The sun beats down relentlessly on my front yard, ruining any attempts at growing the vile green weed known simply as grass.  Just for kicks I've tried a variety of methods to encourage the grown of this simple organism:  Planting more seeds, spreading a natural fertilizer, aerating.  Nothing really seems to make much of a difference, which is fine because I've only mowed the lawn like twice this summer.  But what baffles me is this:  If grass has such a hard time growing in my lawn, why does it grow so effortlessly and abundantly through the cracks in my sidewalk? 

I'm a nerd, so I went running today with an iPod and a GPS device, and I extracted and correlated the data from each device to show which song was playing at different points along my run and how fast I was running at each of those points, and I put that data into Excel and plotted it: 

See?  That's nerdy.  What I was trying to determine was if certain music made me run faster or not.  The specific songs don't particularly matter, but each was selected (by me) for the purpose of working out, which means they were of the rock variety, and generally loud and fast.  In general, my speed decreased throughout the run, which makes sense.  And those big spikes in the data are just GPS noise; nothing significant.  But what stands out to me is the following: 

1. I started out pretty quick, both because I had lots of energy and also because that particular song matched up exactly with my pace.  The internet says it's 162 beats per minute, which equates to a little less than three steps per second.
2. Right around the 600-second mark was when I experienced my first cramp, and then right around the 1200-second mark is when I got the second one.  Both cramps brought about a decrease in speed, and then a subsequent increase after they passed.
3. That song right about in the middle of my run, which corresponds to track number 5, seemed to have a small but noticeable effect on my speed.  That particular song has been in my music collection for a good decade, and it still pumps me up.

In conclusion, music is like a drug to me, and it makes me do things I otherwise normally wouldn't or couldn't do.  Here's to running, and music, and nerdiness! 

Always refill the sugar container over the sink.  Don't question it.  Don't try to remember all the times you didn't spill something.  Just do it, and your life will be infinitely better. 

I was awoken the other morning by the wonderful sound of soft tapping on my bedroom wall.  I got out of bed to find out that it was a stupid woodpecker, boring its way into my house.  As with the squirrel incident, if I owned a gun, this bird would have been surprised to find some extra metal in its fleshy parts. 

The thing I don't understand about this situation is this:  Why in the name of God's green earth do we humans decide to build our living spaces out of the most pest-ridden, rot-prone building material on earth, i.e. wood?  Why don't we use stone or metal or plastic, or some other material that isn't made of irregularly spaced grains and has a tendency to soak up water like a sponge?  Perhaps we could choose something that isn't a natural meal for ants, bees, termites, mice, squirrels, woodpeckers, and hell, really anything that feels like it could use a snack.  I mean, we have iPods and high def TVs and nuclear bombs.  In 1000 years, we'll still have iPods, high def TVs, and nuclear bombs, but our stupid houses will be worthless heaps of garbage because they're made of a once-living substance. 

The Albuquerque Isotopes are a minor league baseball team based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  I verified this with my own eyes on a recent visit.  This is notable because (a) nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory was and is heavily involved with nuclear weapons research (isotope = nuclear thing), and (b) the team name was inspired by an episode of the Simpsons (the Simpsons' home town of Springfield has a nuclear power plant).  Yay science-TV-real-life! 

One of life's great mysteries is how birds get hit by cars.  Ground animals like squirrels and ground hogs, I understand.  But birds have something most animals (and cars) lack:  Vertical position modification, i.e. the ability to fly.  Whenever I see a dead bird on the road, I just want to walk up to it ask it, "Honestly, what happened?  Did you forget that you knew how to fly?  Clearly you use that ability to evade every other dangerous situation in life.  What's so different about a car?"  But that would mean talking to a dead bird, which is weird. 

I once heard someone say, "We communicate our values."  Another person put it this way:  "We act out our beliefs."  Craig Groeschel, pastor of LifeChurch.tv, told this story in one of his sermons: 

What you believe determines how you behave ... For example, one time, when my oldest son Sam came running in, throwing up into his hands ... *blechghchgh* and he said, "Daddy, Bookie is eating his poop!"  So I ran past Sam who was throwing up in his hands and ran into the room where there was little Bookie, my second son, with dark stuff all over him.  And I threw up, not in my hands.  It was like, violent, vomiting.  It went well beyond my hands.  It went everywhere.  So Sam's in throw-up, I'm in throw-up, and so we did the only thing we could do, which was call for Mom ... She came busting in, by all the throw-up, and there was Bookie with the dark stuff.  And she just went up to him and wiped off the smudged Oreo cookie which was on his face.  Wasn't poop; it was Oreo cookie.  But we believed it was poop, and so it affected us as if it were poop.

That's probably the best sermon I've ever heard.  And he makes an excellent point. 

I've noticed that most people have a tendency to regularly pronounce at least one word completely wrong.  And not because they have an accent or a speech impediment or a lack of education, but simply because something went wrong in their speech development to cause them to fumble over just that one simple word.  For example, I have a friend who pronounces the word "awkward" as "ock-ward," except with a huge emphasis on the "ock" part.  One might say he pronounces it "awkwardly."  The pastor of my church, besides using the annoying yet dictionary-approved pronunciation of "mature" as "ma-tyoor" (I say "ma-choor," and what I say is always right), pronounces the word "ordinary" as "awww-dinary," which comes out in sentences like, "The love of man is awww-dinary, while the love of God is extra-awww-dinary."  One might say his unusual pronunciation is a little out of the "ordinary."  I knew a girl in high school who pronounced "frustrated" without the first R, making it "fustrated."  One might say it was a little "frustrating" to hear.  Finally, my aunt says "goff" instead of "golf," which is something I absolutely can't figure out how to include in a pun. 

This past weekend+ was spent visiting my sister in southwest Texas and sightseeing in New Mexico.  El Paso is close enough to Carlsbad Caverns National Park to pay a visit.  The cave part was pretty cool, but the other attraction -- the 400,000 bats that emerge each night -- didn't happen because of the rain.  The next day we drove up to Albuquerque and stopped at White Sands National Monument and Three Rivers Petroglyph Site on the way.  After spending a day in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, we flew home.  Short, but good, trip. 

Pictures: (more...)

When I travel to a new locale, I tend to forever judge it by the weather I experience while there.  I visited my sister in San Francisco one summer, and it was cold and rainy.  Since then I've always assumed the myths about the wonderful weather of northern California to be completely false.  Another summer I visited a different sister in Seattle, and it happened to be during a week of warm, dry, perfect weather.  As much as I know I'm wrong, I assume the Pacific northwest to be sunny and dry in the summer.  I just got back from a trip to west Texas and New Mexico, where it was cool and rainy.  Apparently, deserts aren't that dry, and now I'm doomed to think that forever, or until I visit again, which won't be soon because if I wanted cold rain, I wouldn't leave New Jersey.