A few weeks ahead of schedule, I managed to make it all the way from Orcas to Columbian Way on Beacon Avenue South. It's 1.2 miles round trip, and it took me about 12 minutes to do it - but hey, that's a start, and considering that I've just taken up running in the past month for the first time in six years, I think that it's a pretty signifigant accomplishment for me. Meaning I'm pretty proud of myself :)
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Monday, August 17, 2009
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Sad,Sad, Supemall
Carrie and I went to the Auburn Supermall today to shop for maternirty clothes, and were reminded as to why we rarely like to go to malls in the first place. The mall was quite far from home, and, despite having a promised plethora of factory outlet stores and big-boxes on the premises or nearby such as Sam's Club, Marshalls and Wal-Mart, we didn't really get any deals there that justified us driving past Southcenter in Tukwila. Plus, unlike Southcenter, which recently got both a facelift and an expansion, the Supermall looks quite dated, ill-maintained, and has a (I'm guessing) 15 - 20% vacancy rate.
All in all - not a very satisfying trip. Carrie regards malls as being evil, I regard them as being - when well maintained and upgraded every now and then - a necessary evil. The Supermall - hmm - is probably closer to Carrie's estimation than mine. ;)
Friday, August 7, 2009
At Last! We have all of the songs!!!
One of my friends from Maryland pointed out that when I had provided the links to the Wedding Songs zip files, I had forgotten to include the star of the show, Etta James' "At Last". Oops! Hopefully, I've now corrected that discrepancy ;)
You can download the missing file here.
You can download the missing file here.
Wedding Music
When Carrie and I got married last year, our good friend Alex provided the music for the occasion. He's an avid audiophile who has around 45,000 records in his collection, so he has plenty of music to choose from. Both Carrie and I provided him with "seed" music, about ten tracks apiece, around which he would build out the total wedding set, enough for four hours of music. Aside from having to (a) make sure that Etta James' "At Last" was the first song in the set, and (b) making sure that all of our songs played, there was no restrictions on the order. Alex divided the set into "Slow" and "Fast" songs, but I've decided to mash all of his music into a single folder. I've kept the original choices that Carrie and I made in their own zip files as well.
I'm presenting all of the wedding songs in three files for downloading, so that everyone can see both the inspiration for his set, and the songs that he decided to add. Enjoy!
I'm presenting all of the wedding songs in three files for downloading, so that everyone can see both the inspiration for his set, and the songs that he decided to add. Enjoy!
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Doin' th' Runnin' Man
Well - gotta get into shape. I've come to realize that my cardiovascular health has deteriorated a bit since I stopped working out regularly last Fall (that was when we gave up our memberships at 24 Hour Fitness and embarked on our ill-fated Wii Fitness experiment), so - despite the fact that I absolutely despise doing it, and the fact that it makes both my shins and knees feel like holy hell after I'm done with it - I've decided to take up running in the mornings, at least until I can get a used bike and start riding it part of the way to work.
Let me back up...
Carrie and I bought a Wii Fit back last November, thinking that we were going to save on Gym memberships. Thing is - due to the size of our apartment, only one of us could work out at a time, and that also meant that the other person either couldn't watch the TV, or, if they didn't want to watch TV in the first place, they were subjected to the noise of the console. In either case, neither one of us saw the benefit in using it after about a month, so we ended up joining an expensive gym in Madison Park, and then we enrolled in the Samraya Center when we started our house hunt; we knew that we were moving pretty far away from Madison Park, so we quit the gym, but we were - and still are - committed to the yoga.
Okay, back to the present -
Since Beacon Avenue South has a very nice median with a walkway, I've decided to use that instead of doing either the Greenlake or Seward Park thing.
Here is my first trek - .7 miles one way, ~1.5 round trip. It's pretty good, since I can pace myself and build up to running the entire route slowly. I'm shooting for running to Dawson, walking to Ferdinand, running to and from Columbian to Dawson, walking to Brandon, and then sprinting the rest of the way to Orcas. Each week, I'd like to eliminate a walking route from the route until, at the end of the month, I'm running the entire 1.r5 mile route.
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So, if I can do this by September, here is what I'd like to do for that month - a slightly longer route:
View Larger Map
Now, assuming that I can run the entire first course, I should be able to run all the way from Orcas to Myrtle, do a walking turn around, walk to Holly, run to Graham, walk to Spencer, then kick it to Orcas. I eliminate one walk per week until I can do the entire run without a break.
Hopefully, by this time, I'll have a bike that I can ride to and from Orcas to the new Light Rail station along Beacon:
View Larger Map
If I don't have a bike - it probably won't be too big a deal anyway, since it's only 2 miles, and I should be able to jog that distance, and not get too sweaty - it will be October, and I can do the jog on the way back home, so that I can take a shower if need be.
Let me back up...
Carrie and I bought a Wii Fit back last November, thinking that we were going to save on Gym memberships. Thing is - due to the size of our apartment, only one of us could work out at a time, and that also meant that the other person either couldn't watch the TV, or, if they didn't want to watch TV in the first place, they were subjected to the noise of the console. In either case, neither one of us saw the benefit in using it after about a month, so we ended up joining an expensive gym in Madison Park, and then we enrolled in the Samraya Center when we started our house hunt; we knew that we were moving pretty far away from Madison Park, so we quit the gym, but we were - and still are - committed to the yoga.
Okay, back to the present -
Since Beacon Avenue South has a very nice median with a walkway, I've decided to use that instead of doing either the Greenlake or Seward Park thing.
Here is my first trek - .7 miles one way, ~1.5 round trip. It's pretty good, since I can pace myself and build up to running the entire route slowly. I'm shooting for running to Dawson, walking to Ferdinand, running to and from Columbian to Dawson, walking to Brandon, and then sprinting the rest of the way to Orcas. Each week, I'd like to eliminate a walking route from the route until, at the end of the month, I'm running the entire 1.r5 mile route.
View Larger Map
So, if I can do this by September, here is what I'd like to do for that month - a slightly longer route:
View Larger Map
Now, assuming that I can run the entire first course, I should be able to run all the way from Orcas to Myrtle, do a walking turn around, walk to Holly, run to Graham, walk to Spencer, then kick it to Orcas. I eliminate one walk per week until I can do the entire run without a break.
Hopefully, by this time, I'll have a bike that I can ride to and from Orcas to the new Light Rail station along Beacon:
View Larger Map
If I don't have a bike - it probably won't be too big a deal anyway, since it's only 2 miles, and I should be able to jog that distance, and not get too sweaty - it will be October, and I can do the jog on the way back home, so that I can take a shower if need be.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Sum XL
Audjourd'hui, j'ai 40 ans.
Today, I turn 40.
I greet this fact with a mixture of sadness of the inevitable loss of some years, and a sunny, cheerful optimism at those which have yet to come.
When I was in my late teens, twenties, and thirties, I could still cling to the increasingly slippery illusion of being a young man - an illusion that may have been more factual in the beginning, but, as the years wore on, less so. Still - as far as youth goes, to be a teen is to be naive; to be in one twenties is to be gaining life experience; and to be in ones thirties is to be at the very pinnacle of youth.In one's forties, however, the entire "youth" thing begins to be stripped away, leaving behind the scars and ailments, physical, emotional and spiritual, that time brings. Ones own self is no longer the vessel of almost infinite potential that it once was - instead, in the transitory years between youth and old age, the self becomes that which is being closer to being fully realized, the house that is now being built upon the foundation that has been lain, the poem that is being written from the phrases assembled.
I've heard it said that "forty is the old age of youth, while fifty is the youth of old age". So maybe I should quit worrying about becoming an old man for another decade. Yet, even if forty is to be the old age of a rather prolonged youth , I'd have to face the fact that, mathematically, if not in strict terms of life's being, that I'll be facing my own "middle age" soon enough, when I'll be looking ahead at fewer years than I've left behind (lest I possess a certain mightiness, this could already be the case). Any sort of carefree abandon with which I approached my life has to be discarded- yet, the greatest sadness for me may be that, in my more formative years, I've not been carefree enough.
In my teens, I faced the strict and stifling rigours of an enforced, regimented, extremely conservative religious lifestyle under the suffocating, fundamentalist tenants of the Jehovah's Witnesses faith. In my early twenties, I was in the United States Navy, where, one week after my twenty-fifth birthday, I was stricken with a paralysis on my left side that I would later find out was my very first attack of Multiple Sclerosis. In my mid-twenties and early thirties, I was balancing the needs of a marriage that would eventually fail (due to both my own admitted lack of emotional context and my ex-wife's over-abundance of the same) with the demands of a higher education. In my mid to late thirties, I was flirting about with relationships that would eventually go nowhere while attempting t0 make sense of the "real world". Now, as I enter my forties, I am happily married to a wonderful, witty and beautiful woman who is soon to be the mother of my children, we have a new house, and have fully embarked on our wholly adult lives as a singly joined couple. It may seem, upon slight rumination, that I have forgone some of the inevitable - and healthy - wanderlust of youth for the inevitably(supposed) forgone certitude of adult life.
Yet, upon further reflection, I wonder if this is such a bad thing. True, I've not experimented with relationships, careers, lifestyles and places as much as others may have - but then again, I think that my personality and self-confidence has always been such that, even after a rather cursory examination, I've been fairly certain of those which I've found to my liking, and those which, while romanticizing some discrete aspects of (for a surety), I've rejected pretty wholesale as being non-conducive towards the vision of my future self that I've fostered and done my best to bring about over the years. I can say for a fact that, while I've not been as flighty or eager to undertake some obligatory ritualistic quest to dispel the geas of incertitude as others have been in the course of "finding oneself", I've done so fairly early in life (or at least by now), and I pretty much like what I see.
Pretty much. Yes, there are aspects about myself that I would like to change (the tendency to be overly maudlin may be amongst them); however, for me, that is a proud announcement brought about due, not to any regrets that may have come with the sense of a profoundly (or even mildly) wasted youth, but rather, to the wisdom gained with the passing of the years. I've learned many valuable lessons over the years, through which I've gained said wisdom, and I'd not trade it for the exuberance of youth if the choice were ever presented to me. Chief amongst these lessons is this: treasure the people around you, and the life that you live, for both can be taken away in the blink of an eye. In my attempting to put those words into practice, my life has become fuller with each passing year, with the promise of better experiences to come. This is the key to my optimism.
Graduating college, getting married (again), having a kid, buying a house - all those were accomplishments that, in my life, are taking place belatedly, at least when one compares my life to the "norm". However, I'm pretty hopeful that I'm going into these things, not just with the best of intentions or sunny, wide eyed hope mixed with a dash of almost prayerful faith or driven by my own brand of graceful determination, but also girded with the experience that four decades on this verdant - azure orb has granted me, and with a firmer sense of appreciation than I - who might have earlier felt "entitled" to certain things - would have had before. As an old friend newly-found recently said to me, "You may be going through some things at 40 that others have been through at 20 or 25 - but just think how much better you'll be those things now than they were back then - or even are today!"
And...
I know that, having an ailment such as Multiple Sclerosis, which can can both shorten ones lifespan and greatly lesson ones quality of life, I'm fortunate that I made it this far in the relatively good shape that I'm in with a pretty full range of motion. You never truly appreciate the gift of walking, moving or speech until they are gone, if even for but a little while.
So now I'm fully enconsed within what a friend at the birthday party last night calls "dulce cuarenta" (it just so happens that this man was born in the same, year and hour as I was!). "Sweet forty" indeed - I like that. Thinking of my fortieth birthday as being the start of a newer, more hopeful era in my life fills me - surely - with both a serene joy and a calming optimism. Each year may be yet one more year towards my own eventual journey to the undiscovered country - but while I'm still a tenant of this one, I am determined that each year shall also be a better year, full of faith in my own perserverance, a genuine hope for a better tomorrow, and love for those around me who truly matter.
Today, I turn 40.
I greet this fact with a mixture of sadness of the inevitable loss of some years, and a sunny, cheerful optimism at those which have yet to come.
When I was in my late teens, twenties, and thirties, I could still cling to the increasingly slippery illusion of being a young man - an illusion that may have been more factual in the beginning, but, as the years wore on, less so. Still - as far as youth goes, to be a teen is to be naive; to be in one twenties is to be gaining life experience; and to be in ones thirties is to be at the very pinnacle of youth.In one's forties, however, the entire "youth" thing begins to be stripped away, leaving behind the scars and ailments, physical, emotional and spiritual, that time brings. Ones own self is no longer the vessel of almost infinite potential that it once was - instead, in the transitory years between youth and old age, the self becomes that which is being closer to being fully realized, the house that is now being built upon the foundation that has been lain, the poem that is being written from the phrases assembled.
I've heard it said that "forty is the old age of youth, while fifty is the youth of old age". So maybe I should quit worrying about becoming an old man for another decade. Yet, even if forty is to be the old age of a rather prolonged youth , I'd have to face the fact that, mathematically, if not in strict terms of life's being, that I'll be facing my own "middle age" soon enough, when I'll be looking ahead at fewer years than I've left behind (lest I possess a certain mightiness, this could already be the case). Any sort of carefree abandon with which I approached my life has to be discarded- yet, the greatest sadness for me may be that, in my more formative years, I've not been carefree enough.
In my teens, I faced the strict and stifling rigours of an enforced, regimented, extremely conservative religious lifestyle under the suffocating, fundamentalist tenants of the Jehovah's Witnesses faith. In my early twenties, I was in the United States Navy, where, one week after my twenty-fifth birthday, I was stricken with a paralysis on my left side that I would later find out was my very first attack of Multiple Sclerosis. In my mid-twenties and early thirties, I was balancing the needs of a marriage that would eventually fail (due to both my own admitted lack of emotional context and my ex-wife's over-abundance of the same) with the demands of a higher education. In my mid to late thirties, I was flirting about with relationships that would eventually go nowhere while attempting t0 make sense of the "real world". Now, as I enter my forties, I am happily married to a wonderful, witty and beautiful woman who is soon to be the mother of my children, we have a new house, and have fully embarked on our wholly adult lives as a singly joined couple. It may seem, upon slight rumination, that I have forgone some of the inevitable - and healthy - wanderlust of youth for the inevitably(supposed) forgone certitude of adult life.
Yet, upon further reflection, I wonder if this is such a bad thing. True, I've not experimented with relationships, careers, lifestyles and places as much as others may have - but then again, I think that my personality and self-confidence has always been such that, even after a rather cursory examination, I've been fairly certain of those which I've found to my liking, and those which, while romanticizing some discrete aspects of (for a surety), I've rejected pretty wholesale as being non-conducive towards the vision of my future self that I've fostered and done my best to bring about over the years. I can say for a fact that, while I've not been as flighty or eager to undertake some obligatory ritualistic quest to dispel the geas of incertitude as others have been in the course of "finding oneself", I've done so fairly early in life (or at least by now), and I pretty much like what I see.
Pretty much. Yes, there are aspects about myself that I would like to change (the tendency to be overly maudlin may be amongst them); however, for me, that is a proud announcement brought about due, not to any regrets that may have come with the sense of a profoundly (or even mildly) wasted youth, but rather, to the wisdom gained with the passing of the years. I've learned many valuable lessons over the years, through which I've gained said wisdom, and I'd not trade it for the exuberance of youth if the choice were ever presented to me. Chief amongst these lessons is this: treasure the people around you, and the life that you live, for both can be taken away in the blink of an eye. In my attempting to put those words into practice, my life has become fuller with each passing year, with the promise of better experiences to come. This is the key to my optimism.
Graduating college, getting married (again), having a kid, buying a house - all those were accomplishments that, in my life, are taking place belatedly, at least when one compares my life to the "norm". However, I'm pretty hopeful that I'm going into these things, not just with the best of intentions or sunny, wide eyed hope mixed with a dash of almost prayerful faith or driven by my own brand of graceful determination, but also girded with the experience that four decades on this verdant - azure orb has granted me, and with a firmer sense of appreciation than I - who might have earlier felt "entitled" to certain things - would have had before. As an old friend newly-found recently said to me, "You may be going through some things at 40 that others have been through at 20 or 25 - but just think how much better you'll be those things now than they were back then - or even are today!"
And...
I know that, having an ailment such as Multiple Sclerosis, which can can both shorten ones lifespan and greatly lesson ones quality of life, I'm fortunate that I made it this far in the relatively good shape that I'm in with a pretty full range of motion. You never truly appreciate the gift of walking, moving or speech until they are gone, if even for but a little while.
So now I'm fully enconsed within what a friend at the birthday party last night calls "dulce cuarenta" (it just so happens that this man was born in the same, year and hour as I was!). "Sweet forty" indeed - I like that. Thinking of my fortieth birthday as being the start of a newer, more hopeful era in my life fills me - surely - with both a serene joy and a calming optimism. Each year may be yet one more year towards my own eventual journey to the undiscovered country - but while I'm still a tenant of this one, I am determined that each year shall also be a better year, full of faith in my own perserverance, a genuine hope for a better tomorrow, and love for those around me who truly matter.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
"M" is for "Man"
... and that man is "Me"!
Well, maybe baby won't be sophisticated enough at first to understand the vagaries of sentience, but give the kid time!
I chose this pic, not because of any fancy shooting, but rather the composition of the photograph itself. It's deliberately off-center, drawing the eye a bit more forcefully to the subject
Well, maybe baby won't be sophisticated enough at first to understand the vagaries of sentience, but give the kid time!
I chose this pic, not because of any fancy shooting, but rather the composition of the photograph itself. It's deliberately off-center, drawing the eye a bit more forcefully to the subject
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| From Photos for baby |
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