PLANET3RRY

Another late night last night with my tutorees. I can’t really tell you how they did on their classwork, but I can tell you that I do enjoy this whole teaching gig that I have. At least the one-on-one stuff is pretty good. I think that I’ll need to take some graduate math classes so that I can teach at least Math at a community college level. I would like to go back for a Ph. D. in something, but that won’t be until Jen has her Mary Kay business set to were she is replacing my income, which we figure should be in about 4 years, give or take.

Last night before tutoring, I went to volunteer at a Knoxville Track Club event called “Art meets Science”. I didn’t get to stay for the speakers, but was the door greeter. I had fun with it while I was there. They had wine and lasagna, which I did not partake of any. I didn’t want my students to smell alcohol on my breath and lasagna is yucky. For those that don’t know, I could not eat any italien, tomato based substance, like lasagna or even spaghetti. This made for interesting times at function where lasagna is provided because it can feed the masses. Not me, I had to fend for myself, or just eat a lot of bread. I would get physically sick after eating these foods, which was odd because I liked tomatoes (or tomatos) on sandwiches and I didn’t mind catchup. (Kudos to Pulp Fiction that turned me on to French Fries and mayonnaise). I can eat spaghetti now, and most of the other pasta dishes, although I can’t stand going to Olive Garden. Their menu is just so hard for me to pick an item off the menu. I don’t have a problem with the other italian restaurants, so I don’t know why. My favorite way to eat spaghetti is to use Ranch Dressing with Hot sauce as my sauce, I can eat that NO PROBLEM.

I didn’t get to run last night, since I was volunteering. I am looking get out on the road on Sunday morning for maybe 6 miles or so. I have a weird ankle problem in my right ankle that just popped up. I think it maybe swimming related, but am not sure. At the base of my ankle, slightly on the inside, I have a tender spot on my right leg. It does not hurt to run, it’s not swollen and it doesn’t look like I hit it against anything (not that I remember). I think it started on Wednesday, but I can’t remember when, if it was before or after swimming. I don’t believe that it is running related, because although i did run swiftly on Tuesday, I didn’t have any “events” during the run. I was planning on running the Strawberry Plains 1/2 marathon on the 19th, but now it looks like I will be doing something different. Next weekend, I will be going with Jen to Myrtle Beach. It just so happens to be the same weekend as the Myrtle Beach marathon, how convenient. In addition, they are having a 1/2 marathon and a 5k as well that weekend. This left me with “Do I do the full marathon as a training run or do I race the half marathon” after some serious debating with myself and also putting the question out on the knoxville marathon forum, I decided that I would do the Half Marathon. This way, I can get a mid mileage run as a Tempo run or so I thought. It seems that the Half Marathon is sold out! So now here are my options: 1) Run the marathon as a long training run or 2) Race the first half of the marathon and then slooooowwwww down for the second half or 3) Run the 5k, which is expensive for a 5k $30 or 4) Do a run, by myself and it would not be very fast at all. Looking at the website, I can only imagine that the 5k is sold out as well. So know I do not know what to do… any suggestions?

I was flipping through the Walgreens sales ad and saw something that brought a smile to face. For the low low price of 3/$1, you can purchase Cadbury Creme Eggs. Delicious Dairy Milk Chocolate compassing a gooey batch of saturated fat that is only available in limited quantity for a short time. The eggs are the cardinals of the Easter Candy season, by far my favorite candy season. The forerunners are indicators that the Holy Grail of all Easter Candy, Cadbury MiniEggs will soon be available. Mmmm… Chocolicious.

On another note, I have a Statistics tutoree for Thursdays now. So, I now have 2 students on Thursdays which will give me time to work out between work and tutoring. I think this will be wonderful, the only thing that would make it better is if they were both an hour earlier so that I could get home before 9pm instead of 10pm.

I was able to get 5.4 miles around campus yesterday. It was a good tempo run among the hills of east Tennessee, my first run since last Thursday. I'll be running again on Thursday after work and will try to get another 5 miles or so in before my tutoring sessions. Today, I am going to swim at lunchtime, for about 1/2 an hour. This will give me my prep work for my long run on Saturday, which will be a 22.5 mile run in the morning. They are forecast rain for today, but it should be good for the weekend. This weekend will be 6 weeks out! I am not sure what time I will finish in. Marty (brewmaster and runner extrordinaire), with whom I have been training some, will finish right at 4 hours. He doesn't know it yet, but I think that he will be able to start off at a 9 min pace and then have a negative split for the second half of the race. He's thinking that he'll finish in 4:20 (10 min pace) but as long as he does not start to fast, he will be under 4hrs. This should put him around a 3:58 to 4:04. For me, I think I am looking more for a 4:15, which I am not that happy about. I would really like to have closer to a 4:12 or 4:10, as I know that I won't have a PR on this course, but i want a strong showing.

My computer at home is still scanning… sigh

Throw me back into the computer woes category. After about 3 weeks of computer success, I am back at square 1. It seems that sometime yesterday, my computer was in the hibernation/powerdown mode. When I tried to bring it back to life, It seemed to hang. So I did a warm reboot and when it went through the load up, it started a perpetual reboot. It would get past the Windows logo screen but then a blue screen would flash for a split second and the computer would reboot. I managed to get the computer to stop at the prompt where I can load windows via Safe Mode or some other choices. Well, it got hung on loading one of the drivers. My suspicion is that the video driver has become corrupt and is stopping Windows from loading properly. After a couple of troubleshooting maneuvers, I managed scandisk to run, which it found some errors. I left the computer going through a physical scan of the harddrive and I could see that there were a few bad clusters on the the drive. Hopefully when I get home it will have made any correction and I can get my computer back.

I ran 2.6 miles at a new greenway (to me) in Knoxville. It is really close to my house and is an asphalt greenway around two soccer fields and next to the lake. It was very cold and particularlywindy on one leg of the greenway. I was trying to squeeze some running in between watching Eric and going back to UT for my Physics tutoree.

I have a Physics tutor for this semester on Thursdays. I think that I might pick up a Calculus person here next week. So far I have had no Statistics students… what is up with that.

We go in for our 20 wk Ultrasound. SO, if my computer is fixed by them, maybe I will have some pictures to post. I had been working on photo albums of Eric to update the ancient albums and they are on my dead computer. Woe is Me!

SO what if I had started a blog entry and I accidentally lost it… Ooops

So where was I? I went to the doctor’s yesterday, not because I was sick, but because I was getting a family doctor. Ever since my pediatrician, Dr. Drewry, I have only gone to walk-in clinics. One reason is because I could and I did not know any doctors. Since we have HMO insurance now, we had to get a primary care doctor. So under the recommendation of our neighbor, I chose this one. Most of the check up was fine other than I need to lay off of the caffeine. I will find out about bloodwork today or tomorrow. I am interested to seeing what my fasting cholesterol numbers are. My last non-fasting level (when I gave blood) was just over 200. I’ll be able to compare this fasting test with one that I had in the summer of 2003. Details to follow.

GREAT NEWS! My fraternity brother Capt John Monihan has now left Iraq and is on his was to Kuwait and then back home! Yippee! And he is safe and sound. Need less to say, his wife Kathy is pretty darn happy! I chatted with her over IM this morning and they are planning a weekend getaway shortly after he is back.

Last night I had a calculus student for most of my time in the Math Lab. Now, I do not mind calculus one bit except it was more theory problems than applied. I enjoy theory when I am just learning it, just don’t ask me to prove anything. So we had a bunch of problems with limits that were hurdles but we overcame them with little problems. I am grateful for these sessions because it keeps the theory in my head and it forces me to think about it since I need to explain it in such away that is more understandable than a text book. I might be getting a physics tutoree from the women’s rowing team, do not know exact details yet.

I have not run since Sunday, but I need to get a few miles in today for my 10 mile run on Saturday. My schedule allows for me to exercise on Tuesday nights before Math Lab, but since my Doctors Appt was in Farragut, I went home instead of going straight back to campus. Technically, I should be swimming right now, but maybe tomorrow, my swim bag is not put together yet.

09.30.04 - What’s the Word? Thunderbird! What’s the Price?
“Happy Birt” to Jen since yesterday was her half-birthday. My birthday was just peachy the other day. The custom here at the CIRPC is to bring in your own birthday cake and ice cream and then everyone signs happy birthday and eat cake. I brought in a texas chocolate cake that I made with cream cheese icing. Usually, this cake has some yummy rich chocolate icing on top, but I found that cream cheese icing provides a nice complement to the cake. Everyone seemed to like it which made me happy. After work, I had two tutoring appointments at the Thornton Center, one at 5pm and the other at 7pm. At 8, I went and played handyman to change some locks and move some furniture, so I didn’t home until 10:30pm. I didn’t mind one bit because when I got home Jen was waiting for me with an extra birthday gift, so that made me happy.

I have made a switch to Mozilla’s Firefox internet browser and Thunderbird email client. Both have been getting great reviews on their ease and security. So, I thought I would try them out and so far I am pleased. Firefox looks more like IE than netscape and Thunderbird has some differences than OE but it reminds me something closer to Eudora. So far the only problem hat I have had is my Yahoo LauchCAST radio station (talan71) will not play in Firefox. The station thinks that I am Netscape and it says it will only play the stream in IE, hmmm…. monopoly?

I have not ran since Saturday, and now it is Thursday, sheesh. Most of it has been due my schedule this week. Yesterday night when I got home, I started with finishing the laundry and then working on the computer. Although, it is not up yet, I do have the “Best of Boppy” in the works, honestly. I also created back CD of all the Eric pictures that I have downloaded to date. I just checked and I have 3,089 files (that includes movies and picture files) totaling 1.3 Gigabytes of data. Wow! I knew it was allot but I did not think it was that much. I finally got my CD burner to work, so I am busy archiving older files that are no longer needed.

Speaking of Eric, This morning, before I left, he walked a good 10 feet to me. He even caught himself from falling over a few times while standing. He is really making some big transitions right now. we packed up his high chair and got him a booster seat for the table. Now he can participate in daily dinners with us. He is also just about outgrowing his 12 month clothes. The 12-18 month size still fits since they are cut a little wider, but the sizes just for the 12 month old are getting too tight.

Tomorrow, I will be archiving these blogs as it is a new month. I have not decided if I will archive the whole month or just through the 15th. I am leaning toward the latter, as people check this rarely, except for Pete, I think. Now that I am able to update it more often, I am thinking about redoing my “news” pages a bit. Currently, they are set up by Year, but I may break them down a little further but increase the font size, to make reading easier.

09.24.04 - The engine is stalling
I thought that I should get something in here before the weekend. I am not sure how much time I will have to update my site Saturday and Sunday. When I am on the computer, I am going to concentrate on updating Eric’s picture albums. It has been way too long since I update his pictures, he is so different.

UT’s homecoming is this weekend, which means the game is par-per-view. So the Higgins’ household will not be watching it, just listening to it on the radio. Maybe the UVA game will be on in the afternoon… just not here. We’ll have a SEC game before an ACC game, go figure.

I picked up another tutor for Tuesdays. The only drawback is that it is at 5pm, which means I have a 1 hour break between sessions. This was the time that I could out and get in some running with enough time to get showered and less stinky before my 7pm session. Technically, I could get out for an hour on the track since I will be adjacent to it, but, I truly won’t have an hour. Oh well, I need the money more than the miles.

I ran 3.1 miles last night on the treadmill and it turn out to be pretty tough. I was covered in sweat and was not able to keep up the pace I wanted or thought that I could handle. On my intervals, my tempo was slow. Not sure what that means, I guess since I don’t race more 5ks, that my speed has gone down. Although I was pleased with my pace of my 5 mile runs on Monday and Tuesday. Tomorrow, I will be having a long early morning run, although tomorrow it will be just 10 miles. It should be really comfortable at 5:30, so that will make it NICE!

I am thinking about getting another digital camera, so that I have one to take to American Samoa in November. I am looking at something in the mid grade range that is compact. So far I have looked at Canon’s digital Elph and Casio’s Exilim. Both are small and compact with reasonable features. I am thinking that I only need somewhere around 2 megapixels, that way it will keep the price down. If I can get 3 great, but I’d rather invest in the memory card and an extra battery than better resolutions. The income I receive for my professional photography prints is still zero.

I am going to look at Kelty kid carriers tomorrow as well as used bikes. I’d like to get a beater bike for when I ride the bus and I want to get a carrier to stick Eric in if I want to hike or volunteer at races. Lucky for me, the bike store near my house is having a sale and Blue Ridge Mountain Sports is two doors down! Jen has a customer appreciation day at one of the local nail salons, so Eric and I will be hanging out for most of the day.

I realized last night that because I tutor on Tuesday Nights, I don’t see Eric from Monday night bed time until wednesday night when I get home. Almost a 48 hour span of time of not seeing the little monster. Allot can happen in 48 hours, so I run the risk of missing some great happening. Of course, being gone all day at work does not increase my odds. Well, someone was a early riser today (6:45am) and I got to see him! YAY! Didn’t get to spend anytime with him, but did get to hold him.

Yesterday, Eric walked in between Jen and Diane, who were about 4 feet apart, about 4 times without falling and apparently screaming with delight. Jen also commented that walking is becoming his preferred mode of transportation, although not extremely proficient at it yet.

I ran 5.75 miles yesterday before my tutor session. Since I was on campus, I decided to go to the Ag campus and follow the Neyland Greenway until a great place to eat called Riverside Tavern. Once I was there, I thought it would be cool to run back through downtown and onto to campus. And yes, it was cool, when I was able to run while in the shadow of a building. Running west in the sunset was killer, I really couldn’t see much because of the sun’s location. I did not have any incidents, so that was fine. When I got back to the car, I realized that I had cruised through the run in 49:04. Today, when I mapped out the mileage, it put me at a 8:32 minutes per mile. That is FAST for me on a training run. I should have ran at a 10:00 minute pace or something around there. If I run too fast, too often then I will cause more damage and ultimately, slow my times down. Thursdays are suppose to be my speed days on the treadmill, where I can regulate my pace.

I did some work on my website today. I finally uploaded a few pages that I had been working on for a long time now. Thanks to Mom and a scanner, I was able to put up some pictures of my aunts and uncles. Also, I was able to move some pictures from our Iowa trip in 2001, to put up family members living there. I did not put up a picture of Chris, just out respect since all I had available at the time was The Cove pictures and I know how much he loves them. You’ll also see that Pete’s side is pretty barren. Well, I do have a few pictures of Uncle Ray, but that is about it. They are also on a different computer, so they are not ready. Hopefully, when Pete reads this, he’ll fill in some of the blanks for me. I also included some of the books that I have recently finished and some that I would like to read. You can find all of this new stuff by clicking the ‘about me’ link in the black header bar at the top of this page.

My home computer is almost ready. I have fixed the sound and have all of my old files off of the other hard drives. So, I should be ready for some Eric Updates by weekend! I know that you can’t wait! I’ll be doing finances and speedwork tonight, so I doubt that I will get to them tonight, but then again you never know.

We are having beautiful weather here in Knoxville. It in the upper 50’s this morning and is in the low-mid 80’s in the afternoon. Cool and just absolutely beautiful. Of course, it won’t last too long, but I am going to enjoy it while I can.

09/20/04 - Clear skies for a Monday
First let me comment on the UT/ Florida game from Saturday night. What a game! The entire game was played decently by both teams and I think that had we lost it would have not been the end of the world. However, since we won and in such dramatic fashion, people are excited around here. The kicker missed an extra point to tie the game in the late fourth quarter. With an eminent loss, the UT defense stepped up to give the offense one last chance to score. The offense moved the ball up the field to give the kicker one last chance to win the game, a modest 50 yard field goal attempt. It could have been a 55 yard attempt, because when he split the uprights, the ball still had plenty of height. I believe, had we made the extra point, the coach would have played for overtime and we who know how it would have ended up. We were having a hard time keeping up with their receivers, so I don’t think that overtime would have been good at this junction. In related football news, Virginia and Furman both won their respected games. I can not say the same for the Packers, they lost to ‘Da Bears’.

Saturday morning, I did get out of the house at 5:45 and ran 16.5 miles around the community. I left my neighborhood and went out around Farragut, through some subdivisions, around the high school and then back to my home. THe problem with my subdivision is that there are hills! Big ones, so when i am coming home, the hills really slow me down and I end up walking up parts of them. I was pretty pleased with my overall performance. My legs did not get heavy until mile 13 and they were not sore after the run. With that said, tonight is slated for my 5 mile course in the subdivision, hills and everything!

I picked up another tutor on Tuesdays. I currently have one of the women swimmers whom I tutor physics, and now I am getting a pre-calculus student. Not sure what sport she is but we will see.

For those of you who know that in a few days, I am getting older, I have no problems with it. It will be my “Rolling Rock” birthday, brought to you by the number 33.