And the little white dove, made with love, made with love

There's this thing that happens, often, when I listen to music.

I think it's the result of my current state of mind aligning with the emotion of a piece of music, such that listening to it just feels incredibly right and inspirational.

I've always kind of wondered if there was anything I could do with that feeling, powerful as it is.  Is it possible for us to transform the emotion we're given as an audience into our own creation?  I think it must be.  It's a difficult feeling to hold on to long enough to get into the act of creation, however.

Perhaps visual arts are more useful for that sort of thing; they can sit on the wall and stare at you, delivering their emotion continually for more than a few minutes at a time.  Maybe I need to do a better job of surrounding myself with sights that I appreciate; not simply music.

Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved)

I spent most of the day over in New Haven at Chris and Aleksandra's.

On my way home, I was listening to Lifted Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground.

Let's get one thing out of the way - I think Conor Oberst is an absolutely brilliant man.  Maybe I identify with Bright Eyes because I started listening to them on a very, very formative couple of days in my life traveling alone from Illinois to Connecticut over 19 hours in November of 2005.  I listened to Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and I'm Wide Awake It's Morning repeatedly; for the entire trip, as I recall.

Hopefully you can appreciate that this music strikes a chord with me.

But tonight as I was returning to Oxford from New Haven, I was listening to the last track on the album, Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved), which is a long, epically beautiful, exultant, scream of defiance in the face of everything that sucks in the world.  Tonight it just hit me, and reminded me of all the reasons why I've always just wanted to sing at the top of my lungs and create music.  And I had this moment where I just felt to my core that that's what I ought to be doing.  And what I'm not quite doing.  And what I'm not quite pursuing.  Right then I found myself - 15 seconds left to the song - suddenly crying my eyes out as I drove into my parents' driveway.  I couldn't even tell why, exactly.  Maybe for loss of time, or regret, or beauty, or maybe just for the sudden clarity.  Or maybe hope that I still have a chance to do what I really want to be doing.  I was just... sorta overwhelmed.

Tonight I want to sing, and I'm writing this so that I'll remember it.  I want to scream bloody defiance and joy at a world which, often, seems intent on presuming the worst of itself.  I want to bring our faults to the light so we can see them for what they are.

That's what I want deep down.  I want to sing - literally and metaphorically.

Everyone has an opinion.

My brother and I watched Untitled last night.  It was an excellent film, but there was one quote that stuck out to me, made by the aging composer Morton Cabot (played by Ben Hammer).  It was - intentionally and quite brilliantly - the only line of dialogue from the entire movie worth taking to heart.  I had to search around for the exact words.

Mr. Cabot was attending a performance of one of his own pieces, and some jackass came up to him and started art-snobbing, telling him how much he disliked it.  After shooing the guy away negligently, Cabot states, "Everyone has an opinion.  An artist must find meaning... in the process."  That ellipsis folds away some other stuff, but that's the gist.  And it's as good a piece of advice as you're going to hear.  And something I think I'd do well to take to heart.

I'm very concerned with perception, and always have been.  I think I ought to be a little more concerned with my own meaning in things.  Everything exists in a context, and it's the interplay between that context and someone's work which we all tend to find exciting.  That said, context and opinion are fickle, and if you rely on them to lend meaning to things you've created, one, it seems less likely that you're producing something endowed with grand ideas, and two, you're also likely to be disappointed most of the time.  Because most people won't like what you do, or will simply be indifferent.

So find meaning in the process.  Of life, of creation, of travel, of music, whatever.  You'll be happier for the effort.

Tour De Grave and the Tour De Front Door Locking Mechanisms That Don't Function

This morning was the Tour De Grave through Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, Medford, and Charlestown.  It was a bit chilly, but a lovely ride overall.  I think we visited maybe... 10 burying grounds and cemeteries?  Something like that.  It was a good twenty mile ride, I think.  I brought trail mix which included candy corn.  I'm quite happy about this.

After the Tour, Daniel and I went to The Border Cafe in Harvard Square to stuff our faces with calories.  It was absolutely delicious.  The margarita helped.  Upon leaving the Border, I biked myself home around 4:30 or so, stumbled around for a few, and then took a nap until 6:00 PM.  I was awoken by my downstairs neighbor blasting shitty techno/dance.

Around 6:45, I finally got ahold of my brother, and went out to meet him at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery down by the waterfront, where he and Zack were hanging their show.  They'd apparently been there all day, and by the time I got there, it was looking great.  When they finished up, we got everything out to the car, locked the gallery, and attempted to go lock the door to the building itself.

... This is when the problem started.  The damn key just wouldn't lock the door.  It fit in the lock, it turned, but... nothing happened.  We called the building management company several times and they gave us the run around.  We talked to a few tenants who happened to be coming or going, and their keys wouldn't lock it either.  Eventually, we told the maintenance people (who still hadn't shown up), that we had to leave, and they finally took responsibility.

Later, as we were having dinner and Sapporo in Chinatown, the maintenance dude called my brother back and quizzed him about the door, to which he repeated everything and said, "And I'm not there anymore."  To which the guy was like, "But... I'm not there either!"  To which my brother pointed out that he should probably remedy that, given that it's his damn building.  The guy eventually resigned himself to shutting off Three's Company and hauling himself down to the building.  Presumably.

It's been a long, but great day, over all.  Sleep time.

Organization and Role Models, of a sort

I spent the better part of this morning/afternoon kinda... organizing.  And doing laundry.

I started writing down thoughts on my whiteboard about what I'd like to be doing with my time.  Like... if I could do anything.  Which, I guess, I can.  I have a color system:

- Orange: Major goals
- Green: Chores
- Blue: Scheduled events/appointments
- Brown: Things standing in the way of orange items.
- Red: For the love of God, do this now.

The colors - save red - are more or less arbitrary, but help me keep it all straight in my head.

It seems useful to throw the orange items up on the board and see if they stick.  It's hard to say until I spend some time considering them as my goals.

This evening, I biked down to JP with Daniel, where we met up with Annalisa and Jeff for dinner at... Wonderspice?  Was that the name?  Tasty foods, excellent company.  Following that, we all pedaled our way over to Bikes Not Bombs, for a presentation by Russ and Laura of the Path Less Pedaled (http://pathlesspedaled.com).  Really inspiring.  As a result - and I had been thinking this before, but didn't really realize it was a "goal" - I'm going to be adding another orange item to my list:

- Shed excess objects.

I really have too much crap in my life, and I really don't need most of it. I think there's many things that, perhaps, I go store at my parents' house rather than sell off, but I'd really like to simplify this mess.  I'd like to get to the point where everything that I bother to own has a clear purpose.  I'm not going to get to the point where I can just hop on a bike with my four panniers of stuff and take off, but I could at least stand to get to the point where I can walk through my apartment without tripping over something.

Something to think about.

Thursday run

Went for a short run this morning around Davis/Porter.  Wasn't really feeling in a groove, but am glad I got out anyway.  Run was approximately 2.8 miles, with a short walk through Porter in the middle somewhere.

The route looked like this:

Try'n beat the rain

I went over to Noteflight land today for a few hours this morning.  I think I accidentally turned off my alarm, as I didn't wake up until 9:10 or so, and had to hustle to get there at 10:00.  Ended up walking in the door at 10:09 (I looked at my watch).  Not bad, given that I'd been asleep an hour earlier.

Around 2:00 PM, after some tasty Lemon Grass Tofu from Thailand Cafe, I picked up my stuff and biked myself home along a meandering route through Cambridgeport.  Once home, I spent some more time on a few Noteflightly things, and then... reactivated my World of Warcraft account for a bit of relaxation.

Bwahaha.

Good times.  Jason and I wandered around for a while tonight.  It really is a pretty relaxing, well made game.  As always, I can't imagine that I'll be playing it all that often, but it's fun to come back to sometimes.

Otherwise, a pretty uneventful day.  Not bad.

Dado time?

So.

I woke up wicked late today, after attempting to wake up around 8:00 AM and failing miserably.  I woke up, read a chapter from the second book of David Eddings' Mallorean, and then went back to sleep until 10:30 listening to the White Stripes' Icky Thump while a crew was busy putting a new roof on the apartment building right over my head.

It wasn't the most restful sleep, but it was really, really comfortable.  Ahh, free time.

So around 12:30 I finally made it out of the apartment and rode myself down here to Dado-land.  There was coffee.  There is currently a sandwich.  There was some desktop cleaning.  Funny how that rarely involves cleaning a physical object anymore.

Man, tasty sandwich.

And now what is there, you might ask?  It's okay.  Don't feel bad; I've been getting that question constantly for the past two months or so.

And it's a good question.  What is there now, anyway?

I've got a few things on my mind, none of which have manifested themselves into a concerted effort yet.

Is it okay that I'm still thinking of this as a staycation?  I wonder how long it'll be before staycation finds its way into the dictionary.  I wonder how long it'll be before I stop thinking of this as a break.

I've been saying for a while now that I want to go back and learn - more thoroughly - many of the things that I was supposed to have gotten awesome at over the past two years of taking classes and lessons at NEC.  If you didn't know, I'm not taking any classes this year, despite deciding that I wasn't going to be working.  One might think taking more classes might make sense, given the lack of employment.  But that wasn't really the point.  The point was to free myself up to figure out what's important without making any assumptions about it before I had a chance to actually do it.

Apparently there's a lot of social stuff that's really important, because I've found that since I left Allurent, I've got more events on my plate (read: whiteboard) than ever before.  Where does all this stuff come from that it springs, fully formed, into being just in time to give me something to do almost every day?

So I'm hoping that I can start to wrangle my thoughts into a coherent plan in the coming weeks, amidst all this other stuffage.

For now, though, here I am at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday, chilling in Dado with a late lunch and all these other funny, remote and/or non-9-to-5 people.

Whew.  Feels good, so far.  Now to make it feel like it makes sense.

Wednesday run.

Went for a run on Wednesday morning.  Worked out somewhat better than Monday's run, and totaled about 3.5 miles of actual runningness.  Here's the route:

Monday morning run.

Went for a run on Monday morning.  It was perfect out - a delightful temperature.  Probably about 55 degrees.  I ran down Raymond/Garden to Harvard Sq, turned around at JFK park, and ran back up Mass Ave to Porter.  Got a wicked stomach cramp on the way, which I proudly ran through.

Total was about 3.25 miles of running, 3.7 miles total.  Here's the route:

Closure.

Today was my last day at Allurent.  I don't know what to expect of the company itself, so I'll withhold judgment on that.

I’m now laid off and unemployed.  And I'm happy about that, just in case anyone freaks out upon reading that sentence.

It’s been an amazing four and a half years.  I've learned and been given the opportunity to do more than I would ever have expected.  I've worked with the smartest, most professional, most badass people in this city.  I've been given the opportunity to grow and expand my career.  I've been given responsibility and trust by people for whom I have enormous respect.  I've been treated as well as I can imagine being treated at a job.

I traveled to Ann Arbor, Philadelphia, San Diego, Baltimore, and Little Rock for Allurent.  I worked with Alltel, Borders, Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, Intuit, Kodak, New Balance, Seven For All Mankind, Sephora, Under Armour, Reebok, Sears, Kmart, Charlotte Russe, Kohls, Carhartt, Nicole Miller, Guess, Living Proof, Land Of Nod, Demandware, MyGofer, and presumably others I can't even think of, along with many of their partners.  (Edit for posterity of other live-and-non-live customers the company worked with: Baby Cottons, Carpet One, Room Store, Leon's, Flooring America, C&C California, FTD, Loccitane, Spiegel, Newport News, and Victoria's Secret)

With this under my belt, I feel more or less like I can do anything in this industry.  I'm thrilled for the day I decide to sit down and re-write my resume, cause I think it'll be kickass, but I'm hoping I don't have to bother to do that for a while.

So, all that said, I think I'm going to be taking some time off.  Like, months.  At least.

I want to take the time to figure out what I should be doing with myself, and how I want to live.  I've had a lot of thoughts over the years, and been struck by wanderlust on more than one occasion, but I've never been able to pull myself away to do it in all this time.  I've never been able to properly think about the alternative ways that I could be working and living and spending my time.  

Getting laid off is, in a way, perfect.  Having someone else pull the trigger for you isn't something you can usually expect, but sometimes it's nice when it actually happens.

So I'm standing here on the precipice; this big, freaky, exciting cliff.  I'm pretty sure that's a wonderful thing, and I think I've been well prepared for it.

Thanks, everybody.

All it's cracked up to be

So I'm starting to get pretty committed to the idea of not working for a while post-Allurent.  Or, at least, not working more than a few days a week.  It's just time; I'm a little scared and a lot excited.

The past few years I've been learning - or trying to learn - all this stuff about music, and I feel like I've hardly had a proper moment to really get it right.  The part that kills me is that I can tell that when I do spend time with it, I learn things quite fast.  Like... leaps and bounds faster than the rest of the time.  But I just don't get to it, or I'm too tired, or whatever.  That really sucks.

Will this change with more free time?  I hope so.  I'm kinda under the assumption that I've been putting a lot of my mental capacity into my job.  It certainly seems plausible - I spend my most productive waking hours sitting in that office every day.  What if I had those hours to myself?  That's what I need to find out.

So I have no idea what'll happen when I'm suddenly not working.  Will I last, or I will I drive myself insane not having a place to go every day?  Will I keep it up for three months and then decide that I've had enough, and go back and get a job?  Will I last six months?  Will I last a year?  I will be eating through my savings by doing this.  If I go six months and then contract for six months, I think that is a sustainable model.

Maybe a few months is all I need.  I have no idea!  But I'm going to fucking find out, bitches!

Worry about your time once you have time to worry about your time

Had dinner with Annalisa and Daniel tonight.

That's a pretty odd way to start a post, as I think you two are the only ones who actually read this thing.

Everything you said tonight gave me a lot to think about.  After I got home, I talked to my brother as well, and his suggestion was just taking some time off.  Maybe a month.  Something like that.  Just... not doing anything for a while.

I'm feeling a bit rudderless at the moment.  I'm not really sure what I want to do, or maybe I've been doing it all so long I don't really know what I actually care about.  Maybe I just need to take an extended trip or something and not think about all this for a while.

I feel like trying to go back to class this year is rushing it.  I don't know that I want to be tied down to weekly classes and lessons for the next nine months right now.

I want to go sit in the MFA and think.  I want to get out of the country and think.  I want to take a road trip and think.

My brother repeated for me something that a friend of his told him a few years ago, which is that you should worry about what to do with all  your free time once you have the free time to worry about it.  Don't try figuring out what to do with your time before you actually have it - use the time itself to figure it out.

When my head is all full of programming and things-I-want-to-do, how am I supposed to know what it is I really ought to be doing?  I feel sorta apathetic about everything.

I dunno.  Not working is feeling like a decent option at the moment, at least until I know what I want to go back to.

Beautiful, short run.

It's beautiful out - just barely 70 degrees, and feels cooler.  Somewhat windy.  I went out at around 11:00 AM or so and ran down to Harvard through the back streets, out to the river, and back towards the Elliot St. bridge.  Once there, I was kinda worn out (late night?), and started walking.  That's about a 2.7 mile run.

I then walked myself back home, for a total distance of about 4.4 miles.  Here's the map:

ICA and Half of Central Square

Went out to the ICA yesterday afternoon, and was joined by Eric O. and Helena.  Eric and I walked over from South Station, which was delightful, and Helena met us there maybe twenty minutes later.

Charles LeDray's work was quite nice.  In Eric's words, much of it evoked some sort of dirty, Sears department store in the '80s.  He had viewers moving around a lot - a row of hats on the wall, well above your head, to miniature racks of clothing on the floor with a drop ceiling hanging over them that prevents you from properly seeing it at all unless you kneel beside it.  There were shelves covered in hundreds (thousands?) of tiny clay and porcelain pots, vases, cups and bowls, each one unique.

Dr. Lakra was, in my opinion, a trifle disappointing.  His work was primarily concerned with augmenting existing prints/photos/old magazines of people by covering their bodies with what appear to be Central American-style tattoos.  My current problem with it is that they appeared applied in a slapdash sort of way.  It was as if he was using the figure's skin as a flat canvas to draw on, which made the tattoos feel inconsistent and out of context even more than they already were (which, I imagine, is part of the point).

After leaving the ICA, the three of us took the T back to Central Square (around 5:30 PM or so), where we got a drink at Central Kitchen whilst waiting for Shannon to appear.  There was a goat cheese plate with berries.  There was also a Left Hand Milk Stout, and a... Final Ward?  Chartreuse, rye, lemon juice, and some other sorta fruit flavor I can't quite remember.  Nice.

Shannon appeared around 6:30 - 7:00 PM or so, and we went over to the Middle East for dinner.  Delightful, as always.  I had Tofu Cous Cous and a hummus plate.  The former was some cous cous on the side, several large, grilled slabs of tofu on a bed of various veggies, and a bunch of chick peas on the side.

After dinner, we went back across the street to the Enormous Room for an hour or so.  There was gin and tonic.  This was an interlude, designed to delay whilst we waited for Zuzu to become club-like around 10:00 PM.

It eventually did so.  It was, apparently, soul night.  Yes.


We stayed until closing.  Great night!

Quite the ride.

Did a lot of biking yesterday, riding all over Cambridge/Watertown from home to work, to Harvard Square, to Jason and Kat's, back to Harvard Square, and finally back home.  It came out to about 14 miles.  I wouldn't mention it, except that I can feel it today, so clearly it was worthwhile.  It was 90+ degrees outside, and I was mostly a hot mess each time I got where I was going.

Here's a lovely, enormous map of the route:

Sunday morning run

Ran around 3.7 miles in New Haven this morning.  It was a wet, humid sorta day, but with a nice, cool breeze.  I started out from my brother's place on Canner St., ran downtown on Orange St., and then came back up on Whitney Ave.  It's been a while; the run was more difficult than expected - or rather, I felt like I had run farther than actually had.  I thought it was about 5 miles.

Here's the map:

Thursday evening run/walk

Went for my first run in a while on Thursday.  This post is backdated from Sunday morning.  Made it from Richdale down to JFK Park, approximiately 1.7 miles, booking a bit more than I should have, and ended up moseying my way back home after stopping in the park.  It was a fairly warm day.

Here's the map.  The running bit stopped a smidge before that 2 mile marker, at the corner there in the park:

Interactive and Visual Design is like Music.

Music has a fundamental concept of tension and release.  This is the phenomenon where, as a song progresses, the composer takes you on both macro and micro journeys of increased tension, culminating in some sort of resolution back to the tonic of a key.  On a micro scale, this happens repeatedly every time a bass player returns to C from G, for instance, or every time they fall through the circle of fourths on some sort of 4-7-3-6-2-5-1.  On a macro level, a soloist may refuse to resolve a phrase for some number of bars, repeatedly increasing tension until it's finally released.

Both visual and interactive design have similar concepts, but it usually takes place over the course of months or years.

In interactive design, there is a tendency for products and interfaces to accumulate features over the course of multiple versions as companies compete with each other to win customers.  These features, if not attended to carefully, tend to increase the complexity and decrease the usability of the interface or device in question.  The process of increasing complexity and decreasing usability, in this case, I'll refer to as tension.  Eventually, tension reaches a critical mass where it can't be maintained anymore, and designers go on a crusade (supported by consumer desires) to release the tension and return to a tonic, comfortable, usable design.  This may mean shedding features.  It may also mean reevaluating organically created interfaces that evolved over multiple iterations, but in general, it means releasing multiple years of built up tension in favor of something that feels more centered and solid.

I think a similar phenomenon exists in visual design as it relates to branding, though perhaps to a lesser, and more carefully controlled extent.  An entity with a well established brand will iterate on that brand to keep it fresh.  In the course of these iterations, the brand will evolve more visually interesting, differentiating, or eye catching idiosyncrasies.  These idiosyncrasies and visual tensions will build up until the visual designer feels they're starting to overwhelm the original, tonic, centered concept for the brand, in which case they will simplify the design and resolve it back to something simple and clean.

I say that this phenomenon exists to a lesser or more carefully controlled extent in visual design because I think visual design culture has put a greater emphasis on simplicity and clarity of message than interaction design.  Interaction design contends with features which forcibly increase complexity and reduce clarity; visual design has lower barriers to re-evaluation and iteration, and is thus more flexible.

In all of these cases, the composer or designer is utilizing complexity, tension, and/or differentiation in order to engage their audience and maintain attention and interest.  All of these tools have the side effect of increasing the audience's perceived need for relaxation and simplicity (a pleasant phrase I just borrowed from Wikipedia's definition of musical tension), which must be satisfied, eventually, lest the audience become frustrated and turn their attentions elsewhere.  Talent in these disciplines often equates to the ability to extend this tension for protracted periods of time without the audience consciously perceiving the effort, except, perhaps, on reflection or meta-attentiveness.

It seems likely that this argument could be extended to fiction and fine art in one way or another.

I want to use excessive profanity here so bad.

Today has been incredibly frustrating.  Nothing worked.  My damn computer felt like it was falling apart half the day.  Our servers kept screwing up and failing to load things - apparently just for me.  I couldn't figure out why my code wouldn't compile.  Twice.  The app I'm working on spontaneously quit on me, repeatedly, and refused to load.  My debugger wouldn't connect to the app to help me figure out why.  For three, separate, obscure reasons.  I tried to relax on the deck for five minutes and the game I decided to try playing crashed when I tried to load it.  My network connection kept cutting in and out all day.  Both computers I'm trying to use are slow as hell.  My stupid .profile file on my Mac is gone, so none of my shortcuts work.

ARGH.


Here's hoping tomorrow is better.  I'm going to either shoot my computer (figuratively speaking), shoot myself (figuratively speaking), or have a mental breakdown (possibly not figuratively speaking) if they continue like this.

Whoah, kay.

Hi.

Another week, another post.  I seem to have fallen into a weekly thing.  I feel like there's not enough stuff to record, often, on a day by day basis.  For instance!

This last week consisted, mostly, of trying to finish up our current project at work-land.  I think we made steady progress, as today we're feeling more or less done.  Otherwise, I think last week was one of those recover-from-vacation sorta things.  It involved a good deal of laundry, cleaning, unpacking, reacquainting myself with Cambridge, etc.

This last weekend I took a little trip down to New Haven to see my brother and Aleksandra in their church's production of Annie.  They did a great job!  My brother was Rooster, and Aleksandra was Grace. Both excellent.  Following the show, we went over to another cast member's house for Ye Olde Cast Party, which I probably wasn't invited to, but which I crashed on recommendation of my brother.  They were all really cool people - we spent a great deal of time listening to tunes from the 70s and 80s and laughing at them.  I think I was the youngest there by a good 5 years.  But that's okay - I'm used to slightly-older company.

Sunday morning we (myself, Chris, and Aleksandra) drove over to Mom and Dad's, where I proceeded to spend the afternoon cleaning my car.  I cleaned all the carpets, all the interior surfaces, and suds-upped the exterior and in-between-the-interior-and-exterior around the doors.  The thing looks great now.  Kinda like when I got it from Grandma.

I try.  Sometimes it just takes me a while.

Today was a fairly productive day, I think, at the office.  Lots of research into various annoying problems, but we managed to fix them, I think.  I got in pretty early and left around 6:00 PM.

I've spent the evening thinking about music, lyrics, and trying to record some stuff.  It's rather difficult, but one of those things I think you only get better at with practice.  Timing is difficult - it's not easy to maintain a consistent pace for however-many minutes.

Sharpen that saw.

So today involved a bit of organizing, a lot of sleeping, a bike ride, and a few hours of Ars Magica.

I woke up at perhaps 9:30 am or so, after deciding that, given that today was my last day of vacation, I might as well take advantage of it. Oh, and boy did I.

I got a few things done in the morning, organized some stuff, and then promptly took a three hour nap from 1:30 pm or so until 4:30 pm. Rockin'. Hey, cool, the iPad automatically added an apostrophe to rockin. Well... The first time, anyway. This thing is weird and inconsistent in its auto-correction.

Anyway, after waking up, I took a bike ride down Memorial Drive, back up to Harvard Square, and then back home. Whilst in H^2 I stopped at Dado for some iced coffee.

Yes, after all this I'm really hoping I'll be able to sleep AT ALL tonight.

Ars was fun - Jason is doing a great job. We quit for the evening around 10:00 pm because Pete had to work. On the way home, after dropping Jason off at his place, I stopped at the Star Market on 16 for some food stuffs.

And here I am.

Races, Vacations, Cleaning, and Relaxationing

So it's been a few.

Major events that have occurred in the past week or two:

1. The Boilermaker!
2. Ocean Grove!

Starting in the proposed ordering, which also happens to be chronological: the Boilermaker was a success.

My results:

Totals (11539 Finishers 6418 M / 5121 F)

Div: M25-29
ChipTime: 1:26:12
Overall: 4060
SexPl: 3059
DivPl: 461
AgeGrade: 50% (pretty average)

Splits:

First 5k: 28:57
Second 5k: 27:10
10k: 56:07
Third 5k: 26:08
15k: 1:22:14

This, to me, must mean that "ChipTime" above is including the time between when the race started and I crossed the start line.

We had a pleasant evening at the World Famous (not really) Palatine Motel perhaps half an hour from the race in Palatine, NY.  I'd stay there again, given the necessity and the lack of closer options.

After our time in Utica for the race, we drove out to Ithaca to spend Sunday night at Julia's friend Angie's place.  Nice town - lovely gorges.  Delicious bagels.  Steep roads.  Cool school.  Lots of smart kids around.  Angie has a pleasant apartment.  Good times.  We hung out with a bunch of her friends for the evening, and went to a delightful place called the Glenwood Pines Restaurant, or some such, which served rather delicious burgers and fried sides (Corn bites, broccoli bites, fries, jalapeno poppers, etc.).

Monday morning, we roused ourselves fairly early, as I recall, grabbed a bagel sandwich at Collegetown Bagels down a tad south of Cornell, and then set out for New Jersey.  We got there sometime in the afternoon.

The beach was fairly rainy and overcast for most of our time there, unfortunately.  But, we still got in the water, still built some sand castles, still went out for ice cream almost every night, and still hung out on the Henry Richard Inn's porch every day.  It was, as always, well worth the trip, and I'm feeling nicely relaxed as a result.  It was great having Julia there.  You may be reading this.  I'm delighted you came!

On our way back up the coast on Thursday, we stopped at the Storm King Art Center nearish Storm King State (National?) Park in New York.  Very cool.

Yesterday, Friday the 17th of July, involved two things of a separate nature to those described above:

1.  A Dentist Appointment
2. A Guitar Lesson
3. Dinner at Takemura with Julia

The dentist appointment went well.  I was told I have excellent oral hygiene.  Woohoo.

The guitar lesson also went well, though I was not told I have excellent aural hygiene, unfortunately.  I'll just have to infer that on my own.  We talked about what I need to do in the next month or two to get ready for being in an ensemble next school year.

Yikes.

Dinner at Takemura was especially delightful (my especially delightful company being responsible for the added "especially" qualifier).  I had a Veggie Tofu Dol Sot Bi Bim Bap, which is fun to say.  We also each had ourselves a little glass of sake.  It rained on us on the way over and back, but not too much.

Today has consisted of several activities.  Ready?  Cause here they come in list form:

1. A brunch at Cabot's Ice Cream & Restaurant down in Newton.  Tasty.  Didn't get ice cream.
2. Cleaning up my room(s).  I have a lot of paper to be dealt with.
3. Futuretoday: Going to see Inception at 7:00 PM in Framingham with roommate Eric.

Seems like a good deal.

Thursday's pre-oil-change run.

Went for a run around Fresh Pond this morning.  It was a pleasant temperature, if a bit humid, and (unlike yesterday) I didn't feel the need to stop.

On the down side, I misjudged my mileage, and ended up running about 4.5 miles, rather than the 5+ I was hoping for.  It's not as far over to Fresh Pond as I thought.  Bummer!  But that's okay, I was in a bit of a rush this morning, as I needed to take my car into the shop for an oil change and check-up.

Here's the map of the run:

Hew-hew-humid morning run.

Woke up at 6:00 AM this morning to go for a run.  Almost didn't go because I felt sorta weird - almost like I'd pulled a muscle in my stomach or something.  Don't know.  But went anyway.


So!  It was a humid and uncomfortably warm morning, despite being only 75 degrees, supposedly.  I ran down Mass Ave to Harvard Square, went a few bridges up on the river, and came back around to the corner of JFK and Memorial... where I stopped.  Temporarily.  Ugh.  It wasn't that my body was particularly tired, but that my head felt like it was going to melt down.  Bummer.


So I walked for about 0.4 miles up Memorial and then started again to run the rest of the way home.  


So, that's a total of 5 miles, and approximately 4.6 ran.


Here's the map:

Campy Camping

Hello world!

So over the weekend, we had a great camping trip up in New Hampshire.  It was raining a little bit off and on, but that just meant that the weather was nice and cool for hiking.  Great!

I have a bunch of pictures on my phone of the Flume, Artist's Bluff, Polly's Pancake Parlor, and Arethusa Falls.  I'm hoping to get them uploaded to Facebook sooner or later.

We stayed at this little campground called, like, "KOA" or something.  It was... mediocre, unfortunately.  I could have done with a bit (read: a lot) more space between us and our neighbors.  I don't like to see other camp sites whilst out in the woods - here, they were like... 20 feet away.  Bummer - but that's okay!  We still got to go through all the motions.  It just wasn't quite as secluded as I might have liked.

We had terrible traffic on the way back into Boston on Sunday.  Allie and I must have sat there, crawling along for about an hour on top of your standard travel time.  Painful.  We ended up getting back to Boston at like... maybe... 8:00 PM?  Something like that.  It was fairly late.  Once we got into Somerville, there was like a fire or something, and we had to take a detour - just to extend things a bit.

But it worked out.  I'd do it again.  I'd just pick the camp site a little more carefully!  The White Mountains are gorgeous.  I had no idea.  Well worth the trip.

This week has been sorta frustrating, in that my poor laptop kinda died on Monday, in that it had a bunch of corrupted stuff on the hard drive and was taking twenty (20) minutes to boot up, which was wicked painful.  While I was backing it up and restoring it and all that over the past few days, I've been using my old work PC.  Also painful.  I did, however, make a bit of good progress anyway, which was nice.  Unfortunately, I think our project is a bit behind at the moment.  Mark and I are on it, in our own special ways.

I had a lesson with The Zoffer on Tuesday, which went really well.  I feel like I actually know some jazz chords now, and that, given a sheet, I might have a good idea how to play it in a jazzerific way without too much trouble.

It's kinda funny - I figured all that out in an hour prior to the lesson.  I swear, if I could just focus like that three days a week, I'd be spectacular in no time.  Such a hard thing to do, though.  Oof.

On Wednesday, we had a great band practice.  I recorded the whole thing.  We had a few really awesome jams - I need to get them off my phone and share them with everybody.  It is, however, like 2 hours of recording.

Today, Thursday, was my four year review with Mr. Marty.  A good talk.

The morning run

I went for a run this morning at 7:00 AM or so.  It was hot and muggy (approximately 83 degrees) though I felt pretty good.  Well, mostly.

I ran approximately 4.2 miles with a 0.2 mile walk after the first 3.7 miles, between Sparks and Garden St.  After the 3.7, I was feeling a bit overheated.  After a block or two, I'd cooled down and kept going.

Here's the map:

Wednesday's Jaunt

Went for a short run on Wednesday morning around 7:15 AM or so.  It was a muggy morning.

Diversity

Today started with a brief run around the river. Maybe... 2-3 miles or so? It was an off day.

I got to work by about 9:00 am or so, and decided I should flip my desk around so that I can see everyone in the office, rather an have them all sitting behind me. Good move, so far. It's nice not having everyone and their mother sneaking up on me and tapping me on the shoulder all the time.

Today was relatively productive, and definitely better than yesterday. Oh! And I had tofu yellow curry for lunch, which always makes a day better.

I ended up leaving the office around 6:15 pm, biked back towards Porter with Mr. Daniel on my tail. I got home, decided to make myself a tasty wrap of awesomeness, and found that half my veggies had gone rotten. Total bummer. And they were the ones I hadn't cut up! Grumble. But I had enough for a thang anyway, and it was tasty.

All that said and done, I was kinda late getting out to Framingham - maybe 7:45 or so. But, regardless, we had a great time and did more general jamming than playing of specific songs. We keep jamming on all sorts of random styles. Today was a sea shanty and a sorta funk groove. It was more or less awesome.

On the way home, I listened to The Aeroplane Over The Sea on my way, and proved to myself that I can sing the whole album, straight through, at full volume, whilst hitting all the notes. This makes me pretty happy.

And once home, I had some ice cream. Woot.

Foo and the bar.

Today felt like one big exercise in awkward, frustrating, and/or embarrassing situations. Sometimes that's about all there is to say. At least the evening was nice and I got to meet Julia's friend Doug, who was awesome.

Meh. Yep. That's all I've got. Here's to tomorrow.

Kinda crazy.

Been a couple of days. Last Thursday, in fact. It's been a pretty nutty weekend, in its own special ways.

Saturday involved a trip to Target with Julia's family, followed by hitting up
TJmax, Newbury Comics, and Whole Foods. Lots of shopping. When we got back, we found Julia's bike had been stripped of its handlebars and cables. Argh. It was a total bummer for everyone on an otherwise great afternoon. She called the po pos, who came and took a report. I took he opportunity to tell them about my stolen seat as well, not that there's a chance they can do anything about that.

After all that business, I went home and spent the evening cleaning. I rearranged my office room a bit and took down the second table. The plastic one. There's a ton more room in there now, which seems pretty cool.

Saturday morning I bummed around for a bit, and then joined Julia on her apartment hunting trip. Saw a few places in Allston which were okay. Following that, we went to her place for a few, where I decided that she should do her laundry at my apartment to save some cash, and also give me the opportunity to make her some dinner. Good plan, right?

So I rode home with the intention of returning with my car to load up her clothes, head over, and have a lovely evening. As I walked out of my apartment, car keys in hand, I closed the door behind me... And realized I didn't have my house keys.

Really?

Yah really.

Sigh.

I called Eric, and he was still in Baltimore. I called Matt, and he was in Miami. I called my landlord, and he was out on the Cape.

Daaaaaaah!

So I returned to Julia's, sweaty and defeated and stayed there until a few hours after Eric got home. Lucky me, he wax returning Sunday.

Today included a rather productive morning, followed by Kat's birthday dinner at New Ginza in Watertown. Tasty tempura! Huge beer! Fried ice cream! Delightful.

After dinner, I stopped into Julia's for a few, before returning home. It's hot, but I have a fan. Whew. And that is that.

Has either got two glass eyes or he's wearing the patch on the wrong s-s-s-side.

Yeah, yesterday.  Wednesday.

As noted, we went for a nice run in the morning.  I ended up getting myself into work by around 9:00 AM, which was awesome.  I spent most of the day coming up with a way for us to make it easier for developers to create new widgets/layouts/brands.  I think it'll be pretty cool.  It's always been a process fraught with errors, as it requires a great many very manual edits and copies.  With any luck, this will mitigate some of that error-proneness and help us automate the process a bit.  Good times.

After work, I took the short way home and gathered up myself, an iPad, some staff paper, two guitars, an amp, a capo, and a guitar stand and shuffled my way over to Jason and Kat's, where we subsequently went out to Framingham to Mark's.

Practice was good - we had a few awesome impromptu jams, one of which was pretty bluesy.  Also practiced a few of our classics.  Ob-la-de, Ob-la-da's guitar business still eludes me.  It's very weird - no matter what I do, it somehow sounds like shit.  I'm not out of tune.  I'm sure I'm playing the right chord.  It just... doesn't work, somehow.  I think I need to be playing an acoustic for that song - the electric just doesn't work.  It requires more chunka than Mr. Les Paul can provide.

Oh, and my stupid, $10 capo from Target died and wouldn't hold down the strings.  That's what I get for buying cheap.  Sigh.

We stayed pretty late last night - I think cause everyone was enjoying themselves.  Jason sounds awesome on his new drums.  I was pleasantly, delightedly, and excitedly surprised.  Good job, dude!  You rock.  I practically thought there was a drum machine in the room or something.

Anyway, after practice, I headed home, unloaded my stuff, and more-or-less went right to bed.

Wednesday the Runningith of June

Yesterday morning's run was a pretty decent 3.8 mile jog around the river course.

Still felt kinda tired from the weekend, but did decently.  Here's the route:

I'd pick you up each morning for doughnuts and tea.

Sunday was a fun filled extravaganza, even after the run. At 1:30 pm or so, my parents showed up at Chris and Aleksandra's and we had us a little birthday party. Complete with presents, cake, brownies, and little boys attempting to open presents that weren't their own - simply because they couldn't help it.

I ended up leaving Connecticut around 4:30 pm or so, and drove myself up to Sudbury for the evening. Hung out there until around 12:30 am. Good times. Jason is doing a great job.

Monday morning Julia and I had breakfast and coffee at Dado at 7:30 am. It was wicked relaxing. The work day went pretty fast, and I spent a good chunk of it trying track down some weird rendering bugs in one of our widgets.

In the evening after work, Julia and I ended up going to The Border Cafe for dinner and a margarita. Awesome.

Today was very similar to yesterday, except that I figured out the problems I was working on since yesterday, and we had smoothies in the evening at her place, rather than Tex-Mex.

I don't know how, but I am so full, and I need all that bolding and emphasis to convey to you the gravity of the smoothie currently nestled in every corner of my poor, yet delighted stomach.

Oof!

And now I should sleep.

Sunday morning run, #28

So my proposed running route, linked in previous post, and my actual route were pretty close.  I left out a small loop in the middle, but added a larger one at the end.  So... all told, I went 8.3 miles.

It ended up looking like this:

So, umm.  Yeah.

... YEAH!!!!

There, got that out of my system.  I found myself with energy to spare at the end, and as far as I can tell, I was only outside for approximately 60-70 minutes or so.  I think I must have left around 8:30 AM, stretched for a few, and got back into the house after a short walk at 9:45 AM.  Sounds good to me.  At worst, I was doing 8 min 30 second miles, but I'm fairly sure it was bit better than that, and I'm hoping it was sub 8.  That might be a stretch, though!

Material Girl

Tomorrow's proposed route:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=3803875

Just so I can remember.

Today, I got up at Mom and Dad's, had some breakfast, then helped Dad move Grandma's old TV into the back of the truck so we could take it to the dump.  The thing is massive.  After half an hour or so of wrangling, tying it to a dolly, strapping it on securely and wheeling it down steps, we got it in there and drove it over to le dump.

Once there, we saw that we had it easy.  There was an enormous 50" CRT TV, probably twice the size of Grandma's, sitting on a palette.  Crazy.  I think you'd need a forklift to move it.

After the dump, Dad and I went into his shop and took the pedals (or one, anyway) off my bike.  Unfortunately, we discovered that the clicking sound their making must be inside the pedal itself.  That being the case, I think I might just be getting some new pedals.  These ones are kinda cheap plastic anyway.

Around 2:00 PM I started getting myself together so I could come over to Chris and Aleksandra's.  I finally left around 3:00 PM after getting all my stuff back in the car.  The bike was a total pain, and I'm going to have to have a really good reason to transport it in the car again.  Augh.  

I stopped at Best Buy along the way and got Mom her birthday gift.  Woo!

Once here, I bummed around for a bit, ate some hummus (which I've been eating constantly all day), and played a smidge of guitar for a while.  Around 6:00 PM, we got ourselves together and went over to St. Thomas' for their evening Speakeasy.  Awesome.  Gin and tonics in church.

The time is now 10:30 PM, and we just got back a few minutes ago.  We played a lot of Canasta, and some other game called, "Oh, hell."  Good times.  And there was a bit of dancing, for which I wish I'd had certain company.  Mid-game, at one point, my brother stands up and says, "I'll be back, I have to go dance," and runs over and starts dancing to Material Girl with a bunch of kids.  I love that guy.

And now it's sleep time.  Run in the morning.  I've been thinking about it all day.

Isn't it a lovely night?

The hour is late, yet I'm still awake.

Just kinda bumming around Teh Internets, sitting in the guest room of my parents' house with the window open, listening to the crickets and Passion Pit, alternately.

Pretty much a beautiful night.

I woke up at 7:30 AM or so and got into work by 9:00 AM, which was great.  I think I've finally figured out how to ride a bike.  Yay, learning!  Just a little shifting here, a little shifty-shifterton there, and look, you're not working nearly as hard as you were a moment ago!  And you're going faster!  Amazing.

Work was mostly productive - we've gotten through the estimation phase and are actually getting into development at this point, I think.  The client is supposed to provide us with a bunch of documentation and such on Monday - after that we'll really be ready to roll.

I ended up leaving work today around 3:30 PM, biked myself home with my new skillz, packed myself up (including shoving my bike into the car), and headed towards Connecticut at 4:20 PM.  I hit some traffic trying to get out of the city, despite my trying to beat rush hour, and ended up getting to Oxford at... 6:50 PM or so.  Too late to get to Aleksandra's parents' house for dinner, but early enough to get to my parents' house before they got back from the former.

I think that sentence technically made sense.

I've been mostly catching up with Mom and Dad all evening.  Did two loads of laundry.  Talked to Dad about a bunch of book series I need to read, including a bunch of David Eddings stuff and the Foundation books.  He found all of the Foundation series except the first one, of course.  We can't figure out where that one is.  Here's hoping that Julia has it.

I think that it is perhaps time to sleep.  A full day awaits me tomorrow.

Hey, hey, hey, Thursd-d-d-day!

Work involved a lot of estimation. I got there at about 9:00 am. Like... Estimation pretty much the entire day. These things are usually pretty exhausting, and this time was no different.

At a little past 6:00 pm, Julia gave me a very welcome phone call, which got Mark and I out of the office, finally. She asked if I wanted to hit up the Cambridge Public Library, the prospect of which was pleasantly attractive to me, as I'd never been there before. It's wicked nice! Very modern.

After hanging out at the library for a bit, we walked ourselves to Harvard Square and had a pleasant dinner at Veggie Planet. Soup of the day, peanut curry, and Dinner for Henry were enjoyed.

After that, we hung out at Julia's for a bit, before I biked myself back home. Exhausted! Sleep time!

Spring Run #27 - Thursday.

Woke up this morning at 6:10 AM feeling quite tired.  Got outside by 6:35 when Julia showed up.  Started off thinking, mostly to the road, "I don't have a lot to give, but what I've got I'll give to you," feeling like I wasn't going to make it two miles, much less...

4.6 miles.  Whoah.  Here's the map:

Not bad for a day on which I was tired, sleepy, sick, and sore.  If I can do 4+ on a crap day, I should be all set for good days, right?  Woohoo!  It was really quiet out until the very end of the run up Mass. Ave.  A chilly (~55 degree), wet morning.  Lots of mist.

An efficient day.

After today's run, chronicled earlier, I got myself in to work by a round 9:00 am. The day proceeded along with a great deal of requirements definition, task breakdowns, and a lovely diagram of the request flow for the new application. Not bad. I left the office around 5:45 pm or so, right as it started lightly raining. Kinda annoying, as I was on my bike.

When I got home, Allie was waiting, so we went upstairs for a few, I grabbed a bite to eat quickly and gathered my stuff up, and we headed off to Jason and Kat's to carpool with Kat to Flamingham.

Practice tonight was pretty good! We played our usual songs, as well as this Clash tune. They didn't sound half bad. I need to figure out some different voicings for Ob-la-de Ob-la-da, cause what I am doing sounds like crap. Mostly cowboy chords.

Anyway, we left around 9:00 pm or so, Allie and I in my car, Kat hitching a ride home with Jason.

On our way back into Cambridge, Allie and I hit up Shaws for our respective vegetarian supplies. It was kinda funny how similar our grocery lists were.

After that, I came home, put my stuff away, listened to President Obama rap about the Gulf Oil spill, and now it's sleepy time.

Zonk.

Wednesday morning run

This morning's run was a respectable, yet weary, 3.2 miles.  Given that we just did 4.something last night, this doesn't surprise me too much.  Anyway, it was great to be up and about.  We started out from Julia's and did a nice river run:

Had a 1 mile bike ride on either end of the run to get to/from Julia's.

There.  A skeleton of wrywind.com lives.

Sleepyhead

Woke up kinda late today, got into work around 10:00 AM or so.

The morning involved a bunch of stuff on one of my new various new projects, figuring out what we were going to do, as well as some e-mailing with folks over at DW.  Lunch was pretty good - we called in some Tofu Yellow Curry over Brown Rice.  Yum.

The afternoon was fairly uneventful.  I eventually left the office a bit after 6:00 PM - Mr. Erik and I were the only ones there at that point.  I had a pleasant ride home through MIT's campus (Vassar Street) and along the river, getting home around 7:00 PM.

Once there, I tried to get the pedals off my bike.  I had little luck.  They're on there way too tight for my meager tools to undo.  I'm going to need to like... bring it home, or get somebody with a better tool set to help me out.

At 7:45 PM or so, Julia came over, and we went for a run.  It was approximately 4.3 miles.

It felt pretty good, though my knees were bugging me a little bit.  I think I've done a lot of running/biking the past few days.  Maybe just a tad worn out.  Speaking of which, I should get me to sleep.

First I should finish my whiskey.

Mmmm.  Whiskey.

I'm putting off reading A Game Of Thrones.  Once I start, I know I'll be reading the series for a few months.

I've also been listening to Passion Pit a lot lately.  Just picked up Manners today, and it seems pretty good.  Rockin'.

Last night Julia and I were talking about writing over dinner at Jose's.  I like the idea of having a site on which to post snippets of story.  I've always thought that was a cool idea, it was nice to have a little validation that it isn't a crazy notion.  (I don't know why it would be, but it was still nice.)  I'd like to hook that up.

Maybe it needs to go on the todo list.  Oh, yes.  The list.  Mmm.

Yeah, that's all I've got.

Event Awesome: The Seven Mile Run!

Whoah days.

Lets see...

Thursday.

I had a lesson Thursday!  I think.  Wait, no I didn't.  That got moved to Saturday morning.

Instead, on Thursday, I had dinner with my cousin Peter, his wife Kimberly, and their daughter Abby!  They live off in Oregon, and were in town for a weekend wedding for Kimberly's nephew, I think.  We had dinner at Grafton Street in/near Harvard Square.  I had a Sixpoint Bengali Tiger (IPA) and a pizza with wild mushrooms, rosemary, feta, and onions.  Both were delicious.  It was great catching up with them - sounds like things are going well out west.

Afterwards, I biked myself home and, as I recall, collapsed for the evening.

Friday involved hitting up a gathering at Julia's friend Ben's place down in Allston.  We met her friend Alix in Central Square, got some supplies (read: cheese and beer), dropped some stuff off at Julia's, got some more supplies (read: wine), and then took the 66 bus down to their place on the other side of the river.

There was a lady on the bus who kept yelling out "DEEEHH!" (which I originally, creepily, interpreted as "DEATH!" the first few times I heard it), at irregular intervals, sometimes five or six times in a row.  Loud.  The bus did its best to pretend she wasn't there.

Society is weird sometimes.

The party was a good time - it was a wine and cheese affair, with great varieties of both.  Cool group of people.  Pretty chill - we left around the time when they started le dance musik.  We all stood around and waited for the bus for around 30 minutes (or what felt like it), and then moseyed our way back to Harvard Square and crashed at Julia's place, all wine and cheesed up.  There was a craaaaaazy thunder storm during the night.

Saturday morning I was to have a guitar lesson at Dave's over in Brookline.  I got up, went outside, and discovered that someone had stolen the seat and stem off my bike.  Bastards.  My wheels were there, everyone else's bike seemed intact.  My wheels are even quick release.  Just my silly little seat was gone. What the hell!  It wasn't even expensive or something - it came with the bike.

People are weird sometimes.

So, grumbling to myself the whole way, I walked my bike back to my place, had a quick breakfast, and car'd my way over to Brookline for a lesson.  Dave and I talked about West Coast Blues some more, played it a bit, and it was time to go.  I helped him out and gave him a ride over to school.  It was graduation day.

After that, I recall taking a little nap and bumming around for a bit before going over to Jason's place around 2:00 PM or so, where we sat and talked about Ars for a while.  I'm handing off storyteller-ness of our campaign to him, so I told him all my secrets.  At 4:00 PM or so, Dave FR and Mike came over, and we all sat around and played Risk: GODSTORM.  (Capitalization added for emphasis.)  Fun Risk variant, though there were a few things that we weren't sure were particularly necessary, such as the underworld battle area thingy.

We played that for a few hours, and then I left around 8:00 PM or so and hung out with Julia for a while.  Great end to a great day.

Sunday morning, we went for our weekend long run of 7 miles.  SEVEN MILES!  YEAH!

I am happy with this.  

After the run, we took a walk from our ending spot to Central, took the train to Porter, and got some coffee at Cafe Zing.  It was awesome with lots of cream.

The next few hours involved my taking a shower, bumming around, and taking a bit of a nap from 4:30 to 6:00 PM or so.  Whew.

Then there was Ars!  Jason did a great job. 

There was no power out in Sudbury, so we rocked the whole evening by candlelight.  I think all tabletop RPGs should be done this way.

Then there was sleep, after the ride home.  I was exhausted.

Monday, today, was pretty good.  Did some more exploratory stuff at work, got a new, awesome coworker (Sam), and left by around 5:30 PM or so.  Moseyed my bikin' self over to Julia's school by 6:00 PM, and we took a pleasant river ride back to her place.  At 8:30 PM or so, we walked over to Jose's out in the neighborhood back there for some margarita, guacamole, and fine Mexican dining.

My roommate Eric just brought us Old Fashioneds.

A great evening.

Mundane Mond... Wednesday.

Woke up this morning for a 6:45 run, which went quite well. We ran from my place out to Fresh Pond, around said pond, and back to the corner of Concord and Walden. Similar to my weekend run, but with only one time around the pond. Rockin'.

After that, we hurried ourselves back to get on with our respective days. I got myself into work by around 9:00 am, thanks to my trusty bike.

My poor trusty bike is starting to make weird noises when I pedal. I'm not sure why, but it has nothing to do with the gears, but something to do with the pedals themselves. Weird. I'm going to try to investigate in the morning.

The rest of the work day went alright. Several weird meetings, and a lot of branding kit thought in the meantime.

After work, I biked home, squeaky clicking pedals and all, and got myself over to Jason and Kat's by 6:45 pm or so. Then we all piled in Kat's car and headed out to Mark's place for some music making. Did that until about 9:20 pm, when we went home.

Now I am sleepy and feeling mundane.

The beginning of the week

Yesterday (Monday!) involved a lot of being out and about in Boston.

I woke up around 8:15 AM, bummed around for a while, and set out around 10:15 AM and headed out to the South End to get brunch with everybody.  We went a place called Myers + Chang, which was awesome.  After brunch, which took until approximately 2:00 PM, we went to the North End for a bit, stopped in at Mike's Pastry for some gelato and the usual stuffage.

After that, I went home by about 6:00 PM.  Around 7:00 PM, I think, Julia called, and I wandered over there to hang out for the evening.

I slept really poorly last night, which was rough.  Kinda a bummer.  Surprisingly I wasn't that tired today.  I made it to work by around 10:00 AM or so, and left at 6:00 PM, after taking pretty much no time for lunch.  The day involved a lot of investigation on one of our older widgets to see if it could support some new use cases.  It... kinda... could.  At least, I can see how it would.  Ultimately.  So, well, yay.

Tonight's been pretty chill.  We're watching some movie about the perfect getaway or something.  Some couples in Hawaii.

That's... yeah, I'm about done.  Whew.

Bar bee queue num bar tue

Today involved a grand total of four things.  See if you can spot them in the post below!  Lesser things done whilst being exhausted don't count.

I woke up at 10:00 AM, puttered for a few minutes, and decided that I needed to get out, get running, and do my weekend long run.

The plan was to go for about 6 miles. I decided that this might best be accomplished with the aid of Fresh Pond. Whippin' out my Gmaps Pedometer, I figured out that from my apartment to Fresh Pond, twice around the pond, and back to my apartment was 6.7 miles. That seemed appropriate - if I couldn't make the whole thing, at least I'd be sure to get the six in.

So around 11:00 AM, after looking up said route and getting myself ready, I set out.

The first trip around the pond (and the preceding mile or so to get there) was fine. The second one started getting a tad rougher, but I made it. It wasn't wicked hot out or anything, but it was definitely warmer than I would have preferred. By the time I made it around the pond the second time, I'd seen a bunch of people multiple times on their way around. On the way back home, I made it as far as the corner of Concord and Walden. At that point, I was quite happy to be done.

After I got to the corner, I cooled down for a bit at the edge of St. Peter's Field/Park/Thing off of Walden.  Turns out I made it approximately 6.2 miles.  Not bad!  I got the whole six in!  I think this is officially the longest run I've ever done.  Next weekend I'd like to push it up to seven, perhaps.  I think I can do it.

This also gives me a sense of how the Boilermaker's going to go.  Julia and I signed up for it yesterday.  I think if I keep training towards it, it'll go fine, but ~9 miles or so feels like a stretch if they're like today's.  By the end of this one I was feeling pretty beat.  That may have something to do with having a good deal of alcohol yesterday, as well as the heat - I don't know.

Anyway.  The run was awesome, and I'm thrilled.

After I got home and cleaned myself up, I grabbed my bent-spoke wheel and wandered over to Ace Wheelworks.  They said they could fix it in 20 minutes or so, so I walked back to Cafe Zing and got myself some coffee, sat for a few, and then returned.

Turns out they didn't think I should actually do anything to the wheel.  The spoke isn't that bent, and the gentleman helping me out said that it'd probably be worse to unbalance the wheel to replace it than it would be to just leave it.

Replace it when it breaks, he said.

Okay then!

So I bought another tube and a patch kit, then went home and patched my other tire.

First patch!  And it seems to have worked!  (I'll find out for sure tomorrow morning, I imagine).  Getting the tire and tube back on the wheel proved to be an adventure without any tools.  I got it after a bit of a struggle, though.

After getting everything back together, I took Mr. Surly out to JFK Park for a celebratory ride, sat down under a tree, and finished Bird by Bird again.  What a great book.  It's very motivational, in its own weird way.  

Around 5:00 PM, whilst sitting under said tree, I decided maybe I should look up and see when Daniel's BBQ was supposed to start.

2:00 PM, said my e-mail.

Dah!

Picking myself up, I biked up to Somerville through Union Sq., around the mountain, and eventually found my way to Daniel's place.

Ahh, what sights, smells, and tastes awaited me!  What glorious fare!  What delightful desserts!  What pungent punch (read: sangria)!  Wonderful.  They always throw excellent parties.  I stuck around there until around 8:15 PM or so, when it started to get dark.  Then I biked myself down Highland Ave. back to Davis Square, backtracked, and shuffled into my apartment.

And then I promptly sat around going "Uuhhhh" for a while as a day full of activity finally caught up with me.

I played a little of some iPad MMO.  Not half bad.  Good interface.  Something something Legends.  Little Legends?  Happy Legends?  Neither is correct.  Something like that, though.

And now I'm going to pass the feck out.

Bee bee queue.

Today was Mike and Ria's barbeque. Yesterday was a tofu stir fry at La Casa del Wagner.

It makes me happy that I can define these days by the food that they included.

Yesterday was also Friday, which included a lunch at "Za" - a pizza and salad joint that recently moved into an apartment/condo building near our office. It is, unfortunately, rather mediocre. You'd think that a place might be able to do something creative with a mac and cheese pizza, but no, they did something completely tasteless instead. Bummer. I went there with Mike, Daniel, and Erik, and I think the only reason any of us were remotely happy was because one of the pizzas had goat cheese on it which gave it some salty flavor. Double bummer.

Julia and I also went for a run Friday morning, which was great. A little less than 4.5 mills, I think. Tomorrow I needa go for about a six mile run. Yum.

I didn't get to the bike shop today... Hoping to do that tomorrow morning.

Earlier today, we went kayaking on the Charles out by 128. It was great! Lillies and their pads everywhere, and minimal power boat traffic. Great!

We (Jason, Kat, Eric C and his friend Angela) also went to Target and Best Buy for all sorts owe stuff. I think I spent upwards of $160 on household stuff, a capo, running gear, and shaving equipment. Soooooo worth it.

Mike and Ria's party was great. Tons of people. So tired. So mostly tipsy.

Time to crash.

Sippin' on gin and... gin.

Today worked out pretty well. Got up at 6:30 AM, went for a run around 7:00 AM from Julia's.  Ran from my place to hers, ended up with about a 4.5 mile run, all told.

Got to work by around 9:30 PM, and had a fairly productive day with branding kits.  Finished off the rest of my Tofu Yellow Curry for lunch, which was delightful.  Around 3:00 PM or so, Mike, Mark, Eric and I (Hereafter known as The iPad Crew) took a trip to the mall to get coffee and wander briefly through the Apple store looking for various things.  I wanted to get a sleeve for my iPad so I can actually, like, take it somewhere without worrying about scratching it.

Alas, no decent case/sleeve was to be found.  Bummer.  At least, not for anything cheaper than $40, which is absurd.

The rest of the day went without incident, and I left around 5:30 PM or so.

I took the train back to Harvard Sq., and then walked up to Porter from there, reading Bird By Bird as I went.  It was a great walk - very pleasant!

Upon arriving home, I went into cleaning mode after a quick snack-o-dinner.  I put away all the dishes, put away my clean clothes, and sorted, trashed, and filed every single piece of paper in my possession.  That last one feels spectacular.  Normally I end up with a stack somewhere... not this time!  Bwaha.

Ahem.

Since then, I've kinda been hanging out, playing a bit of Warpgate, mentally preparing myself for tomorrow.

Which, I think, I'm going to go physically prepare myself for by going to sleep.

All together now! (All together now!)

I want my bike back! I just haven't had time to go get a patching kit yet.

Needless to say, I took the train to work today. On the way, I stopped in Central to cancel my BSC membership, finally. After that, i stopped into Carberry's for some coffee, which was delicious. Work ran a bit long with a short lunch - just how I like it. I ended up leaving around 6:30 pm or so. By the time I got home, Jason, Kat and Allie were all waiting for me at my apartment. Music night!

We played a few songs (All Together Now and some Clash tune) before deciding to call it quits cause it was crazy hot. My downstairs neighbor banged on the ceiling once.
I don't like those people. At some point, we were all like, "What's that smell?!" We turned off the amps and started sniffing tinges to see what was burning. ... Turns out it was the living room TV. Doh! Poor thing went "Poof!" and died.

Julia showed up around 9:30 after what sounded like a long day. She's currently taking a bit of a nap. I think that's about it for this Wednesday.

Oh. And it was Eric M's last day. Major bummer.

Nine Twenty-Five, Press Return

Yesterday was your average sort of between-projects sorta day at work. Lots of jumping from thing to thing, trying to get a few other things done in the meantime.

After work, we went for a run down to Harvard and back up Oxford. It was wicked hot. I've run in hotter, but this was, I think, our first like... 80+ degree run of the year, and I was feeling it. Somewhere close to Porter I dropped my pace a little. Bummer. But that's okay, there'll be more runs.

The wanderlust has been returning the past few weeks, I've noticed. It seems for most of the last year or so, I was very content with my current situation and activities. Maybe it's the end of the school year, but I find myself thinking about all the things I could be doing again.  It's an exciting feeling as always, but it's also concerning. It's distracting, and generally, there's little to be done for it.

Maybe it's just summer - I don't know.  I think I probably need some sort of absurd vacation that'll remind me why I'm doing what I'm doing.

That's all I got!

Pretty standard day.

Got in to work at about 9:30 AM. I brought my guitar with me, which I got a chance to play around lunch time out on the roof deck. Lots of people out there at lunch - was a good time!

Around 6:00 PM I left work and headed home. Called my parents on my way back. Mom was out, but I had a nice chat with Dad for a while. After said chat, I drove myself over to Jason and Kat's for the evening. We had pizza from Thyago's, talked about jobs, played iPad games, watched some Dr. Who, and generally relaxed. Nice.

And now I'm back here. Fan in the window. It's been a pretty nice night.

Whoah, Mt. Holyoke.

Huh, last post was Tuesday. Crazy.  That's sorta unexpected.

Lets see what I can remember.

I don't have much for Wednesday left in my brain.  I seem to recall most days last week leading up to this weekend's trip out to Western Massachusetts for Mt. Holyoke's reunions/graduation proceedings.  On Thursday, Jason came to interview here at work, which was fun.  Afterwards, he and I raced back to my apartment - he in his car, me on my bike.  I won by a few minutes, which was pretty gratifying.  Unfortunately, it seems that I blew out my back tire in the process.  I woke up Friday morning to find my front tire with a bent spoke (which happened, I think, prior to the race), and my back tire completely flat.  Bummer.  I need to make it out to Ace or somewhere to get a new tube.

After the wee little race, Jason and I went out to dinner with Kat and Eric Fields (I almost beat her to my apartment too).  We had some tastiness at Christopher's.  After that, around 9:00 PM, I hurried out of the place and hitched the Red/Green lines down to Fenway to meet Julia at the House of Blues for drinks with some of her MHC friends.  A good time was had by all.

Friday was mostly an exercise in waiting for the weekend and trying to get all sorts of things done.  It, unfortunately, did not involve biking to work.  Booo.  Jules and I went... somewhere... that night.  OH!  Right!  We went to a play put on by the kids at her school.  Tumbleweed.  It was probably the best school production I've ever seen - they did a great job.  We also had a brief adventure through Trader Joe's.

Saturday morning I bummed around for a few, packing up some things to bring with me to Western Mass.  Meanwhile, Julia was out at another kiddo's soccer game.  Around 1:00 PM, we got in the car, drove through Watertown, and got onto Interstate 90W.  After a pleasant drive, we arrived at my cousin Shauna's place around 2:30 PM or so, and chatted with her briefly before heading down to MHC's campus for the afternoon.  We walked along the horse/running trails, took a tour of the campus, saw a bunch of friends and acquaintances, and generally took in the whole experience.  The evening saw us at the Hangar for a drink with a bunch of her teammates from track/cross country, after which the two of us went to Basta e Pasta in... Amherst... for dinner.  Which was quite good.  And then there was ice cream.

There's always room for ice cream.

Sunday morning we got up, Julia went down to graduation, and I hung out with Shauna, Yem, and the kids for a bit.  It was cool - I got to teach them a bit of guitar stuff.  I need to ask Dave what the most effective thing to try teaching a nine year old is.

Around 12:30 PM I walked from Shauna's down to MHC and met Julia at the top of the amphitheater.  We wandered around for a bit meeting/congratulating people before heading back to Shauna's for lunch.

A bit later, we said our goodbyes and went on our way.  We decided to take route 2 back, instead of 90. Good choice, kids.

Route 2 was much more pleasant.  On the way, we stopped at Mt. Skinner, drove to the top, looked around at the world, and went on our way.  Then we saw a rainbow, chased it (in the car), found Mt. Sugarloaf, drove to the top, and once again checked out the world.  Hey, world.

The rainbow was still there.

Sooner or later, we found our way back to Boston.

It was a great weekend.

This is a post on an iPad. Booyah.

Today began around 7:00 AM. I got myself together around 8:30 or so, maybe a little later. I had a lovely bike ride into work - I decided to take Cambridge Street in, which is becoming my new go-to route. The work day was pretty good, if somewhat fragmented. I feel like I worked on four different things. I probably did work on four different things.

After work, I rode down to the river and decided to head home that way. I stopped briefly at Julia's school to see if she was still around (I later found out she wasn't). After which I moseyed my way back towards West Cambridge. Somewhere around Harvard Sq. I decided it'd be easier to coordinate the evening with Julia in person, rather than over the phone from my place, so I stopped in to say hello. We agreed that a run would be a great idea, that the Pressure Cooker concert wasn't going to happen, and that we both really needed to get food from the grocery store.

So all that happened.

We went for what was probably a four mile run, after which we took a little trip to Shaws for some food. I'm thrilled! Food again! Finally!

And then we came here and ate it all. Or, well, a reasonable amount.

And that's about it. Whew. Made it through - it's not terrible typing on this, but it ain't easy either.

Common trend lately.

Long, crazy couple of days.

Friday.

Right.

The highlights of Friday involved a lot of studying for jazz related things. As I recall. OH.

And I got my iPad that day, and took a long ride home along the river. Hung out with Julia in the evening. I recall that it was raining a lot. Yeeeees.

Saturday morning I got up at 6:30 AM so I could get over to NEC by 9:00 AM. Arrived 15 minutes early, which was perfect.

Found my room (356) in Jordan Hall, got in before anyone else, and greeted all the instructors as they filed in. Spent a few minutes making sure all the evaluation spreadsheets were working, and then we got into it. Played my two things with Joel and a gentleman on drums whose name I didn't catch. Joel was playing bass. There were three others in the room who were kind enough to give me their comments.

I didn't really get to do the chordal parts. Just the soloing. This was probably easier on me. Meh. But... not quite as planned.

After my evaluation, I walked around to the other two rooms and made sure everything was going smoothly. It was like 9:20 AM.

I then left, got on the #1 bus, and took it back to Harvard Sq., where I met Julia at Dado. We got some coffee and breakfasty foods, (her: scone, me: bagel + apple).

We ended up at her place for a few, I took a nap, and then around noon we walked to my place, got in my car, and drove down to South Bay St. in Boston to the food bank, and hung out there volunteering until 3:30 PM. Afterward, we hung out with some Mt. Holyoke people in the volunteer room, and then drove ourselves back. We hung out at my place for a few, and then walked to Porter and took the T to Broadway and walked out into Southie to go to a gallery opening. LaMontagne Gallery. It was an opening for a friend of hers, Monica. We found Eric Fields and Brian Kane there, chatted, drank some PBR, and then hitched a ride with them back to Cambridge.

Then, we quickly went to Shaws for some habaneros and jalapenos. And then to the liquor store for gin and beer.

And then we walked back to my place, got in the car, and drove to Jason and Kat's in Watertown, where we proceeded to watch Up (spectacular movie!), have nachos, and drink beer. Awesome.

We ended up going home around 11:00 PM, I think.

Sunday morning we met Jason, Katherine, Justin, Ali, and Jamie at the Deluxe Town Diner for brunch around 11:20 AM. It was delightful and delicious. I had an omelet and a single flapjack. And some hash browns. And some rye toast. And awesome coffee.

After that, I took Julia home and proceeded to clean my room(s) for the next five hours until around 6:00 PM. I rearranged my bedroom. I thoroughly vacuumed everything. I organized my magic cards. I made the whole place make more sense.

Champ.

Around 6:30 or so, Julia and I went to Danehy Park out back a block or two from my apartment, sat on a blanket, ate chips and hummus, and hung out until just after sundown, watching the sky turn red across the track and football field in the park. Niiiiiiice.

After that, we went to Jose's for guacamole and margaritas. At some point thereafter, we walked back to my place, chatted with Eric, Travis, and his wife about piercings, and then it became sleep time.

This morning, I woke up at a decent time and took the T in to work. The day was pretty straightforward. Learning about all my new projects (of which there are several). Trying to finish up my filter logic parsing thingy. Got some excellent help from Daniel, who was kind enough to improve it for me. I love code reviews. Things are always just better afterwards. Such a great idea.

After work, I went off to NEC.

Oh, and I spent some time studying for my Jazz Theory exam here and there during the day.

The quiz went okay... not quite as good as I might have hoped. It's difficult recognizing common jazz patterns in eight random bars of the form. Crazy.

After class, I took the #1 bus back to Harvard Square. It took 35 minutes (!!!!!). I think I need to start taking the bus, rather than the Green/Red lines.

From Harvard I wandered over to Julia's, and she was kind enough to let me share her dinner while we watched Wall-E. And that, as they say, is that.

Weekend over.

Class (basically) over.

Day basically over.

Stress basically over.

Bring on summer!

I've been reading Bird by Bird again. It really makes me want to get back to writing. Kinda can't wait. Now I just need to block off some time.

Goodnight, world!