Week 13

Wednesday
I am throwing out my speed work for this training session. I am just working on getting in the miles. I have determined that since my goal is to just finish this first marathon that I should do what I can to be well trained but not push myself toward injury. I have plenty of time for that in the future.

I ran 3.1 miles at a tempo workout pace. But it felt easy at the time. 8:50 per mile. I also rode my bike again that day. It was just an errand and not really a workout. But I did put in the miles, so I am counting it. I rode 12.5 miles.

Saturday
Thursday and Friday we were moving into our new house, therefore I did not run or bike. On Saturday I got in a great 20 mile run as prescribed by the training plan. I was slower than my goal pace for the day running at 11:32 per mile.

After that run, I feel ready. Mostly because I am tired of these long runs. Not that they are hard to do, but it is just hard to see the fun in running for 4 hours and never crossing a finish line. After this first marathon, the longer runs will probably not seem so bad since I can see how they pay off. I hope.

Week 14
Monday: Easy run, 2 miles.

Wednesday: 4X1600 at 8:11 pace.

Saturday: 12 mile long run.

I am planning my handout for tomorrow. How many should I print?

He responded with nothing helpful.

How ever is convenient for you.

This is a friend that gets frustrated with others who give partial answers. Maybe he could learn something.

I took off into new territory and quickly got lost. 30 minutes into the run I was completely confused. I was new to the neighborhood, which did not help. I figured if I kept running I would eventually find myself. I did. A little after the hour mark I saw something familiar and knew how to proceed from there. It was a good thing too. I was so lost that even if I had called my wife, I would not have known how to tell her to find me.

When I did find myself, I stopped in a convenience store and grabbed a Gatorade and kept running. I got home in 1 hour and 35 minutes.

Secondly it was enjoyable just to hear about Argentina. Though we have spent time with the Carneys and they are about our age, we really have not developed a deep friendship since we work in separate ministries. Many of the things she mentions in the interview was new information to me. You will really get some insight from what she says about moving back to the US to go to college.

It was also a very easy interview to edit. I normally go through several times pulling out junk words and whole sections that just make the interview too long. After the first edit, this one ended up about the right length. It was just a matter of pulling out as many “ums” as I could and toning down the breathing. I had the mic kinda hot since I did not want to have to pass it back and forth (I really need a second mic). So I put it on my desk stand and we sat as close as we could to get a good sound. But the result is that you can hear excessive respirations while we talked.

Finally, it was fun to have them here for the evening. As I posted before, we had a birthday party for our son last night. Elisabeth and her husband were here and we had a good time playing games. I am not sure what the kids did for four hours, but we adults had fun.

Don’t forget to digg Missionary Talks at digg.com.

You may want to take it easy and just do a few of the 31 at a time.

This was an easy run that ended at a 9:58 min/mile pace. I am pleased that my running speed really has picked up. That was an easy run for me. I remember when an easy run meant 12 min/mile.

I have a 5K race that I am running this weekend. I will probably do a faster pace run on Thursday and a nice slow one Friday getting ready for the weekend race.

Well, it isn’t for my head. No, not for the curly locks on my chest either.

I read something a short time back about using an art fixative for your inkjet photos. This fixative spray is used in charcoal, pastel and pencil art to “fix” the picture. It helps protect the art from casual water and smudges. The article said that it would do the same for inkjet photos.

Back in my more artful days I used aerosol hairspray instead of the professional art spray. If you had seen any of my art from back then, you would understand why it was not worth spending more than just the few cents that White Rain hairspray cost in those days. That got me to thinking that I could probably do the same with inkjet printed photos. If I used hairspray to coat the photos, then that should help give them some water resistance.

So that is why my wife bought me the hairspray. I tried it and let it dry. Then I ran the photo under the water in the kitchen sink and it came out mostly unaffected. The one spot that did go wonky in the photo was right on one edge where I apparently did not get the spray on well.

Since my testing, I have done some research. I know, most people research and then experiment, but not me. Here are some things I found out.

You want to avoid hairspray with conditioners in it. The conditioners are usually oils which can cause spots in the paper. Another caution is that the reason the art spray costs more is because it is designed for that purpose. While the chemical makeup in the hairspray is fine for the job, the nozzle that delivers the hair spray probably is not as well metered. You can end up with spray coming out in blobs instead of a nice mist.

Do your own testing. Use at your own risk. But, it may be just the thing to use when you print out snapshots that are going to be handed around in a group. I realize that you can always print a new one, but this is supposed to also help keep the ink from fading over time.

By the way, this is not necessary in photos from a photo lab. The process used is totally different. In fact, if you get something on a real photo you can just rinse it off with water. The last step in a photo’s birth process is a water rinse cycle. Just let it dry (best results if hung on an edge) and the photo will be as good as new.

Please don’t sue me if none of this works for you and it ruins your photos. I am just giving info that has helped me. Apply at your own risk.

I am planning on getting one of the sons of the last two missionaries to record with me. Get his take on things. Then there are other college missionary kids (MKs) home for the holidays.

Whew! I need a break. That was a lot more work than it should have been. I thought I would not have enough material for 15 minutes. Turned out, I had to chop out a lot.

That was until this weekend. I got 28 comment spams on Saturday. I decided to enable the plugin Akismet that comes with my blogging software. Before I got it running I had another 35 spam messages. That put my number up to 60+ in just a few hours. Since then the software has caught and blocked over 500 spam messages and I have had to manually mark as spam another 100 that the software has missed.

I don’t know why I got so popular all of a sudden, but maybe this kind of popularity is not what I am looking for.

I am curious to hear from other bloggers as to how many comment spams they get each day.

This was a fun episode. The plan is that he will be interviewing me in a few weeks. His wife is scheduled to be on the show next week. She will be our first wife on the show.

In this show I did something different to make the audio shorter. I had 25 minutes of audio to cut down to 15. In the first run through I knocked out all the “ums” and “ahs.” Also there were some repeated phrases that got thrown out. That brought it down 22 minutes. Next edit I got it down to 18. Then I got down to 16 finally.

In Audacity, there is a way to speed up the audio without changing the pitch. I sped the whole thing up 4% to get me under the 15 minutes. Even knowing that, you won’t be able to tell it is not normal speed. Very cool.

To the first one he asked, “What’s your IQ?” The new arrival replied, “190″. They discussed Einstein’s theory of relativity for hours.

When the second new arrival came, Einstein once again inquired as to the newcomer’s IQ. The answer this time came “120″. To which Einstein replied, “Tell me, how did the Cubs do this year?” and they proceeded to talk for half an hour or so.

To the final arrival, Einstein once again posed the question, “What’s your IQ?”. Upon receiving the answer “70″, Einstein smiled and asked, “Got a minute to tell me about what Microsoft was thinking when they released the Zune?”

(Apologies to the Fortunes program which included this in it’s original form and to Prof. Einstein for bringing him down to the level of Microsoft.)

The hard part about this episode was that to keep within my 15 minute goal, I had to cut a bunch of stuff out. Also, I had to remove some of the silence between questions and answers, so it does not sound as natural.

This was the second recording since my computer ate the first recording. I had it all recorded, but ran out of space. When my computer was trying to convert the raw files to mp3 with no hard drive space, it just lost it all. It was kinda good. Gave us a chance to do it the second time around without being so stiff.

Enjoy!

I am learning to use Audacity and how to record from Skype conversations. I am also playing around with GarageBand on the wife’s Mac.

You have to guess what the cat is before I let it out.

This last week I was in the US to do some shopping. I needed a new pair of jeans and have a particular brand and model that I like. Fortunately Wal-Mart carries them and they are pretty available. My size 34 are getting a bit big so I wanted to check out 32 to see how they fit.

What!? No 32? That’s right. Now I am falling out of the sizing range for even new clothes. What is this world coming to? I did finally find some 32 at another store. I would have bought a couple of pair, but at this rate, I am not sure how long I will be at that size. Ah the trials of losing weight.

I got the permalinks to the previous contents figured out, so the comments are back.