Purl, Interrupted

phone call from home

my dad called me friday night after seeing the very sad news reports about the swimmer in san diego getting killed by a shark while training for a triathlon. since i am doing a triathlon in may, my dad was concerned for my safety.

i told him that i thought a shark attack was pretty unlikely in the bartlett high school pool, but that i would exercise heightened vigilence.

i don't think it made him feel better when i told him that i was actually much more likely to get killed by a moose or a bear during my triathlon....

listen to my heart

i took advantage of the snowy weather yesterday to engage in some online retail therapy to bust me out of the foul, foul mood i was in.

i'll soon be the proud owner of a polar heart-rate-monitor watch and "coded transmitter." boy am i excited. i tried a timex heart rate monitor last summer but really hated running with it b/c the transmitter strap was incredibly uncomfortable. the one i ordered yesterday (1) can be used w/o a transmitter strap (doesn't give you continuous information, but can give you readings on demand, and (2) allegedly has a soft elastic strap that doesn't feel like you're running in a vise.

oh, and it's waterproof, so can be used in the pool. now i can see with mathematical certainty just how out of shape i am in multiple settings.

but wait ... there more. i also ordered a pair of fancy running headphones. although ... and this is by far the worst thing about this triathalon ... we're not allowed to listen to music during the race. this policy is apparently for safety reasons (moose, bears, traffic). i don't mind running, but for me it's all about the music. running 4 miles without music just sounds boring as hell. but i'm sure the race itself will give my ADHD-addled brain lots of things to look at and focus on -- someone told me that one year there was a moose giving birth on the side of the trail. but the headphones will still be nice for training, since the ones i have now have a freakshily long cord that i'm always afraid i'll trip on....

spring has been cancelled

not surprisingly, yesterday's surprise blizzard set a record for snowfall on that date. in fact, we got more than a foot more snow than the previous record for april 25, which was less than half an inch. the official total yesterday was 17.2 inches by midnight, although some places got much, much more.

the anchorage daily news tells us that 17.2 inches makes it the third snowiest single-day event in anchorage history. we were here for the snowiest day -- 28 inches on st. patrick's day in 2002. pretty amazing.

here are a few photos i just took off our back deck.

the snow is really heavy, so a lot of it has already fallen off the railing. i'd guess we got about 15-18 inches. i think tonight we're going snowshoeing to take advantage of the very strange phenomenon of having 2 ft of snow on the ground AND daylight until 11 p.m.

did i mention that terry has rehung the stockings and started playing the charlie brown christmas album?

ouch.

this is my brain with a migraine after a long hard day.

holy late april snowstorm, batman!

oh mercy, it's been a surreal day here in the house of good times.

earlier this week it was sunny and 60. yeehaw. spring, springing. we planned a big end-of-semester bbq for the philosophy kids.

this morning i went into an unpleasant 8-hour hearing in a windowless courtroom. came out and found ... 8 inches of snow on the ground. it was totally bizarre. a real rip van winkle experience.

thankfully, tk had the good sense to cancel the bbq. now i'm sitting at home, unwinding from the unpleasant day, watching the blizzard. it looks like we have about a foot of snow on our balcony. by far our biggest snowstorm of the winter -- they're calling for up to two feet of snow. madness. photos soon, hopefully, if the camera turns up....

welcome to the monkey house

i have come to the conclusion that administrative law hearings are patently absurd. why did i bother taking classes in civil procedure and evidence if i was going to practice in an area of law that acknowledges neither?

in triathalon news ... took a few days off training to nurse a strained quadricep. today felt better and biked 10 miles during spinning class. i realized today i've been going to the spinning class for a month. i'm still the slowest and most out-of-breath person in the class by a long shot, but have definitely improved.

the shoulder is still a little sore ... either from riding the bike or from swimming. i was hoping to take the bike out this weekend but the forecast is for rain mixed with snow. ugh. when will THAT end? also this weekend is the heart run, a 5K i was planning to walk/run. whether i do it or not will depend on how miserable the weather is on saturday. if it's really bad i may just head to the gym and have my own private heart run.

triathalon update

In my first post about the GNT, I said that I didn't actually know if I could do any of the three activities that make up the triathalon. The big happening of the last few weeks has been the discovery that, in fact, I can actually do each of the three events (swimming 10 laps; biking 10 miles; walking/running 4.1 miles). Now it's just a question of doing them on the same day. And outside, as opposed to on a stationary bike and a treadmill.

All in all I'm enjoying training for the GNT. It's given me serious motivation to be active and really push myself physically -- two things I've never been very good at. At the same time, I'm trying not to overdo it or injure myself -- two things I excel at.

I went to the pool after work today for a weekly swim with my "teammates" Jen and Jara. My shoulder was feeling a little punky ... it was the first time I've been to the pool that I stopped before finishing my 10 laps. I suspect that yesterday's little bike ride was a little tougher on the arm than the season's previous bike rides, which were all on stationary bikes inside. So it'll take some getting used to to see if the bionic arm has ten road miles in it.

summer on the brain

summer is the official pasttime of alaskans. a close second and third are talking about summer, and planning for summer. so here is a list, in no order of significance, of the various things we want to do this summer:

- go fishing on the kenai penninsula
- go canoe camping
- go kayak camping
- visit denali national park with our niece
- take a backpacking trip
- do some kind of weekend adventure fishing trip
- go to valdez (so terry can do the fireweed)
- fish for halibut
- go camping anywhere that the haases and their big RV full of morning coffee goes!

spring, springing

at the party yesterday, between the elmo cake and the bubble makers, a friend mentioned that she'd found my very out-of-date blog. so ... my efforts to catch up.

it's spring here in anchortown. which means very long days and, at last, some warmer weather.

it got up to abt 50 today, which was amazing. i took my new bike out for an inaugural ride. it's been a long, long time since i rode a normal upright bike (last summer was all abt the recumbent, and i haven't owned a standard bike since i left AK the first time in 2002). so i was pretty happy that i didn't fall over.

whoever coined the phrase "just like riding a bicycle" was much, much more coordinated than i am.

big bird must die

Yesterday we went to a two-year old's birthday party, where Terry ably demonstrated why we don't yet have children.

No muppets were injured in the taking of this photograph.

no excuses

OK. I have no excuses whatsoever for not having blogged in i-don't-even-know-how-long. I guess that it's been a confluence of 2 things: (1) Facebook has become my blog proxy. (2) Work pretty much swallowed me whole this winter.

But now it's April and I'm almost human again.

So where do I start when it's been this long?

The big news around here lately is that I'm training for the Gold Nugget triathalon. That's right. Me. Doing a triathalon. Or trying to, anyway. It's what's called a "sprint tri", although nothing abt it seems "sprinty" to me -- 500 m swim --> 10 mile bike --> 4.1 mi run. Right now I don't know if I can do any one of those things, let alone all 3 together in rapid succession.

Today will be my first attempt at swimming in awhile, which should be illuminating. (Read: terrifying).

Mr. PurlInterrupted, meanwhile, is training for a 200-mile bike race, the Fireweed. Now who's the crazy one?