St. Louis Trip

Hey, we went to St. Louis . . . 4 months ago. Look! Pictures!

St. Louis is only 4 1/2 hours away, so we went down there the day after Thanksgiving last year. Shannon's sister Whitney lives on the Illinois side of the river down there, so we went to see her, as well as some sights around town. Some of the high points:

St. Louis Science Center
The St. Louis Science Center is a fairly typical kids oriented science museum, but it's free and parking is only ten bucks, which both seem miraculous to someone living in the Chicago area. We checked the speed of cars on the freeway with radar guns, and found a hamster wheel sized for little girls (which powered what is essentially an enormous marble run).

Cemeteries!
Because no trip is complete without cemeteries. We went to three different cemeteries - in the rain - looking for graves that we had never seen before. Our earliest known Blockburger relatives eventually made their way to this part of Illinois, and even my grandfather was born in Alton. We found graves for the first Julia Blockburger (my great-grandmother) and well as Christian Benjamin Blockburger and Jane Little (my great-great-great grandparents (I think)).

The Arch
The arch was cool. Everything else about going to see the arch was not. First off, I just want to say that I remember being so disappointed when I found out that the arch didn't actually go over the river. (To be clear, I found out about this decades ago, not recently.) Anyway, we reserved tickets in advance to go up to the top of the arch, picked them up and walked over there so we would be there 20 minutes early, or whatever it was the ticket said. And then they had us wait, outside, on a cold, windy, rainy day, for about an hour and a half. I am not sure what the point of selling tickets with a specific time on them is for, if you leave people outside for that long. I also don't understand why they couldn't tell you when you pick up the tickets that they're more than an hour behind schedule, so you should hang out for a bit inside the old courthouse before taking the 15 minute walk over there. But I guess reasonable ideas like this haven't occurred to anyone down there yet. Once we got inside, patience was thin and tempers were short. I did still enjoy riding the tiny little cars up to the top and enjoyed the view.

Fitz's
We asked a friend from St. Louis for a suggestion of where to go out to eat there, and she suggested Fitz's which was fabulous - and we needed something to turn out better than expected after the rough time at the arch. The food was quite good, but the cream soda is simply fantastic. Seriously, it's the best cream soda ever. They make it themselves, and the girls enjoyed watching them bottle soda on site. Everything was so good there that I couldn't be bothered to take any pictures.

Whitney
And, of course it was fun to see Whitney and fam. We went to church with them, and it was good for the girls to get some cousin time. I tried to get a picture of the three of them sitting together in church, bit it was very difficult to get any of them holding still. (Ok, lies, it was easy to get Julia holding still.) This is the best of the many pictures I took.

My Two Passions

Data and Running. I've loved numbers at least since I got my first calculator watch in about 2nd or 3rd grade. Running is a more recent thing. We flirted a bit in college, we spent a summer together in St. George, and now we've been together pretty steady for a few years. I'm well aware that running makes up about 50% of my blog any more, but it also makes up about 50% of my discretionary activities (once you remove "the internet" in general). So, I've made some charts - not really even intending to post them here, but once I had them, I figured, I might as well ....



Over the years I've gotten gradually faster. 2010 was the year I was exclusively focused on completing a marathon, which means I was running long and slow. It's easier to run fast when you don't have to go as far, so that explains 2011 and 2012. The next several years were a pretty consistent pace, but with gradually increasing average distance. Then, over the last two years, I've been very pleased with my pace dropping significantly. The next chart shows this even more dramatically, I think.






This shows total mileage and average pace by month. Again you see lots of slow running in 2010, not much in 2011 and then a gradual build up in mileage at reasonably steady paces for the next 3 years. The big dips correspond to either brutally cold weather (winter of 13-14 and 14-15) or injury (probably stress fracture in my foot in April 2014). Or just laziness. The laziness has been happening less lately, and apparently it's paying off. From Jan 2012 to April 2015, my average pace improved by 0.13 seconds per month, or 1.5 seconds per mile per year. That seems to border on the edge of being random noise (no, I will not do any statistical tests for you). Since May 2015, however, my average pace a dropped like a rock. 3.8 seconds per mile per month doesn't sound like all that much, but if you keep that up for the better part of a year, well, you can see it on the graph.

When I go run, I just run. I don't have a fancy watch that calculates my pace as I run, and I don't even look at the stopwatch on my wrist while running; so I'm not consciously trying to run faster - this is just what has happened as I drag myself out of bed in the morning and go running. The lesson here is probably either that it takes a long time for consistent running to lead to speed increases, or perhaps that there is some threshold in mileage where improvement becomes more rapid.