citizen of the planet

Song of the summer. Sure thing.

Ack!

It’s late!  I’m tired!  I’m bruised!

Tonight I played in a friend’s improv show, and it went better than I ever imagined it would.  All the same, I’m tired and hurting so I’ll have to save the tale spinning for another time.  Side effect though: there’s a small small small possibility that I might end up in the weekend edition of the Globe and Mail.  We’ll have to see.

Coming out of work, I was about 15 minutes later than I needed to be in order to make it home, change, then go up north to the Running Room to make it in time for the Run Club.  Unlike clinic night, there’s no showing up late for that run.  Instead of rushing back, I decided to do something that I swore I would never do again.  Yeah, I decided to walk the 15 kilometres home from work.  Yes, it was hot and humid, but…why should that stop me from doing something like walking?  Yeah, sure, it was 3.5 hours of sweaty walking, and my black golf shirt was accumulating white lines of salt, but I say it was sort of pleasant.  I made a few stops along the way for stuff like sports drinks to keep my electrolyte levels stable.  I even managed to swing by my parents’ place to grab a quick meal.  I can honestly say that I don’t feel completely destroyed.  At least, it’s a different feeling from how I felt last May when I did it.  And I’m sure that today was a bit hotter than it was back then.  I think I can say that my fitness levels are higher than they were a few months ago.  How awesome!  It’s not like I plan on doing this walk again in the immediate future–it’s just too much, but I know that my body can take it.  It’s making me a bit more confident about tackling a marathon where I might be on my feet for 5-6 hours.  Crazy.

In continuing with the whole communication thing I’ve had going over the past while, today I gave a small speech to a 5K clinic at my usual Running Room.  About a month or two ago, the guy currently running the clinic asked me if I was available to give a talk.  See, he was once part of my half marathon clinic back when I was coaching it.  I guess I left a good impression on him if he actually sought me out.  In the past, I’ve given talks on the topic of motivation before.  That topic felt easy, if only because the easiest way for me to cover that topic was just to give an outline of my running history, which I think is fairly inspirational.  It’s not like I’ve had to overcome tough obstacles like cancer or blindness, but the whole averageness of my journey makes me easy to relate to.  At least, that’s how I’d like to think about it.  So yeah, that’s what I’m used to talking about.  Instead though, I was asked to give the talk on goal setting.

Whaaaaa?

I’ve seen this talk given before by a few people.  It’s a fairly straightforward topic.  There are a lot of basic ideas to convey.  For my speech, since I was somewhat comfortable talking about my journey, I decided to talk about goal setting as seen through my experiences.  I brought in a few of my medals to help carry the ideas along.  I actually spent some time jotting down points that I should cover.  Each talking point had a story attached.  In my head, the talk was going to go over wonderfully.  Truthfully, I should have practiced, but there was just no time.  I figured that if I talked from the heart that I’d be able to wing it.

Well…

I’m sure if I asked people that I knew that saw the speech, they’d probably tell me that it was just fine.  I got that much from one of the staff that knows me.  Personally, I kind of feel like I was rambling and scatter-brained.  I’m not sure anyone came out with a better idea of how to set goals.  Perhaps I’m being far too hard on myself (as usual).  I’m sure there have been worse speakers out there.  I’m sure there have been better ones.  I wonder how many of the better ones are actual speakers though.

I think this is just another example of just how I need to lighten up and not apply so much pressure to myself to perform perfectly every single time.  I didn’t kill anyone, and I didn’t make a horrible fool of myself.  I did what I could do.  Time to move on.

Just got back from our improv student show.  Goodness gracious, at the start it seemed like we’d only be playing to a few people but more and more people trickled in until the small theatre space was about two-thirds full.  I’m really not in any condition to go at length as to what happened because I’m simply exhausted; however, it was an amazing show.  That one hour flew by.  There were so many people in that space that I became entirely sweaty and was drenched by the end of the show.  There seemed to be a lot of love from the audience.

As it is, I’m currently being a little hard on myself.  Maybe I could have been stronger in X or in Y.  Maybe I jumped in too much.  Maybe my characters lacked variety.  I don’t know.  There was one game in particular that I was a part of that was pretty much a train wreck, but we committed to the game and played through to the end.  That’s probably the only thing that saved that game.  In the end, I can’t let that shadow the fact that I played hard tonight and left nothing in the tank.  I was exhausted by the end, sweating like a mad man.  The audience should be able to at least appreciate that much.

So, like I said last night, I am deeming my dinner party to be a success.  I chose to go the tougher route and cook/acquire most of the food on my own instead of relying on my guests.  I am so happy that I took that route.  Sure, some items could have used some improvement, but I don’t think I embarrassed myself at all.

For snacks prior to dinner, I set out three things.  The first was just chips and salsa.  I put out two types of chips with salsa to give a bit of interest.  I liked the square angle dishes I used for it with the contrasting colours.  The second was toasted pita chip triangles with hummus.  I toasted them myself with olive oil and salt and pepper.  To be honest, I don’t think this one was all that great.  The pitas I used were sort of thick and didn’t lend themselves well to this application.  I was hoping to serve this one freshly toasted, but I prepared it a bit too early.  I ended up putting it in the warming drawer while waiting.  I think that made them a bit tougher instead of crispy.  Next time I can improve that one for sure.  The third thing is the fruit platter.  I figured that I needed something fresher to go with the starchy things.

In terms of main courses, there were two items.  The first was a vegetable lasagna.  I don’t think it was that bad, but it could have been a lot greater if I timed it better such that it came out of the oven closer to meal time.  Plus, I think I could have put more cheese on top.  The second item was prime rib pot roast.  Now, this turned out better than I thought.  I braised the meat in broth, onion soup mix, red wine, and some frozen Mediterranean veggie mix.  I let it stew for about 3 hours.  The resulting roast was really soft.  I was totally pleased with the result.  I really need to do this again on Saturday.  It’s too bad that the only picture I got of it was blurry.

For dessert, I used a caramel crème brûlée recipe.  Really, this is the type of thing that should be prepared the night before.  Unfortunately, I only got it started at noon.  It didn’t provide enough time for the custard to really cool down significantly.  Also, without a blowtorch I had to use my oven’s broiler to get the caramelized top.  That probably contributed to the custard being warmer than I wanted.  Next time, I need to get this dessert started early, and I need to acquire a torch.  In terms of taste, I thought it was great.  Just needs some tweaks to kick this thing up to the next level.

All in all, I did a passable job.  Combining all of this with salad, garlic bread, cookies, and 1.5 bottles of red wine (for me) and I ended up really stuffed.  And that’s why I didn’t run this morning.  Yes, I’m comfortable with that decision.  Anyway, next time I’ll work even harder.  Got to hone the skills!

Yeah, so the dinner party seems to have been a success!  Everyone enjoyed themselves.  I succumbed to gluttony though.  Condition is currently such that I won’t be able to run tomorrow morning; there’s simply too much food in my system to run efficiently at all.  I’ll tell y’all about the food tomorrow.

Long ago, the first video game system that was ever given to me was the Nintendo Game Boy.  It was a Christmas gift and was totally unexpected.  I actually cried for joy when I got it.  Now, the game that shipped with the Game Boy was Tetris.  I spent many hours on that game and became pretty good at it.  It served me well whenever I played head to head battles with other people at school--including my computer science teacher.  During lulls, sometimes I’d challenge him to a versus game on the school computers.  I always ended up on top; I had a knack for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.  I remember some friends being amazed at how I often managed to survive even with my blocks stacked high.  At night, I remember finding an Internet Tetris client: TetriNET.  Among my friends and I someone would set up a server and we’d all connect to play a multi-player battle Tetris game.  Sometimes these sessions would last until the wee hours of the morning.  Crazy stuff. I had a decent track record with that.

I stopped playing Tetris actively after high school.  I had a version of the game on my computer, but I didn’t really touch it that often.  Over time my skills rusted.  I never thought I’d get back into it.  The other day though, while I was poking around the Wii stuff at BestBuy, I spotted Tetris Party Deluxe.  It wasn’t crazy expensive or anything so I just picked up a copy.  I figured that it might come in handy as a party game at some point in the future.  I broke it out this evening just to see if I was as good as I was maybe a decade ago.  Umm…nope, can’t say I am.  I can hold my own, I guess, but…yeah, my old-self would have cleaned the floor with me.  No matter.  The game is still fun after all these years.  It’s so simple, and that’s perhaps one of the key factors as to why this game can withstand the test of time, right?

To close this off, here’s a guy playing Korobeiniki on an electric guitar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j9W5PBsa30