Not as ignorant, still blissful

This morning at just before 7:00 we met up with Justin, Jessi, Nita and Matthew along with nearly 100 other people who showed up to run with the Las Vegas Roadrunners. After a quick pep-talk from Tim, we broke up in to groups based on your expected time to finish the race.

The run was supposed to be 30 minutes. The groups would run 15 minutes out and then 15 minutes back. I made a few mistakes this morning and it caused me to run too hard and long.

Here is the list of mistakes I made:

I know for sure my heart rate was somewhere north of 160 and probably closer to 180. My “zone” is around 135-140.
I started out in the 2:15 half-marathon group. I ran with them for a while but eventually stopped to walk. At some point they turned around and i didn’t realize it. Because I didn’t have a watch, i just sorta kept going… When I finally turned around, I was one of the last runners heading back. Oops!

For next week, I will correct my previous mistakes and I will drop down to the 2:30 half-marathon group. We will see how that goes.

Blissfully Ignorant

It’s currently 11:40 on Saturday evening. I’m heading to bed because I’m excited about tomorrow morning. We go on our first run at 7:00 am with the Las Vegas Roadrunners in preparation for running the half-marathon at the end of the year. The running joke is that I have no idea what I’m getting myself in to. But here I go, headlong in to something with a smile on my face and no sense of what I”m up against… I can’t wait! :)

Let’s see if I’m as excited next weekend when I have to get up to go run. Especially considering they start at 6:00 after this first week. Can’t wait.

Easy surgery?? Is there such a thing?

On Friday I spent the afternoon at the dermatologist’s office having a small chunk of “pre-cancer” removed from my back. The surgery was about as simple as surgery can be. The doctor came in and marked the area with a pen. The nurse came in and gave me some shots to numb the area. Then, while they went away to wait for my back to be ready, I fell asleep on the table. When they got back in to the room the doctor had to shake me a little bit to wake me up. It didn’t help that I had my iPod on so I never heard them enter the room.

I never felt her cut in to me. It was over before I realize we had started. She spent about 5 minutes stitching me up (both internal and external stitches) and that was that. They brought in Chris to show her how to wash and re-bandage it as I have to keep it covered pretty much the entire 17 days I have them. Because it’s in a spot where the clothes will rub up against it constantly, it’s best to keep it covered. Oh joy.

So, for the next 17 days I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy, not supposed to reach too far for anything and I’m not supposed to put my hand over my head. That all seems easy enough. I’m not a big fan of lifting heavy things anyway.

As usual, the wife is taking this harder than I am. I haven’t so much as taken aTylenol and she’s about ready to commit me to bed rest. Not that I mind her doing her best Florence Nightingale routine on me. I really should milk this for all it’s worth. (it’s OK to say that here, she doesn’t read my blog.)

Here are a couple of photos for those of you who aren’t too squeamish. Enjoy.


Building return site visitors

It’s been a while since I wrote about any good WordPress tools. I’ve recently found some very worthy plugins that deserve writing about. The plugin I’m going to talk about today is called Subscribe to Comments.

At the time of this writing, Subscribe to Comments is currently on version 2.1 and is compatible with WordPress versions 2.06, 2.07 and 2.1.

The plugin allows visitors who place comments on your blog to check a box while commenting that allows them to receive e-mail notification if any further comments are left on that specific post. From that point on, each time somebody comments on that blog post, an email goes out to everybody who requested to be notified on that post. Each email going out serves as a reminder to your visitors to come back and see what is happening on your site.

This plugin has a long list of features including:
- Confirmation email to subscriber
- Recognition of subscription status
- Post author is recognized and assumed to be subscribed
- Themeable Subscription manager
- Ability for users to change notification email address
- Easy installation / integration
- Internationalization

If you are looking to build a community of loyal readers and return visitors, you are definitely going to want to check out Subscribe to Comments.

You can see it in action here on geeeek.com and also over at wellwtf.com

Concert, ATV riding & the diet

This has been another busy week. Don’t know when the heck things are going to slow down. It’s really been insane the last couple months. So much stuff going on. Well, to catch you up for the past week:

Thursday evening we went to see Cross Canadian Ragweed at the House of Blues. Once again, they put on a fantastic show. It’s a shame they don’t get more radio airplay. We drug Jake and Diane along for the show this time and they both really enjoyed the show. Not to mention the opening act, who I had never heard of, Micky and the Motorcars. Another great rock band. I’ll definitely be picking up their CDs in the near future.

If you are a fan of good ‘ol fashion southern rock, you should definitely check both of these bands.

Paxton on an ATVOn Tuesday Paxton will turn 16. We wanted to do something really cool for his birthday rather than just getting him a gift that he’d forget about in a few short weeks. Chris came up with the idea of taking him out on an ATV tour. We had originally planned to take him next weekend, but since I’m having surgery on Friday, I didn’t think going ATV riding with stitches in my back would be a good idea. So, we moved it up to this weekend. Holy crap, what a fun time!

This was the first time Paxton had been on an ATV. It was also my first time on an ATV in about 20+ years. They started us out on the skills track. You go pretty slow and get used to the machine and how it handles bumps, dips, rocks and such. Paxton started off fairly tentative and that had me a bit nervous. Next we headed out on the the trail around the base of a mountain. We had our guide out front, then Paxton and then me pulling up the rear. We were told to stay a certain distance behind the guide. Not to get too close and not to drift back to far. Paxton started out fairly well behind the guide to start. But, by the end of the first hour, he was hanging right in there with him. At the end of the second hour on our way back to the hanger where we had started out there was about a quarter mile stretch of wide open flat ground. The guide waved us on to open it up. It was awesome seeing Paxton peg the throttle and just tear down the open stretch. No fear. Just flying!

For as much fun as I had riding, I had 10 times as much fun watching Paxton ride.

And finally, the diet. This has been another pretty good week. I still have yet to wake up and have my morning weigh in be under 200 pounds, but Saturday was pretty close with an exact 200.0. Actually, something really interesting happened on Thursday night at the concert. I had a beer. It was only my second beer in 5 weeks. The first can be seen here. The interesting part being that I did not enjoy the beer at all. I would have so much more enjoyed a bottled water. So this getting in to shape thing has really started making some major changes in me. I am just about certain that I have had my last beer until after I reach my final goal. And even then, I don’t know that I”m going to rush back to drinking beer on a regular basis anyway.

Saturday afternoon Chris and I went to the Village Runner shoe store to sign up for the Las Vegas Road Runners and also the Las Vegas (half) Marathon. It’s official now. We have until December 2nd to get ready to run 13.1 miles. You know I’ll keep you updated!

if you are interested in joining up with the Road Runners, they will be back at the Village Runner and also at some other locations next Saturday, May 19th. The first session running with them will be at 7:00 am on Sunday, May 27th. The scary part is, after the first run, all other Sunday morning runs START at 6:00 am. If there was anybody remotely interested, that last sentence probably killed that, huh?

5K Walk, golf & friends

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve written, so I’ll try to catch you up on a bunch of happenings.

Last week was pretty cool in that some items I had lent out had found their way home. That may not sound like all that big of a deal, but one of the items was actually lent out about 4 years ago. I had lent Rodric my paperback version of the book Fight Club which went missing for years. Thanks to his recent move, he was forced to go through all his stuff. In doing so, he ran across the book. The story almost didn’t end there, though. He found it while packing up for the move. Instead of just putting the book in the car so that he could return it the next day, he placed it in a box of stuff to be moved to the new house. When he told me it had been found, but packed, I was certain it would be another 4 years before the book found it’s way home. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Also, I have to say, for something that had been borrowed so long ago, it was in exactly the same shape when it was returned as when I lent it out. That is amazing. So, if you loan something to Rodric, you may not get it back for a while, but at least he’ll take care of it.

One of my best friends and certainly the friend who I have known the longest Sean McLean recently got hired on at my company. This is such cool news! We haven’t seen each other in 5 years since he’s been living in Northern California and us in Vegas, so it was absolutely awesome to get to see him this weekend. He flew in on Friday to look for a place to live. Since Friday night was poker night here at the house, I gave Sean a quick lesson on how to deal Texas Hold’em. Since he didn’t want to pay to play, this was a great way for him to hang out and be part of the group. With all of the potty mouthes we had at the house on Friday (you know who you are), I was a little surprised we didn’t scare him off. But, we figured that if he moves his entire family to Vegas and this whole “head of QA” thing doesn’t work out, he can always start dealing cards as a back up.

Saturday morning was the 5K “Race for the Cure” event I had written about previously. We got to the parking location around 7:00 am. We were going to take the tram over to the start of the race. While waiting in line for the tram we realized that wearing only shorts and t-shirts may have been a bad idea since it was windy and COLD!! Luckily I had a long sleeve shirt in the car that we gave Blake so she didn’t freeze. We were going to meet up a group of people from our office who were all going to walk, but weren’t able to find most of them. So, our crew was smaller than expected, but we still had a great time. There were more than 20,000 people on the course. This was much more than they were expecting! I don’t know what the final numbers were, but I’m sure they raised a pretty decent amount for Breast Cancer research. We crossed the finish line in about 1 hour. If you haven’t already made a donation, it’s not too late. Click here to donate Now!

This was the first organized walk/run I had ever been to. I’m very excited to do more in the future. Chris, Jessi and I are all planning to train for the Las Vegas half-Marathon on December 2nd. We are likely going to sign up to train with the Las Vegas Roadrunners. They have a 28 week program for getting you ready to run. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

One last thing before I go. Last Thursday our company golf tournament took place. I have to say I’m quite pleased in the fact that I hit only one house! Our team played really well and we had a great time. We took 2nd place. Not bad. The video below is pretty much how it went on every hole all day long.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Can’t wait for next years golf tourney!

Also, here are some photos from the 5k walk. Hope you can make it out to walk with us next year!