November stats

Today is obviously the last day of November and barring a late evening run on the treadmill, I will finish Nov with 27 miles and need just as many for December if I want to crack 300 miles for 2017.  That isn't counting any rounding errors DailyMile apparently makes. The website says I'm at 272 miles but the app shows 269.91 miles.

This week was bad because we were on holiday Monday, Tuesday was too chaotic to bring running clothes to work (I swam) and my kids are sick.  I WFH yesterday but didn't want to take a break to run even though my mom was there.  I had got very little sleep the night before. 

Back in the day, 28 miles would have been one, maybe two weeks worth of work this time of year.  Sigh, those days are gone. 

Meanwhile, I've written 46 posts on ChicagoNow which means I need about 6 to keep my average of 1 a week.  I'm okay with missing that target since 46 is still a nice number.

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Might be better this way

A couple of weeks ago, I finally took down the rest of the deck furniture for winter including the gazabo we bought this summer.  I have to remember next year that I need to start putting things away sooner than late October because the weather turns quickly.  It's better to do it and have a few wasted weeks were you could have still enjoyed sitting outside than to have to fight with bitter cold while you try to put everything away.



For any project I need the perfect storm of

• Appropriate Weather (not to hot, cold, rain)
• Sunlight
• Materials (nothing like starting a project and finding out you don't have the right something)
• Energy to do it (after work is not optimal)
• Kids out of the way 

I need to repair the deck railing but that will be a 2018 project.  Depending on costs, we will either put in a permanent pergola or  continue to buy cheap $100 gazabos, though hopefully we do a better job of securing it so it doesn't get bent and broken like our last one and we can re-use it.

We still don't know how much longer we will live in this house or what to do about the kids and school. 

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Winter Training Memories

I was thinking of someone I use to run with back in the day.  We were group leaders for Winter Training.  One winter I was going out for a 20 mile run and looking for some people to run me in.  I

was training for one the many spring marathons I've run as such, was doing the bulk of my training solo. 

SF volunteered but she only wanted to do 5 miles.  On the surface that sounds like a great thing.  SF is gonna help me with 25% of my run. 

Couple of things here..

First, most marathoners do their LRs by going out and back.  If you are running 12, you go six miles in on direction and then come back.  This is a little game we play with ourselves so that we finish without quitting or cutting our run short.  [unless injured, inclement weather or just having a really craptastic run.]

Second,  anyone who has ever trained for a marathon and has run 20 miles knows that the first 5 miles is the "easy" part.  Heck, if you are a marathoner and have run multiple marathons, I'd say the first 10 miles usually isn't so bad.  It's the second half where the struggle is real. 

Third, when someone asks you to Run Them In, it's just understood they are referring to meeting up with them closer to the end of the run so that they don't give up. 

But SF didn't want to wait 2 hours or come back, SF was already there.  And SF didn't want to run 5 miles with me and then turn around.  SF wanted to only do 5 miles total, which meant 2.5 out and 2.5 back which doesn't really help me at all.

What SF should have done was done some fuzzy math and figured that if I left at X time and ran an 8 minute pace, I'd be turning around at 1:20 minutes, give or take and meet me five miles from our base two hours after my start time.  But that is a lot of work and not fun.  She didn't want to flesh it out over email the days before, saying we'll figure it out on Saturday but when Saturday came she didn't want to stand around in the cold trying to figure it out.

What I should have done was said okay let's go 2.5 miles north, turn around and then head back to base and I'll run 15 south on my own.  But I wasn't thinking of making the best of what a flake had to offer, I was trying to figure out how to get what I wanted. 

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About that Great American Novel

"The book I have had in my mind since 20 is still there instead of on pages. I tell myself I'll write everyday but then one day turns to two then three and I'm still here not working on it. Why? Because I'm afraid of not being perfect. Of disappointing myself."Mahjabeen Syed

At ChicagoNow the bloggers fall into three large buckets.  There are the main, vocal, interactive group that I'm friends with on FB who support one another.  There are the ones who blog for a short time then fade away because bloggin is hard.  finally there is the group of people who post semi-regularly but go about life without interaction with the rest of us.  Sure, they'll reply to a comment, but they don't join our reindeer games or read our blogs etc.  And that's fine.

I decided to scan all the hard copies of my draft stories from the 90s that I never finished.  if nothing else it will get rid of the paper trail.  I figure I can always print it again and hopefully saving it to The Cloud will be just as good as putting it in a binder on a shelf and ignoring it for another two decades.

I have to say this.  It is hard to re-read all these story drafts because....they suck.   I'm not being modest or fishing for encouragement or reinforcements.  The writing is sophomoric at best, pedantic at worse.  I was trying very hard to sound like other authors and weave a story with too many genres and influences. 

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That must be some discount

my neighbor is getting new siding.  He's using the same shit-for-brains assclown who I hired to repair my porch stairs posts.  I hired him because he had dome some carpentry work for Sam and seemed to do a decent job.  He must be some relative or something because he said he gave them a discount on the work and is working on and off, presumable between other paying jobs.

They started the work on Sept 29th.  It is now Nov 17th.  Call me spoiled but it would have to be a significant discount for me to go this long without the work being completed.

I don't like the guy because he never came back to finish the job, nothing major but he was supposed to put a cap on the top which would have looked nice and might have kept the wood from splitting.  He used cheap, untreated wood.  He convinced me that because he was painting it, it would be fine.
Wrong.   Because you don't paint the underside, moisture gets in and damages your wood.  Worse than that, he started ignoring my calls and when I called from a landline, he actually pretended his wasn't the right person. 

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An Actual Mystery

I’ve been reading books of old
The legends and the myths
Achilles and his gold
Hercules and his gifts
Spider-Man’s control
And Batman with his fists
And clearly I don’t see myself upon that list

Today I scanned a few letters I received in the spring of 1990.  I feel like a spy at the office sneaking over to the copier to do the scanning, hoping no one comes along while I fight with the sometimes hard-to-feed letters.

It is interesting some of the things I've discovered while scanning these letters.  Pencil doesn't scan very well.  Also, some people thought it was cute to write "Me" as the From or only their first name or nickname.  30+ years later I cannot always recall who Aslan was, although I don't believe anyone intended these letters would be re-read 30 years later.  Also, some people folded their letters in such ways that it makes it hard to feed them through the copier.  Some people used both sides of the paper, some only one.  Some left all the back pages blank except one.

Some people would write on a page in the class notebook and then tear it out and send it to me.  I've had to cut those edges off so the feeder doesn't get jammed.

The one thing about many of these letters is that they respond to a previous letter, but unlike email, there isn't much history to go on.  A vague reference or one-line sentence is sometimes all I get.  OF course, at the time it was probably crystal clear what we were talking about, but 25 years later?  No chance.

"you sounded like you wanted to tell me something when we talked." 

I probably did, but if I was hesitant to open up before, you cutting me off because you had to go absolutely guaranteed I'd never speak of it again.


The one thing I have to remember is that I'm looking at these now with more Life Experiences, Wisdom and yes even Maturity under my belt than I possessed back then.  I need to remember not to be so hard on myself for missing subtle hints and hidden clues like Aslan inviting me to come to St Louis to see a concert.  That probably wasn't about using her spare ticket, it was a casual safe way of asking me out. 

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what did we do this weekend

Saturday we stayed in.  raked the leaves.  Our kids were not feeling well.  on Sunday we met Katness at the MCI and then went back to her house to watch the Bears lose another "close" one.

I'm at the point where I should know better than to get my hopes up about the Bears.  No matter what happens to Green Bay, they were not going to loss 3 games in a row especially to the bears.  beating the Bears has been indoctrinated in their DNA.  If you cannot beat a Aaron Rodgers less Packers team, there isn't much hope for you.

This team is looking like the 4-12 season (the 2nd one) the Bears had in the late 90s.  It's mostly because of internal politics...the GM wants to get rid of the current coach.  I'm convinced we lost more games than we should have last year in order to get the lowest draft pick possible.  Which means we have to suffer through another ugly season and then maybe have a decent rebuilding next year and beyond. 

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Memory replay

It's not what's happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.  – Anthony Robbins

I have been reliving memories from the past, not to dwell in the past, but to learn from it.  To try and figure out what was my fault, what was gonna happen anyway and how to let it go.

While I always replay events from my past on my High Definition Pensieve, I'm sure a lot of this has been  caused by scanning and re-reading all those letters.  In order to save time and sanity, I may have to just scan and not read them. 

 In other news, I'm slowly chipping away at the 300 miles I want to run this year.  I ran 4 at lunch on Tuesday, bringing my total up to 254 for the year.  I know I could just not run if I really feel like it.  There were many years where I was running until December 31 trying to make some arbitrary goal but since my running ability is diminished, I feel like I need to keep fighting. 

not sure if i mentioned so I'll write about it here.  With our kids we had three battles to win. 

pacifiers (pacis)
sleeping in their own beds
potty training.


I knew we were not going to win all three at once.  for about six months before their recent birthday, we switched them to pacis only at naptime and bedtime.  the week before their birthday we went paci free and they pretty much accepted this without much of a fight.

On the potty training, Natasha is essentially there.  For those not in the know, PT has two components: the act and the cleanup.  It's gonna be a while before Natasha masters the cleanup but as long as she is going in the potty, we are happy.

Boris can do it but refuses except to stall bedtime or to get attention.  Everytime we buy a new box of pull-ups or diaper genie refills we wonder if this will be the last.

On the sleeping in their own bed, we lost some ground.  This is probably my fault for letting them sleep with me while NIghtingale's parents were in town using our bed and she was at a conference.



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The best laid plans...

So today was supposed to be in the 60s.  I had hoped to put away the rest of the garden furniture and the Halloween decorations during breaks while WFH.  I also hoped to get a long, leisurely run in. 
Followed by organizing the attic a little better.

Unfortunately, it is raining but that isn't the kicker.  My kids are sick.  Boris woke up in the middle of the night and vomited.  A LOT.  It got on most of our bedding.  The kids already stayed home Wednesday because Boris allegedly had diarrhea on Tuesday.  We kept Natasha home as well because it was just easier than fighting to get her to school.

I say allegedly because they have a tendency to send one of our kids home every few weeks like clockwork.  One of the twins vomited.  Or has diarrhea.  Or a fever.  Or is leading the Toddler Rebellion demanding more cheese in the mac and cheese.   I sometimes think they just call to get the kid-to-teacher ratio down a bit.

I'm really lucky at this point in life to have a job where I can just decide to WFH without my drama.  At TopFive I would have been able to but I would have had to alert people.  Here at the new gig, I already work remote, so it doesn't matter if I'm at the Chicago office, my house or a Starbucks as long as there is wifi.

A job like this only comes once in a lifetime.  When I started out in Corporate America, WFH was not a thing.  Even if it were, the junior paralegal thing couldn't really be done at home because we mostly assembled files and redwells, bates stamped documents and got treated like shit by attorneys and other paralegals...hard to do all that remotely. 

A job like this only comes once in a lifetime.


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