You must be lost

After my costume journal post this morning, Semagic helpfully notified me that there's a new version of it available. I naively downloaded and installed it thinking all my old drafts would remain untouched.

Goodbye beautifully pictured and formatted NC trip post from a month ago and god only knows what else I had stored away. I know, it's my fault for procrastinating and not posting this crap. But who honestly thinks that when they update a piece of software that the update is going to completely wipe away all data from the previous versions? Well, I didn't, so there!

*sigh*

Anyway, for anyone who missed it, we went camping in North Carolina about a month ago. All the pictures are here. I'm not writing that shit up again though, sorry. But I will give a brief synopsis.

It was a trip like most of our trips there: we set up camp in the same area (our super secret spot within like a quarter of a mile of the car), took the same hikes (mostly), got rained on a bit (only on our way out, so not really that bad), this time Jonah did quite a bit of hiking on his own (made it up the 1 mile/500-something ft ascent to Sam Knob), he got to eat marshmallows and chocolate milk for dinner because we forgot his hot dogs, drove into Asheville before heading home and got some pizza and beer and mead at Barley's Taproom, stocked up on stuff at Bruisin' Ales, checked out French Broad Chocolate Lounge (cayenne brownie and coffee, YUM! but pricey truffles of which we did not try), remarked on how we think we'd love to live in Asheville until we visit there and realize we'd probably grow tired of it very quickly (but you gotta love a place with Old Crow Medicine Show graffiti), got stuck in traffic on the way home, praised the gods of technology that we had a portable DVD player and a binder full of DVDs to keep Jonah entertained while we were on the road and finally arrived home safely and sufficiently exhausted and stinking.

Why I didn't just write that to begin with, I don't know. But it was going to be pretty! And with pictures!

Last week was a week of listening to my body and doing what it thought it could do, instead of the scheduled runs. Nothing went as planned and I only got 4 days in, but some excellent progress was made. I'll take that happily.

Monday - 1 mile straight run; 1.79 miles in 22:06; 11:12 min mile
Tuesday - rest
Wednesday - rest
Thursday - 1.44 mile straight run; 1.96 miles in 23:27; 1st mile 11:24, 2nd .44 mile 4:07
Friday - 1.9 mile straight run; 2.53 miles in 29:17; 1st mile 10:38 (PR), 2nd .9 mile 9:27
Saturday - ~4.5 mile hike in 2:48:00 (Mossy Ridge trail in Percy Warner Park)/2 mile straight run; 2.53 miles in 30:16; 1st mile 11:09, 2nd mile 11:21 (logged approx. 7 total miles this day give or take)
Sunday - rest

Mileage Totals:
Week - 13.45
Month - 15.98
Year - 40.55

( Reflections on last week, projections on this week and how running is changing my life. )

Well, we went to B'ham last night, great show musically, however very similar to the time I saw them before. Same antics, somewhat rehearsed, not quite like the phenomenal energy I witnessed last weekend, but still very good. I'm kind of disheartened at how Victor Wooten performs. He seems to be there to impress the audience, and in my standpoint, if I wasn't already impressed with his playing, I wouldn't have bought a ticket. Don't get me wrong, the guy has been playing since he was 2 years old, he's a phenomenal bass player, but I'd like to just see him play, that's all, just play. Not swinging his guitar around, doing magic tricks, and pulling out rehearsed choreography. I'm all for showmanship and such, but how far is too far?

The crowd sucked last night too, mostly yuppies ages 14-21 it seemed. About the same as most of the shows I've seen in B'ham. I just couldn't get my groove on though. Never really picked it up. Perhaps it was the crowd, perhaps it was how I felt about what I was seeing on stage, I don't know. Somewhat of a blessing in disguise though, I'd be a total mess at work today if I danced my ass off last night.

Luckily didn't drink much either. $10 minimum tab, stupid $4 for a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in a bottle, LAME!!! Not even that good of a pale ale. Chris said the bartender seemed to think they had "shitloads" of different kinds of beer, but then handed him a list of maybe 20 or so. Guess we're just spoiled from going to The Vortex in Atlanta last weekend (well over 150 different kinds of beer, I'd say probably over 200 actually with draft and bottled combined, and all those local brews, *drool*) Why do we have to live in crappy Alabama, with our crappy beer laws, and no one seems to want to open a brew pub or microbrewery cause there's too many rednecks who just plain like crappy Budwieser *gag*. What's a beer snob to do?!?! Move I guess.

Well, the venue was probably the best I've seen in Birmingham though. Called Workplay theater, there's a bunch of offices in it and then this really nice (looks pretty new) contemporary theater and bar. Hence the name Workplay. I told Brian we kind of have the ghetto version here working at Booksys with Crossroads two doors down.

Well, even though I'm sounding really negative about the whole thing, the show really was great through it all. Just not very energetic, which was what I was expecting. I'm just so spoiled by hippie shows where you feel like you're there with thousands of your brothers and sisters and best friends, and you can all get down and groove together.

Chris made me laugh, said he saw these girls dressed up in hippie garb (I'm guessing patchwork dresses or something) at the bar ordering martinis and talking about how their boyfriends were on a guys night out at the club. Has patchwork, corduroy and hemp jewelry become a uniform? Unfortunately though, on the way home we stopped to get gas and Chris realized he left his credit card at the bar. Paid his tab, and left it on the tray. Oh well, we probably don't need that thing right now anyway.

Well I suppose that's my rant for this morning. Still so groggy, came into work an hour late to try to get a bit more sleep, but we were out of coffee this morning, no caffiene, man, I'm sure by about noon I'll have a raging caffiene headache. Going to Brandy's house tonight for a dinner party, and Chris has to finish his group project for school right after work. Then tomorrow getting up to go hiking, man, Sunday I'm not moving from my couch, I swear!!