Weekend Musings

This morning I had a nice solid run. My legs felt a little heavy from having increased my mileage since coming back from vacation, but other than that it was a good run. The threat of rain kept things cool, so there was no repeat of last weekend's heat and humidity troubles. It was a pretty boring run, actually. I spent my time thinking about things, but didn't see anything interesting or unusual out there, except for the crowd of runners who gathered in the Shell station to have a group photo taken. I was in there filling my fuel belt bottles with cold water and couldn't figure out what the commotion was about. Why would you want your picture taken inside a gas station?

My parents took off for California today. They'll be there for two weeks, then in New Mexico for a week before returning to Texas at the end of the month. I haven't heard of their safe arrival, but I haven't heard of any plane crashes either, so I'm guessing they're having a good time. Let's hope those Southern California fault lines stay quiet!

And while natural disasters are on my mind, good luck to my friend Mark in Mobile! It looks like Dennis is heading for the Florida panhandle, but that's close enough to bring a lot of rain to southern 'Bamy, and hurricanes being the unpredictable things that they are, I'd hesitate to say Mobile is out of the woods quite yet. At the very least they look like they're in for a lot of rain and maybe some tornados.

And in the category of unnatural disasters, what's with the London bombings? Why do some people think blowing up ordinary citizens ever solves anything? Governments tend to respond to that sort of thing with a "kill anyone we think is a terrorist" campaign and things just go from bad to worse. I worry that we're living on the leading edge of a much more brutal and chaotic world and I don't like it.

This whole week was sort of unsettled, both in the macro and the micro.

At the micro (personal) level, I had to deal with car issues, an assistant on vacation and lots of nuisance-quality things at work. And meetings. Lots of those. If one can guage one's importance by the number of meetings they're required to attend, I'm very important, indeed! Unfortunately, meetings seem to rarely be more than a whole lotta talk while the real work goes undone. If everyone could stay on topic and get to the point, we could reduce the time we spend in meetings by at least half, if not a whole lot more.

Here's how a typical meeting might go in my perfect world:

Organizer: Did everyone read the list of things to do ahead of the audit?
Attendees: Yes.
Organizer: Have you started working on these items?
Attendees: Yes.
Organizer: Any problems or questions?
Attendees: No.
Organizer: Great! Here's a deadline for having FY05 items audit-ready, and here's a deadline for FY04. Call if you have questions or if I can help in any way. Meeting adjourned!

Now why is that so hard?

Okay, since I was tagged earlier this week by Wil to reveal my addictions, I guess I had better 'fess up. The odd truth of the matter is that I'm in a highly unusual addiction-free spell right now. It's cool but weird at the same time. So I'll answer by listing some of my past addictions:

• Animal Cookies
  


• Baker's Breakfast Cookies
  


• Chocolate-covered coffee beans
  


• Peanut Butter Puffins cereal
  


• Peanut Butter/Chocolate Chip Puffins cereal bars
  


• Cinnamon graham crackers
  


• Peanut butter-oatmeal no-bake cookies (homemade)
  


• Whole Foods "oreos"
  


• Ginger snaps
  

Uh... anyone notice a pattern here?

Hopeless sugar addict? Me? You don't say!

Recent Workouts
Tuesday: 1000 meter swim, 1 mile run, 45 minute bike - Spinervals 3.0 Suffer-O-Rama
Wednesday: 45 minute core and strength training, 5 mile run
Thursday: 1000 meter swim, 1 mile run, 35 minute bike - Cyclerobx
Friday: 45 minute core and strength training
Saturday: 15 mile run