Ran the Santa Clara Pueblo 10k (June 30) in 49:45. A dirt road led us through the residential part of the pueblo (small adobe ranches, barking dogs, little gardens) and then out into a plain. Tall mountains on the horizon, cacti, grasses, live oak trees. I studied the depth of car tire tracks, trying to stay on the firmest parts of the road. The women's leader shadowed me for about four miles before passing. It was at around this point that the road led into sparse woods. A small herd of cows rushed towards me within their fenced pasture. I passed a boy who looked to be around 12. He had a fierce looking mohawk with a long mane, but turned to me and said "great job." As I ran back into town he was close behind. Bystanders cheered him on, making me feel conspicuous. At the finish line I heard my name and "Austin, Texas" called out on the PA, but all eyes were on the kid. Todo es bueno.

Saving Lives

At the Town Lake Trail this evening, in the stretching area under mopac, a man tapped me on the shoulder and handed me his cell phone. "Call an ambulance," he said. He almost dropped the phone before I could take it from him. A few people tried asking him what was wrong but he could hardly speak. His hands were purple and twisted and his jaw hung slack. He was covered in sweat. The 911 operator asked me to ask him if he had a heart condition, he answered "nooooooo" with pained frustration. An ambulance came out of a firehouse within sight of where we stood. In less than five minutes he was on his way to the hospital. It was probably heat stroke.

It all felt so routine. I handed his cell phone to a paramedic and jogged off. Under different circumstances we may have stood there helplessly watching him die. It goes to show how when society works it isn't particularly interesting. Or no news is good news.

Ran Round Rock Roadrunner Saturday. I placed high but did not meet goal. I blame 2 miles of woodchips and mud for the 12 second differential.

Gearing up for a trip to New Mexico and San Francisco June 27-July 7.

6/27 - Arrive AM in Albuquerque, pick up car
6/28 - Astronomy Day at Los Alamos Lab ("We're the bomb.")
6/29 - Healthy Heart, Mind and Soul 10k in Santa Clara Pueblo
6/29 - Los Lobos at Taos Solar Music fest
6/30 - Taos Pueblo
7/1 - Santa Fe
7/2 - Santa Fe
7/3 - Albuquerque
7/4 - Fly Oakland
7/5-7 - San Franciso at chez Greg

Still a lot of planning to do....

Roundup Recap

Governor Perry thanked the troops while standing beside a person in a chicken suit (Pilgrim's Pride frozen chicken was the main race sponsor), a horn blew, and before I had really woken up I found myself zig zagging through people in a mad rush down Congress Ave. Need to get better starting position next time.

Ran it in 50:50, or at an 8:11 pace, which is 40 seconds better than a month ago, but about 3-4 minutes behind the folks in my running group.

ran 11 miles today with the paul gonzales group. paul didn't make it today, though. i made a map of the route with the highlights.

running in the texas roundup 10k next saturday.

Recipe: Indian Food

Here's a recipe which I think rivals anything you'd get at a typical Austin Indian resturant. It's so simple I thought I'd share.

2 lbs. of central market ancho/coriander marinated chicken breasts
olive oil
yellow onion
red pepper
carrots

Slice chicken breasts into chunks.
Saute chunks until cooked. (use a big pan)
Remove chunks to bowl, leave some drippings in pan
pour sliced vegetables into hot drippings
saute until soft
put chicken chunks back in, stir

serve over jasmine rice.

Town Lake, 6.7, 54:55, 8:12

Ran the Capital 10k in 51:29, which seems just about right. Thanks to Julie and Matt for getting up early to meet me at the finish line (more photos).

I've taken it easy this week. Matt and I attended a 12-hour cop marathon at the Alamo last night. Electra Glide in Blue, Police Story II, Sudden Impact, Freebie and the Bean, and the new movie by Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright, Hot Fuzz. There was a funny Q&A after the film, with Pegg, Wright and Nick Frost decked out in brand new Sheplers black cowboy shirts.

Freebie and the Bean was the surprise hit of the evening. Thrilling car chases and an edgy, urbane script (with "somewhat lacking" political correctness and Alan Arkin and Valerie Harper playing a married Mexican-American couple with six or seven children). The movie was probably both too hip and too insulting to broad demographic swaths to achieve the popularity of The Blues Brothers but it is a very fun movie.

Ran the Mopac to I-35 loop on the trail (6.9 miles) in 58:57 or at 8:33 min/mile. The running group is really helping. I also bought some New Balance 1061s which are like velvet shock absorbers.

The 10k is in less than 3 weeks. My goal is to break 50:00 minutes, or maintain an 8:05 min/mile pace.

I've become addicted to this site where people design, discuss, and produce T-Shirt designs. The insecure kid who felt his best in an Echo and the Bunnymen T has not really grown up; I can see myself wanting a horsey shirt...to run the 10k in.

Ran mopac to congress and back tonight. 4.5 miles. 42:10. This is 20 seconds slower than I ran it two weeks ago, but I felt like I was running faster tonight. Not sure what happened.

I've been preparing for the Capitol 10k which will happen March 25. I joined an "Intermediate/Advanced" running group that meets near the Austin American-Statesman building on Saturday mornings. The group leader, Paul Gonzalez, led a 6.5 mile run east to the Longhorn Dam this morning.

I was prepared. On Thursday night I ran from my house to Mesa Blvd., and then took that to 2222. Once there, I found no sidewalk or shoulder, so I had to return the way I came, over steep hills.

My legs were totaled yesterday, but they had regained some bounce by this morning. Three guys new to the group trailed behind for awhile and then disappeared. We started with eight and finished with five. A tall, younger guy wearing a nylon superhero shirt that said "shoot me in my breastplate and I'll bleed", Paul, and I led in a tight pack at what felt like an 8:30 pace the last two miles. I loved feeling that I belonged in the group. I kid you not.

It's possible that I can break 50 minutes in this race, but I need to eat right, train consistently, and not injure myself. I guess my blog will take on the boring aspects of run-speak for awhile. I was watching a bit of the XTerra off-road triathalon this morning.

With great reluctance, I put my 2006 "Warhol's Desserts" wall calendar into retirement. The introduction to the calendar says that in 1959 his dessert illustrations were included in a "delectable cookbook spoof called Wild Raspberries." It reminded me immediately of the Amy Sedaris book, I Like You, a bestselling cookbook spoof which Claire received for Christmas.

You can see that Sedaris (or her graphic designer) borrowed from the style of Wild Raspberries. She rocks.

Mysterious squeaking metal sound fixed. I climbed the attic ladder and sprayed WD-40 at the axle of the roof ventilator. There's no room to stand up there, so I reached and shot from a foot away while standing on the ladder. WD-40 rocks.

Randomly surfing the web, I found an interesting blog entry containing this quote:

"If a person suppresses those very things that make his personality unique, if he blurs and dilutes those distinctions which mark him as different from all others, then in a sense he has marred the only gift it is truly in his power to give." --John Garlock

I deleted a few recent blog entries, regardless.

The UT football crowd of about 100,000, in 100+ degree temperatures, generated a psychic hum that made me feel like part of a vast, spooked herd. A new scoreboard called "Godzillatron" allowed corporate logos to outblaze the sun. My head was, yes, adorned with an orange hat, sporting a silouette of none other than the white horned beast itself. I was a stranger in a strange land...

OU Sucks!!!!

i wandered into an antique store on burnet where a fresh shipment of mexican 50's movie posters had arrived. i also picked up my retro 50's chair from copenhagen saturday.

Went to the "Rumble on Red River" tonight, a badly promoted, badly planned boxing event. You can sort of see the empty seats in the picture. All of the fights were mismatches. The best example of this was the last semi-main event pitting "King" James Johnson, Jr., against Billy David Thompson. The guys threw jabs for about 1.5 minutes, then Johnson connected a few times, and Thompson, intending to show that he was tough enough to take punches, exposed his jaw and made a "bring it on" gesture. Johnson immediately connected with a right, Thompson went down, and the small crowd erupted with derisive hoots and laughter. The title fight was also one round, ending in a KO.

The highlight was meeting Ernestine, who was displaced by Katrina and who could only shake her head and laugh at how bad the fights were, compared to the fights she went to regularly in N.O. We were in a row of empty seats quite close to the ring, in adjacent seats. When katrina hit she was stranded at the New Orleans convention center for four days, and went straight to the Austin convention center after being evacuated. I offered to get her a beer, and she said she couldn't take the "watered down" stuff. I said "I'm getting a Shiner Bock, it's not watery." She dug a five out of her pocket and I got us two. She had not had Shiner yet, and admitted it was OK. It was funny talking to her, almost everying she's tried to enjoy here: music, food, sports, hasn't held a candle to where she used to live. Even when she caught the Rebirth Brass Band at SXSW, the stage was too small to hold all of the musicians. She said she was taping the taylor vs. wright fight being shown on HBO tonight. It was a small miracle anybody showed up for the Red River Rumble.

I didn't think Fox could surprise me anymore, but they just aired a spot for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and their "We Call It Life" pro-CO2 ad campaign. CO2, it seems, is being unfairly maligned by the liberal establishment, and citizens must be mobilized to put an end to senate hearings that might result in CO2 being categorized as a pollutant. It's not a pollutant! This little girl cannot possibly be exhaling pollutants!

The CEI website has similarly nauseating supporting material, but I found the bio for their Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy, Myron Ebell, the most telling; They list WITH PRIDE the fact that Greenpeace and other activist groups labeled him a bad guy. It epitomizes the awfulness of modern American Politics: issues are not fought on the basis of ideas and facts, but on who can assemble a better blacklist. Greenpeace blacklists Ebell, thereby allowing Ebell to blacklist Greenpeace and pander to his conservative base. Americans on either side of political spectrum can be cowed into an "in group" more easily than they can be persuaded by information.

I buy the argument I heard on Nova. Unless drastic action is taken in the next 10 years, global warming will become irreversible. We currently can choose between keeping the only climate civilization has ever known, or force our children to adapt to a new climate with unknown consequences. My trust goes to scientists (and even politicans) who explain an inconvenient truth when it arises, not to Institutes that launch ad campaigns to snuff the life out of reasoned public discourse.

Wild Thing

Stayed late at work today, but time is meaningless when you are wrapping up a problem. On Monday I was told that the software I've been working on for the last two months has to compile on older system software. (I was told to roll back my gcc version a notch.) Things broke. It was depressing. I got to work with a programmer I didn't know well who maintains the test computer running the older system software. The problem centered around an unrecognized system "accessor function", __ctype_b_loc. Which still reminds me of Tone Loc, but deals with the concept of locales, allowing the rest of the world to enter yuan symbols, umlauts, and upside down exclamation marks into the computer. Everybody I talked to seemed united around the idea of the gcc compiler version being the only thing to dictate the presence or lack of functions such as __ctype_b_loc. But there was a whole other side to the problem. The compiler version (gcc) and the system C libraries (glibc) can be updated or rolled back independently of one another. Even after I was told to roll back my gcc, I was still testing my code on a non-standards complaint version of glibc. That took 8 hours to figure out. Sitting there like a solemn chimpanzee in my cube, making people wonder if I was slowly dying. I wrote a very short patch file that makes the old system software deliver its ctype lookup tables in the manner of its newer replacement. I hacked linux. I got a "clever" from the programmer who helped me get started, perhaps the most nurturing comment I've received since starting the job. Then I realized that after all the quiet hours, I also learned the way to TEST for the correct version of glibc. It is a good addition to my skill set.

Last week I solved the problem of depth soundings coming out the system like swiss cheese, several layers of partially complete depth grids rather than one grid that contains everything. And a few weeks before that I fixed a bug caused by small rounding errors in the float datatype.

I am keeping my job.