2013 Year in Review - Good Parts Version

I started writing up 'Year In Review' post, and you know what, it was a total drag.  Unemployment tried its best to ruin our year, and typing up a full year in review sucked - depressing to type, depressing to read.  So I'm packing it all into one sentence and moving on.  I lost my job, it sucked, it was stressful, it was depressing, our finances are in shambles and we moved away from many of our friends.

And now, I am happy to welcome you to the good parts version of the 2013 year in review.  Rather than some sort of chronological listing, we're going through the year topically, in the order that stuff comes spurting out of my brain.

Travels:
It was a light year for traveling.  In April we made the 5 hour trip to Kirtland, OH to see the church history sites there.  Being unself-employed, we went in the middle of a week so we could avoid people (not that April is peak tourist season), and so we could go see the Kirtland Temple on April 3rd.  Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll point you to Shannon's blog post for more details.

We also made the 1,685 mile trip (each way!) from Michigan to Utah for my little sister's wedding.  I'll try not to get too judge-y about Jessica getting married in the middle of a day that was like 102°.  I'll leave that for my sister who was like 8 months pregnant at the time.  Being the lame people that we are, we produced two blog posts on the traveling.  But only one on the month we spent in Utah.  So what did we do?  The wedding went well, and more importantly, Jessica picked a good guy.  (Jess: Have we fully explained how much better Tyler is than pretty much every other guy you ever hung out with? Not like the other guys were bad people or anything, but . . . well done.)  We did the standard Utah things: hike the Y, drink BYU chocolate milk, ride the train, see downtown and temple square, weenie roast in the canyon.  Some of our favorites were probably kayaking in Oquirrh Lake (Daybreak) with Shannon's parents and I really enjoyed my hike (with Stewart) from Lamb's canyon to Little Cottonwood Canyon (via Millcreek and Big Cottonwood).  It was about 17 miles, and we never got seriously lost, despite heading onto some trails that we were probably the first people that year to hike.  Even thinking about that hike makes me miss Utah.

Running:
This year was a banner year for running for me.  This was partly made possible by slacking off sufficiently in all other years that the bar was set reasonably low.  I ran only a single race, the Dow Run 10k, in which I got a medal for taking 2nd place in my age group.  I ran it in a personal best 43:08.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't checking the mail every day for weeks waiting for the silly thing to arrive. I'm going to end up with new records for number of runs in a year (96) and miles (452).  I struggle a lot with running consistency; every month this year I've either run more than 40 miles (6 times), or less than 20 (6 times).  I have hopes of run a lot more next year, provided it quits being so freaking cold.  (High of 6 °F on Monday)

Blog:
blogger doesn't let me look at yearly stats (day, week, month, and all time are the options), and I don't want to bother to add up page views or anything.  But, I can say that the two most popular blog posts of the year have been Enders Game, the Movie and I like big Books (and I can not lie).  Those had 99 and 76 page views, while nothing else I've written this year had more than 40.  Ender's Game also won with 6 comments. (2 of which were me.)

Reading:
At the start of the year, Shannon and I set out to record every book we read for the year.  We gave up on the children's books after a month or two.  It was just too much work.  By the time we quit we had amassed 97 unique books, which we had read 227 times.  We did keep up with our adult reading lists though.  Currently, I'm at 10,937 pages from 29 books and Shannon is at 9790 pages from 35 books.  (Don't worry, Shannon will get to 10,000 before the end of the year!)  My top five books for the year are:

1. "Moonwalking with Einstein" a book about memorization
2. "Born to Run" perhaps you've heard about people running in silly footwear?
3. "Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver explaining how predicting stuff is really hard.
4. "Mistborn" I'm currently reading the second book in this fantasy series.
5. Wheel of Time #14 was an excellent conclusion to a very long series.

Girls:
Julia reads all the time now.  We never really taught her how to read, but at the age of 5 1/2 she's pretty much an expert reader.  We went to the library the other day and got her two Junie B. Jones books.  Both done by the end of the day.  We're pretty sure she understands everything in the books - I mean, who would sit there hour after hour reading if they didn't grasp the story?  It's been amazing to see Julia learn manners and to pay attention to other people over this year.  She long ago learned that we demanded the use of words like 'please' and 'thank you', but now she's actually learned to mean them, and to go out of her way to use them.  On the other side of that, she's also developing an attitude sometimes.  If we ask her to share a toy with Ella her response is often something like, "Fine! I'll just never play with any toys again, and Ella can keep it forever!!!"

Ella is goofy.  She has the most toned legs of any little kid I've ever seen.  I don't think toned is the right word.  They're muscular. She can't walk, she only skips, hops and twirls.  Just this morning she was laying in bed at 6-something in the morning singing jingle bells. Not just jingle bells though, the Barenaked Ladies version, which means that it starts out slowly, then she does the swirling interlude between verses where it picks up energy and roars into a raucous double-time chorus.  Julia, meanwhile, was sawing logs on the other side of the room.  Neither of my girls have ever been snugly, but we went and saw Frozen the other day, and Ella cuddled right up to me for much of the film.  It was heavenly.

Achievements:
There weren't any round numbers this year, but we did manage to turn 32, 31, 5 and 3.  Unemployment did manage to come to an end, finally, and in September I started working at a place called Rubicon Technology.  I do roughly what I've always done, and by this point, you either have an idea what it means to grow crystals or you don't.  With the new job, oh hey, we moved.  We've still got a house for sale back in Michigan, because selling empty homes is a hobby of ours.  Julia is doing great in Kindergarten, though it's eye-opening how little we really know about her life at school - and it's only half day kindergarten.  It's a mystical world full of kids and teachers that we don't really know.  We finally got to see Ben Folds Five in person, along with Guster and BNL.  For about 15 years I've been bummed that I missed BFF and Cake at the Big ___ Show in SLC.  It was the same night as the priesthood session of General Conference.  I don't regret my decision, but I was disappointed that I could see them.

Exponential Growth

Good news everybody!  My bank account is growing exponentially!  Of course, the bank is only paying me about 2 bucks in interest every year.  And today we're going to have a lesson on how those are not contradictory statements.

Exponential Growth is when the growth rate depends on how much you have.  Bank accounts are generally like this.  If you have a lot of money in the bank, you get a lot of interest.  Population growth is generally like this.  Texas has a of people, and so they have a lot of babies.  North Dakota has a lot few people, so they have a lot fewer babies.  Over time, we would expect the population of Texas to get bigger and bigger in comparison to North Dakota.  In some instances where time is in discrete and equal intervals, exponential growth can also be called geometric growth.  This would apply to some contrived board game sort of situation, where each turn you get, oh, let's say, 1 sheep for each 10 sheep you have in your flock.  (I'm inventing a sheep ranching game.)

Note that the term 'exponential growth' doesn't say anything specific about the growth rate (how fast something is currently growing).  In my original example, my bank pays me some tiny amount of interest.  My money will double if I leave it in there long enough.  Unfortunately for me, this time period is probably something like 400 years.  But it will continue to double every 400 years.  If I could become immortal, I could be rich!  Very often, I find that people use exponential growth to mean that something is growing very fast.  This is often the case.  India is adding millions of people a year.  A pile of cells in a petri dish probably add millions to their number in a few minutes or hours.  Sadly, my bank account doesn't add millions of anything per year.

What other types of growth are there?  Well, linear or arithmetic growth would be where your bank gives you $100 bucks every year, regardless of how much you have in there.  This would be a huge bonus for my bank account.  Not so much for Warren Buffet's.  Alternatively, you could have polynomial growth, which would follow a polynomial (something like x^2 where something would grow 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100 . . .).  Exponential growth will always win out over polynomial growth in the long run, though in some cases, like my savings account, you'd be better off to take polynomial growth, were it an option, than waiting 400 years.  I'm unlikely to live that long. :(

So, when you feel tempted to sound smart by saying that something is growing exponentially (which it very likely is), you can sound even smarter by simply saying that it is growing very quickly, which is probably what you really want to say.

Ice

This picture is from about a week ago, wherein I ran 12 miles on a cold day.  While it might look like water, I promise that everything on my face there is ice.  I guess that makes me feel cool.

You are also free to note that I am apparently not smart enough to turn my phone around to take a picture of myself, instead opting to use my rear view mirror.  What can I say, running makes me stupid.  On this particular run, at about 8 or 9 miles my feet were getting really cold, and I was really starting to regret my decision.

So this is Christmas

Me talking about Christmas music seems to be a periodic thing here on the blog.  I think it coincides with solar flares or something.  But this year, I'm not complaining!  (well, sort of.)  It's been noted before that most Christmas songs aren't exactly new.  According to xkcd, the 20 most played Christmas songs of all time were all written between 1930 and 1970, with 16 of those being between 1940 and 1959.

I get that major holidays in the US are extremely traditional, and we all want to pretend to be George Bailey for Christmas every year, but why are we stuck on Christmas songs that are, for the most part over 50 years old?  We record them over and over again, so we can get more electric guitar and pyrotechnics worked into the same songs, but a punk rock Holly Jolly Christmas is still at its heart, just a Holly Jolly Christmas.

So, I pose a question of what's the best Christmas songs written since I was born? (1982)  Heck, we can go further back and take song suggestions since 1970.  (Hint: "Feliz Navidad" is not a correct answer. Also, even "Grandma got run over by a reindeer" is 35 years old!)  Here is a reasonable list of Christmas songs if you want to look some over to get some creative juices flowing.  Surely in the last 40 or so years we have something that can exist on the same plane as "White Christmas" and "Silver Bells".  To be clear, I like most of those old traditional songs, and I generally like listening to Bing and friends singing them.  But society should be about progression, not sitting on our Blue Christmas laurels!

Of course, I have a few suggestions.

1. "Happy Xmas" (War is Over) by John Lennon (and I suppose also Yoko) is terrific, and was written in 1971.  It's perhaps more of a war protest song than a Christmas song, but since it's right there in the title (and written by John Lennon) it gets in easily.

2. Maybe to write a good Christmas song these days you need a cause, be it anti-war, or anti-famine.  I like "Do They Know it's Christmas?" which was written in 1984.

3. I like many of the original songs written by the Barenaked Ladies on their Christmas album, and my favorite (of the Christmas songs) is probably "Footprints".  Also on there are "Green Christmas" and "Christmastime".

And this is about where I run out of ideas.  I'm not all that big on Mariah Carey, giving my heart out for Christmas, or simply focusing on having a wonderful Christmas time.  But maybe someone else has some ideas?

More books

I've been reading a little bit more lately, so here's a book report, or two and a half.

Inferno by Dan Brown is a Dan Brown book.  That is both blindingly obvious, and probably the most insightful thing I can say.  Dan Brown books are the perfect airplane/airport books.  They're very engaging, so they make the time go quickly.  They have a gazillion chapters (103 chapters in a 400 page book), so there is always a handy stopping point. (Though about 90 of the chapters end with a phrase like "until he opened the door and saw who had just arrived." or "when he saw that they were too late.")  In this book, there is an evil badman who is going to ruin the world, and our only hope is follow clues left in art symbols to track down the diabolical device that he's hidden in the historic building.  So, yeah, it's just like all the other Dan Brown books.  This one uses Dante's inferno and associated artwork, and branches out from the Vatican to take us to entirely different places, like Florence and Venice.  I will say that the ending of this one took me by surprise.  Despite the little jabs I take at the book, it was just what I wanted it to be: entertaining.

If you're looking for something not entertaining, I can point you to Winston Churchill's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples".  Shannon first got me an abridged copy from the library, but I figured that if you're going to do something, you ought to do it right, so I sent the book back and got the unabridged one that is eight or nine hundred pages long.  I have since asked Shannon to go back and get the abridged one from the library.  I made it up to the Magna Carta or so before I started skimming.  I'm still stuck in the 1300s.  For some reason, I had assumed that Churchill would be a more entertaining writer.  (You know, "I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."?)  Apparently he did his writing sober.  Anyway, I may or may not finish this.  I plan to fast forward a few hundred years and see how it's going.

Because it was sitting around the house, I picked up "Michael Vey: the Prisoner of Cell 25" by Richard Paul Evans.  It's a YA superhero book, basically.  The writing is ok, but not great.  Michael Vey has some electrical super-powers, and there is a super evil, completely amoral, conscienceless, badman who wants to catch him and get him to do Bad Things.  The villain is kinda over the top, just so we can all be clear that he's completely, 100% bad.  So of course Michael, and friends he picks up along the way, have to get involved in saving the world.  I picked this up as a change of pace from Churchill rambling about King Edward the somethingth and his taxation fights with the church, so it has successfully entertained me.  I finished the first book and am about half way through the 2nd.  They are about 300 pages a piece, and I think there's only 3 of them, so I plan to read through them all.  Not good enough to really recommend to someone else, in my opinion, but now that I've started, I guess I need to see how it turns out . . .

Casio fx-82A

Let's take a moment to marvel at my calculator, the venerable CASIO fx-82a. I picked this up in high school when my chemistry teacher was going to get rid of it. Because even 15 years ago it was considered old. My favorite feature is the physical on/off switch.

If you wanted, you could wax all philosophical about the enduring value of something that still fulfills it's purpose.  Or you could talk about a society that would throw something out because replacements are so cheap.  I'll let you do all that.  I'm busy making a little party hat for my calculators 30th birthday party.

Stream of Unconsiousness

It's been 5 or 6 years since I've pulled an all-nighter, but for the last 2 nights, I've been nocturnal. See, in my career, I've gone from making germanium crystals in about 3 days, to making silicon carbide crystals in a bit under a week, to making sapphire crystals that take 2 or 3 weeks.  And that means sometimes equipment needs someone to keep an eye on it over night.  I never had to do that at DC (mostly because you couldn't see anything while it was growing - you just put everything together, hit go, and then come back days later and see if it worked).  But now I'm in much more of an R&D role, and we've got a big (really big) new furnace, and it needs some baby sitting.  Luckily, tonight is my last night of hanging around here.  I've done reasonably well with this whole staying up late thing, which isn't to say that when 5:30am rolls around I'm not ready to pass out anyway.

So, from my sleep deprived brain, some stories about the girls.

Julia is growing up and has recently learned how to think about other people.  In a way, it's amazing to see little kids and realize that they really no notion of how much of an imposition they are nearly every moment of their lives.  Ella really just doesn't understand that I'm not waiting around all day to go wipe her bum at a moments notice.  But Julia is figuring things out more and more, and as the sensitive soul that she is, trying to make people feel better.  So, if she sees me or Shannon stressed out (usually because of Ella) she'll come over and gently stroke my hand, or give me a hug or something.  It's very sweet.

Ella, on the other hand, just gets goofier every day.  The girls usually take showers, not baths, these days.  I'm not entirely clear why, since they seem to want to stay out of the shower stream as possible, but that's what they pick.  Anyway, while in the shower the other day, Ella declared that she was having a "bum party" and starts doing her little booty shake dance.  Which brings us back to one of the rules we have to go over and over at our house: no dancing in the shower.

The Windy City

Since moving to St. Charles, I don’t play basketball twice a week like I did in Midland.  Insert frowny face here.  (My computer says that ‘frowny’ isn’t a word, but suggests I use ‘frowsy’.  I googled that (I was worried that google would say “did you mean frowny?”; also, why doesn’t my computer recognize ‘google’ as a word?) and frowzy means “scruffy and neglected in appearance”.  I suppose that’s a good sort of face to insert there, too.)  The cultural hall in our church is carpeted (yuck), and we have about half the LDS population density as in Midland, so basketball probably isn’t going to happen.  Basketball at a non-church place probably isn’t going to happen either.  So where does that leave me?  Running!

With two days suddenly freed up, I’ve been running a lot more since we’ve gotten settled in here.  Specifically, in the last 67 days, I’ve run 171 miles.  I set several personal records in November, most notably, getting out 18 times for a total of 95.2 miles.  I was a little bit bummed that I came that close to 100 miles without hitting such a nice, round base-10 number, particularly because I probably won’t be getting back to that level any time soon.  Why?  Because it’s cold here! (And running in the cold is less fun leading to less running (and less frostbite), in case you couldn't quite connect those dots.)

I don’t expect a whole lot of sympathy here, because I know that much of the US is having a very cold week this week, but I don’t know what I’m going to do all winter if I’m faced with days like next Tuesday, where my morning run is projected to be 3° with a windchill of -14°.  I’m just having a hard time wrapping my brain around going out running in conditions where one pair of gloves just isn’t enough.  My coldest run ever so far is 8°, which was pretty darn cold.  My long run this Saturday is scheduled for the afternoon when it might get all the way up to 20.  But my weekday runs pretty much have to be in the morning.  I have a rough running schedule for the month, wherein I might be able to get to around 85 miles, provided I don’t lose more than 6 days due to weather.

Theories abound as to the source of “The Windy City” as a reference to Chicago, but it’s certainly the windiest place that I’ve ever lived.  I suppose my options are to either sit at home and be lazy, or grow my beard out extra long, put on an extra 2 or 3 layers and keep running.

This is the view out my front door. We have a semi-private pond in our front yar

This is the view out my front door. We have a semi-private pond in our front yard, and the other day I noticed that the geese were no longer swimming across the pond, but were walking across. It looks like winter is officially here. There is a little bit of snow scattered on the pond, but that's all we've got thus far. More might have fallen, but then it probably blew south until it melted. Lots of cold wind the last week or two.

Tarnished Chrome

For several years now, I've been a faithful user of Google's Chrome web browser.  We are so poor that we have but a single desktop at our house*, so Shannon and I both like to leave stuff open on the computer.  She uses Firefox, so me using Chrome was a nice way to make sure that we didn't get our email, facebook and other accounts confused.  (Because nothing is worse than accidentally posting on facebook as your spouse!)

Chrome has worked great for years.  And then, apparently they broke it a few months ago.  I don't know what they did, but Chrome became a terrible, slow, mess.  Watching a video on youtube would pretty much max out my CPU.  (yeah, my CPU is closing in on a decade old, but still . . .)  Doing anything on Chrome would run the CPU at 60 or 70%.  And even after closing Chrome, it would still use 60MB of RAM and up to 35% of the CPU.  I don't know what it was doing (NSA? Is that you?) but it would just eat up resources all day long.

I tried reinstalling it.  I tried messing with settings, and pretty much anything that the interest suggested.  I found various other people complaining of the same problems.  But, since Google can't get their act together, I've moved on.

Shannon already uses Firefox, Apple doesn't support Safari for Windows anymore, and IE . . . well, no.  So, I'm now on day 2 of using Opera.  It seems to be working nicely, without any of the problems Chrome had. We'll see how it goes.

* My comment was in jest, but it's pretty ridiculous what passes for "poor" in the world some times.

I fully expect that a picture from my phone won't do it justice but this is my

I fully expect that a picture from my phone won't do it justice, but this is my view from the breakfast table. It's pretty fabulous with the bright red tree against the blue, blue sky.

Now if only I wasn't paying for an equally fabulous view two states away . . .

Ender's Game, the Movie

I don't know when I first read Ender's Game, nor do I know how many times I've read it.  But anyone who has known me over the last 20 years or so has almost certainly heard me talk about the book.  I had a review of it on my really awesome website back in the days of AOL.  I was loaning it out to friends since at least high school, and I've even mailed a copy to Brazil for a friend.

My history with the Ender's Game movie is nearly as long.  The movie has famously been tossed around and re-pitched for a long, long time.  Rumors have been flying about the movie since at least 1999, when I heard Orson Scott Card talk about casting Jake Lloyd (in the midst of his Star Wars Episode 1 fame) as Ender.  (For those who are curious, he defended this by claiming that Lloyd could act, and was simply saddled with terrible writing in the Phantom Menace.)  So, let's get around to my thoughts on the movie, which are many and of course, filled with spoilers.  But really, if you've avoided reading the book despite decades of me suggesting it, I'm not going to feel bad for ruining the ending for you.

From the beginning, the movie is was an impossible task.  No film is going to be able to compete with 20 years of my imagination.  Book adaptations are hard, and lots of cuts have to be made.  These general feelings were more or less universal among Ender fans, and some seriously questioned whether it was worth it to make a movie knowing that it couldn't live up to our completely unreasonable expectations.  Thus, my strategy was to lower expectations.  That was a good call.

I'm not an experienced movie critic. I'm not even an experienced movie goer.  I think the last two non-kids movies I saw in a theater were Harry Potter 7-2 and the last Pirates movie.  Let's talk about some elements of the film.

Pacing
The pacing of the movie was really rough for me.  The story is one of introspection about the nature of conflict and the weight of leadership, and the movie doesn't give you any time to think.  In a scene with Ender and Valentine on the lake, Ender and Val have to complete each other's sentences (E: In the moment when i understand them . . . V: You love them . . . E: And in that moment . . . V: You beat them . . . E: I destory them.)  I'm paraphrasing the dialog, but we don't even get time to have a deep conversation with good pacing. We have to throw out this bit of Ender's psyche and then get on to launching him back into space as quickly as possible.  I really feel like the movie would have benefited from being 20 or 30 minutes longer.  The first Narnia movie (2005) was 143 minutes and came from a book that is what, 120 pages?  EG is 300-something pages long, and they compacted that into about 110 minutes.  Ender's stay in battle school only seems to include 2 or 3 battles, which makes his stay there seem like it's only 3 weeks long.  (Not 4 years)  In the book, when Mazer shows up in Enders room, they have a waiting contest that takes a significant amount of time.  Hours perhaps.  In the movie, Ender asks him a question, gets no response, and quickly declares that someone will come looking for him and we move on to them fighting.  How much time would it have taken to hint at some passage of time?  It leaves Ender looking very impatient and impulsive, where his character out to be just the opposite.  I think someone should have reminded the director about how montages work.  The movie smartly chooses to completely remove the Val/Peter/Demosthenese/Locke story line, which is good, but still.  We needed more time.

Acting and Writing
EG is built around genius children between the ages of 6 and 12, which is what always scared everyone about the film.  Finding 1 good actor that age is hard enough.  Finding half a dozen is near impossible.  Historically, every time a kid had a good acting performance (Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense) Ender fans would get all atwitter about the prospect of him as Ender.  The obvious solution to this is to age up the characters to teenagers, which is what the movie did.  (In a more drastic approach, a script was produced years ago which shifted the story much more to the point of view of the teachers.)  I suppose this works fine.  Asa Butterfield does reasonably well with the part given him, I think.  It's unfortunate the he's as tall as all the adults, but growth spurts happen when they happen for kids his age.  The movie grabbed 3 significant names for the major adult parts in Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley and Viola Davis.  I think Ford had the best performance of the three, which surprised me.  I had higher expectations for Davis based on prior movies (Doubt).  The rest of the kids did ok, I guess, but other than Petra, they didn't really call for them to act at all.  Bean, Alai, Dink and Bernard were reduced to cardboard cutouts that had a few boring lines.  They were generally given a flat delivery, but the way the movie was put together, the importance to their parts is very minimal.  (Every time Bean opened his mouth, I was hoping he might get to say "Two fighters against a Star Destroyer?")  In short, no one is going to be getting any oscar nominations for their work, but I don't have any complaints from the actors.

The writing was a little sketchy in places, specifically the battle room, where apparently the writers decided to let their 7 year-old kids have a shot on some lines.  I can't remember any of the specific offending lines, but it didn't feel like anything that anyone would ever say in real life.  Oh, wait!  I just thought of one.  How do they manage to produce a move in which Petra, upon first meeting Ender says "we can go to the battle room together and I'll show you some moves."  I about fell over at that line.  Surely there isn't a teenage girl anywhere in the world that would accidentally use the phrase "I'll show you some moves" when talking to a boy.  Right?

Characters and world creation
The world created by the film makers, and the characters within had some significant departures from the book that I thought were needless, and not an improvement.  The whole movie had a much more military feel than the book, with lots of marching, yelling and saluting.  Dap was turned into a drill sergeant, instead of being the one person who is actually instructed to be nice to the kids.  One of the things I really disliked was how they significantly shrunk battle school.  In the book, there are at least 20 armies of 40 kids each, plus commanders and launchies, which puts the minimum total population of battle school at around 900 kids.  But from what the movie shows, there's only about 50 kids there, maybe less.  The cafeteria where they eat is tiny, their launch group is 18 kids (but 3 disappear by the first time they enter the battle room - oh, while I'm thinking about it, the battle room DOES NOT HAVE WINDOWS!!!!).  Armies seem to be downgraded to the same 15 kids (16 including the commander, I suppose), though still divided between 4 toons.  What the toons are for isn't clear, as the battles seem to require about the same amount of tactical planning as the trench warfare of WWI, i.e. keep your head down and keep firing at the guy hiding behind the other star.  Anyway, getting back to topic, battle school should have had several hundred more kids in it, and I don't see why they couldn't get a bunch of extras in there for a few scenes with crowds in it.

I'll start with the characters that they did well on.  Graff was right, Anderson was good, though really only exists in both the book and the movie to give Graff someone to talk to.  Peter and Val are one dimensional, and they didn't mess that up.  As I've already mentioned, all the other kids besides Ender, Bonzo and Petra essentially don't matter.  Bean is just a body to fill a seat, same as the others.  We don't learn anything about any of them at any time.

Now the issues I have on the development of characters.  We'll start small and work up.  Ender's dad is kinda jerky, and I don't know why.  Petra does not love Ender.  She marries Bean.  And Peter.  Pretty much every major male hero in the series EXCEPT Ender.  But whatever.

Let's move on to Ender.  They certainly read the book, and they understood what Ender was supposed to be like.  They just didn't adequately show it.  Graff mentions Ender's compassion multiple times, but we never see it.  Instead, we see an Ender that is impatient, needlessly challenges authority, and is aggressive.  The movie got it completely backwards when they made Ender aggressive, but a pacifist who was angry about being tricked into fighting.  In the book, Ender understands the reasons for the conflict, and that humanity must defend itself.  But his lack of aggression is part of what requires the "trick" of the game at the end.  This balance within Ender's personality is very delicate, and that is what is the hardest part of the whole book to put into a movie. They sort of understood it, but not completely.  This is one of the areas where the movie needed more time to sort through these issues.  Instead, they decided to plow on, much as I will now.

Visuals
Visually, the movie was very nice.  The battle room and space battles looked great.  For some odd reason, in the future when you're weightless, your arms MUST float upward causing your elbows to stick out all funny, like you're somehow unable to move your arms into a different position.  As I mentioned, the battle scenes had a lack of movement, both from the students and the capital ships, which just sit there and fire during battles.  As we learn from Ender in the book, "There is no combat without movement."

Story
It's plot time.  There are a couple of plot holes that simply don't work.  First: The Bonzo fight.  In the movie, Ender more or less subdues Bonzo physically and then lets him go.  Bonzo attacks again, Ender kicks him and he falls back across the room where he manages to fall exactly onto the corner of a step which presumably fractures his skull.  In essence, it was a fight where someone accidentally got seriously hurt.  (Also, what's with the windows into the surgical room, where they let anyone watch who wants to walk by???)  Contrast that with the book, where Ender breaks his face with the back of his head, and then repeatedly kicks him afterward.  Ender does not mean to kill Bonzo, but he absolutely intends to inflict every bit of physical damage that Bonzo receives.  Ender believes in not striking unless absolutely required, and then striking with maximum force -- you don't trade blows with your enemy, you destroy his ability to ever strike back.  The intentional nature of the way the Ender destroys Bonzo is important, it's how Ender fights all his battles.  He doesn't win by accident.

There are also a few quick hitters that don't make much sense.  Where did all the buggers water go?  Despite what you may or may not believe about our ecological position here on earth, but we're in no danger of running out of water.  Clean fresh water, maybe.  But just water, not so much.  Also, there are many, many chemical ways of either cleaning or making water that are much simpler and cheaper than interstellar travel.  What does Petra do in all those battles, since her one job is evidently to pull the trigger on a singular gun, which they never use until the very end?  Why do the adults watching the final battle respond to victory with a golf clap?  Shouldn't they be a bit more excited than that?  Why do the formics look so much like the zerg?  Why is Bonzo so short?  Why does it take an extra soldier to escort a guy with a sprained ankle to the nurse's office? (Why does he need a healthy ankle to go be weightless and hide behind a star anyway?  Isn't a weightless environment the ultimate in elevating the injury?)  How dumb is the whole idea that Ender then gets two replacements for his army from the other army that they're fighting, and it happens to be his best friends from that army?  The army leader board shows about 10 armies, shouldn't they be grabbing some other random students?  Why do they have to travel to a distant planet to fight the buggers when they have an instantaneous communication device?

Now on to the biggest plot hole of all: how does the hive queen know to hack into Ender's mind game to plant the images of where they left the cocoon?  Never mind the technical problems of how the hive queen is hacking into the mind game in order to place information into Ender's brain.  Lets just try to answer the question of why?  At that point in time, Ender is a launchie in battle school, and yet she manages to figure out that he is vitally important to the formics survival.  Perhaps she is reading Graff's email? Or listening in on his conversations with Anderson?  Never mind that the entire message that the hive queen leaves requires Ender to have a room with the right view out the window (that he has to stand on his bed to even see).  For the film, they completely reversed this "communication" from the hive queen who is sending information to Ender which matches an already existent real place, long before he is a direct threat to the formics.  In the book, they construct a place specifically to mimic something that they find in his memories - memories that they are looking at because they can sense that he is at the center of the fleet that is currently attacking them.

Summary
Ok, this has probably gone on much longer than anyone really wanted.  I could go on for hours.  I feel bad that so many of my comments seem pretty negative.  Most of these thoughts have flowed from my fingertips as fast as I could type them.  (After some discussion with Shannon, too.)  I'm probably too focused on the details to appreciate the film as a whole.  It was a decent attempt, but it falls short of my hopes and dreams, and landed about where I figured it would.  The acting was a pleasant surprise, as I figured that would be a huge downfall of the movie.  The major plot changes were maddening, because they don't make sense to me.  And most significantly, the movie felt so rushed as they tried to pack everything in to 114 minutes.

As it turns out, the book was better.

I like big books (and I can not lie)

It's been a while since I read something that was too heavy to lift, so I put on my back brace and lugged around a book that is holding down bookshelves all over America: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer.  You've probably seen the big book with the swastika on your parents book shelves, but has anyone actually read it?  Because let me tell you, it's 1147 pages.  Not including the bibliography or index.  Of course, if you account for the pictures, that brings it down to about 1147 pages, and then, once you take out the maps its down to 1147 pages.  That's right, 1147 pages with nary a picture or map to be found.  But don't worry, there are footnotes!

You all have a basic idea of the story.  Hitler starts up the Nazi party, gradually picks up some seats in the legislature during the 20s and then manages to get himself named Chancellor in 1932.  Over the next half dozen years he tells the same story over and over again, pushing around pretty much the rest of Europe.  Basically, he tells them, "Hey, I really need X, and if you just let me have it, then we'll be good, and we can all live together happily".  Over the 1930s, X happens to be, no more reparation payments over WWI, no more limiting Germany to a tiny little army, no more limiting Germany to a tiny little navy, Austria, part of Czechoslovakia, all of Czechoslovakia, and finally half of Poland.  It takes a depressingly long time for other European powers to figure out that he's got a never-ending list of stuff that he wants.  So, they have a big ol' war, he's pretty much crazy, he kills pretty much everyone he doesn't like (which is a lot of people) and finally he kills himself.  There you go, if you have small hand writing, I think you can get that on a 3x5 card.

The book was published in 1960, and extensively references captured Nazi documents, which provides interesting insight in to the fact that they were all crazy.  Page after page left me completely dumbfounded that 1) anyone could be so messed up and hate so many people, 2) he could find so many friends to help him in his cause and 3) so many people let him do it.

I made it through the book in about 8 weeks, and considering that I moved and started a new job during that time, I think that's pretty good progress.  It's interesting, though long and at times overly detailed, covering every conversation that every person had during negotiations, for example.  The best parts were when Shirer would quote his own journal or opinion, as he lived in Germany as a reporter from 1932 to 1940, and saw many important events first hand.

Birding

We went for a conference weekend walk along the Fox river (which runs through town here) this morning.  Near the end of our walk, we spotted a bald eagle circling over head.  Maybe he was looking for foxes or something.  (Fox River, ha ha.)  For me, it's the first wild bald eagle I've ever seen, except perhaps the pair the like to nest near the West Yellowstone entrance to Yellowstone.  Except with those ones, they don't let you stop as you drive past, so all you can do is stick your nose up against the window and hope that maybe one of them sticks its head out over the edge of the nest.  Anyway, it was neat.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that it was Shannon who spotted it up there circling.  I suppose I will have to give up my nickname of "eagle eye" for at least a day.

Strangely ILL

Shortly after moving to Michigan, I recorded a few thoughts differences that I'd noticed moving across the country.  They weren't terribly significant things, which is really the most significant thing about the list.   It's pretty much the same story with Illinois.  The country seems to be pretty homogeneous, at least from my sampling which now includes 3 of the 50 states. But here's what I've got so far:

Illinois likes to charge you for . . . well, whatever they think they can get away with.
- There is a $50 registration fee for kindergarten, which is only 2 1/2 hours a day.  If you want full day kindergarten, they have that, but it costs a few thousand dollars.
- They charge you to drive on their roads.  From our house, it costs a couple bucks worth of tolls to get into the city.  And a couple bucks more to get back out.  If you get a fancy electronic box to stick on your windshield, you don't have to stop to pay the tolls, and they are 50% cheaper.
- Property taxes are significantly higher here than they were in Midland.  (And people in Midland sure liked to complain about those.)  Of course, I don't own any property here, so this doesn't have a large direct effect on me.
- We haven't gotten new license plates or drivers licenses yet, but when we do, I'm sure they won't hesitate to charge us.
- Oh! How could I leave this one to so late in the list: they charge you to take away garbage.  Sure, you might say that every city does this, but in St. Charles, you have to buy their garbage bags, or but tags to put on your bags for them to take it away.  I suppose the upside to all this is that if we don't drive, or create garbage, we can save money!

It gets dark really early here
We only moved a few hundred miles west, but we went from the western edge of the Eastern time zone, to the eastern edge of the central time zone.  The net result is that sunset is about 45 minutes earlier than it used to be.  Today, that difference happened to be exactly 45 minutes, as it turns out.  Official sunset time in St. Charles today was 6:32 pm.  And we just barely hit the equinox.  And we haven't come off daylight savings time yet.  By Halloween, sunset will be at 5:48, and by Thanksgiving it will be at 4:24!  That's about where it bottoms out, which, is a good thing, because otherwise I'd go crazy.  Twilight will be before 5pm, so I'll be driving home from work in the middle of the night.  The other side of this is, of course, that the sun comes up that much earlier.  But that still doesn't motivate me to get out of bed.

New Kind of Unemployment

It's been nearly 4 weeks since we moved to Illinois, and things are settling down, I suppose.  I guess it's been a bit of an adjustment going back to work every day and all the things that entails - seeing the girls less, showering every day - you know, stuff that grown-ups do.  For me, the transition to a new place is pretty easy.  Other than living in a new place, my life isn't that different.  I spend all day at work doing things that aren't totally different than the other jobs I've had for the last half-dozen years.  Shannon and the girls have had much more adjusting to do than I have.

But there is one thing that has been pretty weird, and that's a new kind of unemployment: we don't have callings.  I suppose when we moved to Michigan we didn't have callings for a little while after we moved, but that was three years ago.  Since then I've been choir accompanist, Sunday school president, primary teacher and Webelos leader.  Playing for the choir carried through basically the entire time we were in Michigan, and the primary and scouts covered the last year.  So, I always had something to do.  Not tons to do, but something.  My primary class only had 4 kids in it, but I had to have a lesson every week, the ward choir practiced basically every week, and we at least usually had a plan for scouts.  But now, Saturday night rolls around, and I don't have anything I need to do to get ready for church.  (Brush my clothes?  Shine my shoes?)  Ditto for Sunday morning.

And then when church actually starts, I don't have anything to do.  I guess I just go to gospel doctrine and then EQ?  I just . . . . attend?  I feel kinda like a free loader.  Now, I know that they'll get around to giving us callings soon, and I guess I'm enjoying actually hearing a lesson (which I hadn't done in a year and a half), but it still feels strange.  Our ward has had something like 14 new families move in over the last 5 months, so there's probably a bit of a back-log on bishopric visits and callings.  (Shannon is probably very happy that this also means that there is likely a back-log on "ask the new people to speak in sacrament meeting," too.)

I admit to not knowing a whole lot of boring organizational details about other churches, but I wonder if this is a somewhat unique LDS thing.  My impression is that other churches have a lot higher percentage of people who attend, but don't have other responsibilities.  And, from what I understand, when people do have responsibilities, they tend to be a bit more on a volunteer basis.

Anyway, if this year has taught us anything, it is that unemployment won't last forever!

Chomp!

This is what Julia's leg looks like today after Ella took a bite out of her thigh Sunday morning. If you look closely, you can see 6 or 8 red tooth marks where Ella broke the skin through Julia's pants. Sadly, this is not Ella's first offense, and even worse she seems to bite harder each time.

Sticky special Ella

We got taffy from Aunt Kim a loooong time ago and finally got around to "pulling it out" yesterday. It was un-pulled taffy, so all three girls buttered up their hands to get to work. Ella was very much not impressed. She's always been a bit of a neat freak (often wiping her mouth and fingers after each and every bite at dinner) and so slathering on some butter wasn't exactly her idea of a good time. Adding the taffy and telling her to pull it didn't help much. This picture only begins to show her revoltion at the whole thing. It was pretty funny.

In other Ella news, in the last day or two, her prayers have gotten a lot more special. First she blesses each family member individually to be special, and then a separate round of "bless mommas bones to be special". We just bite our lips and hope that she remembers the food in there somewhere.

First day of work

What did people do before the internet? You can feel free to leave comments below, but since I'm still blogging from my phone, I won't see them for a while. The no internet saga is longer than I want to type withmy thumbs, but just know that ISPs all seem to be incompetent. So instead, I give you my first day of work picture.

It was a bit different going to work after a break that was far longer than any school summer break I've ever had. The first week is over now, and thengsare going just fine. First weeks are always a bit slow until you start to figure out what is going on. Monday morning I'll be at Northwestern for some metrology that should be my first actual positive contribution.

But today is the weekend. I went running without getting lost, and we're tired of unpacking boxes, so we'll have to find something fun to do, even if we're technologically living in the dark ages.

When we moved out of Wymount 7 years ago we reserved a 10 foot U-haul. They did

When we moved out of Wymount 7 years ago, we reserved a 10 foot U-haul. They didn't have any, so they gave us a 16 footer, which was a bit of overkill. We moved to St. George in a 10' truck and all our moves since then have either been in-town or professionally done. Until this one.

I've knows several people recently with 2-4 kids who have tried to move with a 26' truck, only to discover on loading day that they didn't fit. But 26' is as big as they come, so thats what we reserved and hoped for the best. Turns out that all our friends must have a bunch of junk. We fit just fine and were maybe 80% full. So I got to drive the monster 350 miles while pulling our prism behind. I figure we were 45' long or so. Shannon took the girls in the civic which was a whole different adventure. The drive went pretty well, other than the $150 of gas I had to put in, but I think I'll stick to driving little cars in the future.

Yesterday we said good bye to our house. It was a nice house and cleaning it up

Yesterday we said good bye to our house. It was a nice house, and cleaning it up and packing everything left us remembering all of our favorite things. The spacious storage, the swings (outside and in), the space, our manhattan mist bedroom, our big kitchen. Also, we realize that it will probably be a long time before we live somewhere that big again (if we ever do).

I started blogging a virtual tour of the house when we moved in, but never finished. I suppose we move more often than I blog! I realized this week that Ella just turned 3 a few months ago and we're already moving her on to her third state. Even my dad made it to age 5 before his 3rd state (I think).

We'll miss you, house! We hope someone nice buys you! (the sooner the better)

Magic Wish

Ok readers, here's your assignment: If you could magically have the skill or talent to do one specific thing, what would it be?  This assignment, of course, comes with some constraints.  First of all, it absolutely must be physically possible.  So no wishing to learn to fly, or run a marathon in 12 minutes or something ridiculous like that.  This is more of a Groundhog Day sort of thing, where you get to develop a skill overnight, but, in my magical case, you don't have to relive a single day over and over.  It's like in the blink of an eye you get to spend 1000 hours practicing something.  In the movie, Bill Murray does all sorts of stuff with his time: throw cards into a hat, ice sculpt, learn French poetry, play the piano (what else am I forgetting)?  But you only get one thing.  What would it be?  I think the exercise is more fun if you try to be as specific as possible.

To be a good sport, I'll share mine.  I think I'd magically learn to play Rhapsody in Blue on the piano.  I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that I could learn to play it, but I think I'd need every one of those arbitrarily-chosen 1000 hours.  Obviously, I think the piece is pretty cool, or I wouldn't waste my wish on learning to play it.  If you don't have anything to listen to for the next 14 1/2 minutes, here it is on youtube.  (I'll have you know that I did listen to 2 versions, but didn't like the other one much.)  I've listened to it like 3 times tonight, and I'm not tired of it yet.

Ella loves to line up crayons. She will sit for half an hour or more lining up t

Ella loves to line up crayons. She will sit for half an hour or more lining up things (usually crayons) and to end. This particular creation was first a house, and then became a crayon factory. (Why yes, we have been watching Mr. Rogers lately.) Surely this is a sign of Ella's deep genius, which will make it into her biography in later years.

I'm sure her super powers will start manifesting themselves soon.

Tonight Julia said 'I'll get us started tonight' and took off reading. I'm not

Tonight, Julia said "I'll get us started tonight" and took off reading. I'm not sure where she figures out how to read "astonished" or "iniquities". But I guess I don't know how she learned to read in the first place. She just seems to have figured it out. She's not all that good at sounding out words - she just knows them all, even if she doesn't know what the word means.

Ella, on the other hand, only knows a handful of letters. I guess you have to pay attention to second children, too. Ooops.

Its Guster up there. Trust me. Ben Folds Five is next. Then BNL. Its pretty muc

Its Guster up there. Trust me. Ben Folds Five is next. Then BNL. Its pretty much a rockin' party in Lansing tonight.

hopefully we can afford to pay the babysitter when we finally get home tonight.

New Focus Needed?

Thanks to a recent survey, I am now better acquainted with my audience demographics on this blog.  It looks like I've managed to very selectively target people who are: female, married, LDS, have 2.3 kids and are, um, 29 years old.  With this in mind, I'm looking at a new, three-fold focus for my blog:

1. Mommy Daddy Blogging!

2. CRAFTS!  Painted wooden things! Vinyl lettering!  And {lots} {|more|} prettiness in *general*!

3. Shooting myself in the head, because I've been subjected to my own blog.

On second thought, lets turn to the always exciting topic of the weather.  96% humidity on my run this morning and . . . no, let's not talk about the weather, because it's lame.

I guess it looks like I'm still in the market for my own little niche in the blogosphere.  Its nice to be home after a month in UT.  Since I saw a majority of my adoring public while there, you know the basic details.  The wedding was lovely, and I think my sister did a good job of picking someone to marry.  The driving (two 13+ hour days each way) was long, but went as well as could be expected.  And, as an added bonus, ever since we've been home, the girls have been sleeping in until like 8:30!  It probably won't last, but its helped all of us catch up on some sleep.

I don't really think the picture will do it justice but the pool is looking goo

I don't really think the picture will do it justice, but the pool is looking good. If only it felt as good as it looks. The water is still cold, to say the least. It seems strange to actually be rooting for warmer weather just to heat up the pool.

In other news, google reader is officially gone now, so I'm curious to see if blogs take a further hit as a result. So, you should all leave a comment so we know that you're still here.

Who says driving through Iowa isn't fun? We just passed the worlds largest truck

Who says driving through Iowa isn't fun? We just passed the worlds largest truck stop. We are about 450 miles in to our 800 mile first leg of the journey. All is well so far. I'm in a plastic car right now, so I'll have to ask all of my devoted readers (who are of course reading this mere moments after I write it) to knock on wood for me.

So far we've done just over 7 hours of driving and only 26 minutes of stopping. Perhaps we should look into becoming professional long haul truckers.

The pool is finally ready for swimming! Today we learned to work the pump and v

The pool is finally ready for swimming! Today we learned to work the pump and vacuum and even what the giant hook attachment is for. (pulling people out of the pool) And after all that hard work, we're going on vacation tomorrow. We have an awesome friend who is taking care of the pool for us while we're gone in exchange for free swimming rights. Hopefully it warms up enough for them to enjoy it.

Quick poll: does all of this fit in the trunk of a Honda Civic? We will find out

Quick poll: does all of this fit in the trunk of a Honda Civic? We will find out soon. If not, we may have to wear the same 2 outfits the whole time we are in Utah. I already threatened to wear my swimming suit to the wedding. Oh, that reminds me: gotta add my suit to the pile.

Filling up the pool. Ignore all these leaves that are still in there and be gl

Filling up the pool. Ignore all these leaves that are still in there, and be glad that you can't see all the dead worms on the bottom. The next issue to work on is the fact that the highs for the next couple of days are supposed to be in the 60s. Maybe by July the water will warm up!

Death to blogs

Remember when blogs were a thing?  Do you feel old now?

The other day Julia showed me a picture she drew.  In the last year she's gone from scribbling to actually drawing with a purpose and an attempt at conveying an actual scene.  It's been nice to see that she isn't doomed to cubism, and the particular picture I'm thinking of is a nice one of me and I don't remember what else.  Pretty much the only thing I do remember is that my hair and my beard were all grey.  I tried to ask her why she would choose that particular color, but she didn't want to answer.

For the record, there are some pesky grey hairs on my head (which I have been known to yank out if they catch me in a bad mood), but there's no way anyone would notice without seriously invading my personal space.

Anyway, for those who haven't been aware, Google is killing Google Reader in about a month.  I've used Google Reader for years, and it's always worked well enough, though it never really impressed me.  It kills me that Google own blogger/blogspot, and in order to view private blogs, I have to log in with my Google credentials, AND YET, they can't make Google Reader do that seamlessly.  I think they missed the boat there, big time.

Blogs have certainly been in decline for a few years now.  This blog is a nice example.  I suppose we blame facebook, twitter and all those hip new products, as well as our continually shortening attention span.  When Google Reader goes down, will anyone still notice when blogs are updated?  Particularly with many personal blogs being updated much less lately, do people still check them manually?

In our preparation for the Reader-pocolypse, we're trying out Feedly (feedly.com) to keep track of our various blogs.  The transfer of all your favorite blogs from Google to Feedly is extremely quick and easy.  Beyond that, I don't think I have any more comments.  If you have comments, however, you should leave them. (Though probably not on this post, as it's been quite boring.  Pick other posts.  Pick better posts.)  And while you're at it, go and put something on your blog, too.  Maybe I'll comment.  And comments make everyone feel good.

Dow 10k (and 1 mile) Run

I ran the Dow Run 10k this Saturday.  I ran the race last year (which was my first ever 10k), and finished in 44:35 (7:11 pace) which I was pretty happy with.  Last year, I wanted to finish under 45:00, which I beat by 25 seconds, but I was a bit disappointed when I found out that I'd taken 4th in my age group (AG) by only 5 seconds.  Surely, somewhere in the 6.2 miles I could have cut a corner a little tighter, or uttered one sentence fewer to a friend in the first mile, or done something to shave off those 5 seconds.

This year, I've run 60% more miles, but I didn't seem to be any faster than last year (foreshadowing).  So I came into the race not expecting much.  My goal was to finish in 44:30, to at least show some improvement and, in a sense, win 3rd place from the year before.  Obviously, AG placement is very dependent on who else chooses to race that day.

The course is super flat, and fairly boring, in my opinion.  It mostly wanders through neighborhoods in town, and thankfully has enough turns that you can focus on the next corner rather than the runners pulling away from you out front.  My strategy was to run as close to even 7:15 splits as possible for the first 4 miles or so, and then see what was left in the tank to make up a bit of time over the last few miles. I don't have a fancy GPS watch, so I have to rely on my mental math during the race, and my ability to remember where I was afterward to figure out what happened.  Both years, I've learned that my brain quits working after 4 miles.

Mile 1: 7:25
I really didn't want to go out too fast, in which I succeeded.  I stayed near other runners with the fancy watches to over hear them talking a bit about the pace just to make sure.

Mile 2: 14:33 / 7:08 mile / 7:18 pace
I tried really hard throughout the race to think about my form and run easy and light.  I kept within site of a friend who ran it in 42:43 last year and has nice running form.  Whenever I'd look up at him, I'd remember to relax and run correctly.

Mile 3: 21:40 / 7:07 mile / 7:13 pace
I seemed rather alone on the course during mile 3, but started making up ground on half a dozen runners who were about 100 yards ahead.

Mile 4: 28:40 / 7:00 mile / 7:10 pace
A friend of mine running the race said that this is about where he lost sight of me, but that throughout the race I looked like I was running effortlessly.  I really appreciated this comment.  I managed to work past 10 or so runners through miles 4 and 5, before once again ending up by myself.  No one in front for a hundred yards, and no one behind that I was aware of. (Maybe they were there but running very quietly.)

Mile 5: ??:??
Brain shutting down.  About all I could concentrate on at this point was my form and not letting myself take off early and running out of gas.

Mile 6: ??:??
I kept telling myself that at 40:00 I could kick it up a gear in effort and that's about what I did. I had to slow down slightly maybe about a third of a mile from the finish line, because I didn't think I could hold the increased pace, but I was still going pretty darn fast. I passed one more person with in the final hundred yards, and pulled even with another guy, but he wasn't going to let me past, and I didn't have anything left to push with.  He beat me by 1 second.  (But don't worry, turns out he was 17, and thus not in my AG.)

Finish: 43:08 / 6:57 pace
As I crossed the finish line, I didn't really grasp what I'd just done.  I knew it was a significant improvement over the year before, but I couldn't remember the exact time.  I also couldn't even begin to divide 43:08 by 6.2 to calculate the pace. (I have a degree in physics and love to do math problems like this in my head.  The easy way is to know that it was somewhere around a 7:00 pace, so start with 7:00 * 6.2 = (7*6)+(7*0.2) = 42 + (7*1/5) = 42 + 7/5 = 43 + 2/5 = 43:24.  From there I was 16 seconds faster and 16 seconds over 6.2 miles is about 2 or 3 seconds, so I was at about a 6:57 pace.  But, in my stupor, I couldn't do the math, nor could I even think of a way to do the math.)  I got some food and water, and it wasn't until I was talking to a friend who told me I'd gone under 7 minute miles.  I was very surprised.  The math on the final 2.2 miles is that I did them in about 14:28, which is a 6:35 pace.  I'm still puzzled by that number, because it doesn't seem reasonable, but apparently I did it.  Hooray!

The official results are:
43:08 10k -- PR by 1:27
9th out of 265 overall
9th out of 129 men (where were all the fast women this year?)
2nd out of 26 AG (30-34)

After my race, I gave myself 45 minutes to tighten up, and then did a 1-mile run with Julia.  She ran the entire time and finished in 10:23, which was about 3 minutes faster than I anticipated.  About three quarters of the way through she looked up at me and said "this is kinda fun!".  Afterward she asked if she could run the 5k next year.  I told her she'd have to wait for a few years . . .

Spring is finally showing up here in Michigan. It turns out this pile of sticks

Spring is finally showing up here in Michigan. It turns out this pile of sticks I was staring at all winter is really a rhododendron! The other bush in the picture has a cardinal nest in it. As a further bonus, our grass also comes with dozens of little yellow flowers. Yay spring!

Born to Run

I've been reading a lot lately, which means I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to read.  I devoted nearly a year of my life to the Wheel of Time, and I finished that a few months ago.  So, it came down to me instructing Shannon to just find me something interesting at the library on a recent trip there with the girls.  Shannon generally does a pretty good job of this, and she brought home a stack of books, including one that I'd been avoiding for a few years.

"Born to Run - A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" was written by Christopher McDougall in 2009, and you've probably heard of it.  It's probably the single most significant driving force behind the barefoot/minimalist running movement that has grown over the last decade.  The graph below shows the number of google searches over the last half dozen years for "barefoot running" "tarahumara" and "minimalist running".  The terms all show a nice surge through 2009, with the highest blue spike in August.  "Born to Run" spent the first of it's 15 non-consecutive weeks on the New York Times best sellers list on June 7th.  You can mouse-over for specific dates info.

[I think it's interesting to see that "barefoot running" shows seasonal variation, with high searches in the spring and summer.  "Tarahumara" shows a peak with the release of the book, and a general decline afterwards; though it is still above pre-book levels.  "Minimalist running" however, has a much more constant increase over time, and doesn't seem to have been influenced much by the book.  Another note: Utah is 1st, 2nd and 1st, respectively, in searching for these terms.]

Anyway, it's clear that somewhere in the 2009/2010 time frame, barefoot or minimalist running became a bit of a fad.  Minimalist running shoe sales went from $450,000 in 2006 to $59,000,000 in 2012 (wikipedia).  I like to run, but I don't like fads.  (Or at least, I like to imagine that I don't like fads, which is probably what just about everyone tells themselves.)  Whatever it was about this book that was driving the whole world to kick off their shoes, eat chia, decry traditional training practices, villainize Nike and vow to become an ultramarathoner, it sounded suspicious to me.

As I've documented, in 2012 I played around with running barefoot a little bit, got some minimalist shoes and then haven't run in a standard shoe since.  I'm about 300 miles in to my KSOs, which are showing some wear, and I've generally enjoyed them.  I've run exactly one race in them, a 10k, which I had never run before, so I honestly can't say much for the specific results.  I've not sustained a significant running injury in them, but, I never had a significant running injury in traditional shoes, despite many more miles and a marathon in them.  [Well, I probably had a mild to moderate case of shin splints back in 2000 or 2001.]

But this was supposed to be a book review.  So here goes.  I finally read the book, because I figured I had enough of my own opinion that I could read it without being swayed unduly by all the witch-doctory-ness that had captivated the rest of the country.  The book is very entertaining.  McDougall writes for various magazines (Men's Health, Runner's World, Outside Men's Journal, Esquire, etc.) and was a oft-injured recreational runner.  He got started down a story about the Tarahumara, which grabbed his interest and lead to the book.

The Tarahumara are native americans(?) (native mexicans?) who live in the mountains of northern Mexico (southwest of the city of Chihuahua).  They're poor farmers, who live about how you'd expect poor native farmers to live, without running water, electricity or much else.  Oh, and they're basically the best distance runners in the world.  They're pretty content to keep to themselves, but when people have managed to get them out to run in races like a 100 mile race through the mountains of Colorado, they'd win.

The first half of the book focuses almost entirely on the history and stories of the Tarahumara as well as some significant American ultramarathons and ultramarathoners.  I kept waiting for it to get to the part that ignited a running revolution.  It eventually got there, but not as forcefully as I'd expected.  (Though, perhaps my expectations made it seem less forceful.)  The author gets into theories on evolution and to what extent humans are designed for distance running.

The book is very entertaining, and tells a terrific story of some amazing races.  It's not going to drastically change anything I do, but maybe that's just because I'm stubborn.  ;)  Oh, and it did get me out the door for 8.75 miles yesterday, my longest run in over 2 years.