Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Rain!

It's rained here for 4 days straight. That's 4 days of continuous, every minute, 24/7 rain of varying intensity. If you saw the national news of the rain here in California where they showed someone in one of those fold out row boats, that was a video taken in the little town just 20 miles or so north of my home. 2 nearby towns have had evacuation notices. I am fortunately high and dry with no water in my home but I'm experiencing a serious case of cabin fever. I'm stuck on the treadmill until the rain stops. It's currently not raining but that won't last long enough for me to get in even a short run.

Since I have to use the treadmill (which I hate with the white hot passion of a thousand suns) I decided to run shorter distances, but bump up the intensity. I run hard for 1/4 mile, then recover, then another 1/4 mile sprint for 4 miles. If I'm feeling really frisky, I'll finish up with a quick 1 mile walk with the incline bumped up as high as my treadmill will go-12%. We'll see if this translates to better running out doors when I'm finally able to get in a real run.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Pub Night

I'm not a bar hopping kind of person. I don't feel comfortable in a bar and I think I've figured out why-but that's for another post. This is about a most interesting night in a a local Irish style pub when I did agree to meet some friends for drinks after a local parade. We got to the pub first (which I hate doing-again, another post...) so we hung around a bit and watched the parade participants wander in. The first group there was the belly dancers. A nice enough bunch of ladies, dressed in the usual belly dancing attire, who would occasionally break into a little dancing. Then our friends showed up, who happen to be a bagpipe band, complete with drums. So now we had belly dancers mixing with kilt clad pipers and drummers and the dancing got really interesting. I thought this was about as odd as it would get for the night until the roller derby girls showed up-yes they were in their derby costumes, circa 1950's, and yes they were on skates, with nicknames emblazoned across their rear ends like "Thunderwear" and "Black Bomber". So now we had belly dancers and roller derby queens cheering on the pipers who needed no encouragement whatsoever to play for the crowd. It was a very odd, very entertaining night.