I haven’t written on this blog much lately because… there isn’t much going on I guess. I go to work, I sleep. It’s nice that the weather is finally getting warmer, even at night when I’m at work it’s starting to feel comfortable sometimes. Not warm enough for shorts yet, but soon enough.
I ended up skipping the State Farm 5k about a little over a week ago. I shouldn’t have, but it was raining and cold and I was tired and crabby… and I had sand in my pussy. No excuse is a good one, there was no good reason for me to skip it. The half marathon training is going pretty well for the most part, I’m getting in the majority of my training runs in and the longer distances are starting to feel more tolerable again. I still have bouts of motivation loss though, Jess is way more of a trooper than I am. The race is about a month away now, this year it ends on the 50 yard line of Memorial Stadium and they are going to put everyone’s finish up on the giant video board. I would like to get a picture of that! It’s unfathomable that an elite athlete such as myself has never been on the big screen! Everyone seems to ruin my finish line pictures though, the first one I ran they were telling me to get out of the way because the full marathon winner was right behind me and they wanted pictures of him (they took none of my finish), they didn’t take pictures at the finish of Papillion, or none that I had access to, and some jackass got in front of Jessica and I when we finished Omaha and ruined our pictures. I’m sure it will be the same this year, someone in an Elvis costume or something will draw all the photographers attention away from me. I’ve got two races in the meantime, a 10k with Jessica, and a 5k with my uncle Joe. I might run a couple more half marathons in the next couple months since I’m in shape for it, haven’t decided yet. Jessica is pretty much back to work every weekend as of now and will soon be back on full time and have shitty days off so she won’t be able to do many races with me.
We are going on a trip! Just a short four day jaunt up to the Black Hills in South Dakota, nothing amazing or anything but I’m excited! I literally haven’t gone anywhere since I went to the Alamo Bowl and Corpus Christi in 2005. Man, that’s a long time ago so I’ve got a little bit of flatland fever going on. I’ve been there before but not since I was a kid and Jessica has never gone. If we are going to go someplace we needed to get it in before next month when Jessica goes back to the park full time again and can’t get many days off. I’ve proposed a more epic trip for next Winter, a passport trip… Australia! That’s not set in stone yet, it needs to be looked into more.
School is going ok, I’m halfway through another class and it is going well. It’s a Civil War history class so at least it’s relatively interesting. There are a remarkable number of parallels when it comes to the feeling during that time and some of the things that happened since Obama was elected president. Interesting stuff that shows just how much the more things change, the more they stay the same. I need to work ahead a little bit so I don’t have any homework to do during the trip.
I picked up a couple semi-expensive gadgets. I’m getting Jessica an early birthday present. It’s a Dell netbook that I am turning into a Hackintosh. Basically it means I am installing the Apple OSX operating system on a standard PC to make it into a tiny Macbook at a fraction of the cost of a real one. She can use that to toil away on the book/documentary that she’s been working on. I also just picked up a digital SLR camera. I already have a Canon EOS Rebel 2000, but I never use it because it’s such a pain in the ass to mess with the film and it takes too long to see how your stuff turned out. I was in Wal-Mart looking at the new digital ones and I got the itch for one. I couldn’t see myself spending $600 to $900 though, so I did some searching and bought a older model Canon 300D body, new batteries, and memory for just under $175 total which includes shipping. It’s only 6 megapixels compared to the new ones in the store being 10 and 12, but seriously, the vast majority of the time the pictures I take are going to be put on the web and will need to be made smaller anyway, and 6 megapixels is more than adequate if I wanted to print something out on normal photo paper for all but the very largest photo paper sizes. I got a good deal because I’m going to scavenge the lens and viewfinder and other accessories off of my old camera that the new one doesn’t come with. It’s pretty much not worth the effort to try and resell it anyway since no one wants film cameras anymore. I’m hoping that it all arrives before we leave on our trip so I can use it when we go. After the trip I need to go on lockdown when it comes to spending money since I gots bills to pay and I need to save for the future, but if you don’t splurge every once and a while then what the hell is the point right?