Hood to Coast
I ran Hood to Coast this year with the Jive team. It was awesome, and I’m so glad I got to do it!
Hood to Coast teams generally consist of 12 runners in 2 vans, and each runner runs 3 legs. I was runner 10, which put me in van #2. Van #1 went to Timberline to start the race at 12:45 PM on Friday; our van showed up at the Safeway in Sandy for the first exchange. It was pretty hot, easily the high 80′s, and the exchange was crowded with tons of runners. Our first runner from van #2 left the exchange at around 5:15.
My first leg was in Gresham, on the Springwater trail. It was dusk, and the path was edged with tons of blackberry bushes, and it smelled delicious! I wanted to stop and snack on them. That leg was 5 miles long, and it was quite pleasant; there weren’t too many people around, even fellow runners.
The next van exchange was at the Hawthorn bridge. Luckily for us, that’s very close to Jive – which means when van #1 took over for us, starting leg 13, our van headed back to Jive where we showered and got ~1.5 hours of sleep in conference rooms or under desks. It was a really nice way to spend the break.
We got on the road again at about 1:45 AM, and met van #1 in Scapoose. There were some pretty tough legs on extremely dusty gravel roads – I was lucky, though, and got to run mine on a paved road. My leg started at around 5:00 AM, when it was still completely dark out. It started out with a pretty decent climb for ~1.5 miles, but from there it was all downhill, literally. I felt like I was flying! It was cool, it was quiet, and the light was just starting to creep into the sky. Over all, this 6.8 mile leg felt a lot easier than the earlier 5 mile leg, and I felt fantastic!
From here on out, we were plagued by the infamous traffic that HTC suffered from this year. In the line up to the next van exchange, we actually parked the car and turned it off in traffic, and all of us (including the driver) dozed of for a little while. He woke up to realize that traffic had just started moving again. Traffic caused us to have some missed connections with the other van at exchange 24 and 30, adding about 40 minutes to our total time.
My last leg started in the afternoon (I think around 2 PM) in Astoria, and it was an easy 3.5 miles. I didn’t wear my watch or heart rate monitor or have anything to listen to…and I haven’t run like that in forever! It felt pretty good, and when I got done, I wasn’t completely exhausted. I think I felt better than most of the other runners on the team because I had easier legs – although I wonder now if I could have run a little faster.
The ending was very anticlimactic because of traffic. We did the final exchange, and our final runner, Jorge, took off on his 5 mile leg that ends at the finish line in Seaside. We took off in the van and passed him, cheering. Then, about a mile later, we came to a full stop in 4 miles of bumper to bumper traffic trying to get into Seaside. Jorge passed us, along with countless other runners. We got a call from van 1 that Jorge had crossed the finish line, but we had barely moved. In the end, it took about 1.5 hours after he crossed the finish line for us to actually make it down there – probably 2 hours to move 4 miles. We arrived around 6:30 PM.
We got together as a team, got our picture taken, and got a beer from the beer garden, and then everyone headed out. We were beat! My wonderful husband had agreed to volunteer for our team, so he was in a parking lot in Seaside directing traffic. I went to hang out with him; when he got finished, we got Chinese food and then headed home. I was asleep in the car before we even made it out of Seaside. I slept like a log that night, and I was sore up until this morning, but I feel AWESOME.
There’s been a lot of complaining about the traffic, and I can agree with those complaints. If the traffic situation doesn’t improve, I don’t know if I would want to run the race again in the future. But I don’t want to focus on that aspect – instead I want to focus on how much fun I had! I got to hang out with awesome people, some of whom I didn’t know before. I got to hang out with runners – something I don’t get to do very often. Everyone was supportive and didn’t care that I was slower than everyone else. It was an incredible experience and I’m glad I did it! I hope to someday get to do it again.
30 days: all done!
Well, I did it: I went 30 days with out eating meat or drinking alcohol, and ran at least one mile every day. Friday night was my last night. So I woke up on Saturday morning…and I had a bowl of cereal and went for a run. So apparently it wasn’t too hard! (I’ll admit, for lunch I had a pulled-pork sandwich and a hard cider.)
On not eating meat: there were a few days when I did really want to eat meat. But most of the time, it wasn’t the meat itself that I missed, it was the choices of what to eat. This came up especially when going out – there are simply fewer options on the menu to choose from if you’re avoiding meat. Even at home, where we don’t tend to eat a lot of meat, it was still a little harder, since there are plenty of meals we often make that involve a little chicken or beef or tuna. It will be nice to not have to bother with it anymore. I don’t think I could be a vegetarian long-term, even after building up an arsenal of vegetarian recipes, because I just don’t like most vegetables very much.
On not drinking alcohol: this was a little harder than not eating meat, especially in certain (mainly social) situations. There were a couple of times when all of my coworkers were drinking, and it was really hard not to join in. And one day C and I got dressed up and went out to the symphony and a nice dinner, and I really would have liked a glass of wine. But I think in this case, it was easier to cut myself off completely than to just limit myself. If I allowed myself, say 3 drinks a week, I just know that there would be some social event and I would save up all of the drinks for that event…and it’s a lot harder to stop myself from having a fourth drink than it is from having the first.
On running every day: this was the best and easiest part of the month. I ran a total of 101.3 miles during the 30 days, which averages out to about 3.4 miles per day. Most of the time I ran on my lunch hour 3 days per week, plus Saturday and Sunday; on the two remaining days I ran twice around my block, which is a half mile loop. I feel so much better when I run now than I did 30 days ago! Yesterday I went for a 9-mile run, got back home, and decided to take Lrrr out for another quick loop around the block because I still had tons of energy!
I think I’m going to keep up the running every day. I intend to start incorporating some weight-lifting into my routine, so on the days I do that I will probably only do a 1-mile run, but I’m feeling great and I want to keep this up. I do well with defined goals, so my next goal is to make it another month running every day. After that, who knows – I might aim for 6 months, or even a year!
Healthy month: an update
If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I really have been posting incredibly boring daily updates about my no-meat, no-alcohol, run-every-day streak, which I started on April 7th. Today was day 11, and I’ve been successful so far. I think posting publicly about it every day has helped keep me on track, so thank you for enduring my boring updates.
So far, not eating meat has been really easy. I don’t really crave meat itself – I only miss some dishes I’m used to getting that have meat in them. (Turkey sandwiches, chicken caesar salads, pork pot stickers, etc.) Not drinking alcohol has been fairly easy (thanks mostly to the fact that C has kindly avoiding opening bottles of wine in front of me and sticks to beer, which I don’t like.) It’s only been really challenging when eating out and it would be so easy to order a glass of wine…
Running has been awesome. I’ve had plenty of days so far where I only ran one mile (two laps around my block), but I’m slowly upping my weekly mileage and feeling better. Yesterday I posted that I ran 7 miles, and I ran them really really fast too! It turns out I ran them so fast because I miscalculated my route and only ran 6 miles. So today I went out in the gorgeous afternoon sun and ran 7 fairly hilly miles, and it was awesome.
I’ve been running pretty regularly since December, when I was fully recovered from hurting my back this summer. But it’s been hard – I was out of shape, I’d gained a little weight, and I was just having a hard time getting back into it. I had to walk hills that I used to be able to run. It just felt like more work than it ever had before. But today was fantastic. It was sunny, I had lots of energy, and I was in the groove. I ran a hill that I’ve had to walk nearly every week since I started training in January, and I kept running, and kept running. Even though the hills were challenging, for the first time in almost 9 months, running felt easy again.
Now let’s keep it up!
An (un?)interesting month ahead of me
I made up a list of 30 things to do before I turn 30, and included on that list were (separately), one month of running at least one mile every day, one month of being vegetarian*, and one month of no alcohol. I was planning on doing these things at separate times throughout the next two years, but have decided to go for broke – why not do them all in the same 30 days?
I’m not sure what my exact start date will be, but sometime after this Sunday – Sunday, you see, is my half marathon, and I always get a cheeseburger after I run a race. Plus I will probably want at least a day or two after that to rest and not run before starting to run every day. But starting some day in the next two weeks, no later than April 9th, I’ll be spending 30 days being healthy. Healthier, anyway. Well, unless I just make my diet entirely ice cream and cheese and white bread.
I also might post periodic updates either here or on Twitter. ”Day 12: didn’t drink alcohol. Also didn’t get that pulled pork sandwich I really wanted. Ran 1.0 miles.” Exciting, no? Considering how long it’s been since I posted a blog update, I’m guessing Twitter is more likely.
*My personal definition of vegetarian: no animal flesh, including mammals, birds, fish, bivalves, insects, etc. – but eggs and dairy products are fair game.
Party game
My cousin Jacob and his wife Amy introduce my family to a new party game, one without a name. C and I then played it with friends at a party on Saturday. The game on Saturday got rather heated, but I think that might have been more an artifact of the amount of alcohol that had been consumed, rather than the game itself. We all really enjoyed it, so I figured I’d post the rules here:
The goal: get your team to say the words written on slips of paper. There are three rounds, and each round has different rules for how you can communicate.
Have everyone write down some things on slips of paper. These can be people, movies, things, places, brands, or just completely random (Saturday we had “fake muppet barf” and “twice-baked fetal mice”). About 4 slips of paper per person seems to be about right, depending on the size of the group. (Both times we’ve played, there were about a dozen people.)
Divide the room into two teams however you want.
Put all of the slips into one bowl; have another bowl hand where you’ll put the slips that have been guessed.
General rules:
- Each person gets one minute to get their team to say as many things from the slips of paper as possible. Start with one person and continue clockwise.
- A round ends when all of the slips of paper have been guessed (not when it gets back to the person who started.)
- If you run out of slips (get to the end of a round) while someone is in the middle of their minute, they should immediately move on to the next round without stopping. (Be sure to keep track of how many slips were guessed before they throw them back into the new bowl and start the next round!)
- Each round, you use the same slips of paper as before – so that means that each slip of paper will end up being guessed three times throughout the game.
- You can’t spell the word, use a different language, or use props.
- You (the presenter) can pass on one slip once per turn – but only if you haven’t started to try to communicate it yet. If you decide to pass, it goes back in the bowl to be guessed later this round.
- Slips that you mess up on (for example, if you accidentally use 4 words in round 2) go back in the bowl to be guessed again
- If someone from the wrong team guesses, the team whose turn it is still gets the point
- You can guess the slips you put in
Round 1: You can say anything you want to get your team to guess, except for the words on the paper. This means you can’t say “bug” to get people to say “ladybug”. No gestures or sound effects.
Round 2: You can use only two words to get them to guess – again, not the words from the paper, and no sound effects or gestures
Round 3: You can’t make any noise at all – only acting it out. (No props.)
If anyone else decides to try this out, I hope you have fun! We certainly did.
Week 1 at Jive
Whew. I’ve now been at my new job for just over a week. I don’t really feel like writing too much, but briefly – I love it. I’m a support engineer, which means I help support Jive’s products (mainly their flagship product – Social Business Software). It’s an entry position for Java developers, so in 1.5-2 years I can expect to move up to another position in the company. In the meantime, I help customers – currently I can only handle the simplest “how do I do this” requests, but eventually I’ll be working with the application code, fixing bugs, etc.
Jive seems like a great place to work so far. It’s downtown right by Powells; my desk is on the top floor, which has floor to ceiling windows (a vast improvement over the basement I worked in last); and, of course, there’s all the free food, drinks and beer. (I don’t like beer, but maybe I should learn!) The people I work with all seem really great. I’m on the east coast team; there’s the boss, 4 other support engineers and me on the team. There are a bunch of other support engineers who work on the central and west teams. Since we support the east coast customers, I have to be in fairly early; I expect to generally be in between 7 and 7:30, although the last two days I was in at 6:15. (Eeek.) But over all, I’m really happy and I’m going to enjoy working here!
A few side notes:
- Basement remodel continues. They are putting the walls together, so the bathroom is starting to look like a real bathroom! I’m getting tired of having our furniture constantly being rearranged and the boxes everywhere, so I’m looking forward to this step of the remodel being done.
- Lrrr is still an awesome puppy. He is adorable, but he’s almost 6 months now, so he’s no longer the cute tiny puppy he was when we got him – he’s more of a cute, awkward pre-adolescent. He is generally very well behaved (for a 6-month old, anyway.)
- I haven’t finished my Christmas shopping yet. Oh dear. Tomorrow night I have to go buy my husband’s present(s) – I hope I make it! I haven’t had to go shopping this close to Christmas in a long time.
Modifying node titles in your Drupal module
This is a very simple thing to do, but there’s little in the way of direct explanations of how to do this, so I figured a quick post about it wouldn’t hurt.
Say you want your module to make some change to the title of a node before it gets printed out to the screen. (This doesn’t change it in the database, or change it in views, etc.) Why would you want to do this? Well, in my case I was requested to add a new feature to the module I wrote over the summer. Before, it just displayed social navigation cues next to links in views; now they wanted it to have the option to display navigation cues next to node titles as well. In order to do that, I need to insert some HTML (a <span> and <img> tag, specifically) before the title of the node.
How to do it? Implement hook_preprocess_page(). This lets you access the node information and modify it before it’s printed out.
mymodule_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
if (!empty($vars['node'])) { //Only do this for pages that are nodes.
$new_title = $vars['title'];
//Make the changes to $new_title
$vars['title'] = $new_title;
}
}
Here’s my code, which checks to make sure that the user has enabled the setting to turn on navigation cues for node titles, requests the HTML from the server, and adds it to the node title.
function navigation_cues_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
//Display only if this is a node page and the user has
//chosen to turn navigation cues on for node titles
if (!empty($vars['node']) && variable_get('navigation_cues_titles_on', 0)) {
//Build that absolute URL for this page
$url = url('node/' . $vars['node']->nid, array('absolute' => TRUE));
$html = _navigation_cues_request_cues($url);
if ($html) {
//Check for XSS attacks just in case
$filtered_html = filter_xss($html, array('span', 'img'));
$vars['title'] = $filtered_html . $vars['title'];
}
}
} //function navigation_cues_preprocess_page
The only tricky part in figuring this out was realizing that I shouldn't use hook_preprocess_node, which seemed like it would be the right function at first. But no, I need hook_preprocess_page. Also, be sure to modify $vars['title'], not $vars['node']->title.
Continue reading Modifying node titles in your Drupal module
And things are moving along..
Well, life is going well, and things are exciting! Here’s the news:
- I got a job with Jive Software! I just got the offer today, and I’ll be starting as a Support Engineer right after graduation in December. It looks like a great place to work, an interesting position, and I’m really excited about it!
- Construction has actually started on the basement! We’ve been talking about remodeling it for almost 2 years – since the water first leaked in – and have been seriously trying to get started for probably 8 months or so. Every time it looked like we were ready, some new problem came up. But Monday morning bright and early, it began. This first step is just to put a bathroom in the basement and convert the old bathroom into a laundry room; after that we’ll be converting most of the rest of the space into a master bedroom and walk in closet. I can’t even imagine what it will be like to have nice big master suite!
- School is almost over with, and it’s been a good term. I had my doubts about a couple of the classes at the beginning of the term, but I’ve come to like them all. I’ve got two big papers, several smaller assignments, and three finals in between me and graduation. Now I just have to keep my motivation and do a good job.
- Lrrr is a normal puppy again. He’s recovered from hip surgery, his infected cut is healed, and he’s pretty much back to doing everything he could do before. We took him to the dog park for the first time today, and he had a blast. It’s nice to have a happy, active puppy again!
Well, that’s most of the news that you might be interested in. Life is good!
Days of our Vizsla
Yes, there is MORE medical drama, if you can believe it. Attempting to keep the story semi-short, here we go:
We noticed a small lump on his side a couple of days ago. He didn’t react or even notice when we poked it a little, so we decided to hold off on calling the vet until his post-surgery appointment early next week. Today, while I was at school/work, it burst into a pussy, bloody mess. C took him straight to the vet, where they eventually sedated him, cleaned the wound, cut away dead tissue, and gave him 3 stitches. It’s a pretty horrific looking wound (see below) – the cut is about an inch long, maybe a little more. Lrrr is taking this a lot harder than he did the surgery. On the way home from the vet, he lay on the seat and whined, and when C lifted him out, he discovered that Lrrr had peed on the seat without ever even sitting up. He’s still pretty out of it, and whining like he’s in pain a lot.
The vet doesn’t know what happened. Her best guess is that he got a cut, and the cut got something in it that started to rot inside the skin, which started the infection. It doesn’t have anything to do with the surgery, as far as we can tell.
Now he has more pills to take. He has to wear the Elizabethan collar again. We were looking forward to letting him get back to his regular exercises on Monday; now, he has to wait until Tuesday to start taking short walks. He can’t really start exercising again until a week from Saturday, at which point this stitches come out (and the Elizabethan collar comes off.) He has to wait a week after that before he can play with other dogs again.
The moral of the story: Lrr is still wonderful. Also, if you get a puppy, get pet insurance from the moment you bring it home.
Slightly gross picture after the jump.
Doggy update
Well, we’ve had Lrrr for about 7 weeks now, and he is an awesome dog. I figured it was time to post another blog entry about him. I’ll start out with the bad news – on our vet’s recommendation, we did a PennHip test on his hips, and he has a high chance of developing hip displasia. She recommends doing a surgery called “Juvenile pubic symphysiodesis” (JPS), which fuses a growth plate and causes the hips to grow differently. Basically, it’s a preventative measure. It’s cheaper than hip surgery later in life, and he should recover from it much more quickly – only a few days to a week of keeping him on leash and walking slowly at all times. We haven’t decided for sure, but we’re leaning towards getting it done. After all, the plan is for me to run with him. Probably nice, long runs – maybe even doing marathon training with him. But I can’t do that if we’re worried about him developing hip problems, so it sounds like this is the right thing to do.
All that being said, we are both incredibly happy with Lrrr. He’s just an angel – I know all dog owners say that, but he really is. It was a snap to house train him – he did have a couple of accidents last week when we got lazy and assumed he didn’t need to be watched anymore, but Christan bell-trained him in about 15 minutes. Now he paws at the bells hanging on our front door any time he needs to go out. He learns very quickly – he graduated from puppy kindergarten today, and he was at least as good or better than all of the other dogs there. He’s great socially – he loves every person he meets, and generally gets along with other dogs very well. He’s only been going to dog parks for a week, but he has a great time and gets along really well with the other dogs. He sleeps in his crate at night for an incredibly long time without needing to go outside; he’s overcoming his separation anxiety and usually doesn’t whine when we put him in his pen or in the backyard when we go away. And he is just a cute, cuddly boy – he loves to snuggle up to us and spend as much time with us as possible.
So the hip thing is disappointing. But given a choice, we would both rather get an angelic little dog who behaves well and is easily trained, but needs a minor surgery when he’s young, instead of a healthy dog who is always getting into fights and peeing in the house. Of course, just because he’s good now doesn’t mean he’ll always be obedient and social, and this surgery doesn’t mean he’ll always be healthy. But at least from where things stand now, we’re very happy with our little guy.
*Surgery update – It was a hard decision, especially after doing some more research. Some places say it’s a great idea, other say it’s just not known if it will help – the surgery is just too new. But since he has to have it done within the next couple of weeks, we can’t wait until more studies have been done to decide…so we’re going with our vet’s recommendation. He’s scheduled for surgery on Monday morning!
