FINISHED!

I’m feeling pretty beat up right now, that race was brutal! The 10K race was two laps of the 5K run and I was spent after the 5K lap was done. I’ve been training for a while and I’ve worked up to about 3 miles so that second lap to get me to 6.2miles was just a mind game to keep my legs moving. I thought Atlantic Station would have been flatter than it was. The course ran by those townhomes (remember Tim and Stephen the ones with the light switch fireplaces…that brought back some memories) then out to Northside by IKEA and we ran up that hill and turned back down onto 17th.

You know what the biggest morale killer is when running…having a mom pass you with her stroller. Aaaggh!

After the race I went to the Flying Biscuit with some friends to replenish all those calories I burned.

I just checked the results online and my official time was 54:00.72. I placed 23rd out of 41 in the male 25-29 group. And I placed 172 overall out of 586 total participants.

Well, I’m off to bed. I had all these plans for projects around the house. Not going to happen.

Sunday at 8:30am I’ll be running the ShamRock ‘N Roll 10K Road Race. I was peer pressured into it from some guys at work that were already signed up. Both run half marathons pretty regularly and wanted me to join. I said “fine, I’ll run the 5K race though.” Then I heard things like, “come on don’t be a pansy, my wife is running the 10K race and YOU want to run the 5K?!” So I succumbed to the peer pressure and reluctantly signed up for the 10K. Now mind you I’ve never even run a full 5K before. That adventure race I did a while ago was 20 miles but half was mountain biking and the running was split up. And if you remember I finished the race that time just barely.

We’ll see how this turns out I guess. If you hear about a twenty something guy collapse in Atlantic Station during a road race…it will probably be me.

I have been training a little bit. I’m up to running 3 miles in the evenings in my neighborhood. I’ve got my iPod shuffle (courtesy of Tim H.’s wedding, thank you) loaded with about an hour of music:
AFI - Prayer Position
Black Eyed Peas - Imma Be
Beck - E-Pro
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
The Almost - Monster Monster
A Change of Pace - A Song the World Can Sing Aloud
AFI - Medicate
Anberlin - Godspeed
Destroy the Runner - My Darkness
AFI - Weathered Tome
Anberlin - Audrey Start the Revolution
Destroy the Runner - Columbia
Anberlin - The Feel Good Drag
Paramore - Decode
Anberlin - Stationary Stationery

It just seems harder and harder to keep up posts on this site lately. Every time I think of things to post and just feel I’ll get to it later, then later never happens.

April and I are still around and hanging in there. We’ve still been traveling to Claxton every third weekend or so. Next week the power company will be installing there new power pole by our barn. I had an electrician install the service panel and bury the #2 (expensive!) wire from the barn to the service pole I installed. Chuck (April’s Dad) and I dug a 4.5′ hole and picked up the 20′ pressure treated pole and put it in the ground. That wasn’t too easy, it felt like we were install a mini-obelisk or something.

With all that driving back and forth I’ve downloaded a few albums lately and my current favorite is the Zac Brown Band. I’m not really much a country music listener but this band and very good!

Things are pretty decent at work. I’ve been going to a lot of out of town jobsites lately. I’ve been at this site in Knoxville where we are repairing a failed retaining wall. Yesterday I had a meeting with the Mississippi DOT over in Mississippi. Our client (block supplier) has his own single engine plane that he pilots. We took off from Charlie Brown in Fulton Co. and in about 2 hours we were in MS. That was my first time flying in a small four seater plane and I want one! The only down side for the pilot is that you are in constant contact with the ATC. You really aren’t just flying around on your own and going anywhere you want. Our client was explaining all the instrumentation on the plane and the physics involved is very interesting, how the altimeter, air speed gauges work are pretty cool. The best part is just flying so low (7000ft) for such a long way. You’re close enough to the ground to really make out a bunch of things.

Well, that’s about it for this post and I think it’ll be another 2 weeks for my next one.

Don’t you just love the weekends where there isn’t much to do and you just lay around and get caught up on Tivo!? We stayed in town this weekend instead of heading down to Claxton. We spent Friday night doing a little restaurant hopping downtown with our friends that live off of Howell Mill. We went to this one burger place called Flip. Great burgers! A little small on the portions but great tasting food. The place is located at the end of the street that Craig, Eric and Christian lived while at Tech. We then had desert at Crepe Revolutions. This place had larger than normal crepes for a good price. Wonderful evening!

Saturday I split some wood that we brought up from Claxton. It’s live oak and it should burn well. Then we just did a little house cleaning and caught up on Tivo. Today nothing is planned and we love it that way. For a while we’ve been working our butts off in Claxton and when we stay home its some project around here or I’m in the office on the weekends. This weekend is nice in that it actually feels like a winter weekend!

This coming up week at work I’ve got to head to Knoxville on Tuesday/ Wednesday to meet a driller to drill two 40′ bore holes and install the casing for inclinometers. Later we’ll install the inclinometer sensors in the casing that measure the tilt of the ground and upload the data every 2 hours via cell signal to a website. This area we are observing is behind a department store where a retaining wall has failed and is holding up the store. I’m a little nervous about installing all this stuff because I don’t have the slightest clue what I’m doing. I’ve never seen the equipment or the process to install it, I’ll just have to wing it with the drillers once we get up there. I just hope it all goes well. Beside this project, work has been pretty slow. All the erosion problems brought about by the rain in September have been designed and we really aren’t seeing any more work come in from that event. We just hope that the warmer weather comes quick and people start building again. Historically this is a slow time anyway but I hope it picks up when it gets warm.