Running Milestone

Today I ran a 5 miler. It was a tough run. Not too fun. Felt like I was fighting the whole way. Nothing hurt, just did not feel into it. I have come off of 2 weeks of great feeling runs. This week, every run has been a struggle. I ended up running at a 10:42 min/mile pace, which is not at all bad for me.

But, I pushed on. Why? Because I knew that if I ran just .3 miles today I would break my previous number of miles run in a calendar month record. In March I ran 72.2 miles. Today marked 77 miles run in the month of August. This record will only stand for a month as I already have about 85 miles scheduled to run in the month of September. But, for me, it is a record that made me push on through the tough run this morning.

Congratulations to me!

That’s some expensive chocolate!

Monday last was our 13th wedding anniversary. I went to Liverpool to get something for the wife. The $120 shirts got me to thinking that maybe Liverpool was a bit out of my price range.

Then my son and I walked by the chocolate counter. A bit of chocolate can’t cost that much. Right? Hmm, let’s see the price here. $34.80 (Mexican Pesos). The nice lady at the counter told me that was per 100 grams. Cool. I will take 1 kilogram, thank you. 1/3 of a kilo of white chocolate and pecans, 1/3 of dark chocolate and pecans. And, finally, 1/3 milk chocolate with almonds.

She dished up the first 1/3 and my mouth was watering. My son and I would have plenty to snack on before we gave it to my wife and she would never feel cheated. While she worked on the next 2 sets my son and I were starting to drool on the counter. She got it all put together and told me that the final price would be something like $350 pesos. Quick conversion told me that was about $34 USD. What!?

That is when my head started spinning and next thing I knew my son was picking me up off the floor. I realized my mistake was thinking that the price was per kilogram. 100 grams does not equal 1 kilogram. It is 1/10th of a kilo. My great pile of chocolate for $3.50 (USD) turned out to be quite a bit more expensive.

I then told her I just wanted 300 grams. 100 of each kind.

The pile of chocolate turned out to be quite a bit smaller. Only 5 or 6 pieces per flavor. That cut down on our hopes of scoring a piece for ourselves without us looking too cheap.

The lady had pity on us for our saddened, whimpering faces. She gave us an extra piece in the jar. She also threw in a nice glass jar. She and 2 co-workers made up the jar all pretty like and put a bow on it. She also put in a “Rice Krispies Treat” type candy to give it filler. It made the chocolate look more abundant than it really was.

We were happy to get that present home before it melted.

BTW, I just threw in the part about me fainting because it makes a good story. My son at 8 years old can’t quite pick up my 190 lb. body.

Simple Pleasures

Dunkin' Donuts napkin.I have never been a great Dunkin’ Donuts fan. Their coffee is often claimed to be rated highly among normal coffee (not specialty imported coffees). Though I fancy myself a coffee know it all, I would not choose their coffee if given a choice of something else. The one thing they have going for them is that it is possible to make their coffee very strong without it getting bitter. Or, at least, that is what I have found.

Their donuts leave something to be desired in my mind too. But…

A friend of mine landed in the airport last night from Guadalajara. They have Dunkin’ Donuts there. She had a dozen donuts for me to choose from. Mmmmm! I took four for the family.

Eleven seconds in the microwave this morning and we were a happy family. At least until the donuts were gone.

Leones de Yucatán: National Champs!

Leones HatOur local baseball team won the national championship just now (well, actually about 15 minutes ago). This is the Liga Mexicana de Béisbol (Mexican Baseball League). The Lions have not won the championship since 1984 and previous to that, it was 1957. This is only their third time in franchise history to take the championship. Though, from what I understand, they have been second on several occasions.
I am not a baseball fan, so don’t have all the numbers that some would probably want, but here are some interesting ones. We lost the first game of the series in Monterrey against the Sultanes. Then we won the second away. The next three games were played here and we won all three.

The interesting thing about this game is that we went into extra innings. It was the bottom of the 14th when Jesús “Jesse” Castillo hit a home run to the corner of right field. The final score was 2-1. This was by far the lowest scoring game of the series. All the other games had scores like 6-4 Leones de Yucatanor so. The teams were looking tired Friday night (or first game at home). Saturday they looked a bit more rested, but tonight they were definitely worn out.

The game lasted almost 6 hours. The 14 innings sets a record number of innings played in a playoff game. As I understand it, 16 is the record in regular season.

As I mentioned, I am not a baseball fan. But I decided to take my son to a game back at the start of the season. This resulted in going to 3 or 4 more throughout the summer. Tickets are in the $0.70 to $9.00 (USD) range. So if we have the evening off, the tickets are really cheap. We usually spend the big bucks and get the $4 or $5 tickets. With parking and food, we can usually get out for about $12. Of course, it only took us one time of eating the food at the ball game to decide it was not worth the money we spent on it. I am still in awe at the scientific possibility of being able to smash a hot dog so thin. It was like the bun was an outer skin to the weiner inside. Amazing.

We went to one game of the playoffs last week and had to pay a scalper for tickets. We paid a whopping $8 for $4 seats. Outrageous! If I understood the announcer on ESPN2 correctly tonight, those same tickets were selling for $80 this afternoon. Yikes! The crowd was at 16,000 plus for the final games. I am not sure how many the stadium holds, but it was packed.

Congratulations Leones!

Dzibilchaltún

Yesterday we went to the Mayan ruins of Dzibilchaltún. This is a very early Mayan city. It pre-dates many of the cities further south, which would make it probably the earliest northern Yucatán Peninsula cities. I have read that the building of the city can be dated back to AD 200 with pretty good certainty. There are also reports that it could have been inhabited as early as 1500 BC. That would be about the time of Moses in the Bible. I tend to doubt that one, but theoretically it is possible.

It has a beautiful cenote that is about 140 feet deep at the deepest. It is mostly shallow and has a sloping hole that would be like a 140 foot long funnel. This goes down and connects into the underground river system that connect throughout the Yucatán. When we were there the water was murky due to the heavy rains we have gotten over the last several days.

At the main structure, The Temple of the Seven Dolls (pictures), the sun shines through and is perfectly framed by the doors of the temple at 5:00 am on the equinoxes. The temple gets its name from 7 dolls that were found in it. My wife thinks the cleaning lady had her daughter there with her one day while she was working and the girl forgot her dolls when they left. Hundreds of years later the dolls were found and now have a temple named after them.

Dzibilchaltún is just 10 minutes outside of the city of Mérida. The structures are not near as large as those at Chichen Itza or Uxmal. The square mileage is quite broad at Dzibilchaltún. The official number is 9 square miles are what they have mapped out, but I have also seen numbers as high as 19 sq/miles.

There are many neat places near town here. It is good to be able to go see them on occasion.