November 2008 Archives

Today won’t be the detailed rundown of how everything went. I’m still playing catch-up from being out of the house since Tuesday. The family took a trip to New York City (well, part of us did), and everyone had a good time. The pictures and video are bountiful, so I’m going to need some time to pull it all together. However, a bullet-point summary of what we did the past 5 days would go like this:

Tuesday

• Travel to my parent’s in Northern Virginia after school with all 3 kids

Wednesday

• Leave the twins with my parents (thank you for watching them) to drive to Manhattan to visit my sister Emily for a few days
• Walk around the tour of the Macy’s Parade balloons, as they are moored next to the Museum of Natural History (only 1 block from Emily’s apartment) — it was crazy/busy there

Thursday

• Watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade from the middle of 73rd Avenue — we couldn’t get any closer, but was close enough to see almost everything
• Take Will to a playground in Central Park for a while, then walk over to Strawberry Fields and back to the apartment
• Eat a Thanksgiving dinner with Emily

Friday

• Ride the subway twice — first to go to the Empire State Building, then to go to Rockefeller Plaza to watch ice skating, see the tree (unlit), and eat lunch
• Meet up with Emily and visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral
• Walk to FAO Schwartz, only to find the wait in line to be rather long
• Take a taxi back to Emily’s apartment (Will’s first ride in a taxi), then back to the playground one last time
• Go to the movies to see Madagascar 2 (all 4 of us enjoyed it), then go out to eat at a diner-style restaurant

Saturday

• Try to leave early, only to discover the battery was dead — finally got a jump from AAA
• Drive back to Northern Virginia to spend the night at my parent’s house
• Got to see Dena, Dennis and Nicholas at dinner — Will really enjoyed seeing his new cousin again

Sunday

• Drive back home in the rain — only took about 30 minutes longer than normal, and that included a stop for gas

That’s a lot going on in one long trip. We all survived, and we really enjoyed the company of everyone we met over those days. We hope everyone else had a fun and safe holiday weekend. We hope to see you soon.

As I said, I hope to post pictures and video at a later date, but I hope this suffices for a quick summary at moment.

I want to wish a Happy Thanksgiving to all of those that we cannot be with or see this holiday weekend. I hope that you have a chance to enjoy the company of friends and family. Let’s be thankful for the many blessings that we do have and remember the things that are most important to us.

(pauses for a moment of reflection)

Of course, what Thanksgiving is complete without football. (Kind of sad, now that I think about it.) But while you won’t get John Madden broadcasting one of your football games today (you do realize he’s at NBC, now, right?), I will leave you with this impersonation of John Madden — by Frank Caliendo on the Letterman show.

Well, this one is a day late. Yesterday was a busy day, so I’m just going to give you a video of the boys’ second birthday celebration highlights. (I still have a couple other sets of highlights to pull together — there’s last Saturday’s birthday celebration with my parents, and then yesterday morning’s visit with Santa at our church bazaar. So much to cover, so little time.)

And after all of the bustle of yesterday, today was a bit more quiet and allowed folks to settle down. In fact, I found Sean and Daniel doing just that this morning. I found the rather relaxed posture on our good couch kind of amusing.

Well, the official race photos from the Richmond Half-Marathon are now in. You can see the effort crease my face several times on the race. I’m actually surprised there aren’t more pictures, but I guess they couldn’t pick me out as easily in the earlier photo locations. I know I went through some photo zones where I was holding my hat and should have had one or more photos there, and there should have been some photos earlier while wearing the hat.

There’s only one photo of me in my hat, which would have occurred during the first 6 or so miles (before I took it off, because it was so warm and humid). The rest of the shots are in the last mile-and-a-half, it appears — two of me finishing up (when the face is really pinched as I run all-out down the hill) and a bunch right after turning onto Grace Street from Lombardy Street (with a strong headwind on both stretches).

(And let’s say that I don’t know why they show all of the winners crossing the tape. I’m not in any of those shots, challenging for the win — if you know what I mean.)

Still, this is probably more photos found than at any other event I’ve run. They had a bunch of photographers on the course (some who moved about after earlier shot locations finished up), so they did a great job there.

And one more thing — you know you’ve been waiting for it, and it is here now. That’s right — the Monty Python channel on YouTube. (Yes, it is the official channel with high-quality videos.)

This first thing is a bit of an experiment. I am trying out a freeware program called Jalbum for creating an online photo album (rather than creating a video of images). This has the potential to be a much more useful tool for displaying a lot of related images, rather than tossing them into a video or showing a whole bunch of them below. It’s a Flash-based application that will do a whole bunch of different things, depending on what I set it up to do.

My first attempt is actually a more complex set of albums, with artwork and other projects that Sean and Daniel have been doing at their daycare center over about the last 6 to 8 months. You click on the links in the top left to open any of the three albums (Sean & Daniel combo art, Daniel-only art, and Sean-only art). Scroll through, or launch the slide show, even download some of the pictures (albeit lower res — still working on that). And let me know what you think of the approach.

And here is some video of Sean at dinner tonight. He loved one food in particular — ‘pease?’

I’m actually referring to last Saturday, when I ran the inaugural Richmond Half-Marathon. If I told you that the morning temperature was going to be near 70 degrees and humid, which month of the year would you think I was referring to? Maybe August. But no, this was mid-November, after the color on the leaves had largely turned. It was overcast, and a storm had blown through the night before. But yes — weather conditions were rather warm and humid.

My official time was 1:57:33 (good for 877th overall, and 91st in my age group), but I had 2 stops along the way. One stop was for a true pit stop (too crowded at the start to get in line after sitting in traffic for almost 30 minutes waiting to park), and then later running into Will with my parents at mile 9 and spending some time talking to them (that’s where the picture above is from). My total running time (according to my watch) was 1:53:34, which was about where I had aimed to be. It’s a good thing I took a small break at mile 9, because the last 3 to 4 miles was essentially into a 15+ mph headwind, with stronger gusts. I finished strong and feel pretty good about the result, considering my training wasn’t great.

It’s a nice, very flat course, with a super-fast downhill finish. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a half-marathon to do. I will probably look forward to doing it again next year.

Are they really coming up on their second birthdays? Yes, they are — this Saturday. They’ve already had one birthday party this past weekend (with my parents), with more to come this weekend with the local contingent.

But today was a checkup day. When we last checked in five-and-a-half months ago, they were growing fine. And they still are — Daniel is over 90% in height, while Sean is over 75% in height. We just have to remind ourselves that they are also 5 weeks premature, so they’ll be down the scale a little bit. But at this rate, it looks like Will may wind up being the tallest (he was 37.5” at his 2-year check up). Here are their

Daniel
Height: 36” (+2.25”)
Weight: 28 pounds 10 ounces (+2 pounds 11 ounces)
Head: 51 cm (+0.5 cm)

Sean
Height: 35” (+2”)
Weight: 24 pounds 0 ounces (+2 pounds 10 ounces)
Head: 49cm (+1 cm)

Everything is pretty much staying on the proper curve from the last time, so their growth patterns are very consistent (including Sean being in the tenth percentile in weight, despite being as tall as he is). Keep growing up, guys, like this video below shows.

We knew there were a couple of other loose teeth, but we certainly didn’t think anything was that close yet. But Will came home from after-school care today and announced that he had lost another tooth. He didn’t want to show it off at first, but we finally got him to open his mouth enough to see that the next lower-right tooth was gone. (He’s already lost both of his front-bottom teeth, so this was the next one on the right.)

So in less than a week, we’ve had two more fall out. And we know that the other top-front tooth is also loose, so who knows how much longer that will hold on.

I think the tooth fairy is going to be kept busy at our house.

Maybe I shouldn’t be tempting Nature like this. After all, I had yesterday’s blog post about a rabid fox, and we wound up with a wren flying around inside our house last night. (I was eventually able to get it back outside, but it was an interesting hunt for it. It hid for a while — where, we’re not sure.)

But this is too funny to ignore. The British in Basra, Iraq gave what may be the best line all-time in a military press conference:

“We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.”

That is an actual quote. (It sure feels like a Monty Python-type quote.) I’m guessing that maybe the US military is falling behind in this key technology area. Apparently, all we have are rabid foxes.

More seriously, do you think you’re having problems relating to the local populace if they think you’re releasing man-eating badgers on them? Although maybe it would be kind of cool if the British did have a troop of man-eating badgers. They could be put at risk before sending the troops in.

I do have to admit the quote is over a year old. I caught it by listening recently to an old podcast (July 15, 2007) of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. It’s a great show on NPR and perfect for listening to at a later time on a podcast. They really find some amusing stories and get some great guests on there. It never fails to amuse me.

Luckily, these aren’t my stories. After all, who would want to tell about the time when you went for a run and wound up running for a mile with a rabid fox attached to your arm? Ouch.

Then there is running as art — literally. I actually think this is kind of a cool concept, where someone goes sprinting through an art gallery every 30 seconds. (Yes, the runners get paid for it.) But then again, I’m not sure it really causes me to think any deeper about running, motion, or whatever else it is trying to suggest. It’s definitely not something timeless (though it is certainly something that could be replicated almost anywhere, if you had an underground tunnel to get back to the starting spot).

I get to add my own tale (hopefully not bizarre) this weekend. Yes, my half-marathon is this Saturday morning. The weather is supposed to be wet - high 50s and scattered rain. I think I can live with that, but hopefully the rain will be gone by then. We’ll see.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s pitch on signing up for the blog via e-mail, it works great. In fact, it even posts the blog entry itself in the e-mail. I didn’t have any pictures or video in it, though, so I’m not sure how that would work. However, it was relatively straight-forward and easy enough to view or to surf over to the actual entry, if you like. This is what the e-mail looked like for me.

As another follow-up, this time to my rant on the price of gas, I thought of one other factor that may be driving down gas prices more than you might expect — the price of corn. After all, the fuel for most of our cars is 15% ethanol, so just like when gas prices shot up a few years ago when partial ethanol content was mandated (causing the price of corn to go up in a nice little feedback loop), it appears the price of corn is coming down (as shown from the graph for 2008 below):

That’s a pretty steep drop in the price of corn this year, which should help drive down the cost of gas even further. I’m still not convinced something else is going on (as ethanol is only 15% of the gas content), but it definitely doesn’t hurt. Now, what about corn-based foods — why haven’t their prices come down with this drop in prices?

Happy Veterans Day to all of those who have served our country. Your service is greatly appreciated.

As for the core reason for this posting — I finally got around to adding an e-mail subscription feature to my blog to alert you when there is a new entry on the blog. There is a box now in the column to the right of this post (the second of the three columns) that has a place where you can enter your e-mail address to subscribe to this service. This may make things easier for those who do not use an RSS reader to keep up to date on when a new entry is posted on the blog. If you don’t like checking in each day, signing up here can have an e-mail sent to you at the end of each day when an entry has been posted. You will be able to see a good summary of what was posted on the blog that day.

I have not tested it to see what actually gets delivered, but the Feedburner FAQ suggests that it will post the content in the e-mail. I have to believe that with pictures and videos, it will be easier to experience everything on the blog (as opposed to viewing it in an e-mail). But you will be able to link to the entry from the e-mail.

Let me know how this goes for yourself and if you see it as a value-added feature. Don’t worry about your e-mail address going to anyone but me. I will be the only one to see it, and I won’t be spamming family or anything. I’m signing myself up tonight to see how it works for this posting. I’ll let everyone know how it went.

Yes, these can happen even on the warmest of days, like this past weekend (when it was in the 70s). Sean and Daniel have figured out how to have snowball fights - using toilet paper and kleenex. I know — it’s the normal thing that kids this age do. It’s still kind of cute, though picking it up is less so. Particularly when they find the trashcan with the remains of the fight and proceed to empty it back out again.

Then there is Daniel, showing off his dancing skills (of the most dangerous variety). Not sure what he was dancing to, but it clearly caught his fancy.

Hopefully, this will get your week off with a grin…

A blonde calls her boyfriend and says, “Please come over here and help me. I have a killer jigsaw puzzle, and I can’t figure out how to get started.”

Her boyfriend asks, “What is it supposed to be when it’s finished?”

The blonde says, “According to the picture on the box, it’s a rooster.”

Her boyfriend decides to go over and help with the puzzle.

She lets him in and shows him where she has the puzzle spread all over the table.

He studies the pieces for a moment, then looks at the box, then turns to her and says, “First of all, no matter what we do, we’re not going to be able to assemble these pieces into anything resembling a rooster.”

He takes her hand and says, “Second, I want you to relax. Let’s have a nice cup of tea, and then…” he said with a deep sigh…

(roll your mouse over the box for the punchline)

This one was a bit crazy. Will’s top-right tooth was hanging on on one side only, so it was actually slightly crooked in his mouth (tilting toward the other front tooth). I kind of wish I had taken a before picture. The tooth moved front-and-back a whole lot in his mouth, but it was hanging on just enough. It took a wet paper towel to get enough of a grip on it to remove it from his mouth.

And voila — a nice big gap in his mouth. Of course, it felt funny at first to him. So in went an ice pack and a little Tylenol, but within about an hour, no more comments about how funny it felt. I think he’s back to normal.

Now we’re just waiting to see if the tooth fairy shows up tonight.

Kellie went out first thing this morning, getting in line at 5:30am. She was home just after 6:30am. I’m sure she doesn’t completely feel this way, but that probably wasn’t too bad, considering some of the reports of much longer lines throughout the commonwealth.

I went in at just after 3pm, not sure what to expect. Luckily for me, there were essentially no lines, so it was in-and-out. As of 3:10pm, 2462 votes had been cast at my polling place. That’s an astounding number. I don’t know how many are registered in my precinct (I haven’t been able to find that info easily), but that’s a huge number for any precinct. And that doesn’t even include absentee ballots. As of the 2008 primary, there were 3987 registered voters in the precinct.

That’s huge turnout percentages already (over 60%). I’ll post a follow-up later once the final precinct results are posted. We’re definitely heading over 75% participation in this precinct, I’m guessing. As a comparison, there were 757 votes in my precinct for our state senator in 2007 (3927 registered voters that year), 2294 votes in my precinct for US Senator in 2006 (3961 registered voters that year), 1933 votes for governor in 2005 (3914 registered voters that year), and 2847 votes for president in 2004 (3906 registered voters). That’s a fairly steady headcount of registered voters over 4 years (there hasn’t been much development in the area during that time).

A part of me has passed on. I must say I’m pleasantly surprised by the finale for Opus. (If you haven’t seen the final panel, where he winds up — well, you can see it here.) Where Opus winds up really hit me, because it’s a book I often read multiple times each night to the twins. And it seems so peaceful and right. No, he doesn’t get the hot island babes, but there’s something everlasting about that final page (even in the original)

And this sure looks like it for Opus. Nice of Berkeley Breathed to share him with us all these years. (Yes, I had the collection books, and the t-shirts, and the Opus dolls in the 80s.) And we finally get to see Steve Dallas without the sunglasses today, too, and he looks like a kind and sentimental soul, too. Perhaps a bit of Berkeley showing in that look?

Berkeley Breathed shares his thoughts in this interview that I saw in syndication here in the Richmond paper today. Thank you for Opus. He’ll remain a piece of my heart, that subversive little penguin.

You made it to the finish line once again. (As I noted earlier this week, Emily was going to run the New York City Marathon today.) But this time, you absolutely blasted your personal record by almost 20 minutes to finish unofficially in 3:47:18. As we can tell from the splits, you held on well through the end and really kept up the pace through the finish line. Great job — wish I could pull a time like that.

Go get some deserved rest and plot your next move. Hopefully, you’re not too worse for the wear after today’s effort.