Posts tagged twitter

Let’s Dance!

God, I almost skipped another month!  What is the point of this thing anymore?  Stupid Twitter and Facebook!  I need to challenge myself to write daily or weekly or something, or come up with something column-like to write about.  Or not care and do what I’ve been doing.  Hmm, that sounds easier!

I have been riding my bike to work lately because we have decided to be a single-car family, in addition to being a single-income family.   My car was sounding horrible and wasn’t worth the price it would probably have cost to fix it, so I donated it to Cars For Kids and got a tax write-off (theoretically).    I was only really using my car to get to work and back anyway, so using my brand new bike that I bought years ago and never used seems just as easier.  I can’t say it’s much exercise, since the distance from home to work isn’t that far, but it does feel nice to get the blood flowing a bit after sitting at a desk all day.  Maybe I should get a motorcycle or something.  Oh wait, those cost money, huh?

dancedayIn-laws are in town, and the families went to watch The Kid perform at the San Jose Center for Performing Arts with her dance class.  Three hours of show for about three minutes of Kid time, but it was pretty cool, if not a bit long in the tooth.  Those kids are really talented though, and a lot of them could easily go on to dance professionally in theater…or as strippers or something.  (Man! they sexy those kids up young.  Gah.)  Over 100+ people watching the show, and no nervousness from The Kid, so that was impressive.  I’d have been hawking up a liver backstage.  She’s either too young to know better or she’s destined for stardom.  Time will tell.  Afterward, early dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.  Need I say more?

I don’t think I accomplished any of my to-do list I wrote about last entry, so that’s consistent of me.  Working on the garage again today though.  Good thing it’s hot outside!

Slow and Steady Loses the Race

WOW,  I think I skipped an entire month.  Perhaps Twitter is ruining my blogging enthusiasm.  So much easier to write a one sentence thought rather than construct entire paragraphs.  Da horror!

So what have I done?  A bunch of stuff.  In-Laws came and went again.  (They still think I hate their visits, but I really do like it because somehow I end up watching way more of the TV I want when they’re here.  Not sure why it works out that way, but I am not going to question it.)  Went to Seattle on business.  Been there once before, and like last trip, ate at the Space Needle and did not have time to hit the Experience Music Project nor the Sci-Fi Museum and Hall of Fame.  Must visit that city when not working someday.  (I managed to peak inside the Sci-Fi Museum when it was closed and saw a huge Gort in the lobby.  Coool!)

But inbetween all that I did something worth doing, for once.  As I may or may not have stated before, a buddy of mine and I agreed to run a 5K, 10K and 1/2 Marathon by September of this year.  We set this goal last September, giving us a year to do it, so of course we’re just getting started now, because lazy is our M.O.  We settled on the Mission City 5K Run for Fun held at Great America.  It was their first year doing this, and it was pretty cool.  You run through the park, which was nice, but then the last half of it involved circling around many a parking lot, which wasn’t as nice, but by then I was so tired I didn’t really care about the ambiance. The cool thing is they close the park down for the runners to enjoy after the event, and the price of admission is included in the race price, which was all of $20, so that’s about as cheap as Great America gets.  Of course, I didn’t have time to stick around and enjoy the park, but perhaps next year I can drag the family with me and make a day of it.

I can’t say I trained for this very hard.  I knew about for a month and started running at the gym a week prior.  (See M.O. above.)  It hurt, but I did better than I thought.  I only stopped once, about half way through it, for about a minute.  Legs hurting me didn’t stop me, a mild asthma attack didn’t stop me, feeling the contents of my stomach crawling up my neck stopped me pretty quick.  There were children present, I didn’t want to scar any of them for life.  After a brief catching of breath and a quick shot from my inhaler (I know ladies, could I be more sexy?) I finished fairly strong.  That is to say I finished #338 out of 560, so not strong strong, but winning wasn’t the goal at all, just completing.  Considering how little I trained, I’m fairly happy with my 12 minute mile average.

Mission 5K: Complete!
Time: 37.23.  Beat that losers!  (Sooo sad…)

Next stop is the 10K.  No plans yet on which one, but I don’ t think I can get away with no training this time, so I signed up at Snaps Fitness, which is a 24/7 gym literally right across the street from my house.  If I can’t make that work, well…that would be sad.

Twitter

It seems slightly more complicated than it needs to me. Or perhaps not so much complicated as user-unfriendly. It’s a status changer, I get it. But the reply function is just weird. Unlike Facebook, for instance, where you can click the little “comment” link underneath a status, and then it actually shows your comment (and everyone else’s) underneath the status, Twitter doesn’t really thread anything. You’re just supposed to follow who’s talking to who somehow.

You get used to it after a while, but I think it could look more intuitive on their site. It really helps to change the setting “@ Replies” to “@ Replies to the people I’m following”, so that you don’t see replies from the people you’re following to people you don’t care about on your main page. (You still see their replies on their main page, but that’s what you get for going there. Confused yet? I am!)

I was going to dismiss Twitter, but is seems like every site I go to has a twitter application option. And I can sync it to my Facebook status changes, so it’s not really going out of my way to use it. And John Cleese is on there, and if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. So anyone reading this got a Twitter page? I do! Let’s follow each other!