My sweet, sweet grandmother still sends me money for my birthday. I can't get her to stop even though I'm a grown-ass woman but if it makes her feel good then I guess I have to feel good. This year I put that money towards a first class upgrade on my flight to Vegas. I've flown first class on a few flights before and, you know, I just like the way it feels. It agrees with me. It compliments the valium nicely. Flight attendants are so nice to you! Everyone lounging in their wide seats with their fleece blankies while all the poor stiffs shuffle by, longing in their eyes, trying to spot an empty overhead to jackknife their carry-on into. The novelty of it distracts me from my normal routine of crying and rending my garments on take-off. Something I think my fellow passengers appreciate. Thanks, Grandma.

I get to Vegas early Saturday morning, my sister picks me up and we head over to the Mandalay Bay to pick up my race packet. I get to smell the Mandalay Bay Smell. I don't know what it is. Toxic air freshener, most likely. But the Mandalay Bay and The Bellagio pipe in this pleasingly artificial flower/leather sofa smell into their casinos. And rather than hating it, I absolutely love it and it reminds me of Vegas. I've never smelled it anywhere else. We walk 10 miles through the convention center crap and the expo crap, grabbed my number and my T-shirt from Salt-n-Pepa. I'm not kidding. They were the most enthusiastic trio of volunteers I've ever witnessed. From Texas. Not that that explains anything. But they were obviously soaking up the Vegas experience and hitting the sauce. Marla Gibbs said she'd see me at the finish and then Jackee chimes in, "Yeah girl, I'll be there with my spray bottle squirting vodka in your eyes". WTF? Maybe that was her version of 'break a leg'.  I don't know. They were high.

The rest of my day is spent being mellow. We made a trip to the gym and I ran a few miles. Ate pasta. Went to bed around 8 PM.

(cue Rocky's Theme)

4 am rolls around and I bound out of bed, pound a glass of raw eggs and do some pull-ups in my bedroom doorway.

Or.

Hesitantly make myself eat a yogurt and a piece of toast; my brother-in-laws previous nights' tale of Grete Waitz's craptastic NYC marathon finish on repeat in my head.

It is FREEZING at the start. I actually take shelter in the Port-a- Potty to get out of the cold. There is nothing worse than waiting around at the beginning of a race. Even more so when it's 38 degrees. My teeth were chattering. If it wasn't for the menthol-cool stylings of Robin Leach as race announcer, I would have simply perished. Robin Leach? Yes. He's still around. He's some gossip guru in Vegas now. I couldn't see him just heard his voice. I couldn't see much. I had to dash from the car to the start because we were stuck in some pre-race traffic jam. I followed the crowd and took my place in the street. There was talk of starting corrals and whatnot but I couldn't see anything but massive people. The ones next to me didn't look like elite athletes what with their 100% cotton shirts, earmuffs, tool belts with 40 GU's locked and loaded - do you need that many? Seriously? And the others to my left, full makeup, fake boobs barely tethered by only the merest suggestion of pink sports bras. I figured this place was as good as any.

And we're off!

And we're not going anywhere.

It took me about 10 minutes to reach the starting line but I enjoyed the fireworks display and getting black trash bags wrapped around my ankles. If you didn't watch where you were shuffling, you would have fallen face first in piles of discarded sweatshirts. Goodwill has nothing on what's left along the first 3 miles of a marathon. Such a waste!

I'm feeling good at the start. As I predicted, the excitement of running along the strip was a huge distraction. I ran the first 6 miles and it felt like I had been running 15 minutes. The pack never really thinned out and you had to watch where you were going but other than that there was a lot to take in. Seeing Vegas at that hour was interesting. The sun is coming up, there were a lot of spectators. There were also quite a few hookers. Now, I know Vegas has plenty-O-hookers, sure. Usually they're blending in with the other chicks that dress like hookers just because they're in 'Vegas, Baby!' And what might be a legit soccer mom from Waukesha, WI could easily be confused with your garden variety chippie because both have 3 inches of buttcheek hanging out of their PINK short shorts. These however were definitely the streetwalker variety. How else to explain walking down Las Vegas Boulevard solo, barefoot, pumps in one hand, cigarette in the other at 6 am. Whole different slice of life. The juxtaposition of our pack of runners, high on life, with her at the end of her long night was somewhat deflating. Run from the guilt! That's my new motivation!

I ate a few Shotbloks at mile 9 even though I didn't necessarily need them. I carried them all this way, I might as well use them. I called my sister a few times from the route to tell her where I was and when I would be at the finish. I felt so stupid talking on the phone & running, like, "Watch me - this race is SO EASY I'm checking my voicemail". On the other hand, it was very useful otherwise who the hell knows how I would have found her. I'd do it again.

About 2 miles from the finish, the police cars pull through with their sirens and make us all move to the left. The motorcade escorts the female leader past us with TV cameras and everything. She's totally trucking. Not even breaking a sweat, wearing the teeniest of briefs and singlet. It dawned on me that she was finishing her marathon ahead of me finishing my half. My head twirled for a moment. Then it was time to turn on the afterburner. Shelley Style. It's been well-documented on this website that my running gait resembles that of a geriatric overly concerned with low-impact, low to the ground, Stealth Jogging. No matter how fast I'm going, how much energy I think is being expended. At a full sprint, I still think I'd look like I had a load in my shorts I was determined to deliver ever so delicately to the finish line. I attribute this partly to my larger chest, learning over the years to try and keep that up and down movement to a minimum. Partly, I'm just retarded. It doesn't FEEL like I'm running this way in my head and that's the important thing; I choose my own reality. When I say I 'turned on the afterburner', that means I boosted my speed so slightly as to be undetectable and turned on "It's a Long Way to the Top" by AC/DC on my iPod. Yeah. Eat my dust.

Coming into the finishing gate was awesome. I felt super. Not super enough to run another 13.1 miles like others were doing at that moment (good, god) but better than I expected. I didn't see Shannon and Mike but they caught me on video. I passed on the mylar cape but grabbed a banana, walked to the car, got home and took a four hour nap.

Total thanks to my sister and Mikey for their awesome support. They made me feel like a real rock star. Kinda like this guy.

Sometimes those animated greeting cards just make me want to slash my wrists and end the suffering as quickly as possible. This one Shelley sent me had me in tears. Of laughter.

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1176491072

This is the magic number.

When I'm under 180 I feel light, fit, fast. When I'm over I feel slow, fat, you know.

Funny how this kind of thing can affect your mood, your confidence, pretty much everything. Sheesh, I feel like a girl.

Off the top of my head the ability to listen to my music over the Internet has got to be one of the best things ever. EVER. Even better than resealable bags of potato chips or twist off tops on beer. And in the spirit of the holidays I've fired up my Christmas SHOUTcast server.

Listen up y'all.

A total half-marathon recap is coming up tonight. With pictures! For now, I'm still trying to recover from Martin publishing our wedding photos for the internet and all its friends. Specifically, the ones where I'm smuggling a watermelon.

The light switch in most cars has three positions. Off, parking lights and driving lights. True, lots of new cars out there now only give you the option of off, running lights (which is head lights on but no tail lights on) and regular old everything on. For all the other cars out there there is still that middle setting called "parking lights" because it only lights up these little, orange lights in the front and your tail lights in the rear.

Let's start by examining the name of this middle setting, PARKING lights. The intent was that if you pull over on the side of the road or up to someone's house in a dense neighborhood you could turn on your parking lights and 1) be safe so you are seen and no one plows into you by accident and 2) not offend anyone by shooting lasers into their eyes. Also, they are supposed to let oncoming cars recognize that you are parked and NOT actually moving. That way they can take appropriate action to avoid you. Lastly, when you turn on your parking lights, the interior lights in the car also go on so your gauges, etc. are lit up. This is nice in case you need to look at a map or whatever.

So, what clown started the trend of driving with these?

I don't understand the appeal... Is it supposed to make you look all understated and shit? "Look, I'm driving with my parking lights on so that you can tell I know it's getting dark out or the visibility is crap but I don't want to actually be seen or anything so my headlights are still off." Nice.

Hello...! Why does every automotive insurance company on the planet not only recommend you drive with your headlights on 24/7 but also give you a discount if your car has running lights? BECAUSE IT'S SAFER, THAT'S WHY. Car lights help you be seen, even in direct sun light. Doing a quick search showed me this:

• Austria - running lights are required 24/7 or you get fined.
• Denmark - ditto
• Estonia - ditto
• Finland - ditto
• Iceland - ditto
• Italy - ditto
• Croatia - ditto
• Lithuania - ditto
• Norway - ditto
• Sweden - ditto
• Slovenia -ditto

Germany has this bit of legislation up for a vote and in France and Switzerland it is recommended but not required to have your lights on all the time.

Why? Because it works, that's why.

Here is what I see all the time... It's dark. And I mean I'd tell you what time it is except I can't read my watch dark. What comes down the road? A car with only the parking lights on. You just KNOW that this genius turned them on when it was dusk 'cuz it's so damn cool/euro/whatever and then as it got darker they just never figured it out BECAUSE ALL THEIR GAUGES ARE ALREADY LIT UP. Sheesh. And if you plop this joker on a street that has street lights and the road is that kinda half-assed low light where you can't tell if your headlights are on or not, he'll never figure this out.

And mind you it isn't men that posses exclusive rights to this derangement, many times I have seen a women behind the wheel flaunting the same massive brain power.

It's been required on motorcycles for years, what's the hold up for cars?

Shelley just sent me her results from this race today:

http://results.active.com/pages/oneResult.jsp?pID=29165020&rsID=50503&pubID=3

I am so impressed! She has not had much time to train at all what with work and her heinous commute and trying to schedule stuff for us to do together around my exercising so to only be a couple of seconds slower than the Iron Girl 10 km run she did earlier this fall is awesome. Way to go.

Yes! Timing really is everything.

A few weeks ago I was thinking, "It's been a long time since I've spoken with my good friend Chance..." so I gave him a call. Unfortunately (actually fortunately as it turned out) he did not answer and I had to leave a message.

Some time later I saw him reply to a post on a tech support list that I subscribe to at work. It reminded me that I had not heard back from him since I left my voice message so I sent him an email to follow up. After another email follow up Chance finally replied. He apologized profusely calling himself a "technological and social retard" which I think is going too far and besides, no apology necessary. We all get hung up on stuff and besides, I'm the king of letting things slide... I was just happy to hear from him.

ASIDE - Chance is an interesting (read: funny) guy. He's a self-professed Luddite and yet he started Formix which specializes in high-performance computing. Now from my vantage point, anyone that can design and implement a high-performance computing cluster is pretty savvy when it comes to technology. But being able to build computer clusters obviously does not equal knowing how to program your VCR. Or retrieve your voicemail.

So we decided that Shelley, Chance and I should go for a beer at the Stumbling Monk.

Practically the first thing out of his mouth was, "Do you two want to go to Whistler?"

Do I ever...!

So it's looking like we're not only going to be there but be there for New Years eve - what a blast! Chance has been staying in the same cabin for the last like five years:

and it looks really nice. I guess the owner had a chance to turn over the renting of the property to some developer or property manager or something ages ago and just wasn't organized to take them up on the offer before it expired. D'oh...! Chance tells me he could have doubled his money and kept the property. You know it won't last long but at least we still have this one year to enjoy it.

One of Chance's favorite things about Canada is that everything is labeled in English and in French. Like this tomato juice:

One of my favorite things about Chance is that he says stuff like this. And one of my favorite things about Canada is that it contains Whistler. Oh man, I can't WAIT.

I'm half German so it stands to reason that half of my family is German. And while it's certainly true that most of my German relatives don't even have Internet access much less the time or inclination to read this blog, it still makes me think about language more than maybe some other people. Maybe. Anyway, while I would say that my German is pretty fair, like anything else that you don't use on a regular basis it is rusty. So when I came across this translator on techRivet I thought it was perfect.

Just like Babel Fish or Google Language Tools the Windows Live Translator lets you paste in text and translate it into most languages. The gee wiz functionality for me was that you can add this to your web site with the following code:

I just added this to our blog near the top, right corner. Now my German relatives can continue to not read this with the benefit of translation. Neat.

Just this morning I was exercising outdoors and the sun was peeking through the clouds. Now my neighborhood is under 4" of snow. What do you do when it snows? You go play in it. I love this!

When Cameron and I arrived at TT Minor Park these two guys were already rolling a HUGE snowball around the playfield. The way it was picking up snow it looked like they were rolling up carpet or something.

You know how much that snowball weighs? A lot!

While they got to work on the center piece Cameron started packing a snowball by hand.

Here they are staging the middle piece.

Cameron helped by building the head.

So, if the middle section is too heavy to lift onto the base, what do you do? You build a ramp of course! When they were originally trying to lift it up I made the comment that it looked like the Atlas Stones event from the World's Strongest Man competition. They laughed. A little. And then got back to building the ramp.

And then you roll the damn thing up!

Nice. Now you just need to fill in the gap between the middle and the base a bit so the middle section won't roll off the base and you're good to go.

At this point my hands were numb and bloodless so I had to head home. Cameron hung around and helped these guys put the head on top and make some arms. Now that's the holiday spirit.