RandomFailure

What an awful two day stretch for me. First, Duke loses the first round game in the Tourney. Not unexpected, but disappointing just the same. Especially since Karen went to VCU. At least, she didn’t give me much grief.

Then on Friday, I open up my American Express card bill to find out that my card number has been stolen somehow. There was nearly $700 in charges to gas stations in Brooklyn over a 10 day period. According to the rep on the phone, someone had the number and created a phony card, since several of those charges they swiped a card. Lovely. This will complicate things a bit, since I know I already had to redo an order at Amazon.com that I had placed about 30 minutes before checking the bill. I know it will affect my Web hosting, and I have no idea what else.

Spoiler Warning: If you did not watch last night’s episode of Lost and don’t want it ruined for you, stop reading now. You have been warned.

I was happily enjoying last night’s episode. Until the show jumped the shark. That moment was when we learned that Jack’s father is also Claire’s father.

I know the flashbacks are supposed to be important for character development, but this moment seemed like the writers didn’t know what to do, so they figured they’d throw this in. Similar to 24, Season 2, with Kim Bauer and the cougar.

LBRR = Long Boring Race Report, for the uninitiated.

I don’t know how my performance stacks up to my previous half-marathons, or even my single previous CR – that wasn’t the goal. But my overall time was 1:38:25.

I saw Goat before the start and figured I would run with him for a while, since the Ben Franklin Bridge Run had gone so well. Unfortunately for me, Goat decided to go to his car to drop off his gear before the start, and I couldn’t find him in the lineup chaos. I did have a nice chat with Biz, who I hadn’t seen in a very long time.

My goal was to run a “smart” race, and that meant not going out to fast and blowing up part way through (Mile 1 in 7:10, Mile 2 in 6:54). So far, not so smart. I did catch up to Alex and Goat just after Mile 2. I could see a rough approximation of a group sorta kinda congealing just ahead of us and mentioned that it would be a good idea to try to be part of a larger group, as amorphous as it was. (Mile 3 in 6:56.)

This, sadly, was just around the first water stop, where Goat slowed to take on water. I thought they would catch back up quickly; I guess I didn’t slow (enough). I could hear Goat behind me for a little while, and then he faded out. That “group” managed to dissipate (OK, I’ve exhausted my supply of SAT words) rather quickly, and I concentrated on about 2 or 3 people who were running near me. (Mile 4 in 7:18, Mile 5 in 7:14.)

Then the uphill started. It’s funny – I could remember the scenery from two years ago, but my legs still didn’t like it. I know I slowed, since I wasn’t going to try to maintain the pace going uphill (Mile 6 in 7:31, Mile 7 in 7:49). Goat caught me somewhere around mile 7 or just after. I ran with him for a few hundred feet and he slipped away – my legs were burning pretty good.

Not much recovery on the flats; just trying to maintain some semblance of a pace (Mile 8 in 7:31, Mile 9 in 7:30, Mile 10 in 7:35). I was spent enough that I didn’t really gain anything back on the downhill (Mile 11 in 7:56, Mile 12 in 7:52 ). I lost a little time, and definitely many places.

As I approached the final hill, I knew what was ahead of me (Mile 13 in 8:09). And by having a small child in the house, my anger has been tempered somewhat – all I could think of on the way up the last hill was that it was “mean” to put it there (54.5 seconds for the last 0.1 miles). Not the expected string of foul language. Final time was 1:38:25, for an average pace of about 7:30.

I got what I wanted out of this run – knowledge of what I need to do to get ready for Broad St. Now it’s time for some serious goal setting!

P.S. Big thanks to Kevin J for the ride!

No, I’m not punishing myself or anyone else. It seems the bulb in my projection TV has a problem. Good thing it’s still under warranty; bad thing is that it won’t be fixed until next Monday. Nothing like the start of March Madness and not having my HDTV.

I went out to dinner with the girls tonight, since Karen and I hadn’t taken Victoria out for dinner in a while. On our way home from Center City, we were driving east on Washington Avenue. We heard some police sirens behind us, and it took a minute or two to figure out there they were coming our way. Since I was driving in the left lane, I accelerated to be able to pull over to the right. Click to see the map of the location.

It was a good thing I did. First, a maroon minivan comes flying by, straddling the left lane and the middle part of the road (there’s no divider or anything; it’s just flat and rarely used) kicking up lots of dirt, salt, etc. Then one police car and a police van are in pursuit. The minivan ran a red light at 12th Street, and surprisingly didn’t hit anything. For those who don’t know, Washington Avenue is a major east-west street and you generally can’t go more than two blocks before stopping at a red light. This is because there is a lot of north-south traffic crossing Washington. So the odds seemed pretty high that we would be taking a detour to go around what would likely be a horrific accident.

So I keep driving east, heading towards home. Then more police cars start flying down Washington, coming from all over the place.

“Guy must have shot a cop.” I tell Karen.  Strings of police cars are coming at high speeds – three cars from the west, four more from the east. Single cars coming from the side streets. They are all converging on the high-rise at 4th & Washington. There must have been at least 20 police cars, of all kinds: marked with light bars, marked without light bars, unmarked, vans.

Karen says, “I hope nothing happens to us. There won’t be any police around!”

Even heading south on Front Street, we see yet another police car heading towards 4th & Washington. Victoria is a little upset by all the activity, but about two minutes later, I’m pulling into the garage, so it’s all OK. I’ve checked all the local TV stations and their Web sites, and as of 9:30PM there’s been no news.  Maybe it’ll be in the paper tomorrow.

If you use TurboTax for the Mac, you need to read this!

Do not install the latest QuickTime update. There is some sort of conflict between TurboTax and the latest QuickTime update, such that if you install the QuickTime update, TurboTax will not launch. I contacted Intuit customer service about this, and they said that they are aware that there is a problem and that they were looking into it.

Happy tax season!