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)