Hello, Pandora?

I'd like to report a defect

Brushes With Long-Distance Greatness

i.e. The Great White Hope(s)

On Saturday mornings I meet up with some folks to do a group training run for the upcoming Chicago Marathon. This week, Ryan Hall showed up and talked to us a little bit. I've actually talked to him a couple times before so it wasn't a huge deal, but it's still pretty cool to stand next to the guy who is indisputably the premier male American marathoner.

Plus, it's pretty neat to warm up for a half-marathon training run by getting a pep talk from the guy who owns the national record at that distance. It didn't take me twice as long as his best to complete the 13+ miles, but it was awfully close.

Then on Sunday morning I volunteered at the 2009 Rock 'N' Roll Chicago Half Marathon, where I was privileged to see Kara Goucher run right past me on her way to a win. Yes, she beat all the boys, too. She's probably the premier female American marathoner, and I can assure you that she's quite fast.

Too fast for me to get an action photo, anyway: by the time it registered that she was in front of me, she was gone.

I Still Can't Think Of Anything

Ah, flashback humor*

Anyway, if you've noticed my absence from the blog then you're probably directly related to me and already aware that I'm running another marathon. That keeps me away from the keyboard, although inspiration has generally been absent, too.

Stick around, though; it'll come back.

*For 50 points, name that tune. Overly subtle hints in the tags.

Public Service Announcement

Don't forget to defragment your hard drive!

If you're running some variety of Microsoft Windows^®, it's probably: Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter.

At the office, I had a virtual machine image that was fragmented into 110,263 pieces.

I feel bad about making my PC work over a holiday weekend.

Anyway, while your hard drive is rearranging itself, your assignment is to think of ways to defragment your mind.

If I did drugs, I think I would do drugs while watching a disk defragment. I think that could be a really enlightening experience.

Let me know if you try it.

Take A Look Ahead

It finally happened!

So maybe this sounds weird to you, but for as long as I can remember, I've had this reoccurring thing in my mind where I wonder if two radio stations are ever playing the same song at the same time.

I tend to flip between stations anyway, avoiding commercials and hunting for the right song amongst the six presets on my car stereo. But I'm not (typically) listening to any "hits" stations that are just cranking out the Top 40, which means these guys are usually working through catalogs of hundreds or even thousands of songs, many of which won't even overlap between any two stations. Anyway, the odds of two stations running the same song at any given moment are ridiculously tiny. But it's not impossible!

Because today, at 6:45pm Central, I casually flipped from The Drive to The Loop, only to hear the magical sound of... the exact same song. I didn't believe it at first. I wanted to, but I thought maybe I hit the same button again by mistake. I thought maybe all Boston songs just sound the same. No, it was real. I spent the next minute or so gleefully flipping back and forth between the two, reveling in a delight I had heretofore only imagined. I hope I didn't run a stop sign or something.

In the grand scheme of things, this probably isn't a big deal. But now, today, this moment, finally, I have it:

Peace of Mind.

I'm Not Dead

I'm getting better

Well, if you're one of my anonymous fans or possibly some kind of sentient web crawler bot, you may not have known that I was cast in a play and decided to take a hiatus from writing blog posts because my brain had begun thinking strictly in terms of dialogue and I didn't want to inadvertently commit any felony plagiarism.

But the show ended yesterday, so today I make my epic return to run-on sentencing blogging.

Patent 4,864,898

Lives on my kitchen counter

I have used that particular item probably a hundred times. Carried it with me often. Held it in my hand. And yet I didn't notice it had a patent notice etched into the side until today.

I think life is like that sometimes, don't you? No, not life... I mean, maybe love. Yeah, I think love is like that sometimes. You carry it around with you and then one day you notice it has a number written on the side and you have to stop and it really makes you think about how people are, um...

Okay, you know what? I have this little bottle opener on my counter that's on the same ring as the key to the back door. And I noticed it had a patent number etched on the side, but I can't decide for you whether that means anything or not, so I'm just going to keep enjoying this beer, alright?

Because life is like that sometimes. Or love, or whatever.