Here it goes again...

The new year is about to start, and this looks suspiciously like a New Year's Resolution, but you are going to have to believe me when I say that it is not. I want to run a marathon. I have wanted to run a marathon since 5th grade, and I have began training for marathons many times in the past with little success, until now.

I decided to run the Austin Marathon in 2012 two weeks ago, and then made it semi-official with a call to my brother-in-law after running Town Lake in under an hour, feeling great. He is a great personal trainer, but has little training in marathon running, so he mentioned some books: Marathon Method and another one I couldn't find immediately. My main goal is to avoid injury, not time, so I also picked up Chi Running which, so far, has been fascinating. I have always struggled with posture, so that would only make sense to be holding me back.

Other things that have helped have been my dog. Earlier this year, she tore her ACL and had to have surgery. I went through a time where I was understandably frightened that she would re-injure herself, making her quality of life suffer. I'm still concerned when she tussels with other dogs, but my slow running pace seems to be perfect for her. Running Town Lake with her is like having a perfect running buddy: always available when I am, eager, doesn't tempt me with in-depth conversation or stopping, and will happily hold my keys. Also, I think the exercise has helped her out a lot. She has lot some weight, which is good for her knee, and she seems a lot more chill.

Also, my little brother put some amazing music on my I-Pod Shuffle. I don't have one of the new Shuffles that everybody wants; I have an older, less sexy version that just plays music. It has been perfect. I used to get annoyed with the ear buds - does anyone else have this problem? They won't stay in my ears, and I'm constantly adjusting them, making me frustrated, and not helping me with my running. I got some ear buds that are on the headband and that solved that problem. Now I only have problems with my glasses...

Finally, the most help has been my Vibram, "Toe Shoes". Okay, I know many runners would consider this a fad, or even destructive, but I love my shoes. If you have never seen them, they are like rubber soles for your bare feet; imagine what it would look like if you made a mold for your feet, toes and all. They don't offer much protection against rocks, much less arch support, but I cannot compliment them more. After years of struggling against blisters - bad blisters that make it impossible to walk, falling arches, toe problems, knee and joint pain, and back issues, I have never felt so good during a run. The philosophy is simple: our bodies, including our feet, have evolved to adapt to our environment, and adding more stuff to our shoes might make money, but makes little sense. My arches have gotten higher (!!!) and my posture has gotten better, and compared to a quality running shoe, these are a lot less expensive.

Some people say that they are just a fad or gimmick, but I have had problems getting blisters between my toes for years. Maybe they aren't for everyone, but running isn't for everyone either. They are some ugly shoes. I'd like to say I look like a ninja, but my feet are more frog-like than ninja. It's better than one guy describe his brown Vibrams to look like bear feet, though. I love the water wicking technology, though they can get smelly. I think the worst drawback is the strange feeling of walking into a public restroom for the first time.

Anyway, I'll keep posting on my year and two month journey. I'll talk more about how the hubby and I are training, (P90-X... yeah, it's pretty hilarious,) diet, and how far I get with baby in tow. Also, I'm going to tell more about the dog's recovery. I think the reason why this time my marathon might work is because it is not just about me anymore or a goal I had set in college (to run a marathon before I had kids... yeah, that didn't work,) but something I know I can do that will help my entire family.

We shall see.

First Day Jitters

The beginning of school has never been easy, and since becoming a teacher, it has only gotten harder. Starting the week before, anxiety would begin to kick in until the night before when I wouldn't be able to sleep. Even weeks before school starts, I'll have dreams where I show up to school without a syllabus, without a class roster, or the students just ignore everything I say, but usually the nightmare is about school - not the day before school starts.

Well, today is the first day of school and yesterday was pretty much a nightmare. Actually, last week was a nightmare as well - I still don't have a school laptop so I couldn't print, check emails, or plan very well, and a migraine hit around Wednesday around the same time my throat started to hurt. Our text books wouldn't be delivered until school had already started, the studio had failed final inspection... you name it, it went wrong. By Friday I was ready to go home.

Saturday was rough, but not as bad as when I went to bed. I could not sleep. My daughter, who we have been trying to get to sleep by herself, actually slept about 4-5 hours alone while I kept waiting for her to wake up to do something about it my agony. Finally, she did, and I took something but I felt distinctly feverish. Sunday morning I had a 100 degree fever. Great. Tomorrow is the first day of school - how can I stay home?

I go to Quick Care and see a doctor, get a prescription that took the pharmacy 45 minutes to fill, then go home to find out that my daughter has scratched my husband's eye while I was gone.

Back to the emergency room with the baby and husband. Things went slowly, but relatively smoothly until we tried to fill his prescription: Walgreen's had a thirty minute wait, so we went for yogurt, but when we got back, we found out that they thought we were just getting out of line so we started from the bottom again. Then they couldn't find proof that insurance would cover his eye drops, so at 11 o'clock pm last night after a trip to the emergency room, Walgreens, and everywhere else, we finally get home. It was a bit much for any day, much less the Sunday before school starts.

But, you know, school went wonderfully today. I have wonderful classes, I teach wonderful subjects, and I'm feeling so much better.

My nook

When I finally made my decision which high-tech device I would purchase, I faced another equally daunting decision to make: Kindle vs. nook. I used to work at Barnes and Noble, so I remember concerns about the Kindle taking over the printed word well and how that didn't happen, then I heard from dear friends still working there that the manager's pay raises and benefits depend on how many nooks sell in a week, much like the dreaded Membership Card did when I worked there. I do not approve of this carnivorous practice, and for a long time was swayed against the nook for this reason, but as a consumer and not an employee, I allowed myself to remain objective.

Why I would have chosen the Kindle: the keyboard, the library, the weight and size, and the amount of time it had to fix bugs. It's been around longer. Half the people I have spoken to about this say Kindle instead of eReader.

Why I chose the nook: the size was still smaller and lighter than most of the books I read, the interface was relatively easy to navigate after some initial handling, and I am familiar with their search engines. Also, the removable battery was a better option to how the Kindle's is built in, and the flexibility it offers promises to keep it competitive (it has chess and soduko, and plans to add more options.) Also, I was able to handle it before I bought it. I would have liked to have seen a Kindle in person...

Why others did not even occur to me:
Sony: It did not offer even half of what the others did, and still was pretty expensive. I have an app on my phone that does pretty much what the Sony Reader does with a smaller screen.
I-Pad: I don't want another phone, lap-top device, or any other electronic device to have to depend on so much. I like my Droid. I did not get an iPhone because I do not want AT&T, and I have appreciated the freedom in Doid's market. I appreciate the extra help an I-Pad would offer, and I did consider getting that instead of a new laptop, but I wanted a reader without the backlight. It's literally true! No eye strain on my nook! Awesome!

Drawbacks to any ebook include the whole 'you don't actually own a book' thing. Recently, George Orwell's publishers removed Animal Farm and 1984 which is ironic on so many levels. I'm not happy about the control publishers have over already published works, not to mention the very real threats that are posed in 1984, but because I still have my books in print, I am not too concerned about my reading material on the nook. The nook is mainly for things I want to see from The Daily Show, Colbert Report, or some random health book - none of these books would affect my professional life, and I am not an archivist. If you are either, you should NOT get an ebook for these reasons. Besides, flipping pages is hard enough. Using buttons to scan through pages would be silly.

So, how do I like it so far? I love it! I'm reading more, I'm watching TV less, and my wrists don't hurt as bad. Turning from one page to the next without a bookmark is difficult, and making marks are challenging, but worth it if you are just reading the book.

What am I reading, anyway?

I'm reading Change Your Brain, Change Your Body which is surprisingly obvious, and The Mysterious Benedict Society, which is surprisingly brilliant. If you enjoy puzzles and Harry Potter, you would like it - like the computer game, Myst; but I have to admit, I'm not reading it on the nook. I'm struggling with the print version, enjoying every word.

As I said, ebooks have not, will not, nor should not, get rid of the written word.

Extening the Olive Branch

Yesterday, a very dear friend took me to the best place in the world: The Natural Gardener. My daughter got to feed grape leaves to goats, watch chickens, and they have got some of the best gardens I have ever seen. Why, why, why have I not gone before??? This place reminds me of a time when I was very young when Mom took us to a gardening center that had a lot of concrete bridges, animals, and things, and I thought that the place was an enchanted place that an evil witch had turned into stone. This place was the enchanted place, minus the evil witch.

So... Olive Trees were on sale. To make matters more enticing, they have a garden where they planted several olive trees, and they were... perfect. Looking at the varieties in stock, it just so happened that they had two Italian species, the Pendolino and the Leccino, and they would bear fruit if they were together. (!) It would be like planting a long and fruitful marriage in my backyard.. with olives.

Well, I get home and hubby is less enthusiastic. He's a little more concerned with practical things, like root systems and yard space. How can I transport him to The Natural Gardener to see that Italy is for lovers? How can I communicate the glory of the trees if he works all day?

His words: "What happened to your idea about the butterfly garden?"

I did get seeds for that... I just got olives as well.

Break Through

If you haven't noticed it by now, I have an awesome Hubby. (Collective "Aw" inserted here...) Yesterday I got a debilitating migraine while we were working in the yard, and my daughter promptly had an allergic reaction to cucumbers and we had a long night. Needless to say, the Tylenol PM did not work its magic last night and this morning, for the lack of a better term, sucked.

So how did Hubby rise to the occasion? He fixed breakfast, tried to corral the baby in the kitchen, and let me keep the light off in the kitchen though he steadfastly read the paper like he always does. He tried to keep her from screeching - she has an amazing ability to reach high decibel levels without warning, and let me heal this morning. This is the only way I am able to function this morning - let alone, blog this morning, without checking myself into the hospital.

But in my pain I learned something. I never have liked drinking alcohol, which may sound like a good thing, but it really puts a damper on one's social life. Other teetotalers will agree that when one does not drink, everybody who is drinking seems to think that they are making some statement of being 'better' or more moral than everyone who is when it's just not true. Like Doc in Cannery Row, sometimes making a lie up puts people more at ease with my choices, so instead of "I don't like to drink," I'll say, "I'm the designated driver." This is still a problem at bars, parties, or any celebration that usually brings socially acceptable levels of libations. "How much wine is your husband planning on drinking??" is a pretty normal response.

So, what does drinking and migraines have to do with one another? The fish-eye lens. It's that feeling that you can only focus on one thing at a time very closely, and as soon as your focus moves, you can only focus on the new thing then. That is precisely what a migraine feels like to me, accompanied by a massive amount of pain, and it is also how I feel when I am feeling buzzed... albeit with less pain. I have suffered from migraines for as long as I can remember, and I have suffered from alcohol for a relatively short time, and so it only makes sense that I associate more pain with the fish-eye lens than I do pleasure. The taste of alcohol has often been considered an acquired taste... why would I give myself a chance to acquire such a taste if it means pain?

I hope this explains to everybody who I might have offended (brothers, friends, and Hubby included,) why I have not appropriately appreciated your liquors. This is not meant to excuse me from trying it - I hope to one differentiate my fish-eye lens aversion, but maybe this can help people understand migraines as well. The worst part about them is that I look normal, only lazy, drunk, or hung over. If I looked physically as bad as I felt, I would be deathly green and in need of a brain transfusion.

Perhaps more people associate the way I look with a migraine to a wonderful night on the town, desensitizing them to my condition? Food for thought.

Truth and Beauty

July 5th on The Colbert Report, the theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, made some pretty interesting claims. For example, some of the things we have dreamed up in SciFi will make it into reality in the not so distant future, like Time Travel. When Stephen Colbert mentioned that we would already know about it because we would see the people traveling back in time, Kaku said that we will have an invisibility cloak within the next ten years. Um, okay. That's going to make marking absences in class a little more difficult, but whatever.

Kaku had also mentioned the illusive link between Quantum theory and Cosmology, saying that we are looking for a "1 inch equation." He alludes to the E=Mc2 equation. I asked hubby, "what if the link is just not so simple or elegant as E=Mc2?" What if we are ruling out the "mind of God" connection because we want something so small that it can fit on a license plate? (see http://mkaku.org/ ). Hubby answered that usually the most simple is usually the right answer, and we promptly started washing the dishes.

Fast forward to a very enlightening conversation I had with Rich Tollerton yesterday. He was referring to some reading he has been doing about how science and religion have interacted through the ages and came up with a quip that stopped me dead in my tracks. When asked to write it down to be quoted, he was hesitant, but came up with "[When facts are dealt with,] scientists are concerned with beauty." but when he first said this, he said something more like "Scientists seem to be looking more for beauty than truth." (I think he found this comment to be too damning for scientists, whom he emphatically supports/reads/enjoys; this was spoken more in frustration I think, but I digress.)

This reminds me of Einstein who rejected a lot of proven material because it was not beautiful and it was too complicated. It also reminds me of Aristotle, the Father of Science, who discussed his scientific hypothesis with other people without trying anything out. Truly, we have a lot of stuff to rule out to even form a hypothesis, (can I mention the parental anecdote of attempting to figure out why a baby is crying? 'Is the diaper wet? Is she hungry? Is she hot? Is there some variable I'm not aware of?') but can't this process of ruling extraneous material out end up being less about trying to discover truth and more about the justification of one's preferences?

I've also been reading a lot lately on the power of assumption and how assuming can be helpful. If you had to prove to yourself every morning that your car will turn on when you turn the key in the ignition, chances are you would be late a lot; however, if you assume that your car will start no matter what, there are chances that you will be very wrong and, perhaps, this assumption could be harmful if you don't, say add oil to it and maintain it because you just assume that it will all be okay.

So, in conclusion, I am not all that sure of Michio Kaku's hypothesis that we will go sneaking around invisible, or that it is even a good idea, (can I say terrorist attack?) but I do hope for the part about unifying the micro to the macro in physics, I just don't think it has to be so simple to be correct or even work, and, frankly, I do not trust Michio Kaku. He's too... flashy. I'm sure the long, silver hair and bombastic claims get him coveted spots on the Colbert Report and other perks, reminiscent of Tycho Brahe, (had to throw that in, Rich,) but that doesn't make him reliable.

Maybe what we should be looking for, not just in science but in art, entertainment, history, and current events, is the reliability factor - not just how cool something looks.

Tunes vs Tomes...

The Studio is almost done and Hubby and I are (imagine this,) tired of spending money. It gets old: take the plastic out of the wallet and swipe, then watch as the money you have saved gradually disappears. Granted, we saved the money to build The Studio, and we do not live beyond our means, but it wears on us, and so now I have a dilemma.

I am debating which high tech appliance to buy: the Kindle or an I Pod. This debate has gotten me to question things about my values, who I have become, and who I will be because I don't really want to buy both (no matter how cheap the Kindles are getting!) Here's the pros and cons of each:

I Pod Nano: I did have an I Pod Shuffle, which I loved, but it won't turn on and play anymore. It decided to do this on a 6 hour trip without warning, leaving me high and dry. The reasons to get one include that it plays in the car and I can download podcasts to it, (not to mention audio books,) and I could also take it running with me. It has been mentioned that my phone can do these things too. Yes, but the battery life would be greatly compromised, and it is heavy. Hubby also mentioned that he still has not looked at the Shuffle yet to see if it is truly dead. I argue that the police don't call him instead of the coroner for a reason, but I digress.

Kindle: I read a lot... when I can. The books I read can get heavy, and I need to be able to nurse and read. Also, I can get a lot of books on a Kindle and tote it around. During school, I can be reading 2-3 books a week, so any help would be appreciated. Someone mentioned that some readers can be used as Ipods, which would help the decision making process, though I wouldn't go jogging with a Kindle, but do I need music when I jog?

Let me know what you think!