Room by Room pt 3

Continuing our tour through our new house, today we're looking at:

ANOTHER TRIPLE FEATURE -- Upstairs Bathroom / Main Floor Bathroom / Downstairs SpiderRoom Bathroom

Who wants to talk about bathrooms?  If you raised your hand, it might have to ask you to please leave my blog and never return.  They're a necessary part of the house, for sure.  And we spend more time there than we probably realize.  Plus, our house has 4 of them.  Yes, when we get home from a long road trip, we can all run to the bathroom at the same time!  If that's not living it up, I don't know what is.  I've covered the master bath, so today we'll cover the other 3.

The upstairs bathroom is doomed to a life of elastic bands and blonde hair all over the floor.  This bath has the only bathtub in the house, and a fair amount of drawers and storage space.  (Like hot sauce and winter weather, descriptions of the size of storage space has as much to do with what you're used to as it does with what you have.)  There is some potential dead space in the back behind the tub that has been utilized with some glass shelves that go from wall to wall (it's only 2 feet or so) which is a nice use of space.  The mirror is big and nice, and the lights dim, so you can set the right mood for forcing your children to brush their teeth.

One thing that the previous owners apparently didn't believe in is toilet paper roll holders.  Neither this bathroom, nor the one on the main floor had one until this morning.  While willing to leave the TP homeless and left to a nomadic life sitting on the counter (not entirely fair from me here; the previous owners had a free-standing TP holder) the bathroom does have a very important blow dryer holster mounted to the wall.  I'm not sure why suspending the blow dryer 3 inches above the counter is better than setting it down, but surely there must be a reason.  The hook total keeps climbing in this room, with 6 mounted on the back of the door for towels and whatnot. 

The main floor bath is just a little half bath which hides behind a pocket door.  I don't know what, it is about pocket doors, but I've always liked them.  This bathroom has a medicine cabinet as well as a small wall-mounted shelf, which helps make up for the fact that there is no enclosed storage underneath the sink.  Whatever you put down there the whole world has to look at.

I really like the water-pump style faucet.  We need more reading material in there, because I can tell you that the paint job is mediocre.  All the bathrooms in the house are equipped with exhaust fans, but this bathroom has one with an additional built in light!  Oooooh!

In our first trip to the basement on the tour, we'll take a look at the oft-forgotten 4th bathroom. (I imagine this tour being done in the style of "Clue" (the movie) with us all running from room to room in whatever random order I'm choosing for this tour.)  This bathroom has a shower and is fully functional, though clearly not all that nice.  But, it does have a TP holder, and a hook for a towel.

I have yet to use the facilities down here, and in the month we've been in the home we've probably only used it once or twice.  I've found a few spiders down here, which isn't surprising, and doesn't make me want to start making any regular visits.  The purpose of this bathroom is just to save us from an accident when some kid is playing downstairs too long and suddenly realizes that they've got to go RIGHT NOW.  In a few more years, I'm sure there will be some sleepovers down there, and we'll be able to lock the kids down there and hopefully not hear from them all night long.

Best thing: The faucet in the main floor bath just manages to beat out the pocket door.

Worst thing: Spiders!

Room by Room, pt 2

Continuing our tour through our new house, today we're looking at:

 

TRIPLE FEATURE -- Ella's Room / Julia's Room / Green Room !!!!

My attention span is way too short to go through one room at a time.  And besides, bedrooms are kinda boring.  4 walls, a door and a closet.  But, here we go:

The Green Room wasn't just named so because it was our staging room while working on our master bedroom.  It's also really green.  With, of course, the blue, yellow and red stripes down at the bottom.  The room makes me feel like I'm inside a Crayola box.  It's easily the biggest of the other three bedrooms, but has the most glaring downsides, which are the color, the very small closet (only about 4 feet wide), and the world's worst curtains.  Seriously, they're yellow, barely opaque at all, and remind me of making curtains out of a low quality used Jr. Jazz jersey.  But other than that, the room is great!  The room is currently empty, because we really don't need it right now.  Someday we'll either have some guests to make use of it, or perhaps another kid.  We don't have any furniture to go in there, so for now it stays empty.

 

Julia's room is the most boring of the rooms.  White walls, regular closet and non-hideous curtains.  She was very excited about the pink light switch cover, though, which was her main reasoning for picking the room.  With both girls we haven't worried about the quality or color of the paint on the walls because I don't think we'll ever be seeing it much.  Julia has already done a pretty good job of getting her artwork up on the walls.  I'm sure Ella won't be far behind.  As we now have a basement where girls can play and toys can be messy, we're trying to strike a balance between toys and messes in their rooms vs the basement.  Evidently Julia still prefers her room for cutting pieces of paper into confetti.  The girls also got to pick rugs out for their bedrooms.  Julia very specifically wanted something pink and fuzzy.  We went to 5 or 6 stores before finding this one, which didn't quite put her into over-the-top euphoria, but at least made her happy.  (She wanted an oval rug.)

 

Ella's room is very much like Julia's.  It's square, same closet, blue and grey walls (very masculine) and ok-sized, but not huge.  It came with a move-in surprise, however: the hanging chair!  This has been a big hit with both the girls from the very beginning.  We weren't expecting it to come with the house, but it did, and we're ok with that.  I've been very diligent about reminding everyone that it is a chair, not a swing, even to the point of correcting people if they don't call it a chair.  (They're all probably getting tired of that.)  Amazingly, Julia hasn't thrown any fits over the fact that the chair is in Ella's room and not hers.  She hasn't demanded her own chair, either.  All I can think of is that she considers the chair and the pink light switch cover a fair trade.  No complaints from her means no complaints from me.

 

Best thing: The swing chair.

 

Worst thing: The terrible yellow curtains.  But since those are so easily thrown away and replaced, I'll change my vote to the very small closet in the Green Room.  If anyone ever lives in there, they might complain about that, particularly if they're a teen-age girl.

Room by Room

About a month ago, we moved out of our apartment and into a house.  As both of our blogs went almost completely dark.  (Not that my blog isn't prone to doing that from time to time anyway.)  As virtually all readers of my blog live far away from here, and realistically will never come visit, I figured I'd give a tour of our home, one room at a time.  We gave Shannon's parents a skype-tour by carrying the laptop around the house, but you'll have to ask them if it was useful, or just nauseating.

We start the tour with: the Master Bedroom

We're heading straight to my bedroom, because it's already had a partial unveiling on facebook.  This room is the only one that required work before we could move in.  Yes, a purple paint job (with bronze/copper by the windows!) moved the room into the "requires work" category.  I think a picture is in order so you can appreciate what we had to work with:

Because we've got 4 bedrooms, Shannon and lived in the Green Room (pun intended) until the master could be repainted.  Together, Shannon and I had zero prior painting experience.  But, armed with videos from the internet, advice from Home Depot employees and the firm knowledge that it can't get worse than purple, we painted our room gray ("Manhattan Mist") with white trim, to match the already white baseboards.  Before I allow anyone into my bedroom, I think I'll make them sign a waiver to never closely inspect the paint job.  It's not perfect, but so long as I keep the photos sufficiently small on my blog, it looks pretty good.

The room is 12'x15' or so, with the two window bump-outs.  On one side of the room we have a walk-in closet which is probably about 4'x10'.  It's sufficient for our needs, and thankfully not purple.  On the other side of the room is the master bath.  The shower is a bit on the small side, but everything works, and we've got a total of eight electrical outlets.  Let's see . . . curling iron, straightening iron, blow dryer, electric razor, air freshener, electric toothbrush (x2) and . . . I can't even think of an 8th thing to plug in.  Suggestions?  (Christmas present opportunities?)  Not that we even own half the things I listed, or regularly use those that we do have.  For the record, I'm not sure if all 8 are on one circuit.  They're all next to each other, so I assume they are, in which case you may not be able to run all those things at once anyway.  Two recurring things I'll be highlighting on our tour are dimmer switches and hooks.  We have at least 11 dimmer switches, and close to 40 hooks.  (I'm not sure of the number, but we'll all know by the time we're done.)  Our bedroom and bathroom both have dimmer switches.  I guess it's nice to set the amount of light in my bedroom and bathroom at just the levels I want.  The bathroom has 6 hooks for towels and robes and whatnot, and 4 hooks in the closet.  Flooring in all the bedrooms is laminate (looks like wood).

A final note about this tour: I'm putting in lots of pictures, and they'll show the house as it was when I decided to take the pictures.  I'm not cleaning up for you guys!  A lot of the walls are still bare, and things are dirty, and I don't care!

Favorite thing about the room: That it's no longer purple.  Also, the bathroom is plenty big for storing our stuff in the various drawers and cabinets, with room for collecting dirty clothes, too.

Least favorite thing: The small shower.  This could be partially solved by re-working the shower head so it doesn't stick so far out into the shower space.

Non-periodic Self Locomotion Update

I can't begin to call this "monthly" these days.  But here's an update:

Miles complete as of 11/4/12: 883.25
Progress vs target: +38.99 miles

The chart below shows how we've done over the whole year.  Up is bad, down is good.  August we did well (96.3 miles) followed by a weak September (74.2 miles).  We gave up a lot of our gains and peaked at just 15 miles ahead of pace near the end of the month.  With fall and then winter still ahead of us, I was a bit worried about our prospects of churning out high mileage months as the weather worsened.  The solution?  Call in Grammie and Opa!  Shannon's parents came for a week or so at the beginning of October, and we turned into self locomoting fiends!  We logged nearly 28 miles in a 5 day stretch.  G&O like walking, so they went out nearly every day with Shannon and the girls (and the girls were much more excited to go on walks if G&O were going too!).  Then in the evening or the weekend, it was a lot easier for me to get out and go running knowing that G&O could play with the girls while Shannon was making dinner or something like that.  So, basically, the trick to having more time to exercise is to have two people at your house full time to take care of your kids!  Who knew?!?!  October ended with 102.1 miles, our second highest month of the year.  (And it was nice to break 100 after June, July and August all ended between 95 and 100.)

As a result, we're feeling much more optimistic about reaching 1,000 miles for the year than we did a month ago.  We need 2.05 miles per day in order to get there.  With only 116.75 miles remaining, I figure we're a virtual lock to get within 30 or 40 miles of our goal, and if we get that close, we won't miss it, because in the closing weeks of the year, we'd start doing crazy death marches through the snow rather then end up at 984 miles for the year or something like that.

It's also interesting to note that the girls are at a combined 68 miles right now.  The likelihood of us topping 1,068 is very low, which means that you could argue that it will be the girls that put us "over the top".  It's fun to see that, because at the beginning of the year we talked about this being a family goal.  If I had gone out and run 1,000 miles by myself this year, that would have been pretty awesome and all, but it wouldn't make this much of a family accomplishment.

And finally, our goal of 1,000 continues to look like a very good goal, despite the fact that we just sorta picked a nice round number.  Without the goal, I don't think we'd have nearly as many miles logged this year.  (Well, we wouldn't have created a log at all, but you know what I mean.)  It's probably added two or three hundred miles to our total.  The fact that we're just barely meeting it is interesting.  Are we capable of more, if we had a tougher goal?  What number do we pick for next year?  (The girls are less and less excited to take walks with each passing month.)

Allergy Update

My family likes to be allergic to things.  It's sort of a past time for us.  We're all allergic to those "normal" things: dogs, cats, horses, things that pollinate.  You know, the usual.  My oldest sister seems to have won the "normal" allergy lottery.  As near as I can tell she is allergic to every plant on earth.  While that's certainly no fun for her, I think it's generally manageable, and certainly easy for people to understand.

My 3rd sister, she's the one that got lucky in the "deadly allergy" category.  She's allergic to aspirin.  (Or, as the people who made her medical alert bracelet like to call it: "aspirn".  The last time she took aspirin, it landed her in the emergency room, and, from what I understand, that wasn't any fun.  So, I guess she gets to live her life reminding her family and close friends that she has a serious allergy that medical professionals would need to be aware of, and she needs to check medications carefully to see if they have aspirin (or aspirin-like) substances in them.  I get the impression that includes more drugs than you'd think.

If you're wondering about sister #2, she seems to have avoided the worst of the allergy-curse, but she did get Dad's crazy eye condition.  I'd like to thank her for diving on that genetic hand grenade in order to save the rest of us.

So, this clearly brings us to me.  I've documented before about my allergies to various foods: peas, kiwi, fish, refried beans, canned chili, and garbanzo beans.  (Pretty much, I'm wary of all beans these days.  Black beans seem to be holding out, which seems to make some sense, since I ate them every day for 2 consecutive years and all . . . but I keep waiting for those to join their beany friends on the list of foods trying to kill me.)  As I've progressed through my 20s (and into my 30s), the slowly increasing list of food allergies has been partially offset by decreasing allergies in the "classic" category.  Dogs and cats aren't instant disasters of red, puffy eyes and runny noses anymore.  And I haven't dealt with seasonal allergies for years.  I can say all of this without feeling a need to "knock on wood," because life keeps finding other things to keep me all histamined-up.

As of this week, I am apparently allergic to . . . . drum roll please . . . . exercise!  Ta da!  Now, I'm sure the majority of you are already clicking on that comment button to make a joke ("OMG! I'm so allergic, too!") I want both of you to hold on for a minute.  This is no metaphorical allergy.  This is a red, itchy, skin with swelling lip and what-the-heck-I-can-tell-from-across-the-room-that-something-is-up-with-your-eyelid, all too depressingly literal allergic reaction.

Let me explain.  Last Friday, I went for a run.  It was 3.76 miles in a bit over 27 minutes.  Neither of those numbers are in any way abnormal for me.  (Don't make me produce a graph to prove that.  Please.  For all of our sakes.)  I wore nothing that I hadn't worn before.  I ate nothing that I hadn't eaten before.  I didn't run anywhere that I hadn't run before.  And about the time I got home, various parts of me were swelling up or turning red and itchy.  It got to the point that I could see my eyelid out of the corner of my eye.  Symptoms lasted perhaps close to an hour before gradually fading away.  Awesome.  Now I'm allergic to exercise.  Because, you know, it's not like I've ever exercised before.  It's not like I've run 700 miles in the last 30 months.  Or played basketball once or twice a week for the last 2 years.  But apparently, last Friday, I had to be allergic.

Upon consulting with both the internet and a doctor, it seems I have exercise-induced urticaria.  It may pop up again, but who knows when.  It can be treated with antihistamines.  It could be serious, but has only caused one death.  Or, I suppose, it might never come back again.  It can be diet related, and foods that have been implicated include "seafood, celery, wheat and cheese,"* as well as aspirin.  (Seriously?!?!  Another 10 years of this and I'll be living on rice and vitamin pills.)  I'm personally suspicious of my legume allergy that might have contributed to the outbreak.  You remember my list of mis-matched allergens? We don't commonly group them together, but peas and beans are both legumes, and on the day of outbreak, an hour or so before going running, I had an unusual (for me) quantity of another legume: peanuts.

Ever the soul of caution, I went for a run the very next day.  Did about 6.5 miles this time.  Don't worry, I at least made sure my route passed several friends houses, as well as my consulting physician (not my physician, but I did consult with him . . . after this run).  The result: no problems at all.  Everyone inspected my skin and eyelids when I got home with nary a speck of swelling.  So, that's life now.  Shannon points out that I'm the ultimate nerd now.  Does this seem like a condition that Dr. Sheldon Cooper would have?

* Warning, this link has all sorts of doctor-y words, such as: erythematous, leukotrienes, dyspnea, pruritus, and many others.

Paint my bedroom

Alright my legion of readers.  I need your fashion design input!  You may not have heard, but we're buying a house!  It's practically perfect in every way, but one of the features that I don't particularly like is the color of the master bedroom.  It's purple.  If I had more X chromosomes, I'd probably have a better description of what sort of purple, and just calling it "purple" probably makes it sound worse than it really is.  But that's not the point.  The point is: I don't like it, and I want my room to be a different color, but I don't know what color I want.  This is where you come in.  I'm now accepting suggestions for wall colors.  There are four walls to work with, and they don't all have to be the same color, so get as wild as you want - but not too wild, or I won't pick your idea.

The room has a wood floor (technically laminate, but it looks like wood) and our furniture is of the "eclectic/not-matchy" style, so I think you can more or less do whatever you want.  I await with eagerness your suggestions, because while white is fine, it's also kinda boring.

To WoT or not to WoT?

I haven't talked much about books I've read recently here.  This is significantly because I've been reading the Wheel of Time.  The Wheel of Time is a fantasy series by Robert Jordan wherein the individual books all have ridiculously terrible names like "Path of Daggers" or "Lord of Chaos" or "Spirits of Darkness" or "Crown of Swords".  (3 of those are real, one is made of up.)  So, we just call them WoT1, WoT2, etc.

The Wheel of Time isn't so much a book series, as it is a way of life.  You don't casually read these books.  You can't even causally lift these books.  To put this in context for you, with some books you're probably familiar with, let's say one day you decided to read the entire Harry Potter series.  Then you followed it up with the Bible.  Then you decided that a good compare and contrast of those two works would make for an excellent dissertation, so you went back and read them both a second time.  *Yawn*  I'm not impressed, because you're still half a million words short of having read the Wheel of Time.  And that doesn't even include the prequel!  (You can read the OT one more time to make up that gap, and I'll even let you skip the Songs of Solomon.)  If a picture is worth a thousand words, it should take me 4194 pictures to express the length of the WoT.  But I'm only going to use 2.  (Made in google docs, so excuse the sloppiness.)

The labels don't all work out like I'd like, but you should get the idea.  In the top chart, the orange are scriptural books (Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine and Covenants, Book of Mormon and Bible, in that order), the red ones are the 7 Harry Potter novels, and the blue are the Wheel of Time.  Note how only one HP book (#5) manages to match even the shortest book from the Wheel of Time.  The chart below adds up the series.

I'm sure it seems like overkill (and irony) to spend a zillion words describing how long the books are, it has to be done, because the books are a serious commitment to make.  I've had pets that didn't last as long.

Essentially, this is your classic story of a young farmer boy who discovers that he is vitally important in order to battle evil and save the world.  Of course he'll discover he has some superpowers along the way, that maybe his parents didn't tell him the whole truth about their past and where he comes from.  Along the way he'll make friends (who turn out to have some pretty awesome super powers themselves), quite a few enemies, and will destroy about a million orcs/gobblins/stormtroopers/trollocks/monsters.

The first 4 or 5 books in the series are great.  Around book 6, it starts to drag.  Around book 8 you will wonder if anything interesting will ever happen again.  Somewhere in book 9, where the author introduces his 7th character that is named Sheriam/Sheram/Shimra/Semera/Seremia and then spends a full paragraph telling you what she is wearing* you will want to throw the books across the room.  Don't.  Because magically, starting in book 10, and certainly in book 11, the series gets a second wind, and is once again fabulous.  I went through books 11, 12 and 13 in about 6 weeks.  Book 14 (the last one!) is due out in January.

Perhaps part of the sudden pickup in the story is that the author was diagnosed with a fatal blood disease.  He died after the 11th book was published, and eventually, Brandon Sanderson was selected to finish the series.  I haven't read anything else by Sanderson (but I've heard many good things), but he's done a very good job in the two books he's published thus far.  I'm sure Jordan left many notes, and partially written chapters and stuff like that for him to work with.  Plus, Jordan's editor was his wife, so I'm sure she's a good resource too.

As I've contemplated writing this up, one interesting question I've had is "would I recommend these books to others"?  Honestly, I've struggled with the answer.  For about a year, I put all other recreational reading on hold, which is a big commitment.  You can only read so many books in your life, and I've devoted 1% of my lifetime recreational reading to this series.  Will I ever read the series again? Probably not. (I know multiple people who have.)  But am I glad I've read it? Absolutely.  For someone thinking about reading it, go ahead and start.  Read the first book, or two or three.  If you're not absolutely convinced, stop immediately!  But if you can't wait for more, read book 4, but know that after that you will be waiting for a few thousand pages!

In the end, reading the Wheel of Time is a lot like running a marathon.  It's really long.  It's exhilarating at times, but there are also times when you want to just give up.  When you get to the end, you're glad you've done it, but also, in the back of your mind, you can't help but think about how the first guy who ever tried to finish it died in the process.


*Despite what you might think, or what you have heard, Jordan doesn't spend paragraphs describing what everyone is wearing.  He describes only 2 things about each woman's dress: the material and the neckline.  (Everyone who has read this is nodding their heads knowingly.)

Downside of ESPN

I'm watching BYU play football on ESPN right now, and the game isn't terribly competitive, so lets blog.  Specifically, let's blog about the coverage from ESPN.  BYU is up 47-0 right now, and obviously I'm a little disinterested, but I'm actually (as I blog) paying more attention to the game than the announcers are.  And this, is the first downside of ESPN coverage.

1: BYU football games are targeted to generic college football fans, not BYU fans.  As a kid, BYU games were on KSL and more or less only available in Utah.  If a person was watching, they were watching specifically to see BYU (or their opponent).  Tonight, BYU is the only football game on TV. So, when the game gets a bit slow, the announcers have to try to keep as many viewers as possible entertained, so that means talking about Heisman candidates and Notre Dame.

2: It's 11:24pm, and I'm still watching the game.  Because ESPN gets to dictate start times, BYU plays a lot more late games than they used to, and now that I'm in the eastern time zone, well, that's not ideal.

3: I'm streaming the game on some European website.  ESPN seems to be much better at denying streaming online than the Mtn was.  Took me about 10 minutes to find this one tonight.

Of course there are some advantages to ESPN as well.  BYU doesn't generally get their top announcers, but just about anyone is an improvement over the Mtn.  The picture is much better also.  Plus the university is getting more money, and everyone in the country who is willing to pay for cable can watch their games.  (Sometimes it seems like that includes everyone but me.)  Well, game is over.  BYU kept the shutout which is nice, and rushed for nearly 400 yards.  It was nice to see the defense force a few turnovers, which is the only thing they haven't done really well so far this year.  Zero points and 148 yards is pretty impressive.  Ok, time for bed.  I guess I'd better schedule this to post in a day or two, so I don't spoil the ending for anyone who might not have watched the game yet.  (You're welcome, Brett.)

Sunrise, Sunset

Blog post 3 on the topic of sunlight was supposed to be the first (and only) one, but you know how I get . . .

The solar year has two big, fun words that everyone knows: solstace and equinox. You can wiki them up and get the specific Latin roots for them, but I remember it this way. Sol = sun and stace = stay, so Sol + stace = Sun-stay, i.e. the time of the year where the sun isn't moving in the sky. This is the time of year when it is either highest (summer) or lowest (winter). Then we have equi = equal and nox = night so, equinox = equal night (and day). It's the time of year when we've got about 12 hours of each. We passed the autumnal equinox about a week ago, which means this is the time of year where the length of the day is changing fastest. Also, up here in the north, the summer days are longer, the winter days are shorter, and in order to hit those times, the days have to change length even faster this time of year. Here's a few numbers for comparison between a few places that I've picked.

                           Midland, MI          St. George, UT          Tucson, AZ
Shortest Day             8:56                         9:37                       10:02
Longest Day            15:27                       14:43                      14:16
Fastest Change          3.1                          2.1                           1.7
   [min/day]

So, up here in the North, in the summer, we get nearly an hour more daylight than we used to get, and similarly nearly an hour less in the winter. These days I'm really feeling the effect of losing 3 minutes per day for the last week. I have to get up for work before it's light, and I can't go running after the girls go to bed, at least not without some sort of lights so I can see and be seen. I guess it's time to buckle down and get ready for winter!

This Little Light of Mine

Ok. Now we'll get to that question that you had a while ago, which is: but what if I'm designing my own solar system and can adjust the eccentricity of the orbit and the tilt of the planet however I want? Well, then we can get a bit more funky. There are essentially two parameters we can change here: the relative sizes of the two effects and the offset between them. First, let's line up the two effects as they currently exist to instead of partly cancelling each other out, they build on each other. It's not very impressive, and life would remain basically the same for us; we get a little more sun in the summer, and a little less in the winter.

Next, we'll leave them out of phase as they are for us, but make them about the same size. Specifically, I've made it so when we're far from the sun, we get only half the sunlight we would at the near point. Instead of the max and min distance differing by only 3%, now they differ by 41%. This one makes life pretty weird. The folks in Fairbanks never get much sun now, and nobody gets much in the middle of summer when we're far from the sun. People in Utah or Michigan type zones get the most consistant light through the year, while the equator now has 4 seasons. (In this situation we might need to crank up the temperature knob on the sun to keep us all from freezing, but that might be difficult. In the real life system the 5 locations recieve 340, 311, 269, 244, and 142 artibrary units of sunlight over the course of a year. Now they get 263, 234, 199, 178 and 96. If we turn up the sun to get St George back up to where it was, those points shift to 356, 316, 240 and 130. We've kept St. George reasonable (well, as reasonable as it ever was), but made the equator 5% more sunny, while Fairbanks is still 8% less sunny than before. Essentially, this world is more sunlight-diverse.)

Next, we'll make them roughly the same magnitude, but with a 90° phase shift (one curve peaks 3 months before the other). Specifically, we hit the near point of our highly elliptical orbit about April 1st, with the tilt unchanged. This gets a little crazier. The total sunlight is not as low as the last model (263, 241, 209, 190, 111, which "St. George Adjusts" to 338, 310, 269, 244 and 143.) So, if we crank up the sun about 30%, we get the same total sunlight through the year. Unfortunately, it's going to be packed into a few really bright (hot) months. The equator has more seasonal variation than before, but is dominated by the position in the orbit, not the direction of the tilt. Also, everyone now has seasons!

Finally, what if we leave the orbit how it is, but tilt the earth over more . . . 45° sounds good. Well, Fairbanks now doesn't get sunlight for 100 days a year. Michigan gets the sun directly overhead in the summer now, but the sun barely makes it over the horizon in the winter. (Insert joke about how "it barely makes it over the horizon in the winter as it is" here.) The most interesting thing though, is that we've nearly introduced seasons to the equator. The total variation is something similar to what a place like Hawaii has on our earth (I know, doesn't really qualify as seasons) but the interesting thing is that they get 2 complete sets each year. More sun in March and September, with less in December and June. Really, that's how it is now (go back and look at the graph) but this would make the effect about 3.5 times bigger, so it would probably be noticable. If we roll the earth over further and push the angle to about 55°, then the equator gets double St. George like seasons, but gives even St. George 33 days without sunlight each year (and 67 for Michigan) so I'm voting against that one.

So, in the end, the earth is neat.

(It is a worthwhile reminder that there are still other things that are important to sunlight that I haven't considered. The most important is the dispersion through the atmosphere. As the sunlight moves closer to the horizon, it has to go through more of the atmosphere to reach the surface, and more light is scattered out. Then there are things like clouds to consider. Also, while this sunlight is the cause of our seasons, there are many other things that effect temperatures, such as residual ground heat, ocean and air currents and butterflies flapping their wings in China.)

Here Comes the Sun

The days are getting shorter (at least for all my northern hemisphere readers) these days. And they're doing it quickly. Which means it is time to talk about . . . . math! This blog post has already been split into at least three, so get pull out your slide rules and compasses . . . .

Most people know that the Earth orbits the Sun in an eliptical orbit. However, in our efforts to get everyone to appeciate that the orbit is eliptical, the eccentricity (oval-ness) of the orbit is always greatly exaggerated in diagrams in textbooks. The difference between the aphelion (furthest point from the sun) and the perihelion (nearest point) is over 3 million miles, but that's only a 3.3% total variation. Imagine going out in a field, and walking in an oval around someone standing in the center. At the furthest point you're 100 feet away from the other person, and at the nearest point you're only 97 feet away. The difference is going to be almost completely unnoticable. But somewhere along the line, we decided that it was important that everyone know that the orbit is eliptical, so we really stress that point. Now, a 3% increase in distance does mean that we get less light from the sun when further away, and the effect is increased because when you move double the distance from a light source you only get a quarter the light. So the 3.3% distance variation turns into a 6.5% maximum variation throughout the year. Here's a picture:

You should note (and perhaps be surprised at) one detail of the graph, which isn't really visible because of where the year cuts off: we are closest to the Sun on about January 3rd, and furthest from the sun around July 3rd. For those of us in the northern hemisphere this is probably a good thing. During winter, we get to scooch 3% closer to the warm sun to compensate for the fact that we're angled away from the sun due to the tilt of the earth.

Oh! Hey! What about the earth-tilting-thing? Well, yeah, that's obviously important, because it's clear that our seasons aren't coming from the ecentricity of our orbit. ("But," you say, "what if . . " and then I cut you off right there and reply, "Quiet, we'll get there in a minute. I have more charts first.") The rotational axis of the earth is about 23.4° off of normal (perpendicular) to the plane of our orbit. This is the number that also defines the lattitude of the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. (By the way, they're moving towards the equator a few hundred feet each year, currently. The tilt has been varies from about 22.5° to 25.2° every 40,000 years.) So, if the magnitude of your lattitude is less than 23.4°, then at some point in the year, the sun will be directly overhead. If not, you've always got to look towards the equator to find the sun. (From here on out, everything I mention will be specifically talking about when the sun is at its highest point each day.

If the sun is directly over head, the sunlight is as concentrated as it can be on the surface of the earth. Imagine going outside while the sun is directly overhead and make sure to bring with you a sheet of stiff paper. If you hold the paper out horizontally, it will cast a shadow and, provided the light source is very far away (I think the sun qualifies), the shadow will be the same size as the paper. The shadow is the area of light that the paper is blocking, and can be thought of as how much light is striking the paper. Now slowly rotate the paper away from horizontal. The shadow shrinks. Less total light strikes the paper, but that light is still spread out over the entire sheet. As the paper approaches vertical, the light on the paper gets dimmer and dimmer. For someone tiny microbe living on that paper this means two things: less light and less heat. All we have to do now is replace the paper with the earth, replace the microbes with people, and that describes our seasons. So, we all know from practicle experience that at different times of the year we get more or less sunlight, and that this is also dependent on where we live on the globe. Here's a picture that shows the amount of sunlight the earth receives throughout the year at different lattitudes:

I've picked 5 different lattitudes to show here. For someone at the equator, the sun is sometimes a bit off to the north, and sometimes a bit off to the south. Someone directly on the Tropic of Cancer line will see the sun directly overhead on the day of the solstace for maximum sunlight in June, with less in the winter. The next two locations, St. George (37.1° N) and Midland (43.6° N), have some personal significance to me. The final line I picked was Fairbanks, AK (64.8° N), which is about as far north as you can go before you get any days without a sunrise. (That line would be 66.6° N (or S) which is 90° - 23.4°.) You can sort of visually fill in a line inbetween the ones I have drawn for where you live, based on your lattitude. Once you are out of the tropics, the graphs looks basically the same, with a peak in the middle (summer) and a low spot on the edges (winter). You can see that Midland gets 5-10% less sunlight than St. George at any time in the year with this model. The variance between the seasons also increases as we head towards the poles. St. George ranges from 0.49 to 0.97 (compared to a value of 1.00 when the sun is directly overhead), while Fairbanks ranges from 0.03 to 0.75.

Well, now we've finally reached the question that I had when I started on this journey. (Yes, I was bored and had a question in my head that prompted me to make up a spreadsheet modeling the orbit and tilt of the earth around the sun. What's your point?) To what extent do these two factors constructively (or destructively) interact to influence the amount of sunlight we receive? The answer, as you can see from the vertical scales on the graphs is that the tilt of the earth is vastly more significant than the distance from the sun. In a sense, 23.4° >> 0.0167 (Earth's eccentricity). The next graph is the product of the first two, which looks, pretty much like the previous one. The two curves are pretty well out of phase, with one hitting a max around June 21st, and the other around January 3rd.

Now I know that you're all curious about the locigal next step, which is to ask questions about what if the orbit was more elliptical, or the earth was tilted more or tilted less. Well, we'll save that for the next post, but if you've got anything you specifically you want to see, let me know and I can cook it up!

Defensive post

YAY!  COLLEGE FOOTBALL!!!!!

Ok, now that Shannon has quit reading . . .

BYU has one of the best defenses in the nation.  But we can't discuss BYU without mentioning their offense because that is what BYU is known for.  And now, we're known for having no offense.  The last two weeks have gone from bad to pathetic.  If I were the head coach, there would be individual, hand written apology letters to each member of the defense and punt team.  The biggest share of the letters would be written by Riley Nelson, with increasingly fewer written by Brandon Doman and the offensive line.  But enough of that.  On to the defense, which is fantastic.

In order to appreciate how fantastic, we're going to compare the BYU defense to the best defense in the nation, which belongs to Alabama.  In 4 games Alabama has given up 14 (Michigan), 0 (Western Kentucky), 0 (Arkansas), and 7 (FAU) points.  That's 5.25 points per game, which is second nationally (behind TCU).  In 4 games BYU has given up 6 (WSU), 13 (Weber St), 24 (Utah) and 7 (BSU) points.  That's 12.25 points per game, which doesn't quite compare.  But 7 points in the Utah and BSU games were scored by their defenses, which we shouldn't hold against the BYU defense.  That drops opponents scoring to 36 points in 4 games, or 9 points per game, which would place BYU tied for 4th nationally.  (Tied with ND, behind Cincinnati.)

But the more impressive thing is that BYU's defense is able to do with despite getting stabbed in the back at every turn by the BYU offense.  Let's more closely examine the most recent games that BYU and Alabama played.  BYU vs BSU and Alabama vs FAU.  I think it will be generally accepted that BSU is a better team than FAU.  (Trivia: do you even know what FAU stands for?)  BSU is certainly not as good this year as they have been for the last few years, and look unlikely to continue to score 40+ points per game as they have for most of the last decade.  But still, they're a decent opponent and a fringe top 25 team.  Alabama held FAU to 110 yards and zero points.  BYU held BSU to 261 yards and zero points.  Certainly fewer yards is better (and I don't want anyone to think that I'm arguing that BYU's defense is as good as Alabama's.  It's not.  But I think they are in the top 10.).  For the season, Alabama is giving up 185 yards per game (3rd nationally) and BYU is giving up 246 (7th nationally).

But let's break this down one step further (and dwell some more on that offensive back stabbing).  Alabama has an offense that actually scores points and holds on to the ball for a while.  More so than BYU (47th in Time of Possession, as opposed to 69th for BYU).  FAU got the ball 11 times against Alabama, so they made 10 yards per possession.  BSU got the ball 12 times (because we gave it back as fast as possible throughout the night), so they got 22 yards per possession.  Furthermore, Alabama has had only 2 turnovers this year.  (Tied for 6th)  BYU has had . . . um . . . a few more.  9 to be exact, which is tied for 94th.  Amazingly, 17 teams have turned the ball over more.  (Maryland "leads" with 13!)  5 times BYU gave the ball to BSU with 60 yards or less to the endzone and BSU never made it there.  Most memorably, BSU downed a punt at the 1 yard line, BYU fumbled the ball right back, and the defense had to stop BSU four times to get the ball back again.  FAU only got the ball once within 75 yards of the endzone against Alabama.  If only our defense could be so lucky.

The offense has been making life difficult for the defense in other games this season, too.  Utah scored 3 times, a 17 yard TD drive, a 39 yard TD drive and a 23 yard FG drive.  Weber State is apparently the only team that can move the ball on BYU with a 90 yard TD drive and a 77 yard TD drive.  Washington State, had FG drives of 57 and 53 yards.  Those drives were helped out with 35 and 42 yards of penalties from BYU, respectively.  So, essentially, unless BYU is helping the other team out with turnovers or dumb (and sometimes questionable) personal fouls, it's real tough to score.

To come back to where we started this journey, I feel bad for the defense.  It's the best BYU has had in many, many years, and it's being wasted.  The defense is giving up 9 points per game and the offense can't help them out at all.  Sadly, I'm to the point of wondering if we could start asking the defense to score a few points, because the offense sure can't.

Since this is already really long, I'll give a quick shout out to the BYU punt team, which is 20th in the nation in net punting.  We're 6th in yards per punt, but have given up one or two big returns to bring the average down a bit.

Midland, MI - aka Babel

We went to the library today to return 8,000 kids books (and check out another 6,000).  While there, we always go and play with the toys they have there, and there are generally other kids there, too.  Since it's Saturday, the crowd was pretty good, and for most of the time we were there, there were 4 other families there, and, as it turns out, we were the only ones who spoke English exclusively with their kids.

But the even more interestingly, the other 4 families were speaking 4 other languages, and I couldn't identify any of them.  We had one family that looked European, but wasn't speaking anything from Western Europe or Scandinavia.  There was a woman with her 2 kids that looked African, and could have been speaking African French, but maybe not.  There was an Asian man with his 2 daughters which was speaking either Chinese, Korean and Japanese (and I maybe could have figured that one out, but they spoke very little), and finally there was a Middle Eastern family and I can't even make a reasonable guess at what they were speaking.  Persian?

Now, I'm certainly not a linguistic expert or anything, but I can recognized a fair number of languages, particularly many of the most common ones in the US.  Wikipedia (2000 census) tells me that 82% of the US claims English as their mother tongue.  (96% claim to speak English either "well" or "very well" and as far as I could tell, everyone at the library fits the description.)  The next 19 most common languages are (in order): Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Italian, Korean, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, French Creole, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Urdu and Gujarati.  It's not surprising that there is a lot of drop off in numbers along that list, with #2 (Spanish) having 10 times as many speakers as #3 (Chinese) and 100 times as many as #19 (Urdu).

If only I had spent my time teaching Shannon and the girls Portuguese, then we'd finally be able to fit in around here!

(For the record, I think it is awesome that we had people from 3 or 4 continents speaking 5 different languages at the local library today.)

edited to, you know, use complete sentences.

Life

I don't blog much because life is "boring".  What does the boring-ness consist of?  I'm glad you asked!

First off, work!  I work a pretty normal amount.  Roughly 40 hours per week, on average, which I pack into 5 days one week and then 4 the next, leaving me with every other Friday off.  This is an optional perk, which I enjoy.  What this does, in essence, is to steal an hour of time from the other days of the week, and lump them all together in a whole day off.  So rather than getting a little bit done each night around the house or something, I have a whole day off, which we use for having fun instead of being productive.

But still, evenings are free for blogging, right?  Ha! Good one.  I get home around six each night (partly because I am incapable of getting up early unless I really, really have to), and we eat dinner.  You know Shanny, the model housewife with the hot dinner waiting on the table as I come in the door.  At dinner we totally feel like the family from "A Christmas Story," where the mom never gets to eat a hot meal because everyone needs something.  I do help with the girls (Ella is particularly needy), but Shannon definitely gets the short end of that stick.  Last night we went to a park in the evening.  Tonight, right after dinner, I went to scouts (I'm a Webelos leader, along with teaching the primary class on Sundays (and still playing for the choir)), while Shannon took the girls to a preschool meeting.  She's the secretary or something for the executive committee, I think. After scouts, I picked the girls up from the school and got the girls ready for bed.  Shannon made it back just for lights out and that brings us to this point in the day.

This is the general theme it seems for every day.  Sometimes I try and work in running, but that's getting hard with the days getting shorter.  Book clubs and preschool meetings.  Basketball and RS activities.  FHE.  Looking for houses, meeting with realtors.  Home inspections.  Either I'm doing something or Shannon is, and the other one is staying with the girls.  (Too cheap for babysitters!)

So, that's the background noise of our lives right now.  Now that we've cleared that up, I can make some blog posts about unusual stuff in life.

Fall Cleaning

It's like spring cleaning that you finally got around to doing . . . 18 months late.

I've cleaned out the side of my blog a bit.  So now it looks like I have no friends.  In reality, I have just as few friends as always but it turns out that a third of them quit blogging, and another third went private, so links aren't that useful.  Besides, I'm not sure how many people actually visit the actual blog anymore, I assume they read it through other means.  If you're deeply offended that you're not on the list anymore, maybe you should blog something more recently than 2010 (coughadamcough) or 2009 (ahemsuzannehackingsound).

But while we're here, what's become of blogs?  It was so cool! Did facebook kill it? Did it turn out to not be as cool as we thought? Are we too lazy to type? I can't really point any fingers here, because my blog has barely been hanging onto activity for a while now.  The last 6 years I've had 185, 131, 73, 66, 14 and 32 posts.  That's a drop from on every other day, to once a month in 2011.  For me, blogging revolves around interaction between me, the blogger, and you, the reader.  I don't want this to sound like a plea for comments or something.  If my blog isn't interesting, or doesn't somehow elicit a response, there's no need to make one up just to make me feel better.  (Though if you did a good job of hiding the fact that this was your own motivation, it would probably work.  I'm just saying.)  And really, this is probably the worst sort of post to get comments.  It's about blogging for heaven's sake, and this blog was never meant to be a blog about blogging.  It's a blog about me.

It's interesting that my blog really fell apart about the time we moved away from Utah and parked ourselves about 2,000 miles from just about anyone we knew.  You'd think that my blog would have peaked in interest now that other means of communication were limited.  But here's the funny thing: communication breeds more communication.  Shannon and I see each other all the time, and we haven't yet run out of things to talk about!  And it's not because we're some sort of magical perfect compliments to each other that share every interest imaginable. It's because I've always had the most to say to people I see the most.  I don't have any special theories about why that is, so if you do, feel free to share.

So, in conclusion, this blog post took me forever to write, because I got distracted by cleaning my keyboard keys.  And can anyone explain why the dirtiest one was Caps Lock, followed by "\".  Whose grubby fingers are hitting those on my keyboard all the time?

July and August Self Locomotion Update

So it's been a month . . . and a bit.  I've even had two separate requests for updates!  (Probably from the same person, who chooses not to self-identify (which is ok).)  So how goes the locomotion?  The last two months have certainly had ups and downs.  There was a down where I got sick for nearly a week, and then my body decided to keep producing mucus for another 2 weeks after that.  Shannon really picked up the slack with lots of walking as the summer finally cooled off.  And also, I'm tired and don't want to get out and run.  My motivation has waxed and waned a surprising number of times in the last few months, obviously with a fairly short period.  Pre-school meetings, cub scouts (Webelos!), football games, work, back to school shopping, dishes, and all those other things in life wear me out.  And for my final excuse . . . running (and a lot of other tasks in life (at least for me)) is much easier when there is someone else there.  There's no way I would have made it through a marathon without someone to run with all summer, and here I don't have that, so I can skip it whenever I want.

OK, I lied.  One more excuse.  It gets dark shortly after 8pm here now, so it's getting harder to run after work.  It's dark by the time we're done putting kids to bed, and soon it's going to be cold in the mornings.  Do I go to work early and come home early enough to run at like 5pm (before dinner)?  Have you ever known me to get up early to go to work?

Anyway, to read all of that, you'd think we were doing terribly, but we're not.  We're still hanging on ahead of pace.  I had hoped the have 100 miles banked up or something like that, but we can't seem to get beyond 30 or so.  Time for some solid numbers.

July: 99.6 miles (1,176 mi/yr pace)
August: 96.3 miles (1,137 mi/yr pace)
As of 9/13/12: 724.6 miles (1035.9 mi/yr pace)
Relative to goal: 22.4 miles ahead of pace (assuming even pace)

June Self Locomotion Update

You've probably noticed that the whole internet has been abuzz the last few days because my self locomotion update is late.  I'm teaching all of you a little patience.

Speaking of learning, in June, we learned that no one exercises on vacation.  Or, at least, we don't.  We spent nearly 2 full weeks in Utah, and despite our intentions to go on walks and things, we didn't.  We packed so much stuff into each day, that we were too tired to walk (note: not all of those links are up yet).  Half of our plans involved walking (going to the zoo, for example) but those miles generally didn't count per the rules.  So, the large progress we made toward our goal in May wasn't duplicated, but we did manage to catch up almost perfectly to 1000-mile pace by the end of the month.

The numbers:
June total: 95.5 mi
Total through 6/30/12: 496.7 mi
June pace: 1165 mi/yr
Pace YTD: 998.9 mi/yr
Current Deficit: 0.6 mi

The chart:

You can see the big upward trend in the first half of the month, with one big spike down where Stewart and I tried to climb a mountain, and then a return to the downward trend in the second half of the month once we got home.

Physics 105 Problems in Real Life

I spent many years helping physics 105 students work problems about someone throwing a ball off a hill with some sort of initial velocity where they have to figure out what the time of flight is, or the final distance or something like that.  A common comment is that no one does this in real life.  I've said it myself many times.

This week at work, we had something break.  It sits up fairly high off the floor, and threw some broken pieces across the room.  The details aren't important, but this was a bit of a safety hazard, as things aren't supposed to fly across the room.  As part of the report on what happened, they wanted to come up with an estimate of how fast the pieces were moving across the room, as a gauge of how dangerous the event really was.  So they came to me.  Finally, my skills are fully utilized!  With a few simple formulas I was able to calculate the initial velocity of the objects based on their final location, initial height and initial angle.  Sure, the calculation isn't perfect.  I can only guess a reasonable range of angles (though, because of other things in the room, and, you know, the ceiling, I can do pretty good on that) and we're neglecting friction (as always!), but the point is, I was finally able to use those very basic equations for motion in two dimensions to solve a real problem at work!

Soccer Improvements

So, the big soccer tournament in Europe has now gone 4 hours without a goal.  Two consecutive matches (England vs. Italy and Spain vs. Portugal) have now ended in 0-0 ties despite the 30 extra minutes of playing time.  Both games were decided with penalty kicks (with both Italy and Spain winning 4-2).  No one much likes this method for finishing soccer games.  Even the biggest soccer fans who ardently defend the game from the usual criticisms (too boring, not enough scoring, etc.) seem to agree (in my experience) that the current system isn't ideal.  (Another maddening aspect of the current system is when a team like England seems to spend the last half hour of a game playing for a tie so they can hope to win in the coin-flip that is PKs.  Apparently they didn't remember that England never wins in PKs.)  I was discussing with a co-worker what adjustments could be made:

1. Play until someone wins.  Continue with 15 minute overtime periods until someone is winning at the end of one of them.  Pro: Simple.  Doesn't "change the game".  It's like basketball (and many other sports) which has a potentially unlimited number of overtimes.  Cons: With the substitution rules in soccer, this becomes a crazy contest of conditioning very quickly.  Could devolve into a bunch of tired guys incapable of making good team plays, like in basketball when everyone is tired and the game turns into a series of plays where one guy tries to outrun everyone else.  He then either scores or doesn't, but now he's so tired he takes 3 plays off and someone else summons a burst of energy.  Maybe if they granted each team a new sub for each extra period, then this would test the talent of the reserve players.  (Similar to basketball OTs leading to players fouling out and bench players getting a greater roll, sometimes.)

2. Start taking players off the field.  At set intervals, change to 10-on-10, then 9-on-9, and so on until someone wins.  Pro: Opening up the field should stimulate scoring, right?  Cons: Too weird.  If it goes very far, 8-on-8 isn't real soccer anymore.  Plus, that much space will lead to even more running for the remaining players making this perhaps an even bigger contest of conditioning.  I don't like this one.

3. Make the goal bigger at periodic intervals.  In today's world, it's easy to make goals that could be adjusted quickly and accurately.  So every 15 minutes, crank the goal posts another foot apart, and another foot higher.  Pros: Increases scoring, particularly the likelihood of winning a game with an awesome shot from long distance.  Should keep teams playing aggressively, because they know their goal keeper is going to be increasingly less effective.  Cons: Could have equipment malfunction.

I like option #3 the best.  But, as always, I'd be curious to hear your ideas.

Do Not Eat List

My own personal Do Not Eat List has officially been incremented by one.  It now stands at:

• Fish
• Peas
• Kiwi
• Pinto Beans
• Chickpeas / Garbanzo Beans

Other than fish (nasty things, those) I generally like the things on the list.  They just don't like me.  The chickpea was the most recent, reluctant addition.  Not so much because they're a particular favorite of mine (I'm rather ambivalent), but because they're a favorite of Shannon's, and she does the cooking.  Unfortunately, repeated testing showed a strong correlation between eating chickpeas and feeling unwell.  That's really the best word I have for it: unwell.  I haven't had fish, peas or kiwi in years, but as for the chickpeas, they just make me feel very uncomfortable.  I wish I had better words for it, but I don't.  The feeling is centered in my chest/lung area, and it feels vaguely that if I could just get in a comfortable position things would feel better, but it turns out that there is no squirming in your seat that really makes a big effect on your chest.  The feeling goes away in an hour or so.  There's no breathing problems, or really any other symptoms.  But, who wants to eat something that is all but guaranteed to make you feel lousy afterward?  (Other than chocolate milk, of course.)

Getting Old

Evidently, Brett thinks I'm getting old.  That's undeniable, really.  We're all getting old.  But then I realized something that was simply too good to waste in a comment where many people might not see it:

Brett, I'm not getting old as fast as you are.

I live at a lower elevation than Brett, but even more importantly, at a higher latitude.  The latitude is important because the earth bulges at the equator to the tune of 26.54 miles.  So, I'm closer to the center of the earth than Brett.  That leaves Brett at a higher gravitational potential, and per the General Theory of Relativity, time moves faster for him.  It's called gravitational time dilation.  So if you want to stay young longer (compared to others), move toward the poles.  (Or dig a really deep hole.)  And in a few million (billion?) years, Brett will end up older than me*.

* Neglecting of course that Brett spent about 18 years living more polar than I, then we were about the same for the next 6 years, and I've only got about 6 years of living more polar of he does.  Though, the current margin is the largest to date.

Birds

One of the things I love most about Michigan is the birds.  Yeah, that sounds a bit silly, because I wouldn't ever have thought of myself as someone to get too worked up over birds, but there you have it: I like 'em.  (This is also a commentary about my general feelings about living in Michigan: it's not that different!  There is no major adjustment; as such, minor things like birds can move their way high up the list of good things about Michigan.)  For my western dwelling friends, I'd like to introduce you to my favorite two birds.

 

Cardinal

Like 14 states have the cardinal as their state bird, which is totally unoriginal, but I can see why.  (For the record, Michigan's state bird is the robin.)  Cardinals are strikingly red.  I love seeing such a bright color in nature.  There is one cardinal which I hate though: the one who sits in the tree outside my bedroom window and whistles his little heart out every stinking morning starting at 5 O'CLOCK IN THE FREAKING MORNING!!!  Other that him, I think cardinals are great. 

 

 

Red-winged Blackbird

I'd never heard of a red-winged blackbird prior to moving out here, but they're my favorite of them all.  Their name describes them pretty well; they're black with a patch of red (and a little bit of yellow) at the base of their wing.  As with most birds, we're primarily talking about the males here, because the females look pretty blah.  Sucks to be a girl bird, I guess.  The red-winged blackbirds live in the more wetland-type areas, which out here means in the ditches on the sides of the road (in the rural places).  This makes driving to and from work (I work next to a corn field) like a little adventure every day looking for these birds in the tall grass.  (I also get to look for deer on one of my two routes.)

photo borrowed from wikipedia

May Self Locomotion Update

Another record month!  Life is good when the weather is continually improving making it easier to get out and rack up miles.  My running picked up in May in preparation for a 10k.  Skipping basketball to run really helped, as basketball only counts for 1 mile per hour, and I replaced it with running 4 to 7 miles (in less time, too).  Shannon has also been racking up miles walking with the girls.  All of our effort has made major strides for the month; we've gone from being about 70 miles behind pace to only 14 at the end of the month.  In June we'll be spending a decent part of the month in Utah, so we'll have to make sure we keep it up and start building up miles before the weather turns in the fall.  We're kinda like bears preparing for winter.  Only we run walk and hike.

The numbers:
May total: 139.3 mi
Total through 5/31/12: 401.23 mi
March pace: 1645 mi/yr
Pace YTD: 688 mi/yr
Current Deficit: 14.07 mi


The Chart:

10k

Two weekends ago, I ran my very first 10k.  My results were widely reported and followed on facebook, so the world at large is already aware of the main points.  10 kilometers (6.2 miles).  44 minutes, 35 seconds.  4th in my age group (out of 20).  22nd over all (out of 251).  But you weren't satisfied with the facebook account.  How do I know?  Because you're here, which means you want every juicy little detail.

 

I finally got off my duff and registered for the race about a week in advance.  I'd been sitting on the fence for several weeks, and finally just did it.  Apparently that's the way I sign up for all my races now.  (And by all, I mean the 2 I've done in the last 3 years.)  There were both 5k and 10k races that morning, so when I got to the starting line there were many people there, including about half the ward.  For some odd reason, the 5k started first so as the crowd started condensing for that, I headed off to warm-up.  I'd read recently about the importance of warming up before a race, which, of course, makes sense.  The first mile always feels so awkward, until I get into a "groove" so to speak.  In a 10k, that means I'm spending about 15% of the race just getting comfortable.  So, the solution is to warm up for your race by running.  And that's where it gets tricky.  If you want to run 6.2 miles as fast a possible, how are you going to do that if you just went a mile or two to warm up, effectively turning your 10k into a 12 or 13k race?  But, undeterred (and trusting in the wisdom of the internet), I did about three quarters of a mile as slowly as possible.  This has been a big problem for me since switching to running in KSOs.  I have a hard time running slowly in them.  (I know, such a terrible problem to have.)  So, warmed up, I returned to the start line and found the 10k Mormons. 

 

Three of us started out together.  (I anticipated that they would be running the race, I don't think they expected to see me that morning.)  We stuck together for the first 1.5 to 2 miles (no, I was not taking notes while running) before we lost the first guy off the back.  I stayed with the other guy (who ended up finishing 9th overall, oh, and he's 15) until maybe the 2.5 mile mark.  I was trying to run a very even pace for the whole race, and generally did pretty good at that.  This was my first 10k race, but I'd done a few runs which were pretty close to 10k, so I went in feeling confident that I could do it under 47:00 with a stretch goal of beating 45:00.  They had people on the course shouting out times at each mile marker, so I could verify that I was able to stay on my 7:20/mi pace (45:30 10k).  (I don't have any fancy gps-enabled running watches (and I don't need them, thankyouverymuch) so I was wholly reliant on those updates each mile.  I do run with my stopwatch going, which I use to track all my runs, but also to check my cadence periodically.  I like to run at about 185 steps/minute.)  I don't remember all the mile times exactly, but I know I was pretty much on that 7:20 pace at the 5 mile mark (I think I was 10 or 20 seconds ahead total), at which point I cranked it up to as fast as I thought I could maintain for the 1.2 miles left, and hoped I didn't run out of gas.  I managed to pass several people in the last mile.  On the final stretch, with the finish line in sight, I could see 2 or 3 runners that were tantalizingly close, but I just couldn't make up any ground on them.  They were half a block or so in front of me, and I never really made any significant dent in the in the last quarter mile, so I finished without anyone real close to me.  Results show that I was 28 seconds ahead of the closest runner behind me (which was actually one of the largest gaps in the whole field, except for a couple doozies in the top 10.  2nd place was over 4 minutes behind the winner!) and I was 5 seconds behind the guy in front of me.  5 seconds sounds pretty close, and it is in many regards, but at the speeds we were running at it was probably about 70 feet.

 

So I finished.  I was very tired, but not fall-down-collapse-and-puke tired.  Once race results were posted, I was a bit disappointed to learn that the fellow 70 feet in front of me was 3rd in our age group.  So if I'd managed cut 6 seconds out of the previous 44 plus minutes of running, I would have had a top 3 finish (and a medal).  But, I remind myself that it's pretty rediculous to be upset when I'd managed to beat my stretch goal by 25 seconds and that it was the first 10k I've ever raced in my life.  I guess we'll have to leave championship trophies and medals until at least my second race.

 

As I mentioned, I did the race in my KSOs.  I saw only 2 or 3 other people wearing similar shoes.  I had 3 or 4 strangers stop me and ask what I thought of them.  I have no idea how to respond to a stranger in one sentence what they're like, other than to simply say "I like them.  They're a big adjustment though." (I know, 2 sentences.)  Shannon and the girls came and watched me finish, which was nice.  Probably pretty boring for them to go out there just to watch me run for about 10 seconds, but they claim to have liked it.