I'm very excited after today's trip to the gym. The water was turned off in my building before I had a chance to have a shower, so I had the choice of either going to the gym or using the one at work. I've been procrastinating with going to the gym for the past few weeks, so I took the opportunity.

I went to the gym the day before and spent a little time on the elliptical machine. It gave me a pretty good idea that my knee would hold up. It didn't feel bad at all, and despite hanging out at a constant 160 bpm heart rate, I didn't feel any lightheadedness. Definitely a good sign.

I picked up pretty much right where I left off. I was running 8 minutes, then walking for three before, so I started at 7. It was easy. My heart rate was much lower than it was before, and that's with a complete break for the past two or three months. Wild stuff! It must have had to do with the ten to fifteen pounds less that I'm carrying around now. I didn't think that little weight would have made that much of a difference.

The only difference was in my heart rate during the walking parts. It was much higher, my recovery wasn't nearly as good. I guess that had to do with my heart not being in as good shape. Before I was working it hard pretty much every other day for months. Now with the break it's not doing as well. No worries though, I'm sure it'll get better with enough practice.

I know it's a big jump (and fast forwards me a full month over where I was before the break), but I think I can run constant for fifteen minutes. I wasn't struggling at all when I was running today. Normally I was wheezing and struggling to breathe and keeping an average heart rate somewhere in the 180 range. Now that I'm in the 160 range I think I'll have no problems keeping it up for that long. The only thing that I'll have to be cautious about is my knees. But then again, with less weight on them, I think they're going to hold up fine.

Wow... it's amazing. I actually really enjoyed running. I can't wait to do it again! I haven't been like that since I was a kid. I've never felt this in shape before! Weird after sitting on my ass all this time.

Now I'm debating how much more weight to lose again. I know I've been pretty happy recently, but now that I've seen ten to fifteen pounds make this much of a difference, I want to see how much of a difference another ten to fifteen will make. I think I'm shooting for 145 again, instead of the 155 I nearly settled for. It might not look as good, but I don't care anymore. I just want to improve my running.

If I'm able to do fifteen minutes straight, that would be a great base. It's a big deal for me, because that's when I get to start to build mileage. Walking and running is okay, but at the end of my session I look at the distance covered and I can't separate how much I ran from how much I walked. It really bothers me. I want to be able to have big chunks of distance. Be able to build on them, be able to subjectively compare.

I love stats (at least those kinds). As a kid at the peak of my car geekiness, I would be able to name the 0-60 times and top speeds of almost every car in production at the time. They were numbers related to something that I was really interested in. I ate them, chewed them up and spit them out. Now I want to have some solid ones to work with myself.

Here I go again. From one thing to another and back to here. Will it ever end?

I don't know if this is a mistake yet, but I converted my blogger account to the beta. I forgot to test if it would still publish to my server. It should, but of course so should a lot of things. So this is a test, I really don't have much to say.

This evening I got around to updating the backend to hotmayo from Mambo 4.5.1 to Joomla 1.0.11. Kim has been trying to read this blog, but because there's porn in the URL she keeps getting blocked at work. Stupid work filters. Right now I'm trying to figure out a way to syndicate the content from here, since I never update that site.

At the same time I'm trying to find the right balance of what to post on which blog. I've given out hotmayo to a few too many people, and I'd rather most people who have it not read about every minute detail of my life. Not like I'm going to run for mayor or anything, but there are some things I'd rather keep semi-private.

Right now I've set it up with a login to get at the "private content", which right now includes this page and little else. I guess the plan is to eventually open it up completely... but the thing that really sucks is that means I'll have two identical blogs with different URLs. I'm confusing myself... I need to sleep on this. Stupid caffeine.

Finally a minute to myself. Actually this is a borrowed minute since I'm waiting for a job to come in the FTP for first thing in the morning and I've got a nearly booked day for tomorrow. [sigh]

Yeah, the pigeons came back after the last post. I came home that evening to find the same ones in the same place above my window. I freaked out.



This is what I came home to. I was pissed. I managed to push them out through a space I left by my window. They were dumb. So I added reinforcements.



Yes, I have duct tape all around my balcony. Evidently that wasn't enough, because the next morning guess what I woke up to? Yeah, they were back. Two of them. These ones were REALLY dumb. I kicked and screamed at them. I batted them with my shovel and it took me a good fifteen minutes to convince them to go back out through the smaller hole I made for them. One of them was pretty brave and attacked me by flying into my face a couple times. Crazy shit!

After the last round of reinforcements they're completely gone. They've been gone all week now, although I found them on my railing and on my window ledge right around where they used to get in. It's shitty. I think I'm going to have to get an owl to completely get rid of them. I don't care where they are anymore, and I don't care what they're doing. I hope they starve to death. Fucking pigeons.

It would be a different story if I didn't have to live with them. If I was in some Italian square or something it might be fun. You can feed them, hang out with them, make them come to you... it's fun. But I don't have to clean up their shit. I hate their shit.

Here... in the Colisseum in Italy I thought pigeon shit was interesting enough to take a picture of:



Certainly not the most interesting ever, but it almost looked interesting at the time.

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Sunday was a very fun day at the women's show. Shhhhh! Don't tell anyone I enjoyed it as much as I did. I was there to pour samples of some fine wines and other drinks for Sue at Churchill Cellars. It was a little ridiculous actually.

The rules for serving at a show are completely different from selling in an LCBO location. You're allowed to sample the wines yourself for one, and you get to hang out with at least one other person. Plus we had the opportunity to take breaks and check out the show ourselves.

I had absolutely no problem being the only guy at the booth! There were maybe another couple dozen guys working at the show, but that was probably about it. It was hard to tell since I didn't really see all that much. How much better does it get than that? You get to drink, there are about a hundred women for each guy so you get all kinds of wonderful women to talk to, and you get to hang out with friends. If that's not heaven I don't know what is.

To top it all off, there's actually a lot of interesting stuff at the show. I had a lot of fun running around to the different food booths. Most were giving out free samples, and I actually bought a bit of stuff too. There were a few Indian food people, so I picked up some awesome stuff from two of them. I've got some oven ready samosas, a few different organic jars of curries, paratha, and even some frozen dal. Heaven!

It was a little hard to be battling a hangover. It was a pretty brutal one. The night before I went to the opening of a club called Light. I dunno, it was okay. I'm really not into the club scene at all anymore (as if I ever really was). This one was the most generic club I've been to. Generic people, generic music, generic location... it's fine, but nothing makes me want to go back. After that I headed to Tilt Lounge on College to say what's up to my old buddy citrus, who does Saturday nights there. That was better... definitely better music, that's for sure.

During the show I was chasing this one Indian gal around with blonde hair. She was a hottie and a half! I spotted her while sampling her dal (damn, that sounds dirty), and we exchanged smiles later when I was working the booth. When I went back to her booth I kinda lost it a bit for her, but there was this other one who was waiting to buy some stuff too, and she was pretty damn cool. If I didn't have to tear down the booth I would have stuck around. Next time.

Damn, I've definitely been a little SF lately... it's starting to show here, isn't it? :)

I have a lot to post about in the past week, but I haven't had any time. I had to post this though. I did exactly the same thing with my dad's red Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.



Fortunately I didn't do as much damage.