Meandering Starre

July 30th was swimming and spinning day. Once I week I’m trying to do a spinning class as training. It gives me “hill” work and interval training, and often forces me to go faster then I might on my own. Plus, the spinning bikes are probably the best bikes in the gym as far as similarity in riding experience as to my road bike. The Expresso bikes I use the rest of the time are also good, but the other one do not work well. The spinning instructor was a sub, but good.

I also swam another 500 meters. My body didn’t really want to swim and I had a few more issues than my last swim, but I did it. I only swallowed two mouthfuls of water.

Swim workout

Workout: Swim
Time:17:300 or so. This includes some breaks and stops.
Average lap time : 1:40 (I think my original 1:30 lap time was off)
Distance: 500 meters
Total training distance to date: 1350 meters
Body condition: awkward but fine
Time of day: morning

Bike Workout

Workout: Bike (spinning)
Time: 45 minutes
Distance: n/a
Total spinning time to date: 45 minutes
Body condition: Fine
Weather: Inside
Time of day: Morning

This is the oddest sign.
Read it closely.
Seen in NH on the way to Maine on 6/23/07.
Please tell me what they have to do with each other.

Note: you may need to click on it and see it bigger. I am to lazy to photo edit it to make it more visible.

[written late morning 6/1, posted 6/4, predated accordingly.]

It is always a bad sign if you have learned your “lesson of the day” before 6 am. This means two rather unfortunate things:

1. You were up before 6 am
2. Not only were you up, but you were up and moving around long enough to have something happen to you that caused you to learn the lesson

Neither of these makes for, at least in my mind, a delightful start to the day.

This is made worse if said lesson is learned while waiting in the longest airport line you have ever seen.

Here is my lesson:

The security lines at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport before 6 am suck!

My flight out this morning was at 6:00 am. The airport opens at 5 am and I got there shortly after 5. It took 5 minutes to get my ticket and check my baggage. Then I entered the very badly setup maze that leads to the first part of the security check—the id and ticket checkers. There were two main lines and three checkers. However, the way they had the dividers for the lines setup is was impossible to get in the right line if you came from the left and vice versa. This sucked because the other line was shorter. The lines seemed to be going really really slowly, but I didn’t think much of it until I got through to wait for the next stage of the process—going through the detectors. Then I realized the lines to the detectors was the longest I had ever seen. It wrapped around every which way. I then noticed there were only two lines open! It took me 35 minutes to get about halfway through the line. At this point it is 5:40. I am not through security and my flight (at a D gate) was going to leave in 20 minutes. There was a rather disgruntled traveler in front of me who spent most of this 35 minutes complaining about the situation. He pointed out all of the flight crews jumping ahead of us in line (about 10 people on crews went through). We also noticed a HUGE number of TSA employees jumping the lines and going through (at least 20 went through our line). We hoped this meant another line would soon open. But it didn’t. They had a big meeting in the back.

However, circumstances were not entirely against me. When I got halfway through the line I was standing in front of what is normally the first class line. Several TAs employees just opened this line to get the now hoards of TSA employees through. A bunch of people around me asked if they could go through and one of the guys, rather softly, said yes. Another one was less positive. Well the guy in front of me, who knew I was trying to make a 6:00 flight encouraged me to try it. And I did. Another passenger got in before me, and I watched him go though without any problems. I was relieved to also make it through. I made it to my flight on time, but without a stop at Starbucks (much required if you are in line before 6 am) or even a bathroom. But I made it.

… it even sucks at 11:30 at night!

I was traveling home late 5/8 from a meeting with some rhet comp graduate students (over beer and food at Park Tavern) and found myself actually stuck in this awful traffic. It was after 11:30 at night. I was not happy. It was some of the worse traffic I have been in here. Luckily it was a fairly short lived near midnight parking lot—only a mile or so. That took about half my travel time home, but in this area it could have been much worse…  No busses drove off an overpass. No one was threatening to jump off an overpass. No freight truck dumped a load of tomatoes and stopped traffic for hours (apparently a ton or so of tomatoes takes a long time to clean off a road). But still… Not how I wanted to end the evening.

As some of you may know I just went to NYC for two conferences and to visit with my Uncle Schott. I had a great time. The conferences went well and for the important presentation there was standing room only in the room (this was probably more due to the subject matter and the subject matter experts I was presenting with, but still it was very cool). My presentation went quite well. I even had some gasping and laughing and some people were so interested in what I was talking about that there was some chatter during my presentation–people were talking to each other about what I had just said. Now that was cool!

I did many fun things:

• Role-playing of course with my uncle and one of his friends. At one point my character, Jovvi, got hit by an SUV going 80 mph. She flew 11 yards and landed on her feat. She is, BTW a superhero and has some nice DR. But she was a bit scratched up.
• Lots of wonderful meals out. I forgot how good the food was!
• An afternoon at the Bronx zoo, with very active snow leopards and Siberian tigers. My uncle, who works there, had never seen them so active. My theory was the fact it had just snowed and was cool/cold out. Probably it was close to the temperatures they are used to and they felt comfortable. The snow leopards were actually playing a lot—mostly attacking another.
• I spent a great tourist day with my uncle. We saw a show, the Drowsy Chaperon. It was a very light and funny show, we both really enjoyed it. Oddly the show was in the same theater as the last show we saw together. We were sitting a few rows back from the last time and the lead actress was the same. I highly recommend this show for people who want to laugh and don’t want anything too serious. Oh and the female lead jumps through a hope and there is a character called Trix the Navigatrix. What more do you want?

I also took tons of pictures in NYC walking around on Saturday with my uncle. I love taking pictures of buildings, so most are of buildings. But there are some other cool shots (including the tiger and leopards playing). Check it out on my Flickr. I just bought a pro account and plan to organize things a bit better once Flickr realizes I have the pro account.