I hate moving. Not as much as some people I know, but I doubt I will ever move myself again. It’s just too much time and effort; you don’t want to burden any of your friends by asking them to help, but when you do they always “help” with like one load and then suddenly disappear. And you can’t be mad because why would anyone want to voluntarily move someone else?
But in the end you end up in a sweet new townhome.
Pete, Mike, Els and I are living over by Agnes Scott now in a 4 bedroom townhome. I’m pretty much dead right now so I’m going to sleep, but I’ll put up some pictures of the place tomorrow or the next day.
Please don’t judge the messiness, it won’t be close to set up yet.
Also, I’d say running the Peachtree Road Race this Friday is a 50/50 proposition right now. I hurt my left heel about a week ago, and any time I bend my foot up and put pressure on it (think calf stretch) it has a sudden sharp burning pain. Not enough to make running impossible, but enough for me to think it’s probably not the best idea.
I’m going to complain for a while, so be prepared.
Woke up in a bad mood today for reasons that I thought were already over. Had to keep myself from making a mistake I would’ve regretted for months all day. Got a phone call on the way to work that the supervisor was going to be late so I had to play both roles early on. Then the clock hit 6:45 am.
We were supposed to start moving in to a new building today, which is a process expected to take until Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. Well, someone didn’t sign the lease, so we got kicked out. And we got told that we’d be lucky to get anything started before Thursday. But we still have to get everything moved before start of business on Monday. While remaining fully operational.
Our driver called in sick, but really didn’t; he just didn’t show up. So we had to scramble to get trucks moved to the main warehouse, and ended up still having 3 trucks to ship at 3pm. The new driver picked up the 2nd truck at 5pm and we told him to get back here as soon as possible so we can close up.
7pm, no driver. 7:30, no driver. Call him, he’s at Home Depot (what…the…hell) saying he thought he was done. Call his supervisor to get him to come back. He says we’ll have a driver in 30 minutes. 8:10, no driver. Call him, he’s on his way to the main warehouse, not the overflow. Sigh. 9 o’clock, we finally get out him out of there and I can lock it up.
And as the ultimate kicker, all I had wanted to do all day was go home and run. Had the driver showed up on time, it would’ve been perfect. I could’ve gone running as it was just turning to dusk, which is the BEST time to run.
Instead, I got home at 9:30 and did a quick and hilly couple miles in the dark out of spite for the day. It was worth it though.
I need to find something big to motivate me. I’m doing a lot more stuff than I ever used to. Learning about photography, learning programming languages, running and working out regularly, hanging out with friends more often; but without some goal to shoot for right now it’s not making me feel any better. I’m going to spend some time over the next couple days coming up with some goal that, succeed or fail, will keep me occupied for a while until school starts again.
Also, since I’m in a glum mood, here’s one of the saddest songs I listen to regularly. It’s 2002 by Bob Schneider. I guess it’s noteworthy that he wrote this song in 1999 as kind of a way he saw himself in 3 years.
-Those are the results from my first practice GMAT. I filled in the percentiles with the data in the back of “The Official Guide for GMAT Review” book that the testing company puts out. The numbers are based on all 600-something thousand tests taken from June 2003 through June 2006. Umm, yeah, can I just stop now and take those please? Thanks.
-I’m about to go back to my old company to see about letters of recommendation and, rumor has it, they want to offer me a job. However, I don’t think they know I’m planning on going back to school next fall, so we’ll see what happens.
-Three get togethers for me this weekend. First, early Friday night, it’s Ross, Jena, Bill, and a host of other people who play poker. Later on Friday it’s cheap wine party at Katie P and Nikki’s place (picture above). Depending on how intense Friday night is, I might do a 5k on Saturday morning that Cuz just told me about for Creative Loafing. I’ll have to decide if a tee shirt is worth $25. Starting Saturday in the late morning, though, is college football day at Betsy, Erin, and Sims’ place. Tech and Maryland play at noon, UGA/UT at 3:30 (along with Texas/Oklahoma), and then Florida and LSU bring it home after a dinner break at 8:28.
-Saw 17th Floor recently at Tavern. Awesome show, although they kept repping UGA when they were 4 miles from GT’s campus in a bar filled with GT students, so that was uncool.
-I just finished a job recently that should give me some money so, if that all works out, I’m going to buy the membership on Flickr so I can put up all my photos there. Some of them are on facebook now, and some of them are here, but I want one place that I can have them all, and that seems like the best option.
- God help me, but I’m ready for the Joey Harrington era.
- GT football’s over/under for wins is 7? Really? I’d like the over please.
- Running in Atlanta in July sucks no matter what time you try to schedule it. It’s like running through a cloud of heat.
- I honest to God put together those MLS stats I talked about, but now they’re out of date so I have to do it again. Also, it involves a lot of number crunching right now which I’m trying to automate with better database queries. I will make a page for them soon though, promise.
- Ratatouille is the highest ranked movie of 2007 on Rotten Tomatoes. I wanted to see it to begin with, but now I pretty much have to.
- I want to learn how to cook Thai food. Please show me good recipes.
I ran with Ben and Mike, but we lost Mike at right around the 3 mile mark about halfway through Cardiac Hill when his calf cramped up pretty bad.. Ben and I finished in about 63 minutes, which I was happy with considering we started in group 8 so we had to deal with a lot of slow people and walkers, and I hadn’t kept up with my training since about mid-April.  Mike came in about 4 minutes later, so he actually recovered pretty well.
Overall I had a lot of fun and felt good for the entire race. My shirt and shoes definitely got heavy from all the water so that hurt my time, but it felt a lot better being wet, heavy, and cool than it would’ve being dry and hot. This was only the 2nd time I’ve ever run a 10k distance in any capacity, so I was happy with how everything went. I never felt like I needed to stop or that I wouldn’t finish which is something I was worried about. I’m not good at running when my mind starts to give up.
The whole event was run very well. There was plenty of water all throughout the course despite some 50,000 people running, and everything was well marked. Also, since it’s a relatively short race, there were great crowds almost the entire length of the course. In fact, the only time I can remember not having people lining both sides of the street was on the bridge over the connector.
Jen came in (unofficially) at 44:46 (43:53 chip time) and placed 88th in the women’s open. Her 10k PR was 38:54 and she was hoping to run 5 minutes off that, so she did pretty damn well.
I spent way too much time at work this past week doing basically nothing. I have to wait until the very last person leaves because only I have a code for the alarm system, and that usually means finishing up work at about 4:30, and then sitting around until 6 before the last guy leaves. Tomorrow we should be zoning off the warhouse though with different alarm systems so I can start leaving early again. That will be very nice.
In other news, I am running the Peachtree on Wednesday. Mike got us numbers in the 5 group, but we’ll probably go back to the 8s so we can run with Ben. I use the term “run” loosely though because I have declined a lot from when I was running every day back in March. It started with that whole hospital trip and then being out of commission for a week, and then compounded with me being lazy again. Oh well, we’ll see how it goes. Jen managed to get a seeded number in the 1B group, and will be running as Marcia Ammons so keep an eye out for her. I have no idea what name I’m running under, but it won’t matter because there is no way we will be fast enough to finish with our times in the paper.
This weekend is the first trip out to LA to look at apartments. We’ve been using westsiderentals a lot on the recommendations of other LA residents, and will be setting appointments to look at the apartments this week. Hopefully everything goes well because this is pretty much a two day trip that will decide where we live for at least the next year.
In an effort to do something interesting I’m going to be trying to learn some web programming stuff. I know some php and a decent bit of MySQL thanks to those awesome school projects I had to do, but I’d like to learn more. I’m especially interested in the stuff like being able to upload files to websites, and create “comments” sections for different things. Expect to see some sample pages you can mess around on in the next few weeks.
I’m also reading up on CSS, which is apparently pretty easy if you have any other experience programming and using HTML. From what I can gather, you basically create classes with certain attributes and then assign certain text to whatever class it should be. The last thing I’m trying to learn is Ajax which seems to have some pretty cool aspects that I’ll talk about later if I can actually pull them off. Stuff like dragging and dropping icons on a website like you can in Windows.
Completely unrelated (I’m trying to kill time before Sopranos), I played a Razz tournament yesterday and it sucked my soul. I wish I could play just limit Razz without having to play a tournament or 4 other games on a HORSE table.
Also, I may be moving to LA soon. Details to come on that tomorrow. (See what I did there, suspense).
Well, I missed the game on Saturday because I was out looking at condos with Jen and her family but my MLS rooting interest finally won a game. Toronto FC beat the Chicago Fire 3-1 at home and it looks like a great game to have seen. I was lucky enough to catch some of the action when they replayed the match at 11pm Saturday night on FSC, but the video highlights are still up here.
The stadium was packed again with 20,000 people going insane for the whole match. The game came to a stop after each of the goals TFC scored as the complimentary seat cushions given to fans started to rain down on the field.
Hopefully the rest of the league takes note that this is what a crowd should be and hopefully these fans are rewarded with more performances like this throughout the season.
Also, I’m almost finished uploading all the pictures to Flickr, at which point I will just change where the link on the title bar goes to. It sucks that Flickr does such a good job of reeling you in with the “sets” feature and then springs it on you that you have to pay for an upgraded account to have more than 3 of them. It almost hooked me on the $25 upgrade though, so I guess good job out of them.
I haven’t done nearly as well keeping up with the pace I set last month, but I am still running. In fact, last weekend I went up to Kennesaw Park with Jen and ran 7 miles in just over 70 minutes (70:07 to be exact). Not bad considering it’s all trails, there’s a lot of jumping over roots, and I’d never run further than 5 miles in my life. Jen had enough of running with me, so we actually ran separately and she did just over 11 miles in 90 minutes.
My check still hasn’t been cashed by the Peachtree Road Race people, so I don’t think I got a number. That sucks, but I’ll just go online and buy one either on eBay or craigslist as the time gets closer. I’m starting to rethink my 60 minute goal and will be training to do a decent bit better. No new goal yet because I have no idea what kind of times I can expect to run, but we’ll see.
I ran 2 miles today in about 17:50, which is almost certainly a faster pace than I will be able to sustain for the 10k unless I’m severely underestimating what training can do. I was pretty happy with that time since I was aiming for 18 minutes, but I know that I hurt myself by going out too fast. I’ll learn to pace myself though and that will make a huge difference. Of course, the fact that I’d run maybe twice in the past week hurt too I’m sure.
I’ll try to update my running progress more often since it seems like I’m running a lot less when I don’t have the blog to keep me in check. Hopefully that doesn’t bore the 3 people who actually read it or the 15 or so people per month who manage to find it by searching “brother sister sex” on google. I don’t still have the screenshot of this stat from my CPanel, but I can tell you that it was this picture that was responsible:
It’s over. I’m already one beer in and that numbers about to go up. Unfortunately I need to do laundry, and without anything here I’m going to need to come up with something. That probably means I’m going over to someone’s house and giving them beer to let me wash my clothes.
Whatever, I don’t even care. Go Hoyas, secure me some money.
