Football Epilogue

After my conference in San Francisco , my girlfriend and I took a couple of days in Sonoma County. It was a relaxed time, filled with wine tasting, driving the Pacific Coast Highway and relaxing on the beach. While not quite a tropical or Caribbean escape in terms of warmth it was nice to get some son and some quiet. The trip was a relief in that we were effectively "off-the-grid". Minimal cell phone and internet coverage. We couldn't even set our out-of-office emails and phone messages. It was wonderful. I'm hesitant to admit that I am even weary of sitting here in the airport and writing this. The peace it brought me was significant. It is an interesting transition going back. Fortuantely we have a red-eye flight and were able to spend today driving back to San Francisco through Muir woods, stopping to walk amongst the giant redwoods and had a little more time on the coast, chilly, windy, but sunny as my face feels the dosage of UV and vitamin D. Below are few...

I am in San Francisco for a conference followed by a couple days in the Sonoma wine country. When I am in a big city I am often amazed at the level of fitness the people seem to have. Now maybe it's a biased eye at work, but I don't think it's entirely that based on the fact that I'm walking...a lot. There's just no other way of getting places in town cheaply and quickly. Taxi's are expensive and often by the time you've waited for a bus or train you could be most of the way there. I think anything over a 1/1.5 miles (1.6/2.4 km) I start looking for a ride, but even then there's so much going on in town that walking is easily distracted. This is in contrast to living in the suburbs. In the 'burbs I drive nearly everywhere. My car is at my beck and call so even the 0.3 miles (0.5 km) to the grocery store is a more convenient drive. Particularly, when there are kids at home who leave my time limited. This may well be an understated reason for the...

From  http://glovesonline.net Given my quasi-rant from a couple of days ago, you would think I'd have minimal time to waste on baseball. That's simply not true. The game itself has an elegance to it and I see my son hustling and trying his best. He says practices are boring and it's hard, but that also means he's learning to handle himself somewhere besides on the couch. One thing I noticed was the number of balls that bounced in and out of his glove. Essentially, he caught most of what was thrown to him only to have it fall out of his glove. I can imagine this being tiring and frustrating. Then the thought occurred to me that his glove was advertised as "pre-softened", but that it was only "half-fast" pre-softened. The softening makes the glove, well, softer. It allows the hand to squeeze the glove easier to catch, but also there's a little physics to something being softer as well. When a ball strikes a hard surface, the collision coul...

It's amazing at times to see the number of sporting activities available to kids. I recall baseball in the spring/summer, football in the fall, basketball and hockey in the winter. Now there's a plethora of sports to chose from. Baseball now competes with LaCrosse as the spring sport of choice. I have some opinions as this might be a good thing as baseball quickly becomes an "elitist" sport shortly after middle school. You can only put nine people on the field at a time and only bat nine. Substitution rules are cumbersome and result in a total of, 30ish kids making up a varsity/jv squad. It's a lot of standing around as well. Lacrosse places 11 players on a field with ample substitutions, etc. to get lots of kids involved. There are also roles for everyone. There's a lot less standing around on a given day as well. ...digressing, I didn't intend for this post to be a diatribe on why baseball will (rightfully) soon be a lesser youth sport. Instead, th...

My daughter had her first softball practice tonight. She's 8 years old, so it's a coach pitch league. Last year I did some umping for her team. That was a stressful gig at times, but I didn't mind doing it. This evening there were a number of players helping with the team. I was shagging balls (you can stop snickering at any time, UK folks) for the infield drills for a chunk of practice. Towards the end of practice the girls did some live hitting and parents were trying their luck at pitching. I tried to keep quiet, but let slip that I pitched for my adult co-ed team a couple years ago so I had my turn. I don't know if it was a good thing or not, but I threw a lot of strikes. My pitches were a little slower and with more arc than the coach who had given them batting practice so the girls' timing was a little off, but they managed to connect. My throwing felt consistent and to that end it looks like I earned a spot in the rotation for the team. It should be fun...

So on a good note, I won my match yesterday. On a bad note, the latter portion of my round was atrocious. Here's the rundown: Hole 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Tot Par 4 4 5 3 4 3 4 3 4 34 Score 4 4 6 4 9 5 8 7 5 52 One neat thing I've been enjoying is the app  Swing-by-Swing . It provides hole-by-hole scoring, a GPS (although I question the accuracy) and even some side betting. Added features for $15/year can log other performance metrics such as greens in regulation, fairways hit, etc. It's a fun toy so far and may just prompt me to generate some graphs. For a little Overtime workout, I mowed the lawn...

The style of my personal belt. Comfortable and keeps my back un-tweaked. I've been doing a more rigorous leg workout recently. This has included some pretty heavy sets of squats, 335lbs x 5 reps on my workout yesterday and deadlifts (250lbs). For the first time in years I've felt the need to wear a lifting belt. The gym is a bit different of a place nowadays than it was in, what I'll call, my athletic prime (college/HS). The main difference for the purposes of this article is there used to be an abundance of lifting belts; usually on some dedicated rack. My gym today has two belts. Both fit me which is fortunate since my personal belt is currently misplaced. They are hidden on a shelf with miscellaneous other odd and ends and antiquities of the gym: wrist rollers, warped clips and some 1" inner diameter plates. Still I felt the need to save my back so I wear the belt, but I also began wondering if there was an official position on belt use. I dredged-up the fol...

Ok, maybe this isn't the best graphic, but I was thoroughly entertained by the fact that it takes into account bowel movements. Lately, I feel like I'm a bit of a "circadian beast". I'm finding myself awake early and to bed late. I'm feeling rested and productive. I'm feeling more motivated to get to work early and to work in my yard and exercise in the evening. I do have to give some kudos to my girlfriend who is a 6 am gym rat, which results in getting me out of bed early too (by choice). A month or two ago I was going back to bed or begrudgingly going to the gym too. Now I'd rather work and write early. It's a good thing. Bed is comfortable, but productivity feels better.

The weather here in MN has been excellent over the last few days. This past weekend I played par 3  Island Lake Golf Course  with a friend and then on Tuesday I played my first league round at  Dwan golf course . Both rounds were so-so. I have been better off of the tee, although I did land all three greens on the par 3s at Dwan and hit 5 greens in regulation (i.e. leaving me with a two putt for par). I three putted more than I am accustomed to though and only par'd one hole per round. The MN golf season is early and there is lots of time for improvement. This year I'm working on slowing down my back-swing in hopes of gaining some control. Obviously I need to put some work in on the putting green and at the driving range as well. I'm also hoping to play a couple of new (to me) courses this year. The St. Croix river valley is full of scenic courses and I am on the lookout for some Groupon or Living Social deals.

So I decided that the basketball hoop I got for free  would take up too much yard space as a post in the ground setup. Also, I for a while thought that mounting above the garage would be a good spot for one. Here's what I came up with. I took the old backboard and hoop from the free setup. On Amazon I found an  adjustable wall-mount system by Spalding(tm) . This mount was heavy duty and I used big lag screws to mount to the garage, backed by 2x4s above the garage door. It took a little bit of rigging due to the backboard being a different brand from the mount, but a couple of self-tapping screws made it work. I also need to acknowledge that my mom showed up at the right time as I was trying to get the hoop up on the mount to help me steady it and get the bolts in. The stand-off from the wall is roughly 2 feet allowing the backboard to not hit the eave of the house when I crank the thing up to 10 feet. So far it works great, now if I could only develop some skills. My k...