Boston Red Sox

Has anybody noticed the Red Sox lately? So much media attention has been given to the poster boy for HGH (Human Growth Hormone) Barry Bonds* that the respectable achievements of the Sox go unnoticed. They are an amazing 20 games over .500 and lead their division by 11.5 games. Not only do they have the best record in all of baseball, the largest lead in any division over the 2nd place team, but they have done this while the Stankees steal the headlines with their dismal season.

Check out Bonds* as a Pittsburgh Pirate rookie in 1986. Notice how slender he is, especailly in his arms, he is 22 years old.

Check out this picture of Bonds* in 2001 when he was in his home run hitting prime. Look at those arms now they are cannons, albeit 'roid induced. He turns 43 years old this year.

What amazes me about this guy is that he used to be known for power and speed. He is in a very prestigious club of 400 home runs and 400 stolen bases (he is the only member of the 400/400 club and of the 500/500 club). Pretty good numbers considering he has only 9 stolen bases in the last 3 seasons!

Memorial Day funny

Last Thursday we had a door to door sales guy ring our doorbell. I am notoriously bad at stopping these people in mid sales pitch, but I have never bought anything....yet. Anyway, this guy was good, he had charisma and it seemed like he actually enjoyed what he did. So he was selling some sort of spray on cleaner that did everything. First he sprayed the hood of my car (which made me cringe, but it was too late he already sprayed it) he rubbed and polished and said "now take a look at that" and imagine that.....it was clean. But then he said you could run your fingers over it and there would be no streaks. He did this and of course he left big streaks in it! Then he sprayed the glass, "see no streaks" he said. And "it will last for 14 days" he said. "Even if it rains?" I asked. He said the water will roll right off. So then he heads over to the porch light, which is in bad cosmetic shape with tarnish spots and gunk all over it. He says "and watch this" and squirts the fixture and scrubs it with a scouring pad, all the time giving me this spiel about how this magic spray takes all of the rust and gunk right off. So he polishes it up and low and behold...it looks no better or worse than it did before.

By this time I was sort of laughing on the inside, cause this stuff was obviously a crock. He handed me a bottle and on the side it said retail price $34.95. I asked him how much it costs, and he said $40. Again I laughed on the inside. Then he sits down on the step and begins to squirt one of his shoes. He scrubs it and dries it off and said "look at that, good as new!" And of course it looked the same as the shoe that he didn't spray. "But remember" he says "this is only 1 capful in a squirt bottle filled with water." "Enough to make 120 bottles" he added.

Then came the mail box test. He opens up the lid of the mailbox and notices some rust. "Watch this" he says, "I'll remove this rust with out effecting the integrity of the paint." He sprays, he scrubs, and then he proceeds to remove all of the rust AND all of the paint...down to the bare metal. So then joking with him a bit I said "yeah but if I bought a bottle of this stuff I would actually have to walk around and spray and scrub everything, if I bought a bottle would you go around and spray and scrub everything?" He paused for a minute, then he pulls out a notebook and looks inside....then he looks at me and says.......this is the best part......"yeah I could do that for $310!" I busted out laughing and told him I wasn't interested and he got all upset and left. As if his little notebook had a price in it for spraying and scrubbing everything in my house and detailing my car, and apparently reviving my shoes to their exact same luster of pre-revival. Apparently this stuff is the best cleaner ever, but it didn't actually look like it did a thing. If you just have to have some, here is the website. Here it is on eBay for about $28 with shipping. Oh, did I mention that he unscrewed the cap of his squirt bottle and DRANK IT!!!! "Totally safe and totally organic" he said!

Interesting article

At my picnic yesterday the stay at home moms (and me) had a debate with the 2 working people in the group (both residents at the U). One of the stay at home moms sent this article about what it is a stay at home mom actually does in a day, and sort of addresses the question about which is harder working a 9 to 5 or staying at home with kids.

My favorite parts are these points:
"It's needing 45 minutes to do what takes others 15."
and
the part at the end out how to spend your 10 minutes of alone time.

Read the article here

Trying times

So yesterday I had a good day, but it was riddled with critical mistakes that made the day harder than it should have been. Started out with a slow morning, couldn't get in gear at all (error #1). Then I decided to go for a 12 mile run with the kids in a stroller (error #2). Because of Error #1 I didn't start until 10:45 AM and the temps were already in the 80's (error #3). So I took the kids from the house to the jog and proceeded to confine them to the stroller for 2+ hours (error #5). After the run I felt sick as a dog, probably overheated, overworked, and wore out. I rushed the kids home and confined them to their high chairs for lunch (confinement was error #6). Then I quickly showered and we rushed out for an hour long drive (error #7) to a cheese factory that we toured. By the time we got there the kids were so restless they were getting into everything. I was that parent with the annoying kids that were running amok! After the tour we went to a park for a picnic and the kids were actually really good. I was with 2 other families and their kids didn't eat dinner and then suffered the subsequent crash about 2 hours later. But Sydney and Aiden were really good and had a chance to burn off a lot of energy. I was still feeling nauseous and didn't eat dinner and really couldn't think about anything other than going to bed.

We have a walker

Well what ever semblance of a nice, quiet, simple life that I had is now GONE! Aiden is quite the accomplished walker. He is now in to everything, and he does so at an astonishing pace. He still crawls, but he is realizing that he can go faster with walking. He enjoys chasing Sydney around the house, both screaming at top volume (see no more P&Q). All of this started about 3 weeks ago when he would take 5 or 6 steps, with quite a bit of prodding. Now he can go as far as he wants, he usually stops and stand for a second looks around then sits down....sort of a "this is as far as I feel like walking" sort of look to it. Anyway, each day he gains confidence and gets faster. My friends at playgroup and run club are amazed by how fast he picked it up and how sure on his feet he seems to be. One lady seems particularly impressed as her 19 month old just started walking, but we all know each kid is different and walks at different ages.

I don't quite know how I feel about it. On one hand it will be nice not to have to carry him around in a few months when he is efficient at it. On the other side he really does get into more trouble which requires a closer eye on him now. And not to mention that it is one more validation that my baby boy is growing up! He's not really a baby anymore....could he be....gasp....a toddler? Better have another one, the current models are growing up!

I don't want to.......

I'm bored. Sure I have stuff to do, but I don't want to. I have to go to the library, books are due today. I have to go to the rec center, run run run all day long. I have to clean the house, company coming over. I have to finish painting the house, could probably finish it all in 3 hours...I don't want to. I have to mow the lawn, have you seen our backyard? I'd like to wash my car, and clean out he inside...it's filthy. All of that fun stuff and I'd rather sit on the couch and claim that I am bored. The kids need baths, and need to get away from the television. But I don't want to.

Any suggestions, other that to get off my butt and do some stuff?

Hippie stuff

On May 2nd I posted about compact florescent light bulbs and the fact that my counter on the blog had the count over 33 million bulbs sold. Well check it out now, just a day or two from going over 50 MILLION bulbs. That's 17 million bulbs sold in less than a month! Got yours?

Today on CNN I read that by 2012 New York City is going to replace all 13,000 of their taxi's with hybrid cars! They are going to replace 20% of them each year for the next five years, cool huh!

Usually I try to keep my political beliefs to myself, but I found this next tidbit too good to pass up. In this weeks issue of Time there is a great article on Al Gore. As you know he is saying he is not running for president in 2008, however with out even being on the ballot he currently sits at 12% in the polls...tied with John Edwards. He recently gave his Inconvenient Truth slide show to more than 10,000 people in Buffalo, NY, during the Q&A session a woman asked him a great question. She asked "if you are calling for so much change and stating that this change needs to be immediate, why don't you run for president in 08?" I guess the place erupted for 30 seconds with applause and cheers.

Just in case you are interested check out these 2 sites, www.draftgore.com and www.algore.org, both of which are grass roots campaigns gathering signatures to get Al Gore on the ticket. One more thing, here is a funny clip from Sunday's episode of Family Guy which has several references to Al Gore and some of his stances, amusing!

Quickie

Bridget's Aunt Christine is in Park City on vacation for a week, and tomorrow Chris and Steve are coming over to see our house and have a BBQ. So we spent the majority of the day cleaning our disaster of a house. When we asked Sydney if she wanted to help clean she said....and I kid you not..."I can't clean, I'm not a grown up yet!" So there take that, but she did help put some of her toys away.

That's a lot of people

The final tally has finally been released from the race for a cure a couple of weekends ago. There were:
1,749 Timed Racers
13,275 Non-Timed Racers
800 Day of Race sign-ups
Equals 15,824 Total racers in the 2007 Race for a Cure

Pretty cool huh!

The really good part is the race collected nearly $160,000 in donations for cancer research! That's impressive.

Dentist

We took the kids to the dentist today for the first time. They did really well. Aiden screamed a bit, but that was to be expected. He has a funny shaped tooth that looks like the letter T, the dentist didn't say much about it. He did say it could have been an extra tooth that fused to his other tooth, or it could be one of his canine teeth also fused to the other tooth. Either way it wasn't much of a big deal cause it is just going to fall out when his adult teeth come in.

Sydney did amazing! I wasn't sure how she would do, but she was such a big girl. She just sat there quietly and did everything the dentist told her to do! They both got some fancy new toothbrushes, and some little toys. Sydney thought the dentist was a toy store! And maybe the biggest thing, NO CAVITIES!!

Guess What? More painting!

Painting is like a vacuum, it really sucks! All we will have left after today is the cream colored trim, which should go pretty fast. It is still pretty hot outside which makes if all that much more miserable. But on and on we go.

I can't say it enough, I'll never paint the outside of a house again. I'll save up my money to buy siding and have somebody do that for me.

The kids have been doing pretty good with the painting though. We let them play in the backyard while we are working out there. When we are in the front yard the kids are usually watching movies. We try to paint the front while Aiden is sleeping, so only one kid gets square eyes from watching TV.

Well, I better get back to work...my break time is over. I didn't work this hard when I was working for a paycheck! Bridget is a real slave driver!!

And the results are in

So here are the results from the race this morning:
In my age division I was #68/120 (I finished faster than 43% in my age)
For overall males I was #391/690 (I finished faster than 43% in all males)
For overall position I was #692/1749 (I finished faster than 60% of total racers)

In order to be a timed racer you had to pay extra to use a special timing chip. So there were only 1749 people who did this, but there were 15,ooo total (approximate) runners, walkers, and wheel chair athletes.

Had I hit my goal of 24 - 25 minutes I would have been somewhere between 172nd and 245th place (top 10% - 14% of all runners). Oh well there is always next time!

The BIG race

So what is it like to run with 15,000 people? It STINKS! Bridget and I ran in the Race for a Cure this morning and it was rough. First off we were meeting 7 other people who are members of Partners in Medicine who were on my team. The last couple of people didn't show up until 5 minutes before the race started. This left me only a few minutes to get toward the front of the pack. Well, I didn't make it! So I started behind a LOT of slower people, which was sort of fun to try to pass around (I felt like a guy with a bad case of road rage). However, this was very energy consuming and difficult to get into a rhythm. My first mile ended up at 7:42, which is right where I wanted it....but it was so jerky (fast,slow,fast,slow,fast) that I was really winded. Mile 2 began with a hill which zapped what energy I had left. Then I did exactly what I didn't want to do, I walked. I was disappointed to say the least. Mile 2 and 3 were nearly identical with one walk each mile and seemed to be a very inconsistent pace. Mile 2 was at 8:53/mile, mile 3 was 8:54/mile, and then there was the remainder of the 5K which is .12 of a mile. My overall time was 27:00 even, my goal time was 24:00 - 25:00 minutes but I really had dreams of finishing sub 24 minutes.

Bridget had an even more difficult time with the 2 kids in the jogging stroller. She couldn't find 10 feet to run without needing to swerve around a slower person. Plus they made those with strollers start at the very back, which meant she had a lot of people to try to pass. She was sort of excited when she said "I got to pass THOUSANDS of people!"

In the end we decided that a race with 15,000 people that is only 3 miles long is not the place to try to set a personal record best time. Some of those big races like the NY marathon, Boston marathon, or Chicago marathon have the luxury of spreading out that many competitors over 26 odd miles. In three miles it turns into bumper to bumper people, I clipped so many people in the beginning that it started to feel sort of claustrophobic. Oh well, you live and learn!

Random Thoughts

Random thought #1: We are painting this weekend, for the final time. We have chosen a new color to cover the minty green, it is called Grape Vine. But our Mothers Day weekend will be filled with painting in the scorching heat (supposed to be 87 on Saturday!).

Random thought #2: Saturday is the race for the cure. I will be shooting for a time in the 24 minute ballpark, that's for 3.12 miles. We'll see, there is going to be about 15,000 runners there so I might have a difficult time getting out of the herd.

Random thought #3: The National Lacrosse League's championship game is on Saturday. It features the Rochester Knighthawks Vs. the Arizona Sting. The K-hawks were the best team in the regular season and as a result clinched home field advantage throughout the post season. Unfortunately the circus is in town (Rochester, NY) and the game had to be moved to Arizona. So much for home field advantage!

Random thought #4: You are my piss!


Have a great weekend!

Home Depot

I need to get a job at home depot so that I can afford to exist in this world. I think we have spent half of Bridget's yearly earnings there this past week. It got worse today when I spent $250 more dollars on more paint, landscaping bricks, and sprinkler stuff. Those of you that have been to our house know that we have a GINORMOUS back yard. Since our house is on a corner lot, it is especially huge. Anyway, last summer I tried various watering strategies for the backyard...each was a pain in the neck. I tried a lawn tractor, which kept hopping off of the hose and going all over the yard. Finally I found a system that worked, but required me to go out every night and move sprinklers around several times to cover the whole yard (dramatically impacted our movie watching at night!). So today I bought a watering system that works a lot like a sprinkler system. It has 4 outlets that create 4 "zones" that can be programed to run at any time of the day and at whatever time. So I have it all planned out so that I can get the entire yard watered in the 4 zones, I should be set and our yard will get water when we are away on trips!

On and On

We keep on going...... Painting that is. We have chosen to go with the darker "grape leaf" color of green to repaint the house. Now all I need is a baby sitter to watch the kids while I work. While I was priming and painting the first coat the kids were happy playing on their swingset and in their sandbox. No that only buys me enough time to put them by the swingset and make it to my ladder, they can get to the patio and get into trouble that fast! Aiden likes to pull out my flowers and whack his head with my gardening shovels. Sydney likes to try to open the gate and escape, or better yet let the dogs run loose in the neighborhood.

We are dog sitting one of Bridget's co-workers greyhounds this week. Actually it goes home tonight...hopefully. I don't know if it is a greyhound thing or just this dog but it is dumb. She wines, barks for no reason, scratches at the door, eats the kids toys, eats out plastic drinking glasses, begs for food and then won't eat her dog food. Worst of all she doesn't have Buddha's sense for pooping in the same corner of the yard. She poops all over the place (outside), now we really have to watch where you walk! Even worse than that she eats her own poop! I tried yelling at her while I was painting and she just kept munching away. She is a gross dumb dog, hopefully she goes home tonight!

Also, there are new pictures up on my website....www.browntography.com

check out new pics of the kids, as well as a video of Aiden taking his first steps in front of a camera!

Monday funny and pics

Here is a funny clip, not sure if it is mocking An Inconvienient Truth, or NASCAR, country music, or people from the south. Anyway, I thought it was funny. Watch here: http://www.superdeluxe.com/sd/contentDetail.do?id=D81F2344BF5AC7BB970E63516484018E786ABF300B594CB5

So we have pretty much finished the first coat of paint on the house. And guess what WE DON'T LIKE IT!! Isn't that great. So we were going to put 2 coats of color on, the second is just going to be a different color and hopefully it will turn out better. We really like where the new green color meets the brick, but not where it meets the green roof. See for yourself and let us know what you think we should do!

Mind numbing

I know not everyone gets as excited as I do about running, but it is what it is I suppose. Saturdays are my long run days, and today it is extra nasty outside. It is raining, and windy and only 45 degrees. This forces me to run 9 miles on a treadmill at the rec center. BARF! I have been putting it off for as long as I can today, but now the time has come and I need to go do it. Bridget worked all night and we let her sleep till about 3 PM so she is now ready to take over kid watching duties. The kids and I went to the Children's museum today, it was fun and killed a large portion of our day so mommy could sleep.

Well off to the treadmill I go, to run like a lab rat in an exercise wheel!

In trouble?

I need every one's opinion. I have been e-mailing my brother in law about getting a mattress for some friends of mine (he works for a mattress company). Anyway we got the mattress ordered and it is all set to go. So I was e-mailing my friend the details and I just thought I would forward the last two e-mails in the list of 8 e-mails on the subject. Much to my dismay the e-mail program sent all 8 e-mails, of which the first is an e-mail to my sister in which I refer to my friends wife as "goofy." So if my friend reads all 8 e-mails he will find my little slip, so what should I do?

These are the 3 leading solutions:

1. Ignore it, it's not a big deal and he may not even read all 8 e-mails.
2. Send an apology e-mail saying it was a mistake and wasn't meant to reach him.
3. just hope that if he sees it he doesn't take any offense to it.

HELP! what should I do????

Rain, Rain.....at last!

We are finally getting a day of rain. The beauty of it is - NO PAINTING! Yeah! Yippie! Yahoo! I feel like a kid walking out of the school doors on the last day of school! Here in SLC we only had 1/2 an inch of rain in April, 4 1/2 inches is the average. So we really need the water! After last weeks upper 80's low 90's our yard already had brown spots. I guess I couldn't admit it to myself that we would really need to start watering, guess so.

The downside is that we are stuck indoors, but it's not so bad having spent so much time outside recently.

Tree Hugger Stuff

My sister sent me an e-mail today that has a great article describing an new wind farm being built by my Alma Mater, Colorado State University. The project should be completed in 8 years and will fully support the entire university in it's energy needs. CSU currently uses 16 MH at peak demand, and the new wind farm will produce 65 MH. I think this is a great program and I would hope that larger institutions, businesses, even cities and towns see that this is a great source of environmentally friendly power and adapt it to their particular situations. Read the article my sister sent me that got me all fired up....here!

Also as a side note, did you see the CFL counter in the lower right of my blog? It has gone over 33 million CFL bulbs sold! Do you have yours??

One other side note, I am not a big fan of Wal-Mart for countless reasons....to many to list in this post....but I have been pleasantly surprised by a few of their commercials recently. There is one with a lady talking about a bottle of concentrated laundry soap, another talking about CFL bulbs, and one more about natural fiber clothing. I think the idea of spreading the word on these things is awesome, and really send a powerful message that big business can promote environmentally friendly products and still earn a profit.

Are we there yet?

We get up, we paint. We take a break, then we paint. We paint before lunch, then we paint till dinner. We paint from dinner till dusk. Paint....Paint....Paint.....BARF. I hate painting so much. I really find myself looking forward to running because it is a break from painting. We got a pretty good start on the color though, I think I look like Shrek because my hands are all green from paint.

Bridget is enjoying her time off from work a lot. Even if she has to paint, she insists that she enjoys the fresh air and the sun. I think she is crazy, possible suffering from heat stroke or something! We went to the Rec Center this morning. We rode our bikes, I had the bike trailer with the kiddos in it. We decided to run on treadmills so that I could go at my pace and she could go at hers, I did 3 miles in 24 minutes and she did 3 miles in 30:21. It was the first time she went 3 miles in a LONG time, but she felt great. Bridget is joining me in the Race for a Cure in 2 weeks, so she is training for that 5K. She has to push the stroller for that one, so she is hoping for a non windy day!