Rusty's Blog

Should anyone ask, I’m really a big fan of sleep. Especially after this weekend. (I shan’t be becomming a ‘fan’ of it on facebook, but that’s a different matter.)

I’ve mentioned that I work from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am (approximately) 3 days a week for 2 weeks, then 4 days a week for the 3rd week, then back to 2 days a week. There’s a bit of variation in there just keep the hours at 40 every week, for example I leave early on Friday morning when I will be working that Saturday, and even earlier the following Friday because of the hours worked on Sunday. And there’s the whole Tuesday thing for weeks where I don’t work on Saturdy/Sunday.

Part of the reason for this variety of schedule is to reduce the number of people needed to provide coverage for the week. The down side is that since there are fewer people to provide coverage, Saturday hours have gone effectively out the window for PTO. If you need the time off, trade with someone. Right.

This past week was a Saturday night week for me. So I worked from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am. If you’re following my blog, you probably saw that I had noted Saturday that I should have gotten some sleep on Saturday, and it probably would have helped yesterday. I also had plans on taking a break on my drive and getting some sleep Sunday morning, which for various reasons didn’t happen either. A couple of different things had to be done Sunday morning, one of which I expected to take all of 20 or 30 min, which tied up at least 2 hours. Finding clothes to change into once I got to Manchester, wrapping my niece’s graduation gift, and setting up a computer to update firmware on various devices. Of cours there was the obligatory taking care of my dogs needs as well, feed walk and water, as well as play with while other things are going on that don’t need my immediate attention. I figured that since I am going to be doing various things with the computer where I will need to be able to get things from the internet (firmware images for example) that it would probably be a good idea to do a software update of all the recomended updates. 72 updates and 3 hours later, I crated the dogs, threw the computer in the car, and hit the road.

Various sources I have show that I was on the road and rolling towards Manchester Iowa at 11:00 am. Because of the fact that I needed to get gas yet, I stopped a bit out of town and filled up, reset the trip odometer, grabbed some pop and a couple of chunks of food to eat while on the road, and got back going. Probably I spent 15 min there, and another 15 min at a gas station in Iowa where I picked up a map to figure out what my route from that point on should be. (I wasn’t lost, just didn’t remember what the road numbers I needed to take were, and it turns out that I was literally 5 blocks from where I needed to get off the highway I had been driving on.) I made one last stop to take a couple of pictures of a town that I had seen before, and wanted a couple of shots of. I need to get down there again after the leaves are off the trees though, as they obstruct a few things in the pics I took.

I ended up in Manchester just before 3:30. I undesrtand that one of my nieces left the twin cities after 1 pm, and was there by 5:00 pm.

The graduation ceremony went very well. I had a good time chatting with family that I haven’t seen in entirely too long. and long about 7:30 or 8:00 pm it was time to take off and head back to the cities.

Retrace your steps. Right? Well, not quite that simple. There’s a stretch of the route I took to get to Manchester that I don’t trust to take after dark. I drove it for Thanksgiving this last year, and well, it just isn’t a stretch I like driving at night. So I took the slightly longer route. Or attempted to. I got out of Waterloo on the right highway, but found myself on a city street a couple of towns later, heading in generally the right direction for I-35, but not really on the preferred route. I decided I would just go with it. The highways in that part of Iowa are mostly long straight stretches with some rolling hills, but not a lot of turns. However I was on a secondary highway rather than a primary highway (much less a freeway or limited access highway) so I did re-route onto a primary highway after about 30 miles. As I was getting close to I-35 I stopped and filled up with gas. a little over 14 gallons and I had put on over 300 miles. 21 mpg for the trip, which I’m pretty happy about. (I got an oil change on Saturday morning which was part of what I did during time that if I didn’t have a different project to work on, would have had me going to sleep.

I got on I-35, it was about 10:00 pm or so. I realized I wasn’t doing very well, so I found an unimproved/no modern facilities) rest stop, pulled in, and finally took a nap. I got about an hour of sleep in, and got back on the road. When I had filled up with gas, I had also picked up a couple of diet Mt. Dew 20 oz bottles and a couple of beef sticks. I haven’t decided if I am going to blame the beef sticks, but for one reason or another the Diet Mt. Dew just didn’t taste right.

After the hour of sleep, I decided to make a stop and pick up something else to drink, stopped at the Travel America just inside the MN border. I got back on the road and continued. I was still having issues with wanting to fall asleep while driving, so I stopped at the last rest stop on I35 before the E/W split and got another hour of sleep. I was back on the road about 3, and finally got home about 4 am.

Took the dogs out for a walk, and finally got to sleep. Blew right through my scheduled time for running this morning, I’ll try that again later on today. But most improtantly I made it intact. I’m not comfortable saying that I got home ‘safe’ as I don’t think my driving over the last 5 hours, (including the naps) really qualifies as ‘safe’. That’s probably more of a mater of semantics, but I would suggest that ‘stupid’ is a far more accurate description.

I am hoping that my niece got back long before I did. I’m pretty sure she took the route I avoided. I probably could have cut an hour of my trip off by backtracking when I realized I had gotten off my desired path.

I want to thank the XM channels BPM and Area for ‘driving’ beats while I was driving, and Chill for when I was getting naps at rest stops. I have a variety of music at my disposal, but both varieties were ‘handy’ and the relaxed nature of Chill made for a good bit of napping music.

I will say that as much as I enjoyed the company I would much rather not have to have worried about some of the reasons I needed to be back in the cities today. Nick and Mindy might very well have done well in a neighbor’s apartment, and I could have exchanged my plans for Monday as far as SkyWarn was concerned. Mindy might have traveled with me. So who knows. I’m home, and have the experience to review when planning for the future.

There’s a reason that the NTSB does not allow trucker’s to drive for more than 10 hours straight (might be 8 now) and I tend to agree.

I should have gotten another hour or two of sleep.

Never really a good blog begining when the subject is week 6′s wrapup session for c25k, is it? Not all that much I can do about it though, it’s a rough weekend for me. My niece graduates tomorrow afternoon, and I’m going to be doing a bit over 500 miles of driving to get there and back so that I can be available for SkyWarn on Monday. I won’t mention what I got for my niece for her graduation present, but I had to pick that up this morning, as well as make sure that the car was ready to go (oil change) do a recording of a radio net and helping someone check that they have access to the repeater system as well. I was up after work yesterday until after 11 am today, woke up at just after 3:00 pm and got ready to perform my session.

I could blame the wind, or just being tired. but I don’t know if that’s quite right. In any case it doesn’t really matter why I didn’t get quite as much running done as I would like. I just have to keep at it.

I did get to my turn around point, 12-13 minutes out, but the return was not as well done. I would say that I ran a bit over half the time.

I’m not going to get overly concerned with that unless I don’t see an improvement on Monday morning. It doesn’t matter at this point if I try to ‘re-run’ the session or not, as all of week 7 is the same routine as the final session of week 6. A brisk 5 min walk, followed by a 25 min run. I have great confidence that I will be completing that, and moving on to 28 min, and 30 min sessions the next two weeks. I may not be running a full 5k at that point, but I’ll be able to start from there and start building my speed over the weeks to come.

With all that I have to do this weekend, I really could have used a couple more hours of sleep…

As I noted in a identi.ca posting, the client is open, including the command structure for communicating with the server, so for people interested in a totally free/open solution, they are perfectly welcome to build a server that supports that command set, and provides the functionality desired. That may include encrypted storage, or a plug into Amazon C3, whatever.

To tell the truth, I’m not entirely happy with the idea, not because I’m concerned by the U1 licencing, or server implementation, or anything like that.

I have a colection of computers. This includes a couple of PVR systems hosting 4+ terabytes of storage for videos, music, pictures, etc that I wish to watch at my liesure. I have a server at home with about a terabyte of total storage, a couple of MiniITX based computers with 40-120 gig of storage, a primary workstation with 160 gig of internal storage, a couple of eeepcs each with 8 or 16 gig of sd storage for the home partition and differing amounts of ssd storage, one has a hard drive hanging off of it, the other has one available. I have a couple of PDAs, a G1, and a couple of Tablet formfactor computers, as well as a laptop with 128gig of storage as ssd.

In short I have a variety of systems, with differing storage capabilities, so it’s a given that I do not want to maintain a completely syncronized file system across the computers. Considering the current capabilities of te G1, I certainly don’t want to be storing MPEGs from my PVR onto it. I might be interested in transfering copies of videos to the 6670, but that’s a different matter.

The reality of the matter is that I have three different needs for syncronization. The first is to maintain availability of specific data for projects, presentations, etc. This should be temporary, and transient. Next is longer term availability of specific types of data. Music files, e-books, support tools, ISO Images, authentication credentials where appropriate, etc. Finally I would like to task a syncronization system with providing backup/recovery services. When the HD in a tablet dies, I would like to know that the data that I was working with on that tablet is on the server and can be quickly made available on a replacement tablet or notebook.

Let’s take my media library as an example. I would probably want to create a folder labeled ‘media’ (or ‘Media’) that I can create, or not create on various systems. Where the folder exists, all systems that have it, check with each other from hour to hour, or so, and syncronize changes. Do I suddenly disagree with the moral position of an artist and want to discard all that artists music? I get rid of it on one system, and the other systems discard it as well. Discover that the moral position I disagreed with was a fabrication of some creative writer’s imagination, I can pull back the media from my own archive server, and it gets re-synced to the various computers participating.

I shoot ‘raw’ images when I use my Pentax camera, and JPeG on my other camera’s. The original images all need to be archived somewhere, and since the Gimp doesn’t yet work directly with Raw images, I’m interested in maintaining a personal collection on systems that I work with there that is synced. I need the Raw image on both my archive server, and on the system that I manipulate images on. (If only to be able to re-convert from the original if I botch up an earlier converted image.) Once the images have been converted, and imported into a common image library program, I would like all systems that I am likely to present these images on to be able to sync up that image collection.

Project work. Somewhat similar to the photo manipulation process, whether I am working in writer, impress, writing batch scripts, or source code for executables, I generallly only need the original data on the system that I am working on it with. Sometimes that is more than one system, say an eeepc for writing an outline, and my desktop for doing layout, dry runs, revisions and the like. The revisions, and possibly the layout needs to be synced up with and from the eeepc, but for the most part I don’t need to maintain interim copies of object code between systems. What I’m aiming for is a presentable or usable output that I will then want to put on whatever system I need that output on.

With the exception of archiving the data, and to some degree even including that, I’m very likely not going to want to be using a client-server model for this. The single most obvious example of why I don’t want a client-server relationship for much of this is that as described, I need to buidl both a per folder, and a per file ACL at the server, so that I know which systems are going to get what data, at what granularity. The reality is that I would much rather have an rss type model where each system publishes a list of the files that are on the system, and gets told somehow what systems have authority to get data from it, and  each system that knows about the others, keeps track of what data and folders it needs to keep in sync.

Perhaps the most important reason not to have the authentication happening on a server some place is that if that server becomes compromised, it then becomes trivial for someone to gain access to all of the data for the user.  On the other hand if each system is able to identify for itself which systems are allowed access, and where appropriate which user, the security is significantly improved. Add in requiring ssl, or scp as a transfer mechanism, with updated and current security keys, and you could run all of this over open access points. But use WPA. Please.

The thing is, UbuntuOne does not appear to be looking to provide anywhere near this granularity of data management. It appears to be little more than an improved briefcase from Windows 4 Workgroups. I’m not saying that such a service isn’t important, and doesn’t have it’s uses, just that it’s not quite what I’m looking for as a multi-platform data synchronization solution.

The reality is that UbuntuOne could very well be a viable extension to a broader syncronization solution. As an example, I could use UbuntuOne as a bridge between my home systems and a work system. That way I don’t need to try to figure out what the remote feed information is between systems, and pick files as needed. I also wouldn’t be leaving ports open on my work computer, leading corporate security to suspect that my work system may be compromised in some way.

And as I say, from what I am seeing, that is basicly what the UbuntuOne system appears to me to be, along with a service that Canonical can run, and hopefully bring in more money from users who otherwise are not providing a lot of cash flow into Canonical.

I run Ubuntu wherever I can, and a few places that perhaps I should not. As noted above, I have various versions of Ubuntu on at least 12 different systems. I advocate and recommend Ubuntu in various ways, but I would not say that I’m personally making a huge contribution to Canonical’s war chest of funds. I’m afraid that I have to admit that I don’t think I’m really a significant part of the target market for UbuntuOne, but I may participate just because I can see it being useful to me, and I think it is worthwhile to support Canonical and Ubuntu overall.

Like I said to begin with, there’s nothing preventing you from writing your own server to provide a back end to the UbuntuOne client. It may turn out that your server provides better performance than whatever it is that Canonical is putting together. You may find hosting it on an Amazon cloud server is a workable solution, and if you are sharing the source code with others, perhaps you’ll find improvements and enhancements that you hadn’t thought of getting put into the server. If that happens, who knows, Canonical may start using your server software, unless you restrict the software in some way that Canonical may not be able to. I certainly won’t tell you how to handle that variety of moral and licencing question.

Well, I didn’t go to the lake, but just about the equivalent. For the past several decades, railroad right of way has been being converted into bike and running trails. Now I don’t ever expect to be trying to bike the full series of trails, much les run them, but they do have a couple of nice features for runners.

Unimproved surfaces, actually they are improved over what was there to begin with, tend to be gravel that has not had hundreds of 5,000 lb cars driving over them every week. Improved surfaces tend to be blacktop. Both tend to be easier to run on than concrete (sidewalks) though not as nice as a level grass area.

The other major advantage is that they tend to be very close to flat. Railorads do not like to drag trains up hills, or have to try to slow them down comming down hills. Where they do, accidents tend to happen. One of the early solutions to this was that in general railroads have no more than a 3% grade, and usually under 1%. Now the trails that you can ride and run on beside the tracks don’t always follow those guidelines, but for the most part they tend to have a similar slope.

I was complaining that on both my Week 5 session 3 run, and on my Week 6 session 1 run that I ended up havign to take a break when dealing with running up a longish hill. For me a long hill is one that has an elevation change of greater than 30 feet, over a length of 3 city blocks, without a grade change. So today I ran along a portion of what becomes the Luce line trail further out. As I was running, I was not keeping track of exactly where I was in the interval, time wise. However we tend to be reasonably good at estimating how much further we can go at the current pace, and I was looking out over to the top of the next hill and saying, “Yes, I can make that if I have to.” near the end of each of the 10 min intervals.

So I have to say that today’s intervals went very well, and I’ll be looking to make further use of track-side trails, as well as lake side trails in the near future.

This past week I’ve gotten a couple of offers to join a Gym in the area. They are having a membership drive, and they normally charge $40 a month, pluss a fairly high (more than one month’s dues) sign up fee. To get more people in the gym, they opened 100 registrations up, first come, first serve, for a 2 year membership with a one time fee that equates to pahying $19.95 a month. So I stopped in yesterday, signed up. I’ll be going in tomorrow morning to pay my fee, then my membership starts Monday. In theory I could start earlier, however what I have to do beween now and Monday is going to make it very hard to get in to the Gym even this weekend. Monday is soon enough. In truth, I probably won’t get in till Tuesday, as Monday is a running day for me, and should be session 1 of week 7. (3 more weeks to go!)

If that offer is begining to sound attractive, some people may think it’s excessively high even at $20 a month, check your mail. I suspect that the Gym I joined is not the only one working on building membership.

One of the reasons I joined is that I hope that the upper body, core, back and arm workouts will help with my longer term endurance, and also I’m hoping that I can do some leg work that will help me with those hill climbing runs. The hills that are giving me issues, I don’t think should be doing so in the long term. I’m hoping this will help.

Odd bit of spam that Akismit hit this week. Someone suggested that my blog didn’t display correctly in Firefox. Considering that’s all I look at the blog in, it kind of surprised me. About the only thing that I can think of that really didn’t lay out the way I wanted it to was the caption for my run Sunday. And that was an issue even in the writing. I don’t think that it was a firefox specific problem, but I could be wrong.

Oh, well, Have fun, run, feel great.

We’ll just have to see how this week works out. I was up ‘early’ today for doing a run late in the afternoon. I finally got my session started at about 6:00 PM, only to be stopped within the block I live in to receive a package by UPS. Forgot that I had even purchased the books. Oh well. Restarted and got on my way.

Today was a broken up session compared to Sunday’s run. It started with a fairly short run to get the blood moving, then a walk of about the same length, followed by a long run of about 10 min, (I have not replayed any of the tracks to see what the timings are for intervals) followed by another walk I’m going to say both walks were about 3 min, as was the first run. There was a third run as well, I’m guessing again 3 min. Followed by a walk out.

The midel run I completed without any problems. I am presuming this was because while the altitude changed during the route, there were no really steep hills involved. Just some gentle rolling.

The first run I got as far as I could go, actually to the top of the hill I had run up, broke to a walk for few seconds to recover, started running again, and within seconds the transition tones kicked in.

On the third run I think I was about half way through, again up a hill, but not quite as steep, took a 10 second walking break, and went back to running, and completed the run.

Experienced a few scattered raindrops here and there, nothing significant.

Odd sidenote, I had switched loads in the laundry before I left, planning on quickly switching loads again when I got back. I had a meeting to attend tonight, and I was a little pressed for time (schedule reminder note, plan to do the runs around 4, not 5 in the future when running before work. if not earlier) In fact I was pretty sure that I was not going to get the final load out of the drier. So I walked into the laundry room before I got to my apartment, turned on the light, and saw that I had not pushed the coin tray in to get the dryier started. So I pulled all the stuff out of the washer, added it to the stuff in the dryer, and kicked it off. I need to be up at 8, or a bit earlier in the morning anyway, so what wasn’t dry when I got  home from the meeting, I will run through another cycle in the morning. (No use of the laundry room before 8 am, or after 10 pm.)

I’m guessing that for really long runs, I’m going to really have to work on those up hill runs. At the moment they seem to be the killers for me. Running along a level path, or along a lake side path, is probably not going to be a problem, even for 20 or 30 min runs. It’s getting to the top of the hill that I suspect will keep hurting me.

I may have lost a few choce words in this reverie, as it’s been about 6 hours since I did the run, but that’s what I get for setting up an event of this type so close to doing something where I won’t have the opportunity to blog. We’ll see if Thursday goes better or not.

Contemplating driving to a lakeside path for Thursday, just to see if my observations regarding hills has any validity. Just have to find some way to tag a reasonable turn–around point. I don’t mind being 5 to 10 min away, walking when I’m done, but if I’ve just completed a 30 min series of intervals, with a 5 min warm-up walk, that strikes me as a bad place to walk back from. Ok, just reviewed the schedule, Thursday should be a 5 min walk, 10 min jog, 3 min walk, 10 min jog, ‘done’. Based on that if I turn around at the end of the first 10 min jog, I should be about 2 min away from my starting point if I run at a steady pace. I doubt that the steady pace is likely, but I should still be less than 10 min away. Which works for me. To Medicine Lake it is. (Not sure what to do about Saturday’s walk… Cross that bridge when I get to it I guess.)

I’m going to call it a success, though some may think otherwise.

I started in the lower left corner with the 5 min walk to warm up. Even with pausing to wait for a car to turn a corner, I actually got further in this walk than I had in previous sessions along this route.

if you want to look for yourself on maps.google.com, or google earth, the .kml I generated the image from is available at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May10.kml just copy that url and paste it into the search field on maps.google.com, or download the .kml file and tell google earth to open the file. (if you just paste the URL into the address field of your browser, and you have google earth installed, it may even ask you if you would like to open the file with google earth, go ahead.

Along medicine lake on my route is the Sunny Hollow Elementary school. About a quarter of the way across the portion of the sidewalk that is between the exit and entrance fo the parking lot I started my run.

About a quarter of the way along Hidden Valley Park is where I had turned off this path Friday morning, and knew I was going to be doing some walking then. Today I was feeling a lot better, so I continued on, and almost immediately felt better for not stopping or pausing along the way. My turn was between points 57 and 58 on the run today.

There’s a gentle slop there on up to the catholic school, and the corner at 36th. All along that I felt pretty good. I made the turn and knew that I was about half way through the run, but since I had not grabbed a stop watch, and there is no ‘midway’ indicator in the MP3 mix for today, I wasn’t exactly sure.

In any case there’s a brief downhill slope to where the creek goes under 36th, and then a much steeper slope up to next turn. Someone else can check, but I think the change in elevation is about 40 feet in less than half a mile. I know that it was beating me up a bit, and that I did not maintain my hoped for minimum 5 mph or higher through that section. But I did continue to run. I made my turn and continued on. It is a much more gentle slope here, but still up hill, and finally I couldn’t run any more. I walked for what I thought was about 15 seconds, caught my breath and then started running agin. and got the ‘run finished’ indicator tones 10 seconds later.

So while it was not perfect, I do think that it was close enough that I am going to continue on with week 6 this week.

I will give myself a day of recuperation. This next week I will be running Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Following that I will run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but from then on I am going to be running more on my ‘weekend’ than anything else. I’m switching first to Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (afternoon) then I’m planning on making my workouts be Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. Saturday will be when I wake up after work Friday night, or before I go into work Saturday night, on those days.

Perfect? No, but completed to the point I’m going to move on. I suspect that had I a running partner, I would have completed today without any concerns this time. I’m not throwing horse shoes or hand grenades, (or atomic bombs for that matter) but I’m comfortable with ‘close enough’ at this point.

Have a great day everyone.

Every guy knows at some level that he is replacable. It could be with another guy, or a woman, a toy, or even an interestingly shaped handdle, or piece of a broom stick. It often doesn’t matter if a guy is married to a woman or not, He may be replaced at almot any time by another guy, who happens to be convienent, and attracts the appropriate, or is it inappropriate, interest.

One of the side effects of this is that guys either get overly confident, blustery, the like about their own proweres, ability, or endouments, or (and this may also be within those, he becomes insecure, and starts seaking signs that his current interest is devoted tohim in ways that may never materialize.

Someone is going to come along here, and accuse me of saying that “all women are low life scumm who … yada, yada.” I’m not. I honestly think that a majority of women are very satisfied with their partner, and suspect that within stable relationships, the majority take no opportunities to stray. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that most pair bonds are stable relationships. Entirely too  many of us find some way to either re-affirm our manhood, and there is a strong incentive for a woman to find a stable partner who will provide over the long term, whil finding an unstable partner who excites and pleases her for brief periods of time.

With a few exceptions, I suspect that the ‘unstable’ partner is going to carry a lot of characteristics in common with her long term partner, if only to reduce the chance that she will be abandoned with a baby that matches a few characteristics that are somewhat uncommon for highly unlikely to have come from him. Say for example if he and she are read headed irish folk, and their new baby happens to have somewhat darker skin tone, or straight black hair, mom might gt concerned that dad is wondering just how close she’s been getting to the black or indian postman, or the asian tax lawyer they worked with last winter. It’s possible that he’s been ‘replaced’ even temporarily, but if she were thinking about it already, she’s probably made sure that it’s the irish milkman she’s getting some on the side in the morning with instead.

Again, I’m not saying that this is the majority situation. But it does happen, and many, if not most, guys are very concerned about it happening to them.

One method of coping is to ‘Play the field.’ and ‘not commit’ to a relationship, untill he’s a lot more certain that he’s not being played for a fool.

Women, as much as some guy’s will suggest otherwise, by playing the field, or having a girl in every port or at every truck stop, etc, you are not replaceable. And at some level you realize that. You get jealous when you think that a guy is cheating on you with another woman. Now some guys might think that this is strange, why should you be allowed to be jealous, and the guy sort of has to cope with his fears. Well, there is an average 19 year commitment reason that you become concerned over very quickly.

If you’ve decided on the nice stable guy, and all too late you discover that he’s still playing the field, and has knocked up some other woman, you start having all sorts of questions that need to be handled. “When was my last period” may very well be the first question you ask. Ok, it’s not exactly a question for you, it’s more along the lines of it’s been X days since i started, or finished my last period, and I have n-x days left. And you robably know that if you areat x=n-x, or within a couple of days of that, and you’ve been messing around, that you may now have a really big concern over who’s going to help you while Stable guy is over at the other woman’s house raising his other woman’s child.

My take on it is that there’s not a lot of time being spent on trying to figure out what the likelyhood of you being pregnant are. If you’ve been working towards that condition, you already have a pretty good idea of where you are in the cycle. It’s more handling the emotional concerns of ‘what now?’ than trying to figure out ‘odds.’

Of course some guys are going to be cuckooled. It happens, and strangely enough we tend to see enough variation in even ‘perfectly matched’ parrent’s children that a cucooled child can often get by un-noticed. Ladies, I’m going to suggest that if you’ve introduced this sort of a situation, that you work damned hard to make sure that your huby knows that he is appreciated. Perhaps more than he was when you got together to begin with. Specifically you want him to know that even though he was sitting home alone the nights you were in an out of town staff meeting just 9 months before littl one showed up, that little one is very definately ‘dad’s. And reward him frequently. We tend to think with our balls entirely too often, but I would say that its perfectly OK to take advantage of that, and keep our balls happy and in play.

As hard as I tried for 9 years as a single parrent, I can assure you that I know that mom is not who I ever was. I made mistakes, and I know that mom’s do as well, don’t get me wrong, And I don’t think there is ever going to be a step-mom who will suffice. In most cases a father who becomes a single parrent, either as a result of a divorce, or as a result of becoming a widdower. As a single parrent, it’s almost a given that dad will not have the time to get involved with someone who he will be comfortable bringing into his children’s lives as a ‘replacement’ for ‘Mom.”

There are things that I’m not happy with about my ex. Some of them are related to how she fought some of the battles we fought, legal and others. But the thing that most disturbs me is that since we separated, I’ve not developed a stable relationship with another woman. And as odd as it seams, the fault for that is not her, so much as it is my own.

The really bad part is that I like a number of women that I trust, though some might consider that trust to be misplaced. In my case the trust is that I have what I conseder to be a reasonably confident ability to predict an unfavorable result to specific situations. Mostly it means that I won’t let myself get into a situation where that variety of result can happen with them. I’m really hoping that in most cases, that ‘trust’ is misplaced, however I don’t expect to give many people the chance to gain confusion on the subject.

Sounds like I don’t like women? That’s not what I said by any means. In fact with very rare exceptions I very much like most women I have become aquainted with. I even like my ex, and there are people who think I should not. But ‘liking’ is not the same as ‘willing to risk.’

I’m at the point in my career where I am really working on getting my retirement in order. That’s not exactly conducive to having and raising children. And it’s really not conducive to paying child support for 18 or 20 years either. At some level I do think that’s rather sad. But it’s a decision I’ve pretty much committed to for myself.

Obviously this does not mean that I have to be alone. At the moment I have some pretty good ideas of who I’m not interested in sharing that part of my life with, but I still haven’t decided what characteristics I am interested in.

Experience suggests that I won’t see more than one or two comments on this blog, if I see even that many. That said, I really am open to suggestions. I’m not interested in a ‘mail order bride’ or being set up in an “arranged” situation. I wouldn’t mind a few recommendations, or meetings that are arranged, it’s the whole ‘your going to do…’ variety of arrangeed that I’m not interested in.

Tomorrow is Mother’s day. If your mother is arround, send her a greeting of love, and appreciation. If she is not arround, and you’re hardly alone in that, remember her with fondness and love. Especially remember her hopes and wishes for you. It’s entirely likely that you have not achieved many or all of those dreams. Most of us do not. But those hopes and dreams are still a part of her image of you, and you should remember those things too. After all, Your mother was not replaceable either.

Best of wishes.

Well, as you can probably tell by the title, I’m not really satisfied with my results today. I can come up with a number of plausable reasons, or combinations of reasons, but it comes down to either re-do this week, or redo today’s run this weekend.

As I’ve indicated before, I work nights, and last night was no exception. So when I ran this morning I had come off of a 12 hour shift, along with about a 1 hour bus ride each way. On top of that, I did not sleep well yesterday. I think I was up some 5 times in the 7 hours I was planning on sleeping. So when I went to run this morningI was not in the best condition. That said, I had hoped to do better than I did. I would say that I don’t think I did as well today as I did Wednesdayh, but I could be wrong.

I started out well enough. I got further during my warm up walk than I had the last time I too anything like this route. Once I started running I was going along well enough, but at about 7 and a half minutes I had to recover. I walked for about a minute, then got back going again. 2 and a half minutes later I needed to recover some more. This time I think I walked for a minute and a half. Then I got back to running. I’m a bit fuzy on how long I ran this time. I wasn’t tracking the intervals this time very well, but I did take another walking break and got to running with about four and a half minutes left, and stuck to it till the end of the 20 minute interval. So worst case I walked about 5 min of the 20, and best case I walked about 4 minutes.

My plan at the moment is to try to get a good night’s sleep Saturday night, and make another attempt Sunday morning. If that works, I’m going to roll Week 6 a day back and start Tuesday morning. I’ll take to running before I go to work in the evening. Presumably I will get a good day’s sleep on Thursday and Saturday. Then I’ll continue on with Week 7 the following Monday.

This schedule presents some problems for me participating in the 5K in June, as if I didn’t have enough problems with that, but I’m hoping that by then I will be in much better condition, and should be able to do a run like this, or longer, OK, quite a bit longer. It may not be ‘with ease’ and I’m not planning on setting any records in any case, but we’ll see what things look like in a week or so.

I suspect that one thing that will happen this weekend, is that I will force myself through a affine withdrawl headache. I suspect that is one of the things that kept waking me up yesterday.

Just loaded up the MP3 player with Friday’s set for the week. I have a little bit more time available to me today than I was thinking.

Somewhat out of plan for this morning was an early morning run. I normally plan on running around noon or very early afternoon on Wednesday, so that I can run either when I get home Friday morning, or before I go to work Friday afternoon, or even Saturday morning should that be the best opportunity.

However this week I have a dental appointment a little before 8 this morning, and I really didn’t want to have to be concerned about how a workout would either effect, or be affected by the recovery from that. So chose to wake up about 5 this morning and get the workout out of the way first thing.

The sky was already lightening up significantly by the time I got out and hit the streets. and I noticed that for the first time my shins were not complaining about the walk. They didn’t complain about the first run either. Today’s routine was a 5 min warmup walk, an 8 min run, 5 min of recovery walking, 8 min of run, and a walkout. The MP3 walkout was about 2 min, though I was further from home than that by about 8 min.

A couple of things concerned me duirng the first run. A bit of carry over from what sleep I got, or what kept me from sleeping well. I woke up about 2 am and had a vary substantial, though not solid bowl movement. I was a bit concerend about the prospect of having the runs today, though other than a second episode about an hour later, it has not continued to be an issue. On the other hand my stomach was not feeling the best either. So during the run I was a bit concerned that I would end up thinking I was passing gas, only to end up with very fowled shorts. That didn’t happen. I was also concerned because on at least a couple of occasions during the run I felt very much like I needed to throw up as well. Fortunately that did not become a significant issue either. Oh, my stomach still does not feel it’s best, but it is significnatly better than when I started.

I don’t know if it’s because of whatever bug I’m fighting off, or if it’s just because this was one of my first times with some fairly long runs in the mix, but for the first time after a run I’m feeling a bit chilly in a way that does not feel purely like I am cooling off from evaporation. I suppose it could also be the cool temp on the walk out, but I think I understand a bit better why runners need a blanket to warm up with at the end of a run.

Over the years when I was in HS, and the Army, all my exercise workouts ended with me going inside towards the end of the cool-down period. I was always fascinated by the fact that while I knew that I perspired while running, the recovery phase almost always included me being heavily coated in sweat.That said, I tend to suspect that the situation I’m dealing with now is the result of this bug dehydrating me, and I now need to address that as well.

When I was in College, one of my ROTC instructors had commented to people that running was not the best way to lose weight. Oh, it was find as part of a program that included other things, such as watching what you eat, and light weight work, but the problem with ‘running’ to lose weight is that more often than not, you replace the fat with an equivalent of muscle. Walking is more often than not going to give you better results for loosing weight. That said, you rarely see long distance runners, and I consider anyone regularly running more than a 400 meter distance to be a long distance runner, as unusually heavy. Part of that is that if you are carrying too much mass, you can’t effectively run long distances. So people who are interested in running more than a couple hundred yards or meters, and do so with some regularity, tend to change other aspects of their routine and diet to accommodated the changes they need to make. I will say that I really haven’t lost a significant amount of weight in the past month, but that may be changing as I will need to make changes along the way myself.

Assuming I don’t mung the data again, the kml will be at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May06.kml Remember that you can paste that link directly into google maps to see the route I took, or download it and open it in Google Earth to see the details as well.

Stay safe.

Literally just got back from my first workout this week. Legs muscles are still twitching. That will happen for another 20 min or so I suppose. If it goes on beyond that I would be somewhat surprised. the KML for today’s workout will be at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c2k5/May04.kml once I have it collected. If you look at the route I took today, you can see approximately what my 5k route is. I actually have two possibilities, one is to just do the loop around the blocks you see I’ve started today, the other is a bit longer, but gives me a reasonable walkout, and that’s to run down to Winetka, then up 36th, and walk about 6 blocks. If I take the ‘shorter’ route, I need to come up with a way to do the cool down walk as well, and I don’t think walking back along the initial 5 min warmup walk is going to be enough. But that’s the better part of a month away.

Today’s workout was interesting in that I kept telling myself during the walk portions that I really could be jogging a bit. I chose not to, if only because I also remember that near the end of each jogging/running portion, I really felt like I needed to do some walking. The pace felt good.

This week is a bit different workout routine wise. It’s the first of 2 weeks where the routine each day is different. And this firday I should have a 20 min run under my belt.

Well, the leg twitching is going down, so I am going to og and talk with the dogs, let them know how much I appreciate them watching the apartment, and see if I can scrounge up something to eat.

Edit:

Well, unfortunately my GPS did not retain the track information, when I mistakenly pushed the track from last Friday, instead of pulling the track that was sitting on the GPS. So it will take me a bit, but I’ll generate a path .kml file of the route I took, and attempt to identify transition points, but it will be anything but perfect from the perspective of what my real path was. That said, it won’t have me crossing streets that I didn’t cross, or have me running head long into traffic on busy streets, through and over buildings, etc. However since I can’t edit points on the path, it does have me running on lawns that I didn’t actually travel over…