Sunday News Edition

I have a few pieces of news, none of which merit their own blog post.  So here's the digest version of everything.

• I just passed 200 miles run in 2010!  The goal for the year is 500, so I'm behind.  But for taking a six week break, I think I'm still in an okay position.  It'll take me about 15 miles per week for the rest of the year to meet the goal, which is still very doable.  It's even more doable when you factor in my training plan for the 2010 Rock'N'Roll San Antonio Half Marathon.  The 15-week plan ranges between 16 and 28 mile weeks.

• First week of the 2010 RnRSA plan I believe I must call a success. I ran most of the plan, even after the hiatus. Only running 12 miles of the 16 makes me feel a bit disappointed, but it's the most miles per week I've completed since April.  Coming out the other end with no injuries has to be counted as an accomplishment. Here's to next week!  May it be filled with 17 miles including a quality speed interval day.

• My eyes are paid off! My expensive self-splurge this year was on LASIK surgery, which has been pretty awesome.  Sometimes when my eyes are dry, I can't help the feeling of wanting to take out my contacts.  However, I have gotten over the habit of groping my bedside table for my glasses in the morning.  I think I'll appreciate this more in the years to come.  But for now, I will appreciate that I have no bills for it!  So I've taken care of 80% of my pay-down-debt goal with only 60% of the year gone by. 

• I'm behind in my movie watching.  Here's the rundown of ones I've seen recently. Loved the A-Team.  In my opinion, a better series remake than Get Smart or StarTrek. Karate Kid was okay, but my favorite part was the credits for the photography and the Justin Bieber/Jaden Smith song.  Inception was freaking awesome, as everyone should know by now.  The Sorcerer's Apprentice was cute, but not as good as I was hoping.  Despicable Me was very funny, but the trailers were misleading. The dude laughed a lot more than I did.

• I had to abandon the re-read of a book I loved in high school: The Spellsong Sorceress by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.  Twenty pages in and it had all of the writing sins now shunned in recently published books.  The ones that irked me the most were his paragraphs of laundry-list descriptions and flip-flopping verb tenses.  Pairing that with the high fantasy genre, it just felt snooty.  Alas, there goes a fond memory of a childhood read.

• Douglas Adams' sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, was another excellent book.  This particular book had more commentary than narrative, and the time-travel aspect got a bit confusing, but I still very much enjoyed it. His writing style is fantastic, putting character-driven narrative next to laugh-out-loud, snarky, satirical social commentary.  I don't know of any other writer who has achieved both or done it with such a light heart.  My favorite part is the mathematical proof of why there the universe has a population of zero.  Oh, "and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."

I think it's been a good week, though not very productive.