.: bistan.net :.

This is where I’m going next Tuesday. Can you guess why?

Two weeks ago, we signed Tristan up for t-ball.  Then we bought him a glove and a ball.  Basically, we dropped $130 on baseball, but my child can’t throw, can’t catch, and can’t hit.  It really was stepping out for me to sign Tristan up for something like this.  I hate committments, so I’m not looking forward to sitting at practice or the ball field several nights a week.  But I also thought it might be good for him to be part of a team.

Yesterday was tryout day. We were concerned that we wouldn’t know anyone, but we ended up knowing four others:

Tristan’s best friend from his old day care (who he hardly sees anymore)
Tristan’s best friend from his current day care (who no longer goes there)
A classmate from Tristan’s preschool
A classmate from Tristan’s current kindergarten class

And to make it even better, we know (or have met) their parents as well.  Let’s just hope he ends up with one or more of them on his team!

I have a new blog reader, which just *might* bring my readership up to a total of 3.  She sat down the other night and read this site from top to bottom. She gives me plenty of feedback on my posts, though you wont see any of it in the Comments section.

To protect her identity, I won’t disclose her name, but we can refer to her “wife” for short.

Here we go again. I blog about how I resolve to blog more. Then I make about 3 blog posts. Then you don’t hear from me for a few weeks. Then I make an excuse about why I haven’t been blogging and then I resolve to blog more.

I guess that means this is the excuse post. Let’s see . . . I’m swamped at work, swamped with class, and swamped in my personal life.

Work: I won’t bore you with the work stuff.  I doubt you care about Windows 7 imaging and Drupal modules anyway.

School: It was stupid to commit to doing this masters degree in the first place. My first masters degree didn’t get me anywhere, yet I sign up for another one. My classes this semester are Object Oriented Programming II and Advanced Graphic Design. “Advanced Graphic Design” is what Mercer calls a video game programming class when they want employers to pay for it.  Since my language of choice for the program is C#, I’m developing a game in XNA Game Studio 3.1.  I have a project in OOP2 due next week on secure code and wikis and a project in the game class due the following week on 2D game programming.  My game is pretty sweet and when I compile it, I’ll publish it here and you can download and play it too!

Running: My heel is still freaking killing me.  I can barely walk when I get out of bed in the mornings. I only ran 7 miles this week, but I need to knock out at least 5 tomorrow to exceed 70 miles for the month.

Personal life: We signed Tristan up for T-ball.  That should be interesting. I’m not particularly looking to spend 3 nights a week at a ballpark, but we want to get him involved in something.  Kimberlie is now up to 60 – 70 hour weeks so I have the kids by myself in the evenings for a while.  She works with two other Occupational Therapists.  One is in Africa for a month and the other just went out of maternity leave.  And then on Monday, as if we didn’t have enough going on, her mother died.  After this week, we are both certainly looking forward to a new week.

This past weekend was Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend.  This is the second year that I’ve participated.  On Thursday, we checked the kids out of school early and headed down to the Wide World of Sports for the expo and packet-pick up.

The Expo

Friday morning I ran the Up and Away Family Fun Run 5K.  I didn’t really have any time goals for this race.  My current 5K PR is around 24 minutes and I knew I wouldn’t come close to that.  With 5000 runners in a race, it’s nearly impossible to run for a time goal.  Besides, I wanted to save my energy for the Half-Marathon on Saturday.  It was around 40 degrees at the beginning of the 5K, which I thought was pretty cold at the time.  Little did I know. 

The 5K was a nice run around and through a pre-dawn Epcot. I finished in a little over 26 minutes.

UP house at the 5K start

5K Start at Epcot

On Saturday came the race I’ve been waiting for.  The Half-Marathon.  This was the race I had trained for.  I thought the 5K was cold, but on Saturday it was in the very low 30s with a wind chill in the 20s.  And sleet . . . in Central Florida.  Lots of sleet and rain for the entire 13.1 miles.  Nevertheless, the family came out and cheered for me.  We had previously made signs and shirts and Kimberlie committed to getting up at 3:30 in the morning and chasing me around Walt Disney World.

My family at 3:30 in the morning

Me and an army man before the start

Tristan with his sign

The race started and I felt really good at first, but then the heel pain started creeping on. My time goal was 2 hours, but it ended up taking me 2 hours and 14 minutes. Of course, part of that was stopping to take pictures with characters, part of it was the sleet (and ice in my eyes) and the rest can be attributed to heal pain.  By 8:00 am, it was over and we were back in the hotel.  It took my body until well after noon to heat up and stop shivvering.

Princess Tiana along the course

Daisy with the family after the half-marathon

On Sunday morning, my feet were killing me.  Unfortunately, I had to get out of bed at 3:30 and run 26.2 miles before sitting in the car for a six hour ride home.  How was I going to do it?  On marathon morning, it was 26 degrees with a wind chill in the teens.  Brrrrr.

Starting Line	Characters at the Start	Pluto at Epcot
Hot air balloon	Reindeer in the cold	Dopey

It was so cold, that the course was icy. The powerade was slushy. The bananas were frozen solid. People dressed in layers and shed them as they ran. Disney collected the clothing, laundered them, and donated them to charity — over 30,000 pieces.

Somehow, I was able to finish. Over 8,000 of the 24,000+ marathoners did not finish.  Although it took over 6 hours.  At the time, I didn’t think I had ever been in that much pain before, but now I can’t remember — sort of like when a female goes through childbirth.  In fact, I plan on registering for all of the races again next year.

This photo made it worth all of the time, energy, effort and expense.

My bling bling: UP medal, Donald medal, Mickey medal and Goofy medal

Pictured above is the Star Student from Mrs. Hiland’s kindergarten class at Heard Elementary School. Finally!

I’m so proud, that I’m completely overlooking the fact that there are 20 students in the class and it is week 19 of school.  And I’m overlooking the fact that the teacher likes me right now because I did photos of all of the kids during Cookie Day.  And I’m overlooking the fact that this is a short week of school (and even shorter for Tristan).

Here are some of my accomplishments and favorite memories for 2009:

I completed my first half-marathon and marathon, as well as sliced 4 minutes off of my best 5K time.

We visited Walt Disney World SEVEN times in 2009, compared to once in 2008.  (You won’t see this on next year’s list!)  We celebrated both my 30th birthday and Tristan’s 6th birthday in the most magical place on earth.

I visited for the first time: Colorado, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

I began working on another masters degree.

I fell in love . . . with my new iPhone. Ha!

I cut two years worth of hair off.

Tristan learned to ride his bicycle without training wheels, and then later got a new bike.

My kids got to see their first Georgia snowfall, and then later  got to play in six feet of real snow for the first time.  I had never even seen that much snow before!

I went on field trips with both Tristan and Mackenzie.  So much fun!

I volunteered at Tristan’s school — my alma mater — Heard Elementary school.

We went roller skating.  It was Tristan and Mackenzie’s first time ever and my first time in 20 years!

I saw the space shuttle launch at night from the beach — although it was from 200 miles away and not quite as I originally planned.

I’m finally learning how to make money online. My blog made $2019.94 (compared to $78.41 in 2008).  Guess I’m getting a 1099 this year.  If I could sustain those percentage gains, I wouldn’t have to work anymore!  (Of course, if I were a professional blogger I would actually have to blog more.)

I ran 497 miles in 2009 (compared to 343 in 2008).  That’s pathetic, but I’ve been dealing with pain injury pretty much all year.  I’m even wearing a brace on my left foot as I type this — trying to recover enough to run next week’s 5K, half-marathon, and marathon.

Of course, there are many things that I’ve left out.  You can read my blog to find some of them, but there have also been (many) times where I’ve been too busy or lazy to blog about it: such as our Six Flags Trip or Discover Macon, etc.

2009 was overall one of the best years and it was much much better than 2008.  Let’s hope that 2010 is even better. Happy New Year!

Once again this year, I’m not making “resolutions”.  I do have several goals for the new year.

Fitness Related:

Run a half-marathon in less than 2 hours. (Let’s hope this happens on January 9!)

Reduce my 5K PR to 22 minutes.

Run 1000 miles in 2010.

Restart and actually complete hundredpushups.com.

Commit to and begin training to run (not run/walk) an entire marathon.

Drop my weight down to 160.

Eat out no more than once per week.

Finance Related:

Eat out no more than once per week (this falls under both).

Be completely debt free by 2011.

Work/School Related:

Take two masters degree classes each semester and stay on top of them.

Stop passing up greener pastures.

Home Related:

Spend more time teaching my kids things.

Get rid of more junk.

Computer Related:

Tweet more.

Blog more.

Facebook less.

I think that’s enough for now. I’ll try to revisit this post every few months to see how I’m doing.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that we attended part of the taping for the Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade.  I also included a few of the 500 pictures I snapped and one of the videos I shot.  Here is a tilt-shift video, created by Disney of the Christmas parade.

As you can see, tilt-shift is a cool technology.  I consider it analogous to HDR photography, but even cooler.  Here are links to two other tilt-shift videos with short explanations by Disney if you are interested in the technology:

Magic Kingdom Tilt-shift
Epcot Tilt-shift
Tilt-shift Explanation

Here are some screen shots from the video, so that you can see where to find us in the parade.  It airs tomorrow, Christmas Day, at 10:00 AM on your local ABC channel.

As a hobbyist photographer, I always want the best picture – especially when my child is performing.  We learned a hard lesson at the preschool open house last year: Don’t get there on time . . . get there very early!  So this year, we did.

Here is a question for the reader(s): Suppose you arrived somewhere an hour early to get a good seat.  You rushed home from work, rushed to change clothes, and had to entertain two small children for that entire hour.  All of that just so you could (hopefully) take some decent photos of your three-year-old child singing carols.  After sitting for 45 minutes (and trying to entertain those two small kids), the room is about 90 percent full.  There are several seats in the back and one seat next to you. A man with a cane sits in the empty seat next to you.  His overweight wife then asks you to give up your seat so that she could sit next to her “handicapped husband”.  What do you do?

Now I certainly have ranted before on this issue.  I hate it when handicapped people attempt to exploit their disability to gain something.  I politely suggested that they sit together in the back, however, the thoughts going through my mind were much more colorful.  Throughout the entire evening, the man kept making remarks to his wife about how sorry he was that she didn’t have a seat and how inconsiderate people can be.  I bit my tongue . . . so hard.  I haven’t had a reason to show anyone at Mackenzie’s preschool the ugly side of Jonathan and I certainly didn’t want to do it at the Christmas Open House.

Should handicapped people have reserved seating at the front when there are clearly no visual or hearing disabilities?  Parking is one thing, but seating is another.  Like you, I may have left my “What Would Jesus Do” bracelet back in the nineties, but I would have given up my seat to a blind or deaf person.  I will not, however, give up my seat to someone attempting to exploit their perceived handicap.  Notice I say “perceived”, because I doubt that toting around a cane makes you handicapped.

So that’s what Jonathan did.  What would you do?