Chicago to Minneapolis

Caught the 1:15 flight from O'Hare yesterday on United. Normally I pay no attention to the people around me on planes. I don't chit chat and really don't care whether they are going home or leaving home. But every once in a while someone will say something that gets my attention. Such as the rare exchange where the stewardess comes across as normal and the passenger as some sort of annoying fungus....

Stewardess: Would you care for a beverage before we take off?

The human seated next to me: I'll have a White Russian

Stewardess: What is that?

The human: I don't know. Ginger Ale please.

Stewardess: That I can do.

My running life

On January 1 1998 I ran four miles. I don't recall the run but I imagine it was in our neighborhood in St. Louis. I haven't missed a day since and have run 31,643 miles, an avg of 6.5 miles a day. In 2007 I ran 4015 miles, which still amazes me.

I rarely write about running. But obviously it's a big part of my life. I don't enjoy it as much as I did when I was younger though I still love it very much. I can't remember a day when i've had what i'd call a bad run. It is just harder now. I have pains in my knees that usually subside around mile 3.

The closest I ever came to upsetting my streak was a couple of times when I got to a hotel room around 11pm and immediately headed outside or to a fitness room to run a couple of miles.

Today I ran 12 miles downstairs on the treadmill. It caused me to think about how fortunate I have been to have stayed healthy all these years. I ran while watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3 on DVD. I've been going through all our DVDs this last month. I've watch classics like Yankee Doodle Dandy and Guys & Dolls, along with more forgetable flicks like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the Lizzie McGuire movie. Some people hate running on a treadmill, i've come to love it. I run in the privacy of a room in our basement. It's me, a treadmill, a tv, the heater, and assorted household items we cannot bear to get rid of, such as a crib, playpen, kiddy cars, and an almost lifesize Barbie. In the room i'm not too fat or too slow and I always have the perfect gait. Barbie looks at me admiringly and I return the favor by cleaning the cobwebs
out of her armpits from time to time.

I don't know how long I'll keep this streak going. I suppose as long as my health permits. It's been good. It's added some order and discipline to my life. I'd like to think I set a good example to my kids, or at least a better example than I would have otherwise. Running is a time for thinking and often for not thinking. Sometimes I pray while I run or think about what I should be praying about, only to forget later. Running is solitary. Moving my body down the road and keeping atuned to the aches and pains and sounds that remind me i am still alive.

Ribs 2011

Today for the first time in quite a while, it feels like Spring here. I uncovered the smoker, checking to make sure no animals had made a home inside during the winter. I'm here alone this weekend and decided to smoke the first ribs of 2011. Ribs are hard for me to get right. Real frustrating. Why I can smoke a pork shoulder to perfection almost every time, but continually spoil ribs is a mystery. Don't know what i'm doing wrong but will keep trying.

The picture is of our house today. One last pile of snow in front of the porch, big enough that I still cannot get all the Christmas lights off the bushes. There is still a few strips of snow in the back and front yard that will likely be gone by morning. Wandering around the yard I find mementos of the fall and winter that have been buried for months. The girl next door's lacrosse stick, a piece off the snowblower handle, used firecrackers from New Years.

After taking Robin and Caroline to the airport early this morning I took our dog, Rocko, for his first walk of the year. We're not bad dog owners, its just that he is so old he can only go to the end of the block and back and most mornings it has been too cold. He was glad to be out but got tired before we passed two houses and we turned around. Aging is taking its toll on our 16 yr old dog. After that and a twelve mile run I went out to Costco to get the ribs. Turkeys crossing the road near my house have an irradescent sheen to their feathers that I have never noticed before, jade, blue, red. Birds are back, including a few of the pesky canada geese that will soon infest our town. Neighbors are cleaning out the garage and draining gas from the snowblowers. We'll have more snow, just not enough to worry about and not enough to need a snowblower.

Back to the ribs... finally, a decent batch. Really good. I think part of my problem has been cooking them too long. This time I used an approach I saw on the Food Channel. Smoke with a dry rub for four hours at 250. I used just a little salt and pepper. Follow by grilling with a vinegar based mop. I grilled for about a half hour, turning about every five minutes. Good hot flame. Work really well. Given my general incompetence in the rib category, i'll probably use this method from now on.

Ten Places to See

I read an article today listing the top ten places every parent should take their children. It had the typical places, Grand Canyon, Niagra Falls, etc.

Here's my list, in no particular order

The Ausable River, Upstate New York
Palo Duro Canyon, near Amarillo
Sedona, Arizona
Carvers Gap near Roan Mountain, Tennessee
Jackson Square, New Orleans
Cathedral Basilica, St. Louis
St. Andrews State Park, Florida
North Shore of Lake Superior, Minnesota
The Black Hills, South Dakota
Times Square, New York

Daydreams in Houston on the 56th floor of some building

I was in a meeting today and started daydreaming. This is dangerous when it's an important event but I managed to get by. Sometimes I get a version of highway hypnosis in these things. 15 minutes go by and I don't recall much of anything that was said. After a few decades in my field, the dialogue tends to all run together and it is rare to hear something memorable or unique.

Anyway, while daydreaming I had this thought about how my daylife is so different from my home life. I find myself in settings during work that are completely removed from my real life. I talk about things that I am truly interested in, and passionate about, but that would never come up at home. Debt covenants, liquidity traps and portfolio optimization just aren't topics of kitchen conversation where I come from. I guess it's that way in every field. There is the language of trade and commerce and there is the language of hearth and home. I find myself seeing things and being in places that remind me of the old Talking Heads tune Once in a Lifetime, since every line applies to some part of my life.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?

Another thought I had was the number of people I meet in my career who are really important to me in the moment, in the current hour. Then they vanish. Or I vanish. I'll run into them 7 years, 2 months and 13 days from now and what we did on this day will be idle chit chat. "Well how is that deal going?, has it been seven years, seems like just yesterday, time flies, hows the weather, blah, blah, blah. "

Perhaps I'll wake up soon and find I'm late for my paper route and forgot to study for an Algebra test.

My bracket

It's college basketball tournament time. Before it was "March Madness" or "The Big Dance" or other marketing lables it was simply "the tournament" at my house.

I did not grow up in a sports family. My dad had a passing knowledge of sports. Some from his days as a HS football player, some from being a casual observer, but no one would have ever called him a sports fan. I cannot recall him ever asking me to watch a game with him on TV, or to go to a sporting event (oops, he did take me to a Yankees White Sox game when I was 6). Nothing wrong with that I suppose, just a little weird. Dads are not perfect. Whatever sports skills we three boys picked up was due to our own interest, as this was simply an activity our parents neither encouraged nor discouraged. I played little league baseball in elementary school and somewhere around the seventh grade put on a team uniform for the last time.

But I always loved sandlot baseball and football, and as I grew older basketball. In college I played intramural football and once landed the job of coaching the intramural basketball squad of our dorm. Somehow we won the school championship. I have a memory of a game when a bounce pass landed sweetly in my hands and I launched a jumpshot that went straight for the rim while I hung motionless in mid-air. The trophy is in our basement, in two or three pieces. My college team was in the NAIA and because admission was free I was at almost every home game, watching us play UMKC, Evangel, William Jewell, or archrival Drury.  I also coached a third grade boys basketball team in college. When my wife and I brought our first child home from the hospital, she headed to the bedroom to rest. I laid on the floor with my new daughter and watched an Arkansas Razorbacks game. As a father I spent hundreds of hours playing basketball with my kids, usually my son, on our driveway. How many times did one of us yell, "...from down-town" and throw a bomb from the far side of the driveway? How many cheers did we get from Caroline, playing cheerleader on the sidelines. These and tons of other memories contributed to an interest in college basketball that has stuck.

I am not an expert. I cannot explain team matchups. I cannot argue the merits of a zone defense or under what circumstances you switch from to man-on-man. I cannot remember from one season to the next who the players were on my favorite team (Missouri). I can barely remember the coach. But I love to watch the game.

My interest in this tournament was generated largely by a guy named Rick Pitino. I watched him on late night ESPN reruns as his teams in the mid-80's began exploiting the new three-point shot as full game weapon. Most other coaches were using it only in desperation. He took a little school named Providence to the final four in 1987 and I think and I was hooked from then on. These were the days when you had to tune to ESPN to catch the early rounds as CBS didnt start coverage until the last 16 teams were decided. There are tons of other memories around this game. Going to my first Final Four in 1990 in Denver and watching UNLV school the nation. The fans of the other three teams, Arkansas, Georgia Tech, Duke, were mere sideshows. In 1999 I was getting ready to watch the championship game when I got word that my father had passed away. Duke vs. UConn. Funny that now whenever I see one of those teams on the court I think of the man who probably never attended a basketball game in his life. In 2005 I took my son to the Final Four in St. Louis and it was weird because neither of us lived there anymore. He was in college and I was in Minnesota.

So when the tournament rolls around my bracket seems to fill up my head. By the time of the first tipoff, it is all that is there. I stare at the pairings, drawing on every game I've ever watched to pull some insight into which team will prevail. During March I see the world through a 64 slot diagram. Investment decisions, menu options, routes into work, relationships.... all fit neatly in a bracket. I have dreamed about the tournament bracket. There is a mathematical beauty in the seemingly endless combinations (in a 64 team bracket there are 2^63 or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 different ways of completing the bracket). With each game I am either a sports genius or idiot as my bracket looks less and less like actuality with each tick of the time clock. 

There is something about that ball and that hoop that set the rest of the world aside. If you have never had a gym all to yourself, just you a ball and the echoing thump of rubber on hardwood, you have missed one of the best treats in all of sports.

I dread someday going to a nursing home. But if it has a small spot where I can throw a baseball to my great grandkids, or better yet some asphalt and a chain net, I'm there.

Adventure of the Week

On Friday night Rachel and I went to the Shakopee Auction Center . This was one of the first auctions I've been to in a while, maybe ever, if you don't count charity events. It was interesting. The audience was a wide ranging collection of locals, onlookers, and regulars who had their own assigned metal folding chairs. (Snobbery comes in so many forms). Jerry, a regular who was sitting in front of me, gave us some good advice and helped us understand the code language of this particular auction house. However, he was a talker, and I don't care much for talkers. When he started telling me what I did and did not want to bid on, it was time to escape to a nearby Chinese restaurant for dinner. Writing this on a Sunday afternoon, it has just started snowing again. Nice thing about snow, it always makes my yard look just a good as my two next door neighbors.

Our yard in March

Looks the same as in December, January, February. The last neighbor turned off Christmas lights about ten days ago. I have not been able to get the strings of lights out from around the shrubs and it is starting to bug me now.

More snow and more snow and more snow....

The weekend that started with a forecast for a few flurries turned in to one of the biggest storms in our time in Minnesota. All told almost 20 inches fell before it finally subsided. It came right in the middle of Katie's visit which ended up changing all sorts of plans for the weekend. But all in it was a great time and we had a wonderful visit with our niece/cousin. So we missed the day trip to Stillwater and the search for some memorable new restaurant and substituted with a Sunday afternoon at Mall of America and dinner at Santorini, our local Greek restaurant. There were six of us and we were probably half the crowd in the restaurant. We still have several weeks of winter to go but this is already the biggest of our tenure here, at 80 inches thus far. Typical for us has been 45-60. So things are back to normal and after a few days last week of actually seeing grass, we are now back to deep piles of white everywhere. Sunday night was spent by both Katie and me killing time at the airport waiting for our flights to take off, she heading back home, me off to Newark. I finally crawled into bed at a hotel in Princeton NJ around 3am.

I saw my yard today

For the first time since last November I saw part of my lawn this morning. Ugly sight. A snowman that was built back in November and toppled in December, has been uncovered by the melt.

It was 50 degree yesterday, unseasonably warm. Today it is back to normal, 20's. Not much snow ahead though. Spring training cranks up this week. Albert, stay with the Cardinals, take whatever offer you get. Cardinals, give him whatever he wants.

Niece Katie is coming today, bringing some more of the right kind of warmth to our home in winter.

Failure

I missed this and could have done more to stop it.

Six more weeks, or so, of winter

Annual ice fishing trip was this weekend to a local lake. Ice was about two feet thick. Robin and I caught about six small walleye total. No pics from that expedition. Here's the house in Feb. Still too much snow around the bushes to get the Christmans lights and wreaths down. Maybe by next month.