcher at Sussex University, uses a blog in her research and her teaching. She said her blog has become an invaluable part of her work and argued that academic institutions need to avoid becoming “too insular, constructing their own language and cliques which do nothing to promote the getting of knowledge.” On the other hand, David Supple, Web strategy manager at Birmingham University, cautions universities not to rush into new technologies. He advises considering how best to implement tools such as blogs “without creating legal and reputational issues for the institution.”
BBC, 23 January 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4194669.stm

Was that really dated yesterday?

(Note:  more updates on things such as moves and running and such soon.)

The other thing is that moving makes it completely impossible to do anything else other than move.  Because I can’t find any of the stuff that I need to do it with.

Posting’s likely to be a little light here for a while, given that (1) I’m so desperately behind in class preparations that every available moment here in the office needs to be spent on work, and (2) Verizon is so desperately behind on post-flood-and-mudslide repairs that my new phone service will not be connected until February 2, which gives me an optimistic date of February 14 before I’ve got working DSL at home.

Running’s also been thrown completely off-kilter by the move, both because for four days I could not find clean running clothes and because—and I only wish I were exaggerating—every muscle in my entire body hurts.  My favorite one is the muscle which connects the second joint of my left middle finger with my palm.  I’m very, very curious how that got such a workout.

Please, oh please, let me return to my regular schedule soon.

It takes moving to demonstrate to yourself how bad a housekeeper you really are.

Two parts:

1.  You’re about to move house, and you’re dying to be in your new digs.  You’re lucky enough to have access to the new place a full week before you really have to be out of the old place, so you figure you’ll schlep some stuff over a carload at a time and get it moved in.  What stuff do you schlep to the new place first?

2.  There are now five days remaining before the movers show up, and you’ve got massive amounts of crap to pack, so much that it feels a bit overwhelming.  Where do you begin?  What do you pack first?

I’m not exactly sure what the answers will tell you—perhaps it’s something akin to, but different from, the house-on-fire-what-do-you-grab scenario.  Nonetheless, I’m curious.  My answers a bit later.  (Packing, in the meantime.)

Mileage for week:  4 (was meant to be 20)

Number of run days:  1 (was meant to be 4)

Long run for week:  4 (was meant to be 8)

Aches, pains, complaints:  Abort!  Abort!  Abort!  This was a disastrous week, beginning with the bloody toe (now healed, and without loss of nail) and moving to a series of complaints including insomnia, palpitations, and a seriously inflamed knee.  The good news is that it was meant to be a rest week anyhow, just not quite as resty as I ended up making it.  The better news is that I ran the first run of week 9 today, and it felt awesome.  Yes, totally awesome.  So I’m apparently on the mend.  (And, apparently, turning into a surfer-dude.  But that could just come from navigating the torrents currently falling from SoCal skies.)

Why is it that I invariably return from a big trip with some crazy travel saga?  And why is it that so many of those sagas revolve around Washington, DC?  I’m only halfway back to SoCal now, and so probably shouldn’t yet start telling the tale, as I’m just tempting fate.  But I can’t help myself.

I was flying Continental, my airline of choice, this time, and as I still choose them, I’m going to try to avoid pointing fingers their way.  Nonetheless:

My flight from DC, via Houston, to Ontario was scheduled for an 11.05 am departure, and I was scheduled to get home at 4 pm PST.  These facts are not incidental; I believe this schedule to have been the one and only time ever that, flying from the east coast to the west via Houston, I wasn’t required either to depart pre-sunrise or arrive near midnight.  Usually, there are two flights a day from Houston to Ontario, making scheduling more than a little inconvenient.  I stick with the airline, however, because they’re nice to me, and because nobody else services my airport any better than that.  I felt like I’d caught a break with today’s flights, though, and it turns out that I had:  that mid-day westward flight is a Saturday-only phenomenon.

That fact becomes important shortly.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not as if I didn’t have prior evidence to go on; no, me, I apparently need repeated confirmation of the fact that the Sour Apple Martini is Not My Friend.

Take that, LJ-hating-type snobs.

Or that, or that, for that matter.

45 trackbacks at Mena’s Corner.  2905 comments (and counting) at LiveJournal.  Here’s hoping SixApart is ready.

So how much you wanna bet that this APO thing turns out to have some super-secret evil underside? Because just like that Vadik/Tomazaki guy says, the best place to hide evil-doing is right out there in the open. And how much more unsubtle can you get than using a key card to slip through a door fifteen feet from the end of the LA subway platform?

Okay, so there’s never anyone in the subway, so it’s probably a pretty good place to hide, if you need one.

Anyhow. I’ve got, appropriately, unanswered questions. Like, okay, the evil “I was born in Virginia but I have an inexplicable British accent” good/bad/good/bad Lauren is dead. Great. But what became of the rest of the Covenant? Is the regular CIA still fighting them, while this new black-ops group will be taking on some new Big Bad?

And why do you need a new black-ops group anyhow? So far, the missions look pretty much exactly alike. We get Marshall telling Dixon that he’d never have let them do that, but you know he’d have totally looked the other way anyhow.

Yes, I am more invested in this than is probably good for me.