nice job, handsome.

my pop is currently in league city, tx with the red cross. we’re all real proud of him. it’s an awesome way to spend time during one’s retirement, i think.

he flew down from strong island this past saturday to do a two-week stint handing out ~600 southern-baptist-cooked meals per day to people who don’t have food. with my pop being vegetarian, texas being texas, and southern baptists not believing that jesus was vegan, there’s a this-will-be-funny-later twist of irony in that he’s surrounded by food but doesn’t have a drop to eat.

he’s hanging in though, because dude is a scrapper. but if you’re in league city, tx. (close-ish to houston) and feel like bringing my pop a veggie burrito or something, lemme know and i’ll put you in touch. he’s easy to find — dark-olive skin, even thinner than he was a week ago, and he’ll driving a red cross truck like he’s on the race track that is the long island expressway. go get ‘em, pop.

i’ll post updates from him if/when he can send them.

i ran to work today. and then back home eight hours later. 14 miles. i think this is going to be the pattern when days get short and i can’t both bike and run on the same day, re: too much evening dark.

running in the evening dark is kind of a bummer. morning dark is fine, because no one is awake and i have the entire earth to myself. evening dark sucks because people are driving home from work, which always puts them in a bad mood because they’re going somewhere they don’t want to be coming from somewhere they didn’t want to go to in the first place, sitting in something that they thought they wanted but not in the scenario they’re currently in, which is sitting in heavy traffic feeling like a total asshole. i see their faces. they do in fact feel like assholes. oh, and it makes them shitty drivers, which makes for a bad run in the dark.

where was i going with this before the judgment started? oh right. i was running home tonight and i saw all the uw freshmen starting to move into the dorms and holy cats how are they old enough to go to college? they look like babies with too-big backpacks. if my math and sexual timeline are right, i am officially old enough to have fathered a college freshman, which means that i am officially old.

remember when i went to edinburgh in the freezing cold of march to do some ui and visual design work on a site that i couldn’t discuss? well, the site that i couldn’t discuss i can now discuss, because it launched (in beta). that site is soundunwound.com, which is hoping to do for music what imdb did for movies. you can use your amazon id to log in and add/edit/delete/merge things.

it turned out pretty well and i’m glad that the kids finally agreed to the orange. it’s bright.

last night i was watching the cat hunt down a fly with some odd sense of pride. i was thinking to myself, ‘good kitty, molls. you show them that a 13 year old cat still has the wherewithal to stalk a fly and pin him to the wall.’

one nanosecond later, i heard the worst noise to ever came out of the cat — it was a low wail that sounded something like ‘wheeeeeeeeh, wheeeeeeeeh.’ which is when i realized that she was playing with a bee, not a fly. sux.

this weekend, i went sailing with my friend paul. paul is a much better sailor than i am, so i was hoping to pick up some pointers. unfortunately, the only pointer that i picked up was that you shouldn’t leave a loose car key in your pocket while sailing, because it can wind up in the drink and force you to walk three miles back home to get a spare key and then drive back to the locked car during uw football traffic in a different car whose gas gauge is on the wrong side of ‘e’.

because tonight during my soon-to-become-impossibly-boring run around green lake, i may have seen the only shirt that i think would be awesome on anyone:

everything i know… i learned in prison

it would work on: yuppies, assorted street thugs, hipsters, infants, and hockey moms. this particular awesome tshirt was being worn by an old guy, and not a particularly tough-looking old guy. if he had been in prison (and learned everything he knew), i suspect that he was there for some kind of white-collar crime, like arson. and if so, still funny!

i had a pretty good weekend of running. 18 uneventful miles yesterday, with a short break in the middle for wild blackberries and hazelnuts (i got a tip from some people on the bike path that there were hazelnut trees everywhere, and they were right); 7.5 miles today through ravenna park and around green lake.

today there were two seattle rarities bookending the park — a passel of mennonites to the east and a solo sharp-shinned hawk chasing crows to the west. and i wish i had some pithy way to connect those two things, but i don’t. i was just happy to see them all this morning.