May Volunteering

Philabundance is a food bank that serves southeastern PA and southern NJ. I headed there with One Brick for a morning of volunteering. First, they needed to divide us into two groups: sorting and packing meat and cleaning. I opted for cleaning, since the meat locker was cold. After we cleaned the floor, they moved us to sorting and tomatoes. Bad idea. It was pretty gross, and I'm pretty sure I never want to eat a tomato again.

Giant pile of rotten tomatoes that fell on the floor.

Looking at that picture kind of makes me nauseated. See the trash bin behind her? That's full of rotten tomatoes. We had to throw out more tomatoes than we were able to save. Then they dumped the bad tomatoes into the compost (which I was really excited about; I'm glad they find a use for as much as possible). I kind of wish I had packed meat, but people I talked to about that said they did the same thing for 3 hours, so I'm glad to have done some different things. All in all, a pretty good experience. 

The One Brick crew outside of Philabundance.

New Museum 2

A few months ago, I found out that the Penn Museum was going to have an exhibit called "Run!" Clearly, I immediately let Natalie know she had to pay the Penn Museum a visit the next time she was home. She leaves for Tanzania soon, so she's home to see the family before she leaves, and she asked me to take a day and go with her. How could I refuse? We arranged to meet at the train station, and then walked to the museum, getting lost along the way. But we got a nice little tour of Penn in the meantime. I know I had never been to Penn before, and Natalie wasn't sure, so it was cool to see a bit of it. We finally found the museum, bought tickets, and promptly got lost trying to find the exhibit. By "got lost" I mean, totally didn't bother to find out where it was. Once we found it where it was, we wandered around quite a bit before we got there. And there was some sort of lunch event going on in one of the rooms we wandered through. Luckily they were just setting up, but it took us so long to find it, I was worried we'd  never make it back before the lunch started and we'd be stranded in the bottom floor of the museum. Also, I felt like the guy in Indiana Jones. You know "Marcus? He once got lost in his own museum." If his museum were the one I was at, I'd totally understand. The exhibit was pretty interesting. I didn't really know anything about the runners of the Sierra Madre and their ultramarathon. I don't know how much Natalie got out of it, since she had read the book, but I learned a lot. I'm going to read the book, hopefully soon (I currently have 3 other books out of the library).

Having accomplished what we set out to do, we decided to spend a little more time exploring the museum. We saw the evolution exhibit.  In it was a recreation of the mother of all mammals - a little thing that survived the mass extinction 65 million years ago. The placard about it had a note on it that said something along the lines of "No modern mammals, including humans, lived with the dinosaurs."

We then wandered through the Africa exhibit. I feel like that's seriously the best word for what we did, as I spent minimal time reading anything, and mostly just looked at artifacts. I'd like to go back another day when I have more time to look around a bit more.

25 Mile Bike Ride 2

My parents came this morning for a ride to the Art Museum and back. It was a pretty awesome ride for several reasons:

1. The Dad Vail Regatta was going on. So, on the way back, we stopped to watch some races. My arms hurt just THINKING about rowing for that long. We stopped to watch near the finish, then decided to head farther up to the start and we kept being like "it can't be farther than this", but it was. Mad props to crew teams. My dad thinks my family should have their own crew team. I volunteered to be coxswain and am totally stealing his idea to sing Friday from start to finish to make people row faster.

2. We saw the Purdue JV 8-man Heavyweight team row. I texted my friend who went to Purdue to let her know that I was watching the Purdue JV crew team, to which she said "Wow...must not be much on :)" I informed I was at the event, and she expected me to blog about it, so here it is.  Then she told me not to text and bike. For the record, I did not text and bike.

3. There was a dad out with his roughly 4-year-old son on a bike. My dad passed him. My dad likes being the slowest person on the road, so this was a big step for him.

4. We saw many geese and goslings. The geese were, as usual, not excited to see us and hissing at us. Geese are pretty mean.

5. I bought a couple of pretty awesome toys for my neice who turns 1 this week. I'm pretty sure she reads my blog, so I can't tell you what I got her.

6. The weather was perfect. It was a bit cool when we started out, but it warmed up quickly, but not too much. It was sunny, and my face now shows that (note to self: fine aloe).

The downside was we did not see a Coke truck, so my dad didn't get to bike up to anyone and ask them if they got to drink all of the free Coke they wanted. Also, the place we had lunch was a Pepsi place. Minus 2 for dad.

I have just one more long bike ride to do to meet my goal, but I definitely want to do more. Contact me if you're interested in joining me (even if it's for a shorter one).

Podcast Challenge 7

I just finished reading Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil deGrasse Tyson. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tyson, he is an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in NYC. He's the astrophysicist you always see on Colbert or Stewart. He also hosts NOVAScienceNow and is pretty well known for demoting Pluto in his planetarium exhibit before the International Astronomical Union did. All in all, he's basically my hero. So when I heard he had a new book, I had to read it.

The book is a collection of essays that explain the science of getting to space, the history of space travel, and the future of it. It's really informative. Since it's not a novel, nor is it written in novel form, I don't feel I need to summarize anything. I definitely recommend it to people who are at all interested in space, or science in general. The science in it is really accessible, even to someone who has taken exactly two science courses since high school. Granted, I do get a lot of science education via PBS.

Broad Street Run

My parents picked me up at 6:45 and dropped me at the start line, which was really nice because it meant I didn't have to drive to the sports complex and fight the crowds on the subway. I got there in plenty of time to go to the bathroom and find the starting line water, then came the wait for actually starting the race and for my corral actually starting, and I took off. My knee was feeling fine! Then I got to mile 0.5, and my knee started hurting. But I was committed. To finishing, not to my time. I was just going to do what I could. I decided that between the crowds and the knee I'd just enjoy the race. I stayed close to the sidewalk for high fives and cheers, and waved to people as I ran.

Around mile 2, I saw my parents and husband. So I waved and kept running. This was probably when my knee was bothering me the most, but they said they couldn't tell. As I ran past Temple, I high fived the owl, waved to people in the stands, then high fived the football team. High fives gave me more energy than clif shot blox. There was a bit of a funnel effect to get around city hall, but then I immediately crossed to the other side of the street and it opened up a little bit. Around mile 7, I kept telling myself "just a 5K left, 30 more minutes of running." At this point, though, 30 minutes seemed like a long time. My husband saw me around mile 8 and said I was looking quite tired. I didn't see him, so I couldn't pretend I was excited.

Then came mile 9. I signed up to run with Jimbo's Squad. My boss has been running with them for a while, so I signed up, too. I didn't know anyone else running with them and couldn't find them at the start, but at mile 9, I saw their cheering section. They were yelling for me, and I was waving and fist pumping. At mile 9.5, a guy came up behind me and was like "hey, Jimbo's Squad, can I cross the finish with you?" He was also running with Jimbo's Squad. The clock time when I finished was 1:49:xx, and I was pretty certain I'd started somewhere around 0:20:xx, but couldn't be sure. So, I thought I was close. When I finally met up with my family, my mom had been getting text message updates, but they were all giving her the clock time and giving my pace based on that as well, so I still couldn't be certain that I'd beaten 1:30:00 like I wanted to.

We stopped for lunch, then hopped on the subway to head home. When we got above ground, I had a text from my sister Elaine telling me that she saw a sub 2 hour half in my future. I got really excited and tried to text her back as I was walking down steps, when I thought better of it and waited until I was on the side walk. I was really hopping down the steps, as my left knee wouldn't bend enough for me to walk down the steps like a normal person. She texted me back and said my time was 1:27:46. 8:46 pace! I was so excited! My last 10K was slower than that. Now I really want to do another half, but I totally need to take a few weeks off from running. Maybe at the end of the summer.