fdsailor.blog-city.com — May 2005
10:31PM - May Day!
May Day / Busy day! Started out at 9 am, when I went for one of my traditional April / May - "see what birds I can find on the trolly trail" walks. Answer? Not as many birds are normal for the first of May. This was followed by an early afternoon ice skating open skate (a pain until the "hockey party" finally went away to eat their pizza), and afternoon run / walk with Masha (3 km run / 3 km walk), and then evening "club" skating, including a lesson. Oh yeh, and I forgot the evening trip to Wegmans!
I have downloaded another several hundred pics to http://yoj.smugmug.com - yes, many are the same as are on this blog, and most do not have titles yet, but there are a couple of extras. You know, just like with a DVD - includes "original scenes cut from the original movie". No R rated ones, of course, unless you count the naked sole of someone's foot!
I will sleep well tonight.
10:39PM - Weekend ice skate test session
Forgot to say - this weekend at our local ice rink they had a "testing" session - where everyone does their routine for some very quiet judges that don't even seem to look up. They eventually get their scores and either pass or fail.
G and I were especially watching the pre-preliminary, preliminary and adult pre-bronze testing sets, since we will have to do these sometime soon. The good news is that they look possible. So now all we have to do is do it!
Actually, it seems that at least at the early levels you really can make a few mistakes and still pass. I do pretty well technically with two BIG exceptions - my upper body posture sucks and my arms sometimes wave randomly around when I am not thinking about them. Should be able to pass pre-prelim, however, I think!
8:49 AM - Normal stuff, I guess
Last night I went running around the block. Normally Wednesday or Thursday night is "long run" night, but instead I decided to do a "hard" run around our (5.5 km) "block" which goes all the way down and then all the way up a 130 meter "hill". The downhill run was easy, although I was amazed to find that my PEAK speed running DOWN a steep hill (about 5:30 per mile) is still SLOWER than the AVERAGE pace of the top elite running the Boston Marathon! Either way, I finished the block in 28 minutes something, for an overall 8:10 per mile average pace.... And only felt "sort of" sick for the next several hours.
After that, other than going to Wegmans, I did nothing useful. Well, I DID add quite a few pictures (including a "best of" set) to http://yoj.smugmug.com.
10:37 pm - Mother's day
Today was Mother's day. As is past tradition, Gwendolyn and I got up pretty early (OK - 7 am), and drove up to the Lake Ontairo lakeshore to Island Cottage woods to go birding. Normally we think of the beginning of spring migration "peak" to be on May day, with the center of the peak around the 15th. Well, this year things seem really late - on the 8th we had a wonderful time, but didn't see much variety - "only" about 43 species. Still though, it was wonderful, as it always is.
When we returned home, Gwendolyn was greeted by Masha and Anya. Happy Gwendolyn.
G of course got to choose dinner - so we had roasted leg of lamb, asparagus, and of course wine. Life is good.
10:45 pm - Highland Park
Today after work we went to Highland park ( http://www.lilacfestival.com/) for a picnic dinner and to get a chance to wander around in an empty park before a half a million (not kidding!) people decend on it during the next 10 days! But today there were only several hundred people in the park - empty!
The weather was a bit cool, but the sky was clear. The lilacs were at perhaps 40% blooming. Following are some pictures from the day:
This is the a view of where the lilacs begin - the park itself is about 40 acres, I think - in this dimension the flowers just keep going for perhaps 500 m. Note my shadow taking the picture!
10:06 PM - End of a busy, long, weekend
OK, I have now returned back home and am settled in from the weekend. It started out early on Saturday, when Masha, Gwendolyn and I left the house at 7:45 am so that M and I could run in a 5K race that started at 9. Well, we got there in plenty of time, and about 10 minutes before the race started Gwendolyn and Anya decided to register for the race as "walkers" - so we all were doing the same thing, albeit at different rates (Anya says she would have gone much quicker if she were not leashed...).
The race was quite flat, the temperature about right, and the weather beautiful. I am happy with my results (23:04 for 5k, a 7:25 per minute pace - my best so far). I placed 72 out of 311 runners / walkers, in 4th place in my age range (40 - 45). Masha also did well - her first 5k ever. She finished in 27:28, for an 8:50 / minute pace - also the fastest she had run this distance. Gwendolyn and Anya walked and got their exercise. Actually, when you look at the scoring, there is something that is pretty funny. According the official score sheet, Anya finished 17th in the "female less than 14 years old category". - and she beat 7 other people! A good time was had by all.
That evening we went down to the club to have dinner and camp. As seems traditional, at first it was a bit cool and threatening rain, but warm food and cool drink fixed this and a fun time was had by all. Sunday was a bit of a goofing off day - seemed mostly like eating. Okay - we got the sailboat set up on the blacktop, but didn't sail it (yet). But Masha and I went for a late night (11 km) walk while G collected "alone time".
On Monday there was no wind, so we went to Watkins Glen, were there is a long gorge with many waterfalls that you can climb up - it was wonderful. Pictures soon. Gwendolyn finished off the day with her first swim - quite an accomplishment (unmatched by anyone else except one of our friend's daughter Courtney) because the spring here has been late and the water is COLD!
