That's right. Swim shoes. The most basic rubber padding available. Hardly even anything you could really call a lace.
My feet love me right now.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Smugness
Hey, folks - I just ran six quick, easy, smooth miles, wearing these:
That's right. Swim shoes. The most basic rubber padding available. Hardly even anything you could really call a lace.
My feet love me right now.
That's right. Swim shoes. The most basic rubber padding available. Hardly even anything you could really call a lace.
My feet love me right now.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Photographic Hijinks
OK, so it's feast or famine around here. What else is new. Here's some dang pictures:
T does this with her hat on game days. She takes it off and rubs it in the dirt of the first-to-second baseline. (She usually plays in the outfield, which, when you're six, is right about there.) I'm very curious as to why she might do this - it reminds me of pregnant women who eat great clods of earth, or mumbling homeless people who continually streak their hair from puddles of motor oil. It's sort of ritualistic and compulsive. I mean, look how much she got on there! And this is the amount that survived the ride home in the car, too. God only knows how much she had on there originally.
She did really well yesterday, though - she went three for three, and needed only a grand total of about eight pitches to get her hits. A vast difference between now and when she first began, when she would take 25 pitches and finally, randomly hit it. She's downright plunking them now.
Here's another:
This is Q in the Brandon Jennings jersey I bought him for no good reason, and which he opened in the car on the way home from school today, and which has already brought him much joy.
That's the picture that's in focus because I remembered to use the flash. But in the other one, he looks cooler, or so he tells me. So I'll include that one too:
He's wearing it to school tomorrow. With a T-shirt underneath, though. Never fear.
Here's T on opening day of baseball season, back when she couldn't bat her way out of a paper bag:
And here again, waiting to march in the parade, and apparently having heard Mami say, or seen her do, something scandalous:
Her Grandpa sent her that baseball glove, a year ago, I think. And on opening day, her first game, she took it with her to the port-a-potty, and left it there. We had a hard time locating it for about five minutes. "Oh no!", she squealed. "Grandpa sent that to me special! OH NO...!" These kids' memories astound me.
Here's the whole league, assembled for the opening day ceremonies at Bud Anderson Field.
Which, of course, my kids consistently refer to as "Butt Anderson".
Those apples have fallen pretty nigh, I'd say.
T does this with her hat on game days. She takes it off and rubs it in the dirt of the first-to-second baseline. (She usually plays in the outfield, which, when you're six, is right about there.) I'm very curious as to why she might do this - it reminds me of pregnant women who eat great clods of earth, or mumbling homeless people who continually streak their hair from puddles of motor oil. It's sort of ritualistic and compulsive. I mean, look how much she got on there! And this is the amount that survived the ride home in the car, too. God only knows how much she had on there originally.
She did really well yesterday, though - she went three for three, and needed only a grand total of about eight pitches to get her hits. A vast difference between now and when she first began, when she would take 25 pitches and finally, randomly hit it. She's downright plunking them now.
Here's another:
This is Q in the Brandon Jennings jersey I bought him for no good reason, and which he opened in the car on the way home from school today, and which has already brought him much joy.
That's the picture that's in focus because I remembered to use the flash. But in the other one, he looks cooler, or so he tells me. So I'll include that one too:
He's wearing it to school tomorrow. With a T-shirt underneath, though. Never fear.
Here's T on opening day of baseball season, back when she couldn't bat her way out of a paper bag:
And here again, waiting to march in the parade, and apparently having heard Mami say, or seen her do, something scandalous:
Her Grandpa sent her that baseball glove, a year ago, I think. And on opening day, her first game, she took it with her to the port-a-potty, and left it there. We had a hard time locating it for about five minutes. "Oh no!", she squealed. "Grandpa sent that to me special! OH NO...!" These kids' memories astound me.
Here's the whole league, assembled for the opening day ceremonies at Bud Anderson Field.
Which, of course, my kids consistently refer to as "Butt Anderson".
Those apples have fallen pretty nigh, I'd say.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Forever Running
Dude! Where in blue blazes does the time go?! Well, I can actually show you where a lot of it has gone. It's gone here:
That took up a couple of weekends and the evenings during the week. We filmed it in our basement - Brad borrowed the camera and the microphone from Williams, we worked up a script, recorded it, and started filming. I did most of the filming, actually - that was probably the most efficient way to do it. And then the editing of the film. There are things I'd like to improve on it, but now that I have a little experience with stop-motion, the next one will be a lot better. Not necessarily higher-tech - I kind of like the low-tech charm it has. (As my left forearm will tell you.) It was cool to do - a lot of fun, and it made me feel much more legitimately like a board member.
Makes me feel like there are other home movies out there that I've made recently that I could toss up here and regain some goodwill with you, my faithful reader(s...?), but looking at my hard drive where I keep them, it looks like no. Not really. There's one that's more than 10 minutes - though I suppose I could break it up. OK, I'll do that quick:
...though "quick" might be optimistic. This is getting to be one creaky computer. Wish I knew more about them so I could make it not so - the most I ever manage to do is throw out old stuff and clear up space on the hard drive. But that isn't really getting me anywhere anymore - it's to the point where even Youtube videos are all herky-jerky. Probably have to upgrade before too terribly long.
So we filmed a lot of T's baseball parade, which I will get into edited format sometime mid-2019. I've still got films from the summer fair at Cummington from last year to do...All kinds of them. It's a wonder I get anything done at all around here.
(This is where Janneke inserts a one-liner that leaves me sliced from navel to sternum on the floor.)
Big news? Not so much lately. T is playing baseball, although mostly, T is having fun in the dugout. That, I think, is the most attractive aspect of it for her. She's not really much of a hitter yet, and fielding rarely happens - though she did stop a couple of ground balls and throw them toward 2nd base the other day, all in a reasonably facsimile of appropriate hurry. What the heck, she has fun. And she's the youngest kid out there. I heard from another parent at a birthday party the other day that there's a tee-ball league in North Adams, and that a lot of parents schlep over there so the kids won't have this looooong game where 90% of the time the coaches are lobbing rainbow balls to kids who can't hit but every twentieth one. And as a two-inning game currently takes two hours in T's rookie league, I have come to think that perhaps that was the way to go with our six-year-old. But then again, it's over in North Adams, the same place that "organized" the "soccer" "league" that Q played in a few weeks ago. So they probably play in parking lots using burnt-out lightbulbs for balls and passed-out crackheads for bases.
(Ha! Perhaps it won't take so long after all - the video loaded into iMovie, and I'm currently exporting the first half of the "Julius Caesar" video. Shouldn't be long!)
Yeah - Julius Caesar. Phenomenal. I can not say enough about Shakespeare & Company, the outfit that our local elementary school hired to come in and teach the kids the play. Those darn kids did the whole play, and I only recall one kid ever calling for a line. (If you sit through the whole thing once it's up, you'll see it. I don't think there are any legal issues with putting the video up - you really can't see much of anyone's face, and I don't give any names. On the online version. The version I have here, I have rolling credits at the end.) Q was living and breathing Shakespeare by the time that unit ended, and he understood that play inside and out - the motivation of so many of the characters, the simple fact that the real star of the play is not Caesar but Brutus...Excellent work all round. I wrote a letter of thanks to the company, and have it here on the computer, but somehow never got 'round to sending it. And thus is it ever further made clear just how different Janneke and I are. She'd never have let the letter languish like that.
Q's playing spring soccer, as a U-12. He's currently 9, and still has two months before he's 10. But it's good for them to play against the older kids - the game is definitely faster than they're used to, and they're coming to grips with that. Q is still more timid than I would like, but I've really matured as a person and rarely say anything during games. And nothing after. Let his coaches do it.
Been running a lot! I read "Born to Run" (which I highly recommend), which has me re-thinking completely the way I run, and it has been like a miracle. Yesterday I ran between 6 and 8 miles, and today I did another 4.5, and I'll rest tomorrow, then do 2 more days on. It's suddenly feeling like there's no reason on Earth why I couldn't run a marathon. Aaaaall the structural damage that I used to think I had in my feet, knees, ankles, etc. turns out to be a result of the weakening of my joints do to their (a) being encased in shoes that encourage me to run on my heels, and (b) being jostled about and shocked by all that heel-running. It's brilliant: Take your shoes off, and walk. There - you are walking the way your feet are designed to walk. Same with running. At the end of both runs, yesterday and today, I felt like I could have gone five more miles. My friend Bridget - Don the Farmer's wife - read the book, and she just ran a half-marathon where she cut TWENTY MINUTES off the time she had run when she was...Well, ten or eleven years ago. She asked me if I was going to run in the half marathon in Lenox, the town where I teach, at the end of the month. And I said, "Why not?" And I mean it! Why the hell not?
I bought myself some running shoes that I don't think were designed for that - they're called the "Retro", by Champion. They look like this:
...Dang! I can't find a picture of them! OK, I'll take one:
But anyway, yeah, like I was sayin': These shoes seemed like a miracle. Because the book says you should run in thin shoes that don't protect your heel, so that if you do run heel-toe, it will hurt. So you don't. You run up on the balls and edges of your feet, as God intended. All these injuries that people get from running - the plantar fasciitis that I've been struggling with these recent years, shin splints, bad knees, bad hips - all these injuries started happening after the invention of the running shoe by the founder of Nike! It seemed perfectly logical at the time that lots of padding and support would make running safer, but it's exactly the opposite. The padding encourages you to run heel-toe, which jars your knees, and all the "support" encases your feet in a coffin in which they vegetate and become weak and susceptible to injury.
So I knew all this, and then I found myself in Target, in the shoe section, and I saw these shoes. They had only one pair - a men's 8 1/2. Exactly my size. I snapped them up, thinking it must be fate.
It's been a week, and oh my goodness! These shoes are so thin that I can feel every rock in the road (though not so much that it hurts), and my feet! My FEET! They feel tougher by the day, flexible, alive, stimulated by the road and the world. My calves are now made of iron, used to running this way as they are, and I can just go forever. It's a great feeling. Read that book, my friends. It might change your life.
Dude! Here's Part 1 of Julius Caesar, wherein T gets her face painted:
And here's part 2:
And that's plenty to keep you entertained for tonight. It's 11:01 PM, and I have a lot of working to fake tomorrow. So I'll hit the hay. Hasta la pasta...
That took up a couple of weekends and the evenings during the week. We filmed it in our basement - Brad borrowed the camera and the microphone from Williams, we worked up a script, recorded it, and started filming. I did most of the filming, actually - that was probably the most efficient way to do it. And then the editing of the film. There are things I'd like to improve on it, but now that I have a little experience with stop-motion, the next one will be a lot better. Not necessarily higher-tech - I kind of like the low-tech charm it has. (As my left forearm will tell you.) It was cool to do - a lot of fun, and it made me feel much more legitimately like a board member.
Makes me feel like there are other home movies out there that I've made recently that I could toss up here and regain some goodwill with you, my faithful reader(s...?), but looking at my hard drive where I keep them, it looks like no. Not really. There's one that's more than 10 minutes - though I suppose I could break it up. OK, I'll do that quick:
...though "quick" might be optimistic. This is getting to be one creaky computer. Wish I knew more about them so I could make it not so - the most I ever manage to do is throw out old stuff and clear up space on the hard drive. But that isn't really getting me anywhere anymore - it's to the point where even Youtube videos are all herky-jerky. Probably have to upgrade before too terribly long.
So we filmed a lot of T's baseball parade, which I will get into edited format sometime mid-2019. I've still got films from the summer fair at Cummington from last year to do...All kinds of them. It's a wonder I get anything done at all around here.
(This is where Janneke inserts a one-liner that leaves me sliced from navel to sternum on the floor.)
Big news? Not so much lately. T is playing baseball, although mostly, T is having fun in the dugout. That, I think, is the most attractive aspect of it for her. She's not really much of a hitter yet, and fielding rarely happens - though she did stop a couple of ground balls and throw them toward 2nd base the other day, all in a reasonably facsimile of appropriate hurry. What the heck, she has fun. And she's the youngest kid out there. I heard from another parent at a birthday party the other day that there's a tee-ball league in North Adams, and that a lot of parents schlep over there so the kids won't have this looooong game where 90% of the time the coaches are lobbing rainbow balls to kids who can't hit but every twentieth one. And as a two-inning game currently takes two hours in T's rookie league, I have come to think that perhaps that was the way to go with our six-year-old. But then again, it's over in North Adams, the same place that "organized" the "soccer" "league" that Q played in a few weeks ago. So they probably play in parking lots using burnt-out lightbulbs for balls and passed-out crackheads for bases.
(Ha! Perhaps it won't take so long after all - the video loaded into iMovie, and I'm currently exporting the first half of the "Julius Caesar" video. Shouldn't be long!)
Yeah - Julius Caesar. Phenomenal. I can not say enough about Shakespeare & Company, the outfit that our local elementary school hired to come in and teach the kids the play. Those darn kids did the whole play, and I only recall one kid ever calling for a line. (If you sit through the whole thing once it's up, you'll see it. I don't think there are any legal issues with putting the video up - you really can't see much of anyone's face, and I don't give any names. On the online version. The version I have here, I have rolling credits at the end.) Q was living and breathing Shakespeare by the time that unit ended, and he understood that play inside and out - the motivation of so many of the characters, the simple fact that the real star of the play is not Caesar but Brutus...Excellent work all round. I wrote a letter of thanks to the company, and have it here on the computer, but somehow never got 'round to sending it. And thus is it ever further made clear just how different Janneke and I are. She'd never have let the letter languish like that.
Q's playing spring soccer, as a U-12. He's currently 9, and still has two months before he's 10. But it's good for them to play against the older kids - the game is definitely faster than they're used to, and they're coming to grips with that. Q is still more timid than I would like, but I've really matured as a person and rarely say anything during games. And nothing after. Let his coaches do it.
Been running a lot! I read "Born to Run" (which I highly recommend), which has me re-thinking completely the way I run, and it has been like a miracle. Yesterday I ran between 6 and 8 miles, and today I did another 4.5, and I'll rest tomorrow, then do 2 more days on. It's suddenly feeling like there's no reason on Earth why I couldn't run a marathon. Aaaaall the structural damage that I used to think I had in my feet, knees, ankles, etc. turns out to be a result of the weakening of my joints do to their (a) being encased in shoes that encourage me to run on my heels, and (b) being jostled about and shocked by all that heel-running. It's brilliant: Take your shoes off, and walk. There - you are walking the way your feet are designed to walk. Same with running. At the end of both runs, yesterday and today, I felt like I could have gone five more miles. My friend Bridget - Don the Farmer's wife - read the book, and she just ran a half-marathon where she cut TWENTY MINUTES off the time she had run when she was...Well, ten or eleven years ago. She asked me if I was going to run in the half marathon in Lenox, the town where I teach, at the end of the month. And I said, "Why not?" And I mean it! Why the hell not?
I bought myself some running shoes that I don't think were designed for that - they're called the "Retro", by Champion. They look like this:
...Dang! I can't find a picture of them! OK, I'll take one:
But anyway, yeah, like I was sayin': These shoes seemed like a miracle. Because the book says you should run in thin shoes that don't protect your heel, so that if you do run heel-toe, it will hurt. So you don't. You run up on the balls and edges of your feet, as God intended. All these injuries that people get from running - the plantar fasciitis that I've been struggling with these recent years, shin splints, bad knees, bad hips - all these injuries started happening after the invention of the running shoe by the founder of Nike! It seemed perfectly logical at the time that lots of padding and support would make running safer, but it's exactly the opposite. The padding encourages you to run heel-toe, which jars your knees, and all the "support" encases your feet in a coffin in which they vegetate and become weak and susceptible to injury.
So I knew all this, and then I found myself in Target, in the shoe section, and I saw these shoes. They had only one pair - a men's 8 1/2. Exactly my size. I snapped them up, thinking it must be fate.
It's been a week, and oh my goodness! These shoes are so thin that I can feel every rock in the road (though not so much that it hurts), and my feet! My FEET! They feel tougher by the day, flexible, alive, stimulated by the road and the world. My calves are now made of iron, used to running this way as they are, and I can just go forever. It's a great feeling. Read that book, my friends. It might change your life.
Dude! Here's Part 1 of Julius Caesar, wherein T gets her face painted:
And here's part 2:
And that's plenty to keep you entertained for tonight. It's 11:01 PM, and I have a lot of working to fake tomorrow. So I'll hit the hay. Hasta la pasta...
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