I took a rest week. Wiped out from all of that video gaming, I guess. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Monday: Vegetation
Tuesday: 3.1 miles
Wednesday: 3.2 miles
Thursday: HIIT and weights
Friday: Vegetation redux
Saturday: 7.5 miles
Sunday: Vegetation, part trois
Total: 13.8 miles and oh so much vegetation.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Another Week in Review
Getting miles in during PAX proved more difficult than expected. After 12 hours of eating pizza, staring at screens, and wandering the show, I was hardly in the mood to pound pavement the next morning. But somehow, magically, it happened.
Monday: 4.1 miles
Tuesday: 60 minutes on the stationary bike plus lifting
Wednesday: 4.1 miles
Thursday: HIIT and power sets
Friday: 3 miles + PAX
Saturday: 6.5 miles + PAX
Sunday: rest + PAX
Total: 17.7 miles and 3 days of PAX!
Monday: 4.1 miles
Tuesday: 60 minutes on the stationary bike plus lifting
Wednesday: 4.1 miles
Thursday: HIIT and power sets
Friday: 3 miles + PAX
Saturday: 6.5 miles + PAX
Sunday: rest + PAX
Total: 17.7 miles and 3 days of PAX!
Monday, September 1, 2008
Penny Arcade Expo '08 - Day One
After a year of waiting, it finally arrived. The fifth Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) exploded in the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle, with 60,000 DS Lite-toting, black-t-shirt-clad, iPhone snuffling geeks descending into the crater.
Oh, look, here's one now!
(That's me in front of the Fallout 3 Demo Airstream. Talk about a massive nostalgia moment: I played both Fallout 1 and 2 while living in a 1970 Silver Streak trailer (very very similar to the Airstream) that actually had a white--er, maybe off-white--picket fence and astroturf. Aside: this Airstream is much nicer than the one I lived in, which was basically a large twinkie-shaped crap box. Also, Adam Sessler from G4 was in the trailer playing a Fallout 3 demo while this photo was being taken (geek celebrity moment!))
On to Day 1...
We started off the day with a run, if only to negate the oodles of junk food we would surely snarf over the weekend. We met up with my friend (and ex-WoW guildmate) Audrey mid-morning for breakfast at Cafe Campagne. It has been a full year since I saw her last (at PAX '07, no less) and it was great to find excuses to socialize at an event chock-full of decidedly non-social people, myself included. After a delicious breakfast of zucchini quiche and oeufs en meurette, both of
which were delicious, we made our way to the convention center...
I feel the need to provide some verbal imagery here, if only because pictures fail to capture the size and scope of the general geekery that is PAX (and uh, I didn't take any of the line). The main halls of the convention are two vast, equally-sized gray rooms, with one serving as the waiting room for the other. Enforcers (PAX staffers, often men wearing black tshirts and black kilts) control entry into the first waiting room while another group of Enforcers inside hand out swag bags, or the plastic bags full of free goodies for the attendees. Once in the line, people file up, sit down, and sprawl... over be-buttoned messenger bags, wadded MC Frontalot hoodies, or one another. DS Lites appear like white flashes out of pockets, lights from bluetooth headsets flicker from every ear, and the thrum of chatter grows: the con has officially begun. Being in a congested hall with 4000 fellow geeks did lead to a few interesting notes:
- The DSLite : Human ratio is at least 0.9
- "There are only 10 kinds of people who understand binary..." t-shirts are very popular
- Cosplay is not particularly popular at this convention.
- The average attendee is 24, male, white, and neckbearded (bonus points for a soul patch)
- The average attendee appears to carry about $1000.00 worth of electronics on his person: iPhone, DS Lite, and a camera or two.
- New hotness buzz was dominated by Fallout 3 and Farcry 2
As the hour hand on the clock moves towards 2, people beging to stomp and clap. At 2pm, a cheer goes up and the line oozes towards the convention entry doors. After about half an hour, we made it into the convention. It's an overload on the senses (and my brain doesn't come with a cooling fan, unfortunately). People are -everywhere-. Flashing lights are everywhere. Whatever is left of your ear drums is swallowed by hundreds of speakers competing for your attention.
Castle Crashers statue in the expo hall.
At this point we tried to figure out something resembling a schedule for he weekend. Given the number of panels offered, the only disappointment was that attending all of the panels that sounded interesting would have been a logical impossibility. We decided to attend the keynote featuring the Ken "who the hell is he and why is he famous" Levine. It was... okay. The themes were essentially the same as Wil Wheaton's speech last year: that we should embrace being geeks, etc etc, and this is a very sensible way to start a convention dedicated to those of us on the social periphery, but something about the speech felt forced. Maybe it was the swearing that felt more "keep it real with the kids" than genuine or purposeful, or the relative awkwardness of the speech itself. But it had its moments, and the themes were appropriate. Afterwards, we ducked out of the PA Q&A to do a little cookie hawking for charity. We toured the expo floor to gawk and collect swag, when we stumbled on one of several guitar hero tournaments. This guy could sing. For reals. And in the follow-up band, I'm pretty sure that their "guitarist" could actually play, which made the process of playing a fake guitar both more and less absurd:
Then we watched a cosplay ninja fight.
Followed by reliving some of my misspent years in WoW (that's Onyxia's cavern, for the uninitiated):
Given the ever-growing attendence at PAX, the first four floors of the convention center were swarmed, which brings me to the next activity in which we perpetually indulged: sitting in line. While this sounds terribly boring, sitting in line for the events ended up being one of the more enjoyable aspects of the show: you could relax, play some DS, chat up your fellow gamers, sip a Jones cola (hey, they were free), or maybe even crack open a book (but be prepared for hissing and beatings with those slap bracelets from Aion). In the evening, we dallied briefly at the One-Ups concert, but I just couldn't get down with the gamer-jazz groove, and we called it a night for our achey, blistered feet.
I leave you a final image for the day - a baby wearing (or pooping) a PAX badge:
Oh, look, here's one now!
(That's me in front of the Fallout 3 Demo Airstream. Talk about a massive nostalgia moment: I played both Fallout 1 and 2 while living in a 1970 Silver Streak trailer (very very similar to the Airstream) that actually had a white--er, maybe off-white--picket fence and astroturf. Aside: this Airstream is much nicer than the one I lived in, which was basically a large twinkie-shaped crap box. Also, Adam Sessler from G4 was in the trailer playing a Fallout 3 demo while this photo was being taken (geek celebrity moment!))
On to Day 1...
We started off the day with a run, if only to negate the oodles of junk food we would surely snarf over the weekend. We met up with my friend (and ex-WoW guildmate) Audrey mid-morning for breakfast at Cafe Campagne. It has been a full year since I saw her last (at PAX '07, no less) and it was great to find excuses to socialize at an event chock-full of decidedly non-social people, myself included. After a delicious breakfast of zucchini quiche and oeufs en meurette, both of
which were delicious, we made our way to the convention center...
I feel the need to provide some verbal imagery here, if only because pictures fail to capture the size and scope of the general geekery that is PAX (and uh, I didn't take any of the line). The main halls of the convention are two vast, equally-sized gray rooms, with one serving as the waiting room for the other. Enforcers (PAX staffers, often men wearing black tshirts and black kilts) control entry into the first waiting room while another group of Enforcers inside hand out swag bags, or the plastic bags full of free goodies for the attendees. Once in the line, people file up, sit down, and sprawl... over be-buttoned messenger bags, wadded MC Frontalot hoodies, or one another. DS Lites appear like white flashes out of pockets, lights from bluetooth headsets flicker from every ear, and the thrum of chatter grows: the con has officially begun. Being in a congested hall with 4000 fellow geeks did lead to a few interesting notes:
- The DSLite : Human ratio is at least 0.9
- "There are only 10 kinds of people who understand binary..." t-shirts are very popular
- Cosplay is not particularly popular at this convention.
- The average attendee is 24, male, white, and neckbearded (bonus points for a soul patch)
- The average attendee appears to carry about $1000.00 worth of electronics on his person: iPhone, DS Lite, and a camera or two.
- New hotness buzz was dominated by Fallout 3 and Farcry 2
As the hour hand on the clock moves towards 2, people beging to stomp and clap. At 2pm, a cheer goes up and the line oozes towards the convention entry doors. After about half an hour, we made it into the convention. It's an overload on the senses (and my brain doesn't come with a cooling fan, unfortunately). People are -everywhere-. Flashing lights are everywhere. Whatever is left of your ear drums is swallowed by hundreds of speakers competing for your attention.
Castle Crashers statue in the expo hall.At this point we tried to figure out something resembling a schedule for he weekend. Given the number of panels offered, the only disappointment was that attending all of the panels that sounded interesting would have been a logical impossibility. We decided to attend the keynote featuring the Ken "who the hell is he and why is he famous" Levine. It was... okay. The themes were essentially the same as Wil Wheaton's speech last year: that we should embrace being geeks, etc etc, and this is a very sensible way to start a convention dedicated to those of us on the social periphery, but something about the speech felt forced. Maybe it was the swearing that felt more "keep it real with the kids" than genuine or purposeful, or the relative awkwardness of the speech itself. But it had its moments, and the themes were appropriate. Afterwards, we ducked out of the PA Q&A to do a little cookie hawking for charity. We toured the expo floor to gawk and collect swag, when we stumbled on one of several guitar hero tournaments. This guy could sing. For reals. And in the follow-up band, I'm pretty sure that their "guitarist" could actually play, which made the process of playing a fake guitar both more and less absurd:
Then we watched a cosplay ninja fight.
Followed by reliving some of my misspent years in WoW (that's Onyxia's cavern, for the uninitiated):
Given the ever-growing attendence at PAX, the first four floors of the convention center were swarmed, which brings me to the next activity in which we perpetually indulged: sitting in line. While this sounds terribly boring, sitting in line for the events ended up being one of the more enjoyable aspects of the show: you could relax, play some DS, chat up your fellow gamers, sip a Jones cola (hey, they were free), or maybe even crack open a book (but be prepared for hissing and beatings with those slap bracelets from Aion). In the evening, we dallied briefly at the One-Ups concert, but I just couldn't get down with the gamer-jazz groove, and we called it a night for our achey, blistered feet.
I leave you a final image for the day - a baby wearing (or pooping) a PAX badge:
Friday, August 29, 2008
Monstrous Cookies
The Penny Arcade Expo starts tomorrow, well, later today to be exact. After the downsizing of E3, it is now the largest video gaming convention in America, a full weekend where thousands of gamers can convene and indulge in the sport--sport, can I say that?--they love most, and how fortunate are we to have this right in our back yard?
Forums for the Expo (and the eponymous web comic) are buzzing in the run up, and amidst that buzz a grassroots effort was re-ignited to help raise funds for Child's Play, a charity devoted to supplying children's hospitals with games and toys. The PAX Cookie Brigade is a group of a dozen or so people who will be exchanging hand-made cookies for donations to Child's Play over the course of the weekend.
So I made monster cookies.
Did I mention that my husband has excellent arts and crafts skills?
Forums for the Expo (and the eponymous web comic) are buzzing in the run up, and amidst that buzz a grassroots effort was re-ignited to help raise funds for Child's Play, a charity devoted to supplying children's hospitals with games and toys. The PAX Cookie Brigade is a group of a dozen or so people who will be exchanging hand-made cookies for donations to Child's Play over the course of the weekend.
So I made monster cookies.
Did I mention that my husband has excellent arts and crafts skills?
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Another Week in Review
Things are going steadily, by which I mean I have been able to meet my very conservative mileage increases without pain, and to ensure that they continue to do so I've been spending a lot of quality time with The Stick and the foam roller. After 3 or 4 runs I am thinking of returning my new Air Max Moto 6+ because of painful hot spots on the sole of my left foot. And there is something... incomplete feeling about the shoe - when I run in them, my socks definitely stay on. I will probably exchange them for a second pair of vomero 3+'s, which have been so very good to me.
Monday: 4.2 miles
Tuesday: 60 interminable minutes on the stationary bike
Wednesday: 3.1 miles, lifting
Thursday: Does housecleaning count?
Friday: 3.04 miles
Saturday: 7.45 miles
Sunday: 3 episodes of Ken Burns' Civil War
Total: 17.8 miles and 6 documentaries or parts thereof
Monday: 4.2 miles
Tuesday: 60 interminable minutes on the stationary bike
Wednesday: 3.1 miles, lifting
Thursday: Does housecleaning count?
Friday: 3.04 miles
Saturday: 7.45 miles
Sunday: 3 episodes of Ken Burns' Civil War
Total: 17.8 miles and 6 documentaries or parts thereof
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Good Night, Summer
I looked outside the window on this cool August evening and stared at the rain. Yes, the rain. This has been an indecisive season: is it fall? Is it summer? 90F and sunny? 70F and raining? 55F and thunderstorms? This weekend walked the middle ground, cool and overcast with a curtain of rain that only teased us occasionally with the sun. The weekend begged a meal as indecisive as its weather, a perennial favorite of mine: Tomato Bacon Soup. It comes from one of my favorite cookbooks, the Hay Day Country Market Cookbook, marrying the bright flavors of heirloom tomatoes with the comforting smokiness of bacon.
Tomato Bacon Soup
Adapted from the Hayday Country Market Cookbook
4 lbs heirloom tomatoes, diced with juices reserved
8 thick slices of bacon, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 c. chicken stock
4 tbs. fresh thyme
1 c. milk
1 bay leaf
2 tbs. butter
In a large, heavy-bottomed pot cook the bacon over medium heat until
browned and crispy. Drain off about 2/3 of the fat. Add the butter and
onions, cooking until the onions have clarified. Add the tomatoes,
chicken stock, the bay leaf, half the thyme, and some salt and pepper.
Simmer with the lid on for 20-30 minutes. For thicker soup, continue
simmering, sans lid, for an additional 5-7 minutes (this is my
preference). Stir in the milk and remaining thyme, adjust seasoning.
Friday, August 22, 2008
A Proustian Moment for Breakfast
This Madeleine recipe is from Chez Pim. They are fragrant and butter-wonderful. They also make a nutritionally-complete breakfast that is great for post-run fueling. At least, that's how I rationalized eating 3 Madeleines for breakfast today.
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