Heavy Duty

When did New England turn into the Pacific Northwest? This gloomy weather is supposed to continue all weekend and into next week. We're going down to NJ again tomorrow to cheer on Tricia as she does her first triathlon, but alas, the weather is supposed to be pretty soggy down there, too.

After months of hemming and hawing, I finally took the plunge and got a Twitter account. My address is http://twitter.com/koomdogg in case you want to follow me, or you can just visit here and see my latest Tweets in the lower righthand corner of the page. I've signed up to follow a bunch of interesting folks, from friends to celebs to stuff like The Onion and CNN. I'm not going to do much of the "going to the store LOL" tweets that some folks do; more like posting interesting links and things like that. Because I don't have enough stuff to do on the InterWebs.

Speaking of which, my running column this week was supposed to run today but got pushed back to Friday, so I'll post a link when I get one. [UPDATE: Here it is.] As for actual running, I sat down and counted back 16 weeks from October 4 and realized on Wednesday that this week is actually my first training week for the Maine Marathon, not next week. So I did a track workout yesterday and will do a 13-mile long run down in Joisey after Tricia finishes her tri. My right IT band's still ridiculously tight and my back's sore from sleeping on it wrong, but that's why they invented Aleve.

Deb's last day of the school year was today, so she's pretty psyched. Lily finished up last week and Hannah's last day is next Wednesday. At least I won't have to get up as early for a few months, although I'm sure Lily will wake me up well before my alarm goes off.

Dribs and drabs:

• It's hard to figure out the Blue Jays this year. They get swept by the Marlins last weekend and then go into Philadelphia to face the defending World Champs and sweep them. And they do it with the best pitcher in baseball, Roy Halladay, on the DL, along with their closer Scott Downs and starter Casey Janssen. At least Halladay, who's nursing a sore groin, will be back on the 28th. They basically put him on the DL so he wouldn't have to bat against the Nationals (stupid interleague play!) and aggravate the groin some more. But Downs is on the DL with a bruised big toe, which he hurt when he was running out a ground ball. Seriously, some of these baseball injuries are ridiculous. Meanwhile, the Stanley Cup playoffs just ended and you had Sergei Gonchar playing with a torn MCL, Nick Lidstrom playing after undergoing testicle surgery (!), and everybody pretty much just banged up to hell. Hockey players = tough bastards. Baseball players = not so much.
• The NHL Awards were given out tonight. A big night for the Bruins, with goalie Tim Thomas winning the Vezina, monster Zdeno Chara winning the Norris for best d-man and Claude Julian winning for best coach. Bet they'd trade all that hardware for the Stanley Cup. Alex Ovechkin won the Hart for league MVP and the Pearson as players' choice for most outstanding player. I TiVoed the ceremony because I was playing hockey tonight and just fast-forwarded through it, but it was kinda goofy because they had current and retired players handing out awards with celebrities and it led to some pretty awkward cue card reading of stilted awards show banter.
• This is nuts: A federal jury found a Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading 24 songs and fined her $1.9 million, or $80,000 per song. Un-freaking-believable.