Christmas home renovations
Every year my father and I work on a major home renovation project. This year we continued something that we started a couple of years ago and that is to lay hardwood flooring throughout the house. This year we laid red oak flooring in a spare bedroom. We started by removing the furniture and ripping up some carpet that we put down 15 years ago. The underlying floor is a little uneven some we put down a 3/8 inch plywood board to flatten out the floor. In the end, we put down about three 4′ x 8′ sheets. Over a couple of days, we put down about 140 square feet of red oak planks. We measured our progress in 3 1/4″ segments. Our estimate of the amount of wood to buy were bang on as we only had five spare pieces. All that is left is for us to replace the flooring in another bedroom some time in 2010 and the house will be completely finished in red oak flooring.
It’s almost race time…
In a little over two weeks, I’ll be heading to Baltimore to run in my fourth the Baltimore half-marathon. My training is progressing well and I only have two long runs before I can give my legs some much needed rest. The race comes at a good time as my running coach designed a training schedule so that team peaked for a race in Ottawa last weekend. I just have to continue the program for another week and I’m set to go. As the time draws near, I’m starting to get excited. As well, I’m looking forward to seeing Jason and Emily and catching up with them.
The Beach
Every day, I cycle by the Westboro beach twice, once in the morning and on the way home after work. Some days I catch the groundsman cutting the grass, usually on Monday. I can usually tell if I can running early or late based on whether the beach has been raked and smoothed. If I’m lucky, I’ll catch the groundsman, in action, dragging the rake behind his tractor. It has been so wet this summer that I haven’t been able to enjoy the beach first hand. As I write this entry, I’m sitting at the beach for the second time in two days as the hot summer days have finally arrived in Ottawa. People are coming and going with some carrying a once burdensome cooler back to the car that has been sitting in the sun for too long. It’s so hot that there are the same number of people in the water as lazying on the beach. The two lifeguard are sitting up in their chairs with water cans ready for deployment at the first cry of urgency. On top, cyclist, roller bladers and joggers trundle by in the unbearable heat. Close to the shore children are building sandcastles under the watchful eye of their parents. The lifeguards finish another shift and head to the portable shelter to gain some relief and his replacement reluctantly leave his oasis . Slowly, the sun descends towards the horizon and the children and parents take a final swim before packing up for the day. Soon the beach will be deserted and the lifeguards will announce that another day has come to an end. The sun finally dips below the horizon and a marvelous sunset graces the Ottawa River. It is dark. Another day await the groundsman as a new day will break soon.
Long run and El
When I had the wind behind me my legs felt like dead batteries. The wind on the way back was so strong that the sand and road grit started to sandpaper my ankles. When I was back at the university it was good to check off along long run.
Last Wednesday, I did a 12km/7m fartlek run with the folks I train with at the Running Room and it ended with a bit of a jolt. The final mile of the looped course is uphill and I could hear footstep approaching and then backing off. Out of the corner of my eye appears “El” whose mantra is “El loves hills.” At this moment, I said a strong expletive and with a surge of adrenaline pulled away. The dose of adrenaline was stronger than needed as I was able to hold her off for half a mile. At the finish line, we had a good chuckle as she thought I was an easy target and I had overestimated the strength of her long legs. In four weeks time, we will do the fartlek workout again but we’ll have three weeks of intense kilometer intervals before then.
First workout in shorts
Tonight I did my second intervals workout of the year. While doing my warm-up run down to the Running Room on Bank Street I found I was overheating and so I ditched my winter REI tights. My coach suggested I do the same workout that I did last week as it will take a few weeks for my body to adapt to running fast again.
4 x 1,000 meters on 60 seconds rest — 4.09/4.18/4.20.4.30
Wordabble 200K
Today I experienced something that I had predicted might happen soon, that is, my high score in Wordabble went over 200,000 points. Over the past little while I have been inching towards this goal. It was a great milestone to surpass. A quick shout out to Jason and Adam for me one of my daily challenges. I openly wonder which will come next wordabble’s first anniversary or reaching a high score of 500,000 points.
100th Wordabble game — Nov 16 2008
Today I played my 100th game of Wordabble. Each day has been a lot of challenging and rewarding fun. I can say with certainty that my vocabulary has increased as I continue to learn more and more obscure words. When a Jason and Adam at introduced the finger-dragging with auto-entry I found I could play the game faster. Another feature that has become more valuable over time is being able see what words I have missed as I use it as a learning vehicle. I would like to take a moment to take about a couple of the more entertaining games. In the first I was able to make use of most of the urology terms I have learned a couple of years ago. In the other game I was using my knowledge of the various conponents of the heart and lungs. I can say that I have enjoyed each days whether it had 200+ words or less than 100 words. In the high value games it was frustrating to find 50% of the words. When there were fewer than 100 words I would scratch my head and wonder if that four letter jumble of letters was indeed a word. In most cases it would be an obscure word that I would park away for future reference. I’ll close off this entry by thanking Jason and Adam for my first 100 days of fun playing wordabble.
Brevity — an old post
One of the dangers of blogging with your iPhone/iPod Touch is that you will write less than you should. I’ll try to make up for this fault.
I was impressed by how quickly the Jetboil heated the water. The Mac N Cheese tasted good but would taste better after a long day of hiking or camping. I think would taste even better if I had supplemented it with canned tuna or salmon. There was a little problem with portions. If this an outback adventure I would have had to cook two package of the dinner. This may vary depending on the meal. I think my next meal will be the Ginger Pasta which when served with salmon is awesome. Jason, Em and I had this meal when we hiked in the Shenandoahs last year and it rocked.
Weekend in review – part 2
a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://bp1.blogger.com/_5w5ZZWchEd4/RvMwB9×57tI/AAAAAAAAB5o/HPQxirJu93g/s1600-h/DSCF0639-1.JPG”img style=”margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;” src=”http://bp1.blogger.com/_5w5ZZWchEd4/RvMwB9×57tI/AAAAAAAAB5o/HPQxirJu93g/s320/DSCF0639-1.JPG” alt=”" id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5112482812317527762″ border=”0″ //abr /span lang=”EN-US”On Friday morning we headed over to Jason’s place and spent much of the day framing the front window and wall. It was a fiddly task as we had to work around the heating ventilator. We built the wall on the floor and hoisted it up into position. I learned that sometimes you have to use strong tools for a simple task. The top of the wall was a tight fit with the ceiling. I thought we could use a hammer to force the wall in place. Jason retrieved a mini-sledge hammer and it took some forceful blows before the wall was flush. Once it was installed it looked great. Late in the afternoon, we headed north up to Timonium where we did some bouldering and climbing at a href=”http://www.earthtreksclimbing.com/”EarthTreks/a. Jason convinced me to try climbing shoes and I was quickly convinced that they are an essential like you harness. I climbed my first bouldering problem which is something I want to do more of. Jason’s parents came and we spent the evening climbing. With 30 minutes to spare, we headed over to a href=”http://www.rei.com/”REI /ato get some outdoor gear. I bought another mug, a long sleeve REI jersey and an expedition-weight top. We headed to Qdoba for supper and had a filling burrito. Our next stop was back to Jason place to chill. I saw my first episode of Survivorman and enjoyed a relaxing beer. Jason uploaded ring tones to my Razr (Thanks). span style=”" /spanI was getting tired of having the Mexican national anthem as a ringtone. Jason Mraz, “Did you get my message” is the current favorite. /span p class=”MsoNormal”span lang=”EN-US”o:p /o:pbr /On Saturday we headed over to Jason’s place and hung some tracks in the bathroom. In the afternoon we headed over to the Patterson Theatre to watch some swing dance lessons. Nina is an exceptional teacher. We had pizza at Dorry and Sommers house. The evening was spent swing dancing at the Patterson Theatre with a live band (Boilermaker). I danced with a variety of people some better and worse than me. /span/p p class=”MsoNormal”span lang=”EN-US”o:p /o:pbr /Sunday was a more relaxing day as we got together at a href=”http://www.claddaghonline.com/”Claddagh /afor brunch. I had a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple”scrapple /afor the first time. It sort of looks like finely ground hamburger and has a pleasant taste. We headed over to st1:place st=”on”st1:placename st=”on”Patterson/st1:placename st1:placetype st=”on”Park/st1:placetype/st1:place for outdoor swing dancing. Jason brought along his slackline and I gave it a try. It is harder than it appears. I danced a couple of times with Sommer and she gave me some pointers for my rock step. Late in the afternoon we headed north to the Gunpowder Central trails. While hiking on the trail we were keeping our eyes peeled for poison ivy. I thought I saw a patch at one point but the stem was not thick enough. Midway along the trail found a rock overhang and Jason tried his hand to a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/moulec/BaltimoreSeptember2007/photo#5111327855721772930″bouldering /ait and found that wearing his five fingers helped him get a better purchase. span style=”" /spanI changed into my a href=”http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/”five fingers /aand noticed how cool and light they are. We headed down to the st1:place st=”on”st1:placename st=”on”Gunpowder/st1:placename st1:placetype st=”on”River/st1:placetype/st1:place and waded into the river to see how they hold up when wet. It is liberating experience wearing them in the water. We took some pictures mid-stream. As time was running short we hiked back to the car in our five fingers. Somewhere along the trail Jason met some poison ivy which would take a couple of days to develop. Our next stop was Jason’s parents place for supper. After supper we transferred files between our laptops./span/p p class=”MsoNormal”span lang=”EN-US”o:p /o:p/span/p
On death and dying..
A little over a month ago, a friend who I have known for a long time lost his mother after a long battle with cancer. I had drafted a blog entry which had gone through many revisions and was hard to write so I never posted it and parked it away. He and his wife are having a rough time dealing with the loss of his mother and mother-in-law. Many years ago, I heard a radio interview with Elizabeth Kubleur-Ross on death and dying. My mother has often talked about a book that Ms. Kubleur-Ross wrote on death and dying and the various stages that the terminally ill patient with experience before expiring. I got the book out of the library the other day so that I can help S deal with the loss of his mother. The book is written from the patient’s as well as the family’s perspective. In the future, I’ll look back at this entry and hopefully post and my thoughts on the book.
