23rd between 7 and 8, NYC
The place was called "the trailer park."

 German wasn't allowed to drink there because the bouncer said he was too drunk..

 Enough said.

 Sent from my iPhone

I've been to 43 states - all but AK, HI, WA, OR, ND, MI, and IA. I've been to the highest point of 30 states - still need the highest points of the above list plus ME, NY, VA, TX, NM, CA, NV, UT, CO, WY, MT, ID, & MO. I've finished marathons or ultras in 9 states: CA, NV, NY, RI, PA, CT, VA, DE, & IL. 41 to go if I decide to pursue that goal.

i picked up some friends from the airport last night.

their 10pm flight was delayed 3 hours. "mechanical problems."

by the time i got home, it was 3am.

i was up at 7am and went to work

needless to say, i was a zombie all day. i could have pulled an all-night coding session and felt more alert.

i got home, and grudgingly put on my running clothes and headed for the track. 1 mile, 10 minutes, just to keep the streak alive. up to day 58 now.

so here's the weird part..

by the time i was done withthe run, i felt fine again.

at 6pm i was lying on the couch in my running clothes, thinking about how wonderful it would be to sleep, and how much the run was going to suck..

now, at 9pm i feel fine

still going to bed though.. or else i'll be a zombie tomorrow, too.

most people don't know this, but shortly after the show was canceled, albert contracted type-2 diabetes. he didn't treat it and ended up having both of his legs amputated. confined to a wheelchair, he spent two years sitting on a couch watching a-team reruns, only moving to go to the bathroom. He paid mushmouth out of his tv show royalties to cook meals for him all day long. by the time the money ran out, (& mushmouth ran out too), albert had put on another 300 lbs, and .. well.. you can guess the rest of the story. i miss fat albert.

"it's the ultimate instrument of pest control. It's the perfect gift for merciless dads who take no captives in the war against burrowing vermin. The Rodenator injects oxygen and propane into rodent holes and then ignites the mix. The resulting detonation effectively decimates uninvited critters and collapses the tunnels."

http://www.rodenator.com/rodenator-r2-remote-elimination-system

only $3200.00!

had to dust off some old code that hadn't been used in about 9 months.

the programmer who wrote the code left the company about 5 months ago.

it involved a process that involved a long list of addresses. the list was split into several small lists, each assigned to a process that divided up the work. this normally is a neat trick, but in this case it didn't make a difference because of an outside dependency that forced us to deliberately slow the whole process down, lest we be shut off.

i'm not sure why that was there in the first place. probably put in before we knew about the dependency.

anyway, that part of the application had some bugs which caused certain addresses to be processed twice. who knows why?

this difficult-to-troubleshoot problem was quickly resolved just by ripping out all that complex concurrency crap and doing it in a single thread. took about an hour to make sure everything was clean, but you know what? when i was done, the process was much easier to follow and worked great.

so my programming lesson of the day was a real-world example of something I already knew in principle: the simple solution is usually the better one.

I am still sitting here in stunned disbelief.

I spent years trying to get that run in under 30 minutes.

years.

when I finally did it, I was just elated.

since then, i broke 30 minutes a few times. If I was trained, I figured that I could do it at will.

Yesterday, I was trained. So I thought I'd go for 29:something.

I figured, maybe, just maybe, if I had a good day, I could break 29.

After a half-mile, I looked at my watch and saw my pace was 8:45. oops. Better back off.

So I did, and the next two miles I held my pace right at 9. To my utter disbelief, I didn't slow down below this.

Add a finishing kick, and, well, there ya go. something like an 8:52 pace. lapped the lake in 26:07. 2.95 miles.

I might have conceded that sub-28 was possible. Everything would have to click.
I'd never believe sub-27. Never.
Pushing sub-26? didn't even think about it, it was too crazy.

what the hell happened?

but i don't feel like trying to fit it into a 140 character twitter post.

and yet i also don't feel like writing an essay worthy of a blog post (I do put some effort into those, you know)

So I think I'll write something here.

um, i don't have anything to write about.

sorry about that.

i looked down on the carpet this morning and saw something. what's that?

i picked it up. it was a toenail.

my toenail.

so.. sometime since we last vacuumed, a toenail fell off and i didn't know it.

when talking about ultrarunners, it's common to hear people talk about how nice a group they generally are.
like, the preeminent quality of being an ultrarunner is being "nice."
so yeah.. i got into ultrarunning, and the people were very nice. how about that?
but then i got to know a few of them a little better.

all my life, i like being around the most could always bring a smile to my face, or make me laugh, or just improve my disposition by their presence. we all know people like this.
but the ultrarunners i've gotten to know go beyond that. i actually feel lucky and fortunate to know some of these people.

hmm, that doesn't put it in perspective.

lotto. i feel as lucky to know these people as i'd feel if i won the lotto.

seriously.

there you go.

so while before i valued the friendships that made me smile. and those people always have been and always will be great. however, now, with my most valued friends, i get a warm feeling of happiness just being around them.

it's wild.

but i feel so strongly about this that i wrote this squishy sappy post..