I swear this campus is crawling with people I know. Just ran into someone I haven't seen in 4 years. Any guesses? (Most of the readers of this blog know this person...)

Apparently the BBC doesn't think there's much to report on these day, except, of course chimps smoking and bears riding bikes.

Maybe they're smoking 850 pounds of pot.

Eek. I'm not used to having actual work to do at work. The next few weeks could be rough as I re-adjust to having something to do when I come in to the office every morning :)

Friendster freaks the hell out of me. I've had an account for a while, but I never really bothered to add friends. Occasionally I'll get a request for someone to add me as a friend, and those are the times when I edit my profile to reflect moves across the country, etc.

But today I looked around a bit. Talk about world colliding! I found an ex boyfriend I haven't talked to in a long, long time. Friendster informed me that I was 4 degrees away from him. Now I only have three confirmed friends, all from college, so finding that I was connected through them to a boyfriend from grad school was deeply disturbing :) Turned out to be not that strange--the connection was through Spikey--but I think I'd prefer to be disconnected!

In any case, I sent out "please add me" things to a few people, so maybe at some point I'll have friends. Or it'll take me 12 years to look at the page again. One or the other. There were some people I could've added, but somehow the connection level felt right. You know when there are friends that really are 2 or 3 degrees away? Sometimes they become friends in their own right, but sometimes they will always be friends-of-friends.

And I had trouble looking for some of my female friends because I couldn't remember their new last names. :)

Oh, and if I didn't try to add you it's not because I don't love you. It's likely because trying to navigate around Friendster makes my head spin.

Well I was going to start saving money... Instead I am going to LA for Barlo's birthday/Labor Day. Yes, I hate SoCal, but I love the Jeppies and miss them dearly. And flights are (relatively) cheap at the moment. And Chryssi could probably talk me into anything, especially since she does things like fly here for my birthday :) Oh well, it's only money...

I ran again today! Oh, maybe that's not quite as exciting for all of you as it is for me :) But tomorrow I attempt 7 miles!

And tonight I drink with my Liver Foundation team. Yes, I know that seems wrong, but I'm not one to turn down free drinks, and I need to go anyway to pick up my race shirt...

In other news, I'm officially done with Internet Explorer, both at home and at work. The final straw was realizing that IE does not provide Hebrew language support for the Mac. There's no good reason for this. They support a huge number of other languages-- including many with non-Latin character sets-- and lots of languages that I've never even heard of. But no Hebrew, despite an offer by people in Israel to develop/pay for the coding. Hmph. This is not (entirely) a political statment on my part. IE doesn't support Arabic either, so it's not like they're pro-Palestinian or something. I just like to be able to read Hebrew websites, and I am sick of Microsoft refusing to develop code for Macs. Don't even get me started on the problems we have at work with Mac/PC issues (mostly caused by Microsoft). Damn monopoly, anti-trust rulings notwithstanding. I'm switching to Linux on my home PC. Soon.

I ran today! I ran today! I ran today! And it felt SO GOOD!! Oh running, how I missed you. My life for the past month has been miserably incomplete.

Yeah, so I may be mostly recovered, and I can stop being depressed about not being able to run, jump, walk, etc. But now I am going to be completely paranoid about getting hurt again. I don't mind being sore, and I don't mind running through pain, but I do mind having shooting pain down my leg just walking down stairs. I've got to figure out how to run without getting injured because I feel like I've spent more of the past nine months injured than well.

And I've got to get back in shape in the next 47 days. Eek.

I LOVE distance racing!!

It seems like for the majority of Olympic events, you have a pretty clear idea going in of who will win. Sure, there are suprises along the way, but the favorite in an event is probably going to medal. At the very least the favorite will always finish the race. Not so in marathoning.

The heavy favorite in the women's marathon this year was Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain, the world record holder. Radcliffe's WR is over 3 MINUTES faster than the best time of the second fastest woman. Forget these sports where best times are within hundreths of a second; this is a true contest. When Joan Benoit won the first Olympic women's marathon in 1984, she finished 15 minutes ahead of her next closest competitor.

So everyone thought Radcliffe would win. After all, she'd never lost a marathon she'd been in. But then she'd also never run a marathon in 100-degree heat with nasty hills. Unlike most marathons where the course designers try to make the flattest, fastest course possible, this marathon followed the "original" course run by the messenger during the battle of Marathon. At is was not designed for world records.

So what happened? Pretty early on in the race ten women broke out ahead and ran together for ten miles or so. The American favorite, Deena Kastor, dropped down to 18th and was over two minutes behind. Radcliffe was right out in front where she always is. But she has a really ugly stride that causes her to waste ridiculous amounts of energy. And she's BIG for a marathoner. Most female marathoners are very compact-- often under five feet. The upside to a small frame is that you have less weight to haul around for 26.2 miles.

Anyway, long story short, the Japanese favorite, Mizuki Naguchi, eventually pulled out in front of the pack and never looked back. She finished first in 2:26 (the world record is 2:15). Catherine Ndereba of Kenya managed to keep her in sight through the whole race and finished second. After Radcliffe fell to fourth (a position she'd NEVER been in in a marathon) she broke down and couldn't even finish the race.

And plucky Deena Kastor just kept running her race. One by one she passed the women who'd gone out too strong, and in the last mile she pulled into third and easily won bronze. And she had a freaking kick at the end, looking totally comfortable. Kastor became the first American woman to medal in the marathon since Benoit. You know why? She's a machine. She does three practice sessions every day-- running in the morning, weights in the afternoon, and running again in the evening, and she trains at altitude with sweats on to simulate the heat. I love any race where preparation makes that huge of a difference. Yes, these women have natural talent that I don't, but they also work their tails off.

And they're old! Kastor is 31. One of the other American women (who finished about 10 minutes back) is 40 years old! There's still time for me! The gold medalist is exactly one day older than I am, so I've got till tomorrow to win the gold :)

Woo! The women's marathon is actually televised! This is the only event for which I can name all the top competitors and their best times, and for which I can intelligently discuss strategy. This promises to be a brutal marathon, no world records here--should be exciting! Don't try to call me for the next two hours; I'll be glued to my tv :)

I'm not exactly sure why I'm watching the Olympics when I already know all the winners, but I had fun with the Olympic drinking game the other night. I don't know if Scott made it up, but he shared it with us, and Conor, Abby, and I added our own elements. If we'd actually drunk every time we were supposed to, we would have been smashed off our asses. But we're old, so we just sipped beer occasionally and commented on the funniest moments :) Times to drink (at least the ones I remember)-- unexpected medals, shots of beach volleyball cheerleaders, stories about athletes overcoming personal tragedy, sappy comments about swimmers' teddy bears, use of unusual words (like amplitude in gymnastics coverage), Bob Costas mentions his Greek heritage, an American athlete exhibits bad sportsmanship, there's a token nod to sports where Americans aren't top competitors. I'm sure there were more, but you could just make up your own.

I have lived in four different places in the past year. One result of this nomadic lifestyle is that I'm slightly less organized than I'd like to be (as evidenced by my recent inability to find my car title) I pay most of my bills online, so I am always up-to-date on those, but the paper statements I continue to receive have just been accumulating in precarious piles on my "dining room" table. I hate this.

Having decided I want to move in the direction of home ownership I sat down to make a budget, a difficult task when your finances are a jumbled mess of papers. So my preliminary step was to organize every piece of paper in my apartment. I'm about halfway done and already feeling quite relieved. But my apartment is horrible messy, which is driving me crazy.

And now I'm off to buy food. According to my budget I can only spend about $100 a month on food, which sounds ridiculously low to me, so I may be quite discouraged at the grocery store. Luckily I don't spend anywhere near the $200+ the budget suggested for entertainment, so I should be ok.

Soon, very soon, I will throw a dinner party for my Chicago friends (not sure if that's the food budget or the entertainment one). Just need to clean up the apartment a bit first so that people fit in it. I'll keep you posted.

Anyone know how to get rid of spiders living in a car (preferably without killing them....) When I first started noticing spiderwebs on my car I assumed that the problem was that I drove my car so infrequently. However, I have now driven it 400 miles home, washed it, driven it 400 miles back here, and driven 13 miles each way to work three days in a row. And still, every time I go to my car it's covered in webs. Dad killed two spiders that jumped off my car, and I'm not sure how many are left, but the one I saw today was nasty. I've only ever found two webs in the interior, so I don't think they spend much time in there. My guess is that they live behind the driver's side mirror because that's the most consistent web spot. So--ideas??

Being the dork that I am I took several classes in grad school about oral cultures and the transmission of knowledge. I've always been fascinated by non-literate cultures because I learn best through reading. I often recall things I've learned by picturing the words on the page, and I've rarely been able to follow a story or game just by listening. But in the past year, as I've been working office jobs, I've started to spend hours a day listening to public radio, and I believe my listening comprehension skills have really developed. I have recently begun to notice the linguistic clues of public radio and the ways in which public radio is an oral culture, not just the oral component of a written culture. The best example of this is the tags that public figures are given. One of my old professors studied oral epic poetry. He said that the poems were never performed in exactly the same way. But somehow the performer could re-create the poem by knowing the basic story. The difficult thing is doing improv in the right rhyme and meter. One trick for this was to always use the same tag for a character-- something like "blue-eyed Odysseus." Although I don't usually notice any emphasis on rhyme or meter in public radio, these tags are still used. And they help the listener (especially those of us who don't listen well) by cue-ing us in for what we are about to hear. Sometimes these tags are job tittles (e.g., National Security Advisor or Iraqi Prime Minister). But often the tags are descriptive. I'll be you can't hear the following tags without filling in the name blanks: "Rising Star ___ ____" and "Rebel Cleric ____ ____"

Has anyone else noticed this? Have a favorite tag?

After work tomorrow I'm off to Ohio for football fun!

Saturday starts out with the parade, sponsored by Dad's (soon-to-be-defunct) company. So I'm sitting in VIP seats, where (apparently) donuts are provided. WTF? We don't have to get there in the middle of the night to stakeout our seats AND someone just hands us donuts? That's not a real parade experience!!

And then fancy dinner with free drinks and famous people. This could be very bad :)

Yay! I'll be back Tuesday.

The universe is fucked up.

Y'all would scoff at my proof, but trust me on this one.

And trust me on this, too--synchronicity can be a cruel mistress.

I can walk up AND down stairs without pain!!

And I ran a half marathon yesterday. Wasn't a PR or anything, but I finished in 2:26:25, so my pace was 11:11. That's certainly nowhere near where I want to be, but considering the heat/humidity and the fact that I hadn't run in a week due to injury, I suppose it's much better than I anticipated. Every time I passed a race official I considered asking how long they were going to keep the course open, but as it turns out the last-place finisher came in at 3:52:44, with a pace of 17:46, so I could have just walked the whole thing. I tried to find out ahead of time whether the course was walker friendly, but maybe it's better that I didn't know, or I would have walked more.

Anyway, tonight I do yoga, and tomorrow I RUN!!

And I need to run because I have now raised $698.20 for the American LIver Foundation, and I have lots and lots of people counting on me finishing this marathon thingy :)

Walking down the street yesterday I saw a sign for a new condo development. The condos looked reasonably priced; the location was awesome; and the condos hardwood floors, lake views, and stainless steel appliances in the kitchen. For a brief moment I was excited and wondered if there was any way I could afford a condo. But something was tickling at my mind--the address of the condos sounded familiar. And then it hit me: it was the former address of Marigold Lanes. No way could I live there without feeling like a horrible person!