Great Expectations

Ah, these are heady, historic times. Barack Obama is sworn in as president tomorrow and all weekend, it's been all inauguration, all the time on the cable news networks. Which is cool, but I'm approaching this with a tempered attitude. I am certainly glad Dubya is history, but I also don't think Obama going to come in, snap his fingers and make everything magically better. He's picked a tough time to be president, inheriting a massive pile of crap from his predecessor. I think he knows that and seems to be pretty level-headed about preparing for it. I just hope people don't expect everything to suddenly change at 12:01 p.m. on January 20. Our economy's still on life support. The Middle East is still very unstable. There are many crises to deal with. Here's hoping Obama makes the right moves to get us back on the right path.

So I wimped out on Saturday and ran my 15-miler inside on a treadmill. I just couldn't get myself to run outside; it was about 8 degrees out. I broke up the run into 5-mile segments and it wasn't too bad. But next weekend's 17-miler is definitely going to be on the road. Of course, we've gotten so much snow in the past few days, there's even less room for runners out there. It's going to be a tough couple of months of training.

Here's the latest running column, which came out last Thursday.

I played hockey last week for the first time in a month and of course, there were no subs. Which meant I was out there for 90 straight minutes. I was really dragging ass at times, but managed to get a second or third wind at the end of the night and popped in a couple of late goals. I was seriously hurting the next day or two, just really sore. This week shouldn't be so rough.

Yesterday, other than shoveling snow, I did not go anywhere. Instead, I took on some projects that I've been delaying for quite a while. The recent cold snap finally got me to weatherproof our windows, which let in a lot of drafty air. And I finally went through all my t-shirts to organize and cull the herd, if you will. I wear t-shirts every damn day. I've got shirts from my college days, old concert shirts, and tons of race shirts. I had to get cold and junk a lot of old shirts that were just getting nasty, as well as a bunch that I just never wear. I ended up filling a big trash bag, which I'll drop off at a Goodwill box. I still have a boatload of shirts, but at least I know where everything is now.

House a Home

Okay, here's the newly improved look of our house. Pretty shahp, huh?

Dinosaur Act

Ah, a Saturday morning. Gotta love it. Deb let me sleep in today, which was much appreciated. Of course, she's got a lot of household chore stuff planned for me today, so I guess I shouldn't be too psyched.

The house painting is all done, finally. The place looks great. I'll post a photo sometime today.

I played hockey Thursday night for the first time in about six weeks, and the second time in the last three months. After the marathon in May, one thing after another came up; Deb was busy on some Thursday nights and I had some conflicts and all of a sudden, here we are in July. I actually felt pretty good out there, although my timing was way off. I could feel it later in the skate when I was getting winded much quicker. But I did manage to pop in a couple of goals, so that was cool. A guy on my team brought his 13-year-old son to play with us and the kid was pretty good, but damn, did he make me feel old.

Last night, I finished moving my CDs into wallets, at least the majority of them that I had alphabetized. I still have soundtracks, EPs, and a ton of bootlegs to file away. One thing I discovered during this exhaustive process was that jewel cases aren't recyclable; I had just assumed they were, but the type of plastic they're made of isn't accepted by our city recycling program (or pretty much any city's program). There's one place up in Salem, NH, that accepts them, but I wasn't about to ship 1,000 jewel cases up there. So I had to throw them out. It's kinda mind-blowing to think of how much space they used to take up compared to now. I have the booklets stored with the CDs, but not the inserts; I saved them, so I'm trying to figure out what to do with them. Might turn into an art project or something.

Post-Paint Boy

I had promised a photo of the house painting in progress. Here's one from last Friday of the old gray paint, which was cracked and peeling, sanded off the front of the house. The crew has since put down a layer of primer, so the house is gray again. They're still doing some woodwork, replacing window sills and such, and that stuff will need to be primed before they can start putting the final coat of paint on. We're hoping they'll be done by the end of next week. More photos of the job as it progresses will be forthcoming.

Living the Dream

Y'know, I kept meaning to post something during the week and then for whatever reason didn't and here we are on Saturday. It's been a busy week around the homestead; we've had workers painting the house. The first few days they were sanding the old paint off, which meant all the windows had to be closed to keep the dust from getting in. Not particularly fun to come home to after a 90-degree day. But now they're actually painting. We're also getting new gutters put on because our old ones were hanging off and full of pine needles and crap. At some point, we're getting a new front porch put in because the old one is rotting. So big changes are in the works. I'll post some photos soon.

Tough week for the girls. First Hannah was sick, then Lily caught her own version of the stomach bug, which left her pretty listless and unable to eat much for a few days. I came home at 1 on Wednesday to watch her and she spent much of the afternoon hanging all over me, which again wasn't fun with all the windows closed. Fortunately both of them are back to normal now.

I'm getting used to running in the hot weather. All three of my runs this week were in 80 or 90+ degree temps. Not easy but since most of my running is done at lunch, it's necessary. I've got to run an 8-mile leg in a relay on July 4, so I need to be able to deal with the heat.

Thursday night, I saw Mission of Burma play an impressive set at the Paradise. Met OJ for a beer before the show; he went to see them play last night. I found a spot up in the balcony, which was good because I didn't feel like standing in front of the stage, but tough because it was hotter than hell in there. Plus somebody had puked in there before the opening band played, so that smell was wafting around as well. I was pretty tired going in and the heat didn't help matters. But Burma kicked butt; the sound mix was better than the last few times I had seen them there. They played primarily stuff from their early days of 1979-80, including all of their classic EP Signals, Calls and Marches (which features their best-known songs like "That's When I Reach For My Revolver" and "Academy Fight Song"); after their 80-minute main set, they came back out and played some songs from their recent albums. They were done just before midnight and as they were leaving the stage, bassist-singer Clint Conley came back out and said, "We're up 5 with 15 seconds left," referring to the Celtics in Game 4 of the NBA Finals.

Turns out I missed a pretty good game. The Celts were down by 24 in the first half before storming back to win the game. Now they're up 3-1 over the Lakers and have a chance to win the championship tomorrow night.

The weather the last few days has been awesome. I'm supposed to play 9 holes of golf with Stevie Z. this afternoon, so I'm looking forward to that. Then I plan to run 10 early tomorrow morning.

Some bulleted items:

• I was never a big fan of the guy, but sad to hear about the death of NBC news dude Tim Russert. He was only 58; looks like he had a heart attack.
• So if you're an established rock band looking for a sales boost for your new album, where do you turn? The InterWeb? Radio? TV? Nope, apparently you sign an exclusive deal to sell the album at Wal-Mart. It worked wonders for the Eagles, Journey and Garth Brooks, and now next up is none other than AC/DC. Wonder if some anti-rock preacher is going to start protesting outside Wal-Mart stores because of this? AC/DC has never been considered inoffensive by any means, although they're pretty tame compared to some of the other stuff out there.
• Speaking of bands and publicity stunts, here's an interesting twist on those "Rock Star" shows where bands like INXS find a new singer via the reality show: KISS is in talks to do a reality show in which they replace the entire band. Not a shocker, since these guys have been holding farewell tours for the last 12 years. They'll probably pick KISS Jr. and then go out on tour with both bands.
• Interesting story out of major league baseball about Milwaukee Brewers slugger Prince Fielder (son of Cecil), who hit 50 homers last year but this year had seen his power numbers decline. Coincidentally (or not), he became a vegetarian in the offseason. Is the lack of meat contributing to his lack of power, or is he just having an off year? Fielder's a big dude (270-300 pounds), so what's he eating instead of meat? He's a streaky hitter, so he still could get hot and at least approach last year's numbers. I'm sure a lot depends on whether the Brewers are providing him some decent meat alternatives in the clubhouse spread; pass the veggie burger, dude.