Play date and a California Roll


A kindergarten visit and lunch afterward.



This morning, William had a visit ("play date") at one of the kindergartens to which we're applying. In fact, it's the one that our daycare director doesn't seem to like and which shocked the other parent but which we've been impressed with on every visit.

While William was in the play date, we stayed with other families in the school library, with James playing around in an area that looked like a mini-amphitheater reading "pit". At the end of the play date, as we picked up William, we were a little shocked to see that he had been practicing writing his alphabet, instead of drawing pictures or whatnot. Yes, we certainly want him to stand out, but we also don't want him to seem coached. Hopefully, the teachers will be able to see the truth of it. I asked William if he had fun.

We then went to Old Pasadena for lunch at a Japanese restaurant. James was being picky, until he discovered that he liked eating California Rolls.

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UPDATE: This afternoon, while the boys were supposed to be napping, I went out one last time to try to find some reasonable way to attach the Nike+ iPod sport sensor to my Asics, and since I couldn't find anything (apart from stuff I'd have to order online, sight unseen), I just gave in and bought a pair of Nike+ shoes

Then, I went out jogging around our neighborhood. I originally intended to do a ~2 mile walk/jog, but at the 3/4 mile mark, when I was going to play the "Power Song" for a stretch of hard jogging/running, I accidentally rebooted my iPod nano and lost the run. I had to start a "new" run and ended up going an additional 3.5 km. The 3/4 mile "warmup" went unrecorded.

When I got home, I was exhausted, of course, and I remained very tired for over an hour. When I was 14 years old, I could run 2-ish miles in around 12 minutes*, I think, during cross country in high school. Then, the thing that took effort was just keeping up a jogging pace over the race -- forward motion. Now, over 20 years and about 60 additional pounds later, I find my body struggling not only with forward motion but also against gravity. It's a huge effort after a while just to stay standing when I'd rather just fall to the ground, roll over, and die, unless a kindly, attractive stranger could give me a drink of water, pick me up, put me in her Lexus, and drive me home. Okay, this stranger would probably have to be remarkably strong, for a supermodel, to lift all of my current weight into her Lexus, but delirious fantasies while jogging are probably common.

Anyway, the iPod sport kit makes for a convenient jogging buddy, which I haven't had since cross country in high school. That means I'm a bit more motivated to keep it up. Also, it calculates calories burned for each run, which I don't get during a bike ride, which means I'm additionally motivated, since the point is to lose some of the holiday weight I put on in 2005 and never burned off. It's also cool to see, on Nike's web site, that I'm running a gradually faster pace with each new run.

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For the past few days, I've been noticing a taste like blood in my mouth, coming from the back of my throat, but whenever I manage to hack up some phlegm, I don't see any blood. I'm beginning to wonder if the Duraflame logs we've been burning for the past couple of nights have been putting out some sort of residue into the house. If so, we may need to get someone to clean our chimney.

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The 70-80 degree winter weather in southern CA has vanished. I was pretty chilled when I was jogging this afternoon.

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* Update 1/16/07: Hard to believe, 2 miles in 12 minutes. Actually, I don't recall any time under 12 minutes, but I'm pretty sure I remember times like 12 minutes and xxx seconds, where xxx may very well have been approaching 59. My current pace puts me at about 14 minutes for one mile, on average. Six minutes per mile doesn't challenge any Olympic athletes or even any regular athlete, for that matter, but it seems awfully fast for me today. Was I really that much faster when I was that young? On the other hand, I was actively training with other athletes at the time...

Posted: Sat - January 13, 2007 at 02:02 PM          

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