Back in the Fraternity, we had a thing called Work Week. Work Week was just before school started. We'd try to get all the guys to show up a bit early and we had a list of projects that we wanted to get done. We'd divy up the projects and off we went. Turns out you can get a lot done when the labor is free. Anyway, between work, training, and sleeping, I've always got this nagging feeling that my house is falling apart and...

Just got back from a 2-day trip up to Penticton, BC to watch yesterday's 2006 Ironman Canada. Some friends of mine, Todd and Karolina have been training like crazy for their first IM and it's been inspirational/educational to train with them and watch their journey. They'd rented a house in Penticton and were kind enough to offer Deb and I a place to bunk out, so we headed up there for the weekend. The original plan was to sign up for IMC 2007, but since we're doing IMAZ, that wasn't really a...

Study: Hybrids pay for themselves I don't currently have a car payment, and I like it that way. But next time I do need to get a new car, I'll probably get a hybrid of some sort. I have a car that's fairly fast, and I really dig it, but I'm mostly over the car thing. I think. Anyway, whenever people talk about hybrids (especially people who want to FUD anything that isn't made of 5,000 lbs of steel and guzzles...

I had a small end-of-the-season BBQ at my house for the Zoka clan last night. Good times. I had a few extra hours yesterday afternoon, and needed to trim the vines that grow up the railing below my deck - they grow like crazy. But once I get going on chores I usually start getting more done than I'd planned. I've got a long history of fighting the morning glory on my property, and it's mostly been a losing proposition. But, it's been so dry around...

Okay, clearly there's over four months left in 2006, but my racing season is over. I might do a night-or-two at Seward but that's not a big deal, it'll just be for fun. I've been hard at it since November and it's truely time for a break. This morning was the Beaver Lake Triathlon, which is always a lot of fun, and probably my favorite of the sprints. This was my third time. It was an OK race for me. My swim continues to improve,...

CSS continues to befuddle me. After three years of this blog being hosted at Brian's place, I finally sat down to figure out how to fix the layout issues. I figured out how to generally do it, but I still can't get the CSS right in FireFox/Opera. So, if you're on one of those platforms, the menus to the left are screwy, I know. I'll figure it out eventually...it's something non-obvious that's pushing them over like that. But, hey, I got the "menu-covers-the-content" problem solved, and almost have flow working properly. Yay me.

Another busy weekend. Friday, we headed up to see the Abbotsford Airshow at the invitation of one of my good friends Shane, who's an F-18 pilot and had his plane parked up as one of the static exhibits (e.g. he didn't fly around, he just walked around in his flight suit in Canada and generally got treated like royalty). Good time - we got to check out all the planes, then sit in the Lockheed Martin section to watch the actual air part of...

I just signed up for Ironman Arizona. Gulp. Ironman North America has an RSS (blog) feed where they post updates and stuff. I subscribed to it after I found out IM Couer d'Alene had sold out - they'd sent a "limited spots available" update about 3 days before they closed registration. IMAZ's "Limited Spots Available" post went up today. Last night Todd (friend who's doing Canada in 2 weeks) talked me into realizing...

Today, we did the 2006 Salmon Swim, a charity swim benefiting the Puget Sound Blood Center and a women's center I don't remember the name of. Six of us decided to do it: Deb and I, Polita (who I work with) and her husband Owen, and Todd and Karolina. We were supposed to be to the park at around 7. As luck would have it, we woke up this morning to clouds and drizzle. For the first time in well over a month. Oh well, you really can't get any wetter. ...

Wow, it's like clockwork. Last year, we went to France, saw the Tour, got in a bunch of miles, then got back home, into August, and I started having trouble getting my workouts in. After Lake Stevens, I was pretty motivated, but took some recovery time and now I'm having to kind of drag myself out of bed. This morning I was going to do some speedwork on the track and then bike-commute into work. Not so much. I'll do the...

After being in Chicago visiting family for a few days, I got up this morning planning to get onto the Computrainer and do some long interval work on the TT bike and catch up on the Tour of Germany coverage. My CT runs off of a box that I also use for my server. So I log in and immediately notice a few files on my desktop. They're text files which I opened to discover contained thousands of email addresses. Thirty-five megs...

Last night, I rode down to Auburn with Jim (our team prez and a neighbor of mine) to do the Pacific Raceways race - a weekly training race series at the car-racing track down there. The course is basically down and back the 1/2 mile or so dragstrip. At either end there's a wide connecting road so the course kind of looks like a dumbell or something. The race was kind of boring - a full hour but it was...