Presidential Election, Vol. 1

Here is a good article by George Stephanopoulos called "How to be a better voter" from PARADE magazine. I like his point about not ruling out "flip-floppers".

And I like this Opinion by Glenn Beck called Obama No, McCain Maybe on CNN. I like his comment that our country isn't a Reality Show where we vote for whoever is left after all the lying and backstabbing. And I like his delineation between a conservative and a republican.

Father's Day

This is the You're the Greatest Father candy bar note that they kids made for me. They've been bugging me to share and eat it ever since.


The kids made a Clue Hunt for me. As I solved the first hint, it gave the location in the house of the next clue. We ran all over finding where they had hid these. They did a great job, making sure each clue rhymed. We were hamming it up and having fun.


The last clue took us into the basement for this:

I was shocked! I shouldn't have been shocked that I couldn't kick them off the game to come play Ticket to Ride Europe because it was my day.
It was a great Father's Day. They keep this side pretty well-hidden, and maybe it was just because they wanted to play Guitar Hero, but they are great kids.

Running with the Devil

I ran in the local 10k race on Saturday, the 23rd Longmont Sunrise Stampede. It was cool because I ran 10 years ago in 1998 in the 13th Stampede. Here are the posted results. My time was 54:02, a personal best. My splits, as best as I recall them, were 9:00, 9:05, 9:05, 8:30, 8:30, 8. I figure my average pace was 8:40.

The stats:
190th out of 464 finishers
135th out of 249 men (winning time for men: 31:12)
20th out of 39 in my age group 35 - 39yr old men (winning time for this division 38:51)

It was funny because I suddenly decided to run around Wednesday. The early-registration closed Friday at 5pm. The race-day registration was like $10 more. I hustled down to 1 location (the hospital) and they didn't know where registrations were happening.
So I raced across town to another location at 5:10pm where another guy was registering for the 2-mile with the rebellious-apathetic-teenage-worker behind the counter. I was able to start registering and this old man was standing there waiting for me. He was there to pick up the registration forms and money to "close" the early-registration. I had just barely made it. In reading about the race, I saw that he was one of the original co-founders that started the Sunrise Stampede in 1985 with the other co-founder, our current mayor Roger Lange. Pretty neat coincidence.
I bumped into the guy the next day at the race and wanting to show my gratitude I thanked him for starting the race and putting it on each year. He was probably like, you're the pipsqueak that caused me to be late to my dinner appointment last night! It is so much better (I think) than its bloated inter-county cousin, the Bolder Boulder. The BB boasted around 50,000 runners this year. The Stampede had 465 finishers. Yes, it's a much smaller scale. You have drivers driving alongside some of the roads. But it's nice because you're not jostling the entire time with groups in a straight line across the road.

Top-of-Utah Marathon

While I'm blogging about running, the spouse and I ran our first marathon several years ago. The 1999 Top-of-Utah marathon in Logan, Utah. She creamed me with a time of 5:03:31.08. The female results are here. My time was 5:26:31.08. The male results are here.