Month 1: Mileage Check-In
I’ve got a big mileage goal this year, so I think monthly check-ins are going to happen. Deal with it!
January mileage: 618.67
Monthly average mileage: 618.67
Current end mileage with this pace: 7,424.04
Um…woah. That’s a lot more than I thought it would be. I have to keep in mind, though, that this is a 31-day month.
(Don’t bump up the mileage goal to 7,500…don’t bump up the mileage goal to 7,500…don’t bump up the mileage goal to 7,500…)
Astro
I’m assuming this is referring to me and Leibniz, right?
RIGHT
DOOM (not the game)
Well, fun.
Yes, there are all sorts of problems with this metric for “ZOMG WE GONNA DIE” time, but regardless of if it is something we should really be using to assess how much time we have left, you can’t argue that we’re really, really screwing things up to the point where there is likely no return from the damage we’ve done (in terms of climate change, disease progression, AI garbage, political conflict, etc.).
I still say we have about eight years before it gets really, really bad.
Spherical
In honor of the planetary alignment taking place this month, The Sphere in Las Vegas is putting on a little show of the planets.
I love that Uranus is rotating on its side.
Also, The Sphere is like the most futuristic thing that has been constructed in the past like 20 years.
These Kinvara 14s…
Hurt.
The accidental Kinvara 11 pair I was wearing before this hurt the top of my feet constantly except when I was running. When I was running, the 11s were amazing.
These 14s don’t hurt the top of my feet, but the right one is grinding into the base of my outer ankle and it feels like someone is stabbing it with a row of needles.
Not a fun feeling.
Also, they already feel really worn down, as if I’ve already gone 500+ miles in them. Especially when running.
Sooooooo yeah. Not a fan.
The Kinvara 15s are out on the Saucony website, but the Running Room doesn’t have them yet. And though my sizing has been consistent for like the past eight iterations, I don’t want to risk ordering a pair of 15s without trying them on first to be sure of the size.
So I guess we’ll have to deal with pain for a bit.
No pain no gain, though, right?
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Man
EVERY
SINGLE
YEAR
My birthday is weather-cursed, dude. WEATHER-CURSED, I TELL YOU!
I get it, to an extent. People born in February can’t expect the best weather on their birthday.
But this is a freaking conspiracy.
*frustrated, unrelenting screaming*
I want to diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie
Me: “I DON’T NEED NO PURSE!”
Also me:
It’s basically a purse.
From “Lost” to “Beta”
As you may have been able to tell from some of my blog posts, social generations and social generational differences are things that really interest me. I love the idea of looking at social, political, technological, and global changes through the lens of subsets of the population based on when they were born, raised, and started families.
Thus, I was very excited to stumble upon the “Generationology” subreddit a few days ago. This subreddit contains a wide variety of posts regarding different social generations, including nostalgia-based posts, discussions about differing attitudes across generations, divisions within generations (e.g., early-, mid-, and late-Millennials), different generational vibes or “cores” (e.g., “Millennial core”), ponderings about future generations, etc.
It’s super interesting, though I’d love if there were to be a survey to see what generations are most represented by the posters in the subreddit (there’s probably been one of these in the past, but I can’t find it).
Check it out!
Just OK Go
Just another mind-boggling OK Go video, no big deal.
It’s AQUARIUS SEASON
Run, bitches.
It Was Hilarious While It Lasted
So TikTok was BANNED IN THE U.S….
For all of like 14 hours.
While the Americans were away, though, people from all the other countries definitely ran with the fact that they ruled the platform.
Examples:
(And in case TikTok goes dark in the US again, I’ve provided helpful screenshots, too!)
Canadian shenanigans
Commonwealth unites! Plus comments.
Anyway, welcome back, America!
So I’m Dumb
(title states something that is obvious and well-known by everyone who knows me)
A month or so ago, I finally ran out of my stockpile of Kinvara 13s, which have been – by FAR – the best-fitting versions of the Kinvaras that I have ever worn (and I’ve been wearing them since the Kinvara 3s).
I had bought one pair of Kinvara 14s a while back and had been saving them until I ran out of the 13s. So last month, when my last 13s died, I reached into my pile of shoeboxes and pulled out the one box containing a pair of shoes, put them on, and went about my nonsense.
I’d assumed that I was wearing the 14s, which was super disappointing to me, because these shoes were TERRIBLE. The tongue was way thicker than it was on the 13s and the laces (no matter how loosely or tightly I laced them) really hurt the tops of my feet. Like, to the point I had to sit with them unlaced for the first week or so until I really broke them in. They felt amazing when I was running, but if I was just wearing them or if I was walking in them, they felt like garbage.
But I have hunted the 13s out of existence, so once that pair of shoes started to wear out a week or so ago, I decided I’d just have to get another pair of the 14s and suffer through them (and possibly future pairs as well) until the 15s came out.
So on to Amazon I went and bought some 14s with a gift card my mom-in-law gave me for Christmas ($40 for shoes? YAY!).
Well, I finally had to switch out the first pair of 14s today because they had 500+ miles on them. So I open the Amazon box and, upon taking out the shoes, noticed that they looked really different than the 14s I’d been wearing. Different tread, different tongue, different laces, those kinds of things.
I was like what the hell, did I accidentally buy the Kinvara Pros (a supposedly better and definitely more expensive Kinvara)? But I checked the box and it just said Kinvara 14 with the correct size and everything.
Then I went back into my pile of shoeboxes and hunted for my original Kinvara 14 box.
To my surprise, that box still contained a pair of shoes.
So what had I done? Well, several years ago, I had bought a single pair of the Kinvara 11 shoes but never wore them because I also had a stockpile of Kinvara 10s. Once I worked through all the 10s, the Kinvara 12s were already out, so I decided to keep that one pair of Kinvara 11s as an “emergency pair” and just jumped right to the 12s.
Well, that “emergency pair” was actually the pair I had been wearing. Yes, I had grabbed the Kinvara 11s instead of the Kinvara 14s from my shoebox pile.
LIKE AN IDIOT.
In my defense, the two pairs were almost identical in color, so I think that when I grabbed that box, all I really noticed was that it was full of shoes and just assumed it was the 14s box and not the 11s box, since I thought I’d tucked the 11s box far away from all my others.
But I guess I didn’t.
The upside? I will never have to wear the horrible 11s again because they don’t exist anymore, and the new actual 14s are really comfortable.
So…
Yeah.
Good job, moron.
Oh Pixar, what the hell is this?
This art style makes me want to claw my eyes out. Luca had it, Turning Red had it, Soul…I think had it?
(I know nothing about Soul.)
That freaking generic bean mouth thing…I hate it. They did normal faces in Inside Out and Inside Out 2…why devolve like this?
UGH.
FRENCH
I know nobody cares, but I signed up for French 3 like a day ago or so and we had our first class tonight. Our instructor is definitely very French, haha. It sounds like we’re really going to be focusing on listening skills a lot this semester, which is exactly what I need.
Nervous!
MILEAGE CHECK-IN LET’S GOOOO
We are 1/24th of the way through the year, so let’s check that pace, shall we?
Total distance so far (counting today): 293.07
If I were to keep up this pace, I’d hit 7,033.68 miles by the end of the year.
That’s just a little bit more than my goal!
So I basically have to do that 23 more times, huh? BRING IT ON
OH MY GOD IS FOODGAWKER BACK??????
I haven’t been posting mass recipe lists because Foodgawker was dead for quite some time.
But now…it lives?!?!?!?!?!?!
RECIPE DUMP FOR OLD TIME’S SAKE, THEN!
I hate AI
This is so depressing, yo.
Screw it: 7,000 miles
I’ve decided I’m going to do it.
I’m going to try for 7,000 walking/running miles this year.
It’s going to be a push, but I think I can do it. Last year I did 6,620, so this would be 380 more miles than that. So basically one more mile per day, plus a bit extra.
That doesn’t sound too bad, but I had a lot of high-mileage days last year. Like, my minimum daily distance was 6.07 miles; my maximum was 41.32.
[Insert five minutes of me dicking around in R making boxplots and such. Here is said boxplot of daily distance.]
My average daily distance for last year was just over 18 miles (18.09 to be a bit more exact). I need to bump that up to about 19.18. Again, not that much, but that’s an extra 1.1 miles every single day, and that’s also assuming I have either the same number of high distance days as last year or an equivalent (distance-wise) number of high-but-not-as-high “mid-distance” days this year.
BUT IT MUST BE DONE. A GOAL HAS BEEN SET.
VROOM.
Book Review: Angels in America (Kushner)
Have I read this before: We read the first part (“Millennium Approaches”) back in one of those theatre classes I took during my first semester at U of I. So…2006?*
Review: This is a hard play to read, and I mean that in a good way. It’s hard to read for two reasons. First, it’s a very…physical play. There’s a lot of stuff going on with the Angel specifically, but it sounds like set pieces have to move quite a bit and there are quite a few split scenes, where there are two scenes going on at the same time on stage and the dialogue is mixed between the two. I suspect quite a bit is lost in reading this play rather than seeing it because of these aspects. Second, it’s hard to read because of the subject matter. I can’t imagine the fear that individuals diagnosed with AIDS in the 80s must have felt, not to mention the stigma. Both of these aspects of the AIDS crisis are explored in detail in the play and it’s very tough to get through in some places. But that’s what makes it so good.
Favorite Part: I love the amount of humor in this play. The main subject is, of course, very heavy and serious, but there is so much humor scattered through the dialogue that it really adds another level to everything.
Rating: 7/10
Edit: woah, did you know Andrew Garfield has a Tony, and it’s for his performance in this play? I had no idea he did Broadway. Shows what I know about actors.
Edit 2: Yeah, no wonder he won a Tony. This is amazing.
*God I’m OLD
A THIIIIIIIIING
This one was actually quite hard because it had more flat surface area to paint than my usual flowers do. Also that leaf at the bottom is ugly as all hell.
Woah
This is a really good cover of Foster the People’s Pumped Up Kicks. I think it’s better than the original, actually.
Interesting.
Depressing, but interesting.
The only time I really have to read is when I’m using the treadmill (walking, not running, haha), but I can get through a short book within a single walk (about four hours) and bigger books within, say, three or four walks.
I like to read and I can read for long periods of time, but I’ve never really considered myself an “avid reader” mainly because it’s not my go-to activity if there’s something else I can do. Does that make me a bad person?
Look at these shenanigans
Cumulative walking/running miles by year, once again. 2023 didn’t stand a chance.
What the hell is wrong with me?
(I say as I plan on going even further in 2025)
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