01/23/2001

The Wheel of America

Last Friday, I made a mix CD at work. I took a bunch of things off of Napster and burned the disc while I was re-formatting my boss' hard drive (Although I'm sure there are a great many of you who secretly dream of reformatting your boss' hard drive, this is different. She asked me to do it - it's her home computer that she brought in for me to whip back into shape after her children installed game after game until it choked). I don't have the exact list of songs in front of me right now, but it had a certain type of groove to it and I was trying to think of a name for the CD that would be appropriate. I have no middle ground when naming mix tapes/CDs. Its either really good or really bad. I was telling my wife that I needed a name for it and just as a goof, I asked Jake if he had a good name for the CD. He looked at me, paused for a moment and said, "How about 'The Wheel of America'?" I was stunned for a moment and then said, "That's it, you can't get any better than that." I mean really, it sounds like the perfect name for an album and here it was, spilling out of this little boy's mouth.

On the fitness front, I am trying to raise my running distance by a 1/2 mile every week. I started out the year at 1 mile which is exactly two laps around out little development in which we live. I had worked up to 2 miles last week, but was getting really bored with running the same loop four times in a row. So today I struck out on a 2 1/2 mile route that I had already laid out in my handy copy of Microsoft's Streets and Maps 2000. It used to be that if I wanted to know the distance I was running, I had to drive the route in my car or do the route on my bike. Streets and Maps has a nifty measuring tool that lets you know the mileage of any route that you pick. Something that I found odd was that route I was able to pick was exactly 2 1/2 miles starting and ending at my door. Then I was able to route a totally different route (as opposed to simply adding to the current route) that measures exactly three miles that also starts and ends at my house. It just seems odd, that's all - almost like one of those magic square things or Stonehenge.

I'm going up to Rhode Island next week for my work. I wish I had something more interesting to say about that but I don't.

I haven't updated as often as I'd like because I've been spending more time on the actual layout of the website than on content. You can't see it yet, but will start to see some more layout changes to the site come February.