Laura Jones on the run

Yep, I’m officially a fugitive. I committed my first ever punishable offence on Monday night. B&E. I’m a hardened criminal. Though, I do wonder if it is considered B&E when it is your own house you are breaking into?

Jenny is currently residing in Woodstock while we finish packing up our apartment and moving this week. We took her to Woodstock last week since we didn’t want to leave her by herself from Tuesday to Sunday (particularly after just having left her from Thursday – Sunday. Jenny hates car rides, and proved her hatred for it about 2/3rd of the way there when she (while I was holding her) projectile vomited all over the console and Arash who was driving. Nice. So needless to say she stayed in Woodstock this week so that we wouldn’t subject her (or us?) to the trauma of two more car rides.

So Monday night comes around, and I stop in at home to feed Jenny and to put another coat of paint on the stairs. But wait, the “second set” set of keys, you know the ones that we haven’t tried yet. The ones I have with me? They don’t work. Oops. So yes, I had to break into my own house. Luckily over the weekend I noticed that the latch in one of the bedrooms was broken so I piled up paint buckets under the window, slid it open and pulled myself into the room. Standing on three paint pails that came up to my waist put me so that the start of the window was boob height, so it took a bit of muscle power to get myself in, and for a moment I didn’t think I could do it and that I would fall to the ground with disastrous results. Thankfully though I made it. And now have the bruises all over my arms to prove it. I’m in a bit of pain here.

When I got back to KW, I had time to pick up my ring. Yay! I feel like I am officially engaged now since I have the ring to prove it :)

Yesterday I was sick. It sucked. Woke up with a wonky tummy and a bad headache. Headache is gone, but tummy is still not perfect. Kind of coming and going in ebbs and tides.

So that is it for me. Please, no one disclose my location to the police ;)

A Very Busy Weekend

Or, actually, 4 days.

On Thursday we spent the day running around with our heads cut off… well, not really, but that is certainly how it felt. A. had his drivers test at 8:55 am in Woodstock, after that we had to pick up the rental cargo van to pick up stuff that we would need. Alas, there are some tasks that a Toyota Camry is not built for ;) We had to go to storage, pick up the futon, go to sears buy a bbq and lawnmower, go back to the apartment to pick up stuff we would need and get Jenny ready for 4 days on her own (the longest we have left he for! She was pretty needy last night and this morning), to home depot to pick up painting suppliest ($1000 worth of paint and accessories! Ack! The dude told us way too much paint though, and it looks like we pretty much got twice as much as we needed. Grrr. Hopefully we can return some of the white paint (ceiling paint, semi-gloss and primer). Finally we went to best buy to buy our new tv (32” Panasonic LCD TV – regularly $1500! But it was on sale, we got it for the discount price of $1200 .)

By the time we finally got back to the house and unloaded it was 6 pm, and we needed to get the floor cleared of carpets since the guy who was coming to refinish the floors was supposed to be there Thursday evening. We started removing the carpet and the floor was looking pretty fantastic. Until we got to the stairs. There was a dark dark stain at the bottom of the stairs and it looked bad. By this time it was 9 pm and no flooring guy, so I decided to give him a call. Apparently something came up and he couldn’t come. Thanks for the call asshole. Seriously, why would you not call? I described the stain to him, he though he wouldn’t be able to get it out and that the floor would have to be patched there. Great. So we continue along with our carpet removal and hit “The stairs of staples”. We have a side split, so there are only 6 stairs between the main floor and the upstairs. Sounds simple enough right? Well, on those six stairs their must have been somewhere between 1000 and 2000 staples. I’m not exaggerating here either. They were the little tiny ones that are just wide enough to fit a pair of needle nose plyers through (if there is enough clearance, and got about 1 cm into the wood. They take an incredible amount of effort to pull out, provided that they actually come out and don’t break in the process. I started working on the stairs at 9 pm on Thursday and finished pulling staples out of the six stairs by 2:30 on Friday. Seriously. We think the dude that put the carpet in got a new nail gun and went a little gung ho. The wood was pretty beat up from that little escapade. Another part of our floors that couldn’t be refinished. While I was busy going insane, A. got the carpet off of the other rooms and ripped up the subflooring. The room that will be the office has rotten wood that is buckling. Great. Hallway same deal, rotting wood, but the guest bedroom was the saving grace. The floor looks FANTASTIC in there and won’t even need to be refinished. It looked amazing. I was very happy about that.

So off to home depot we go to sort out our flooring woes. We ended up deciding to put in Laminate in the office and upstairs hallway and hardwood in the living room. We are still trying to sort out the stairs. Right now we have filled in all the little staple holes with plaster and have painted the sides white. We were planning on painting the sides white and laminated the steps, but now we are leaning towards painting the whole stairs white and perhaps running a nice rug down the middle to keep them a little cleaner. When we finally got back to the house, I continued to remove the staples from upstairs (just the subflooring staples, MUCH easier to pull out, but there were still a lot of them) while A put the BBQ together so that we could have some dinner.

When the BBQ was all put together and A. was going to start cooking dinner, he called me outside to come and join him. And, as some of you know now, he proposed. Apparently, this isn’t how he had planned it. We got a mulberry tree to plant at the house (the tree of love ;)) and he was going to propose while we were planting it, but the tree kind of got pushed aside in favour of other stuff this weekend so he asked while cooking dinner on our new bbq. The tree did eventually get planted but it wasn’t until dusk last night. The engagement ring was my mums, which made me cry. I always loved my mum’s ring, and I am so happy that it is now mine. It is more valuable to me than all the diamonds in the world. It is white gold with an oval star sapphire. I can’t wear it yet because my mum had ginormous fingers. Like the ring is at least a size 10. I believe my ring finger is an 8 or 8.5. The ring is currently too big for my thumb. No details yet on when the nuptials will take place, we aren’t going to start worrying about the details until after the house is finished.

This is the post that does not end, yes it goes on and on my friends…

Saturday we got the rooms ready for paint. A’s mum came from TO to help out. We primed all the trim (ugly wood coloured) and before we left on Sunday we got 3 coats of semi gloss on. I’m thinking I want to do one more coat, but this will likely wait for a while now. Ceilings in the upstairs hall and office got painted and the walls in the living room, hall (asparagus green – the colour of my green v-neck sweater for those that know it), and office (sky blue) got their first coat of paint. I’m happy with how it is starting to look. I think that when we are done it is going to look great and very us. Before the house looked old and dull, now at least half of it will be hip and modern (we are leaving the basement for now). We are a far cry from where we wanted to be at this point, but hopefully it will all come together. A is taking Wednesday to Friday off this week. I’m taking Friday off so we will be in Woodstock starting tomorrow night. This time Jenny is coming with us. Hopefully we can get a second coat onto the walls before Arash starts putting in the floors on Thursday. Should be possible now with him taking another day off work. Otherwise it would have been a sleepless night on Wednesday which would not have made for a fun day on Thursday for me. We are kind of in full damage mode now and plan to only get done the essential things before we move. Hopefully everything goes well and we get most of the important stuff done first!

Countdown Homeowner... 22 hours, 9 minutes

So. This is it. One day from now, I will be a proud joint owner of a 1960s side split in the booming metropolis of Woodstock, Ontario. It has been a stressful week. I, like blythe, made the mistake of waiting to the last minute to transfer money into my chequing account. I called last Thursday thinking I had plenty of time, but neglected to account for the fact that it would have to do two bank transfers – one from Manulife to CIBC (my investment banker is CIBC Wood Gundy) and one from CIBC to my chequing account at Scotia. My CIBC account isn’t a regular account that I could go to any branch and get a bank draft. Anywho, CIBC apparently got the money on Friday but forgot to send it on and it takes 48 hours between CIBC and Scotia. Aka, Laura is screwed, but I talked to them first thing yesterday morning and the money was still sitting there, so they prepared a bank draft and walked it over to the scotia branch in downtown Belleville and deposited directly into my account – Crisis averted thank god.

I am very preoccupied at work today, and am not being very productive. I keep getting excited/stressed about our house and impending home ownership. On top of that my IBS appears to be acting up today so my lower digestive tract is giving me grief. I may go home sick early today because I’m in quite a bit of pain right now. And from past experience it is just going to get worse. I’m sticking it out to lunch since I have to go to the bank, but if it doesn’t get better, I may leave early this afternoon.

Do not Follow this link unless you have finished HP7

It is JK rowling giving an interview answering some of the questions that we want answers to that weren't given in the epilogue.

http://www.hpana.com/news.20129.html

Also says which character she was going to kill but didn't.

I'm done

If anyone wants to talk HP, let me know. Preferabley by e-mail. don't want to spoil it at all.

Peterborough Half Ironman

Niki, here is the report for you!

So after doing triathlons for 6 years, I finally decided to start ramping up for the possibility of one day doing an Ironman. For years, I put off doing an Olympic triathlon because I didn't want to take longer than 3 hours to do, I wouldn't let myself start training for that distance until my sprint race times came down. I trained for my first oly last summer and would have just squeaked by under 3 hours, but the swim was cancelled and I freaked out at the prospect of an Olympic duathlon. After fighting a weird stomach problem for several months (ended up being acid reflux), my run training was not good.

Since then, I have worked back on the running and have lost 20 pounds. Both of which have made me faster, 2 weeks ago, I did my first oly (on a long bike course) and got 2:57 (based on bike pace = 2:50 for a true oly. I have also had this weird though in my head that I didn't want to do a half Ironman unless I could do it under 7 hours. That may seem like a lot of time to some, but I've never been an exceptional cyclist. I enjoy it, I'm just not all that fast.

So the days leading up to the race on Sunday weren't really ideal. Well, the day before mostly. My dad got married an hour away from the race site on Saturday so we had to be there early on Sunday to register the day of the race. Not smart, but I wasn't going to miss my dad's wedding, so such is life. The other downside of my dad's wedding was that it was hard to leave the reception. I wanted to leave around 10 and it was close to 11:30 by the time we left. What should have been a 1 hour drive turned to 1.5 hours, due to 4 stops on the side of the road for my boyfriend to throw up. Nice. Silly boy was very hungover yesterday. So these things combined meant that my legs were tired and sore and I was tired from 4.5 hours sleep.

I wasn't really in the mood to race Sunday morning. Was a little down that I hadn't stayed for the rest of the wedding and wouldn't be able to visit more with my family on Sunday, but I guess it was my decision, and it is done. We got to the race site, water was like glass which was a good omen, and the wind wasn't too bad, but would pick up during the day along with the temperatures.

Swim 38:15, 6/13 AG, 187/580 OA, 1:55/100m
I was originally hoping and thinking I could do 35:xx for the swim, but I guess that didn't happen. I haven't been swimming nearly enough for that to be possible. There was also a 1 minute run into transition and the timing mats, so I likely lost some time there too.

Overall the swim wasn't bad. It was my second mass start swim with almost 200 more swimmers, but it went much much better. Probably a combination of me being prepared for what is was going to be like, and other swimmers knowing what to do. I'm guessing close to half of the racers have done an IM and we were much more spread out across the beach. There were a LOT of M-dot tattoos yesterday!

Overall the swim was pretty uneventful. It was two loops, so running into the water the second time, I really didn't feel much like starting swimming again, and waded in very deep before finally starting to swim again . On the last leg of the swim, I remember thinking to myself "hey! I'm almost done the swim of my first half Ironman" but I didn't let myself get too excited about that since the swim is always my strong suit .

Bike 3:17:33, 10/13 AG, 471/580 OA, 27.3 km/hour

The bike. Me and my bike have a love/hate relationship. I love riding. I find it relaxing and just plain fun. That said. I seem to not be able to do well on the bike section compared to other riders. I don't know why my bike splits are usually so slow but there it is. So given my normally abissmal bike performances, I set myself an ambitious goal of being off the bike in 3:30 which would be 25.8 km/hr. To be honest, I was a little scared that I would miss the bike cutoff and not be allowed to start the run. No need to worry though, but I ROCKED out there

As per my usual triathlon carreer. The first 20 km of the bike were spent with the crappy swimmers speeding by me which to be honest is a little demoralizing. Why can't the swim be longer. Like have a triathlon that is not so heavily weighted on the bike. Say something where the average time for each of the events would be 1 hour. Then I could place better . After about 20 K or so though, the passing became less frequent. I even passed one girl who tried passing me. Looking at the results, she ended up getting off the bike 12 minutes later than I did. I was keeping up a good clip too on a challenging course. Lots of hills in this are. Not mountainous long hills where you are climbing for kilometres at a time, but definitely hilly with no real flat sections. I reached the turnaround with an average speed of more than 28.5 km/hour. Holy crap! That is very fast for me given the distance that I rode. And then within km of the turnaround bam! It hits me! Wind. Nice. Now I know why I had such a speedy time on the bike. The wind wasn't horribly strong, but it was a constant presence during most of the second half of the bike. At least 30 km, were a constant head wind. I learned on valuable life lesson during those 30 km: although I hate headwinds and they slow me down, they slow down others more I probably passed about 20 people during the headwind period, most of which passed me earlier.

There was also a tonne of drafting in the second half of the bike course. I would be slogging up a hard hill with a headwind about to pass another rider, check my shoulder to make sure that there wasn't a rider I was going to cutoff and sure enough there would be some jerk sitting inches off my wheel. I probably saw this about 10 times, but quite a few times it was the same two riders. I wanted to take down their numbers and report it to the OAT officials, but I'm not sure they could do anything. I realize it doesn't slow you down any, but it isn't really fair if half the people draft. Makes for an uneven playing field.

On hydration, my stupid thing for my areo bottle that keeps the liquid from splashing out fell out again. 2km into the bike course. Crap. On the way back, I noticed several of them lying on the ground in the spot where mine flew out. I had to drink the contents really quickly since it was splashing all over me. Also make the container pointless for the rest of the race. I am pretty bad about remembering to drink on the bike, and this water bottle always makes be drink since the straw is at normal mouth level. Meant that I didn't end up drinking nearly enough for the heat on the bike course.

One last interesting note: I got passed by a chick with 8 km to go. She was Riding a P3. I'm sorry, but if you are going to buy a $5000 Tri bike, I would think that you would want to be a fantastic bike rider. But to be passing me with 8 km left of a 90K bike? I'm sure her average speed at the most might have been 28.5 km/hr. Most people would be able to pull that off on that bike. Rant over.

Run (if you can call it that ) 2:31:13, 12/13 AG, 455/580 OA, 7:10 min/km.

Coming off the bike I was in great shape. Well, kind of, I was out of it a bit, but I was running with around 4 hours elapsed time. My recent run times in triathlons have been fantastic, and I have had two half marathon PRs this year. I thought, Great, now for the fun. Ha. Yeah, not funny or fun.

For the first 7 km I was holding my own pretty well, not passing a lot of people, but not getting passed either (pace was about 6 minutes/km). Was keeping up a pretty good clip, and was happy with how I was doing. That was until I started overheating. Yes. Overheating with 14 km left to go isn't a good thing. I was probably also dehydrated from the bike, but I during the run, I was hydrating well, drinking water and Gatorade (I was carrying Gatorade with me) and took salt tabs, but I think the damage was already done. Soon holding the pace wasn't working and I had to slow down a lot.

They changed the course so that it was a two loop course this year. We had to run by the finish 3 times before we actually got there and it was really demoralizing. Not fun at all. On the second loop I really slowed down a lot. I walked the uphills (there were three good sized hills on the run course that were all back to back, but after the hills were over on the second loop, I needed to take another couple of walk breaks because I was overheating. I was generally able to keep up my spirits and knew I was going to finish well inside my 7 hour goal time even if I had to crawl across the finish. So I was happy about that, but my body was just falling apart. I couldn't tell you what it was really, nothing hurt terribly bad, my calf was cramping a bit in the last 1 km but there was no one thing bad, I just was tired and wanted to sit down for a bit.

After the slowest 21 km of my life (including long runs!) I finished the race in 6:32:08 13/13 AG, 436/580 OA.

Now, this is interesting, I thought this morning. Remember several hundred words ago when I told you about this girl who tried passing me on the. She was in my AG and I know for certain that she didn't pass me again during the race. I'm thinking that she may have only run one loop of the race course, but since I don't know her name, I can't verify this. Mind, you, I don't really care because I beat my goal time by 28 minutes .

So that is that. When I finished my friends asked how I felt, my response was "Like I don't want to do that again". But sure enough, here I am, a day later thinking about IMFL 2009. But for now, it is all about rest and relaxation. I've decided to switch to the half marathon at the race I'm signed up for in November (it was supposed to be a full), and for the next year, I'm going to focus on losing the rest of the weigh I want to drop and shorter race distances. Sprint Tris, and 5K-half marathon races.

I have an announcement

Arash and I have had our offer on a house accepted.

the MLS number is 56-776. We looked at probably ~ 20 houses and this one was the best all round. there were ones with a nicer backyard (there were two with absolutely beautiful back yards) and there were ones that we loved the interior for (but had tiny itty bitty back yards where you could see into the neighbours windows. This one had a nice back yard and a nice interior.

And the garage has rafters to store my future canoe ;)

Milton Triathlon

First tri of the season. First tri since losing 20 lbs. First tri in a wetsuit. First time having to bike up the nigara escarpment. Also the First race in which I won

So going into this race I had no goals. I was secretly wanting a PR until I found out this wasn't a proper sprint distance race last weekend – this race was - 750 swim, 30K bike, 7.5K run. After I found that out I decided not to care about my time. I had three goals 1) be less nervous at the start of the race (HR is usually > 120 waiting for the race to start), practice swimming in my new wetsuit, and to get in a good workout (one of the most challenging courses in Ontario - we have to bike up the escarpment, and run up most of it. Both mean we get to go down too though, which was very nice.) In fact, I cared so little about Sunday’s outcome that I rode and ran 4 times last week, and swam 3 times, about 2-3 more workouts than normal, and I even rode 44 km saturday morning (then spent the remainder of the day wondering around the zoo in extreme heat and humidity. Definitely not ideal

Before the race I ran into one of the girls in the UW tri club. She won the series opener (a duathlon) in 25-29 and got 4th over all. She is a crazy good cyclist (sunday she averaged 34-35 km/hour on a very challenging course). It was nice to see a friendly face.

Swim (13:41, 13/29 AG 1:50/100m) The swim went well. Although my heart rate was way too high the entire time. It goes much higher in open water than in the pool. Weird stuff. It was also a big race. There were 610 competiters so the waves were much bigger than I'm used to. I had people swimming over me left and right, but I ended up finishing safely and in one peice. The run to transition was on gravel. And sucked. Big time. I'm sure my split is off because of that as well, I was probably out of the water like 12:50 or so.

T1 (2:04) Bad T1 time for me. I'm usually around 1:30 or so. I struggled a bit with my new wetsuit... and had very little room. And the stupid gravel we had to run along sucked big time.

Bike (1:00:46, 24/29 AG 29.6km/hr) Despite being at the end of my age group on the bike, this is a pretty good time for me, considering the race. The race started on a gentle downhill to bring us to the bottom of the escarpment and the next 5 km were pretty much uphill. Started with a gentle uphill, a short downhill, 90 degree corner, then up up up. On the first uphill section, I stopped because a girl right in front of me popped a tire. I yelled "DO YOU NEED A TUBE?" she did, so I stopped and got out my spare tube hoping I wouldn't need it. I probably lost a minute there, but seeing as I really didn't care about this race, I didn't mind. On the big hard part of the hill I saw two others stop with mechanical problems, but there was no way I was stopping for them. Had I stopped, I wouldn't have been able to start again. I was grunting, and heaving, and saying "Oh God" over and over. I'm sure I sounded like I was having sex or something. certainly didn't feel that good . I made it to the top though (going a wopping 7.5 km/hr) without having to get off my bike to walk it (as a number of other people were doing). I was proud of myself for that. Took me several km before I regained composure and didn't feel like I was going to throw up anymore. I was able to pick up the speed considerably after that though. On the big downhill I sat up. It was scary and there was no way I was going down that with no access to my brakes! still, my max speed going down was 76.7 km/hr. Yowzas! that is fast! One final thought is that there were a lot of packs riding together with no one making a concentrated effort of losing them. It pissed me off a bit, but I wasn't in this for competition so I just had to shrug. When the packs went by me, I actually sat up and slowed down a bit because I didn't want to draft. One of the tri club guys said that he had a guy on a P3 drafting off him. Nice. You have a $5000 bike, but you will still draft off another rider???

T2 (1:10) Ahh, much better with shoes on. Bike racked, bike shoes, gloves, helmet off, run shoes, visor on. and off I go.

Run (16/29 AG 42:10 5:38/km - exact same as my 1/2 marathon pace!) The run was also very challenging. Pretty much uphill with a few short downhills for the first 3 km, flatish for the next 1.5, then back downhill for the rest of the race. It was a pretty hot course and only half of the stations had gatorade. I wished more did (they usually all do, and was kind of counting on that given the heat and my hydration strategy. I only had one bottle of gatorade on the bike and with the heat, and the amount I sweat, that isn't enough for a 2hr race. Oh well, I finished, and with a pretty decent time. I'm impressed that I was so high in my age group standings since I'm generally not that great of a runner.

Overall time: 1:59:50 (including the stop to help the girl on the bike), 22/29 AG - BUT, I registered as a Clydesdale, and I was first there Albeit there were only two racers . Given last years results, I would have been third, but at least the 2nd place girl is now 40+, not 39-, so that was kind of cool. I got a hat that says race winner Stuck around for the awards to claim my prize. Ended up also getting a door prize - a timex ironman watch. I'm happy about that. I needed a pool watch for doing repeats and i can also wear it when I am doing fieldwork. As a side note: had this been the standard sprint distance, given my paces, today, I would have gotten a 1 min PR (over Peterborough 2005), but the course was by far the most challenging race course I have done. Those hills were crazy big.

Hem, Hem

I have an announcement to make.

My thesis has been submitted to the Grad studies office :D. Now they just have to tell me that the format is good and I can print. Wahoo!

I was planning on going to the gym tonight, but I don't feel like it. Perhaps I will go for a run or a bike when I get home. Or perhaps I will do both. We shall see.

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stuff

I'm busy these days sorry for my lack of updates.

Last weeks HAZWOPER training went well. It was pretty interesting since for years it has been drilled into my head that the most dangerous pathway to the receptor is often Water. Apparently that really isn't the case for most scenarios. Often the most dangerous is inhalation which I guess makes sense, but when you are talking about Joe public, they won't be exposed to the free phase contamination so inhalation comes secondary (unless they have soil gas vapour intrusion into their basement). For workers at a site though, proper respitory protection is apparently really important ;). I got to dress up like this one day (that isn't me inside, but I was wearing a similar suit. It was kind of cool.

On the weekend I did the missisauga half marathon (as you might have gathered from reading Burgers blog yesterday. Got another half marathon personal best, took > 1 minute off of my Chilly time and finally broke the 2 hr barrier. Crossed the finish line in 1:59:29.6 (the .6 matters ;)) even with requiring an emergency potty break after clenching my butt cheeks for 7 kms. Without the break, I probably would have taken around 3 minutes off of my time from March which makes me even happier.

This week it is back to stressing about my thesis. It is due for submission at the end of the day on Friday and I have yet to get my edits from one of my readers. The other one got me his edits today and the changes will probably take an hour or so. I will do those tonight. I have thursday and Friday off this week to ensure that I graduate this spring. I'll be mighty pissed off if I'm done and just don't have my thesis approved by GSO in time which everyones favourite graduate secretary is trying to scare me into believing will happen. I intend on hand delivering my signoff sheet between the offices to make sure it gets handled well.

So that is it. Hopefully things go smoothly on Thursday and Friday!

Edit (12:20) - Silly me, forgot to post about the other exciting thing from this weekend - Dad and Nora tied the knot! The reception isn't until July 7th, but the actual civil ceremony was Saturday afternoon. The difference in the day has to do with Chinese luck stuff. They had their "numbers" read and decided on July 7th, but found out afterwards, they had to have close family and friends numbers read too. The 7th is apparently an unlucky day for me (but isn't bad since I don't believe this stuff), but it was also an unlucky day for Nora's Sister in Law who has lots of friends who believe this stuff, so hence the day change.