The Ironman has been completed. Too tired to write now.
Our phone is out of commission until tomorrow. The battery was dead and we have to allow the new battery to charge fully.
We can hear messages left on our answering machine.
A week from today, I’ll be suffering through the Ironman. It starts at 7:00am. I’m thinking the swim will take me about 1 hour, 15 minutes. Then I’ll get out of the lake, run up the parking ramp of Monona Terrace, change into my biking clothes, and get on my bike.
The bike ride will take about six hours. So I’ll finish it somewhere around 2:15, I’m guessing.
Then comes the run, which will be miserable. Here’s where I’ll probably need the most encouragement. I’ll look like this:
-without the dog peeing behind me, of course. I won’t be smiling either. But I’ll have on this exact outfit, complete with orange and black Harley-Davidson hat.
If you’d like to see what the course looks like, this guy named Simply Stu (who I prefer to call Disco Stu), has created a video of it at his website. In fact he’s got the bike course and the running course, though they’re both 30 minute videos, so they’ll take a while to download, especially if you have a slow connection. Click: Bike Course; Run Course. At the bottom of his posts, he has a link to “direct download,” which will get you the videos.
The Ironman website also has maps and a “Spectator Guide,” if you’re interested. If you offer me food from the sidelines, I’ll have to respectfully decline. However, I’ll gladly accept a cold bottle of Vitamin Water spiked with testosterone.
Actually, that might be illegal, too. I’ll have to check the spectator guide.
There’s also a site called Ironmanlive.com which will be tracking everyone, so you can tell approximately where I am on the course.
I have no idea how easy it is to drive around to different points of the bike course, but the run course is all pretty much in the downtown/campus area, so it will be very easy to traverse as a spectator. The bike portion is pretty cool, unless the only thing you’re interested in seeing is me. If that’s the case, I recommend blowing up the above picture and carrying it with you.
If you do end up turning out to watch the event, I’d love to see you out there. I get motivated by demeaning comments like the following:
Seriously, though. If you are watching this thing and you take the time to single me out, you can say anything you want to me, including cliches (“Keep it up!”), lies (“Looking good!”), poor attempts at motivation (“Only 126 miles left!”), or over-the-top remarks (“Yeah, Beotch! Time for the Smackdown!”)
Okay, that’s all the self-promotion I’m gonna do. A week from now, I’ll let you know how it went.
P.S. My number is 568. I’ll have to wear a belt with the number displayed, and I’ll get the number written on my arms and legs.
Eileen and I were looking at craigslist yesterday, and we stumbled upon the “free” listings. For those who don’t know, craigslist is an online classified ad site that’s free to use. I was on it yesterday since I’m going to try selling our older computers before doing the ebay thing, which usually involves shipping.
The craigslist free section has some pretty funny stuff on it — toilets, dwarf bunnies, big screen tvs, hostas. The list goes on.
We were pretty amazed reading through all the offerings. But by far the best one was the “kick-ass cement block entertainment center and computer desk.” The sales pitch was this: “Free to whoever the hell wants to come get them, decentish computer desk, and a cement block entertainment center (OK, it’s 7 blocks, with a 2’x4′ sheet of plywood on top, with 2 smaller blocks and a 2’x2′ plywood square on it for the TV). The plywood is Birch, and still looks kinda nice.”
Good sale.
This past Sunday, we invited some friends over for dinner. Among the company were a couple kids — two boys — who were a little bored at times with our childless home.
I snuck downstairs at one point and looked through our puzzles and games, which we keep in a big wooden cabinet shaped and painted like a cat. I was trying to move quickly. I grabbed something called the “Log Stacker,” which claims to be the “World’s Most Difficult Puzzle Box,” and a Rubik’s Cube.
I figured the puzzle box would be a little more captivating, so I introduced the poor kids to it and left to go socialize with the adults.
Turns out the Log Stacker really is the world’s most difficult puzzle box. The kids couldn’t solve it, and I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure it out once everyone left.
Eileen kept saying, “Time for bed,” but I had to solve the damn thing. I’m just like that.
When I did finally get it, I pumped a fist in the air and yelled, “yessss!” But before I headed off to bed, I picked up the Rubik’s Cube.
I didn’t do much with it. I just looked at it.
And I had an epiphany: the middle piece on each face of the cube cannot move from the middle! It only has one exposed side, so it will always stay in the middle of a face. And the corner pieces can only fit in the corners. They have three exposed sides. And the pieces on the edge have two exposed sides. They can’t be middle pieces or corner pieces!
Okay, granted, this “epiphany” was a pretty obvious one, but I haven’t looked at a Rubik’s Cube since I was 12.
The next day, I began casually searching “rubik’s cube” on google. I perused a few sites, which were all overly complicated with their explanations. Most of them start by saying something like, “First we need to get some terminology straight. The cube has six sides. In this article I’ll be referring to the sides as front, back, up, down, left, right. A clockwise turn on the front side, will be notated as F. A counter-clockwise turn will be F’ (F prime). And a 180-degree turn will be F2.”
“Screw this,” I thought, and I closed the web pages and started turning the faces of the cube.
I got nowhere.
So I set it down and left.
Hours would pass, and then I’d suddenly get an idea about how the math of the cube works, so I’d pick it up again and try.
I’d fail again and leave.
I went through this process a few times; then I finally broke down and searched “rubik’s cube” again. This time, I understood a little more. I decided to give the notation a try. I struggled with formulas like this one: D L D’ L’ D’ F’ D F. I couldn’t get it to work.
But last night, I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept picturing various permutations of turning sides and having corners line up with middle pieces. It had invaded my head, like Tetris.
So I got up and went back to the computer. I tried just holding the cube and following the formula without even looking at the cube. After meticulously executing each step, I looked down at the cube. It worked!
I followed the other formulas. The final one is a killer. It reads like this: R2 U F B’ R2 F’ B U R2. It took about three tries, but I did it. I solved the Rubik’s Cube.
I could sleep easy now.
This guy named Tunnel Bob used to live next door to us. He was nicknamed such because he used to break into the tunnels underneath the university and under the hospitals — pretty much any tunnel in town, he could get into it. The rumor was that he was so capable at finding his way around the tunnels that the police could never catch him; so eventually they hired him to help them map the tunnels.
I never asked Bob if the police hired him, but he did often bring up his tunneling in conversations. He told me that he’d go to different cities to explore their tunnels. He’d been in Ann Arbor tunnels, Minneapolis tunnels, Milwaukee tunnels. Some of them were really nice, he told me. One even had drinking fountains in the tunnels.
He was a nice guy. Genuinely good-natured. But as you might have surmised by now, he was a little nuts. Eventually, he got evicted from his house.
By his mom.
She owned the place, but lived in a condo or some assisted living place since she was getting up there in age. She warned Bob that if he didn’t keep the place clean, she’d kick him out. And I guess she followed through on that.
This all happened a couple years ago. Bob stopped over to tell us he was getting evicted. Soon afterwards, this guy showed up at the house in a van and started fixing up the place. He was a nice guy, about 60 years old, handy, hard worker. We just assumed that Bob’s mom was getting the place prepped to sell.
We didn’t say much to the guy, since you don’t typically get to know tradespeople who work on your neighbors’ houses, you know? But he was there a lot; he even had a couple helpers — younger guys he’d hired to help him out.
Weeks turned into months, and eventually, he introduced himself to us. One of his employees was living in the house “to help defer the mortgage,” and he introduced that guy to us too. We’d never seen the house for sale, so we assumed Bob’s mom still owned it. And at one point, the man mentioned that he lived 45 minutes out of town.
This was all about three years ago. The guy’s still working on the house; we talk to him more often, though neither one of us knows his name. He told us when we first met him a couple years ago, but I didn’t figure he’d be around so long, so I didn’t bother paying much attention.
The other night, I went out in the front yard with Tember and noticed the guy’s van had its lights on. He’s got two vans — one big one with ladders on top, and one minivan that gets driven more often.
The house was dark, like it usually is at night, but there was a blue light in one of the rooms. We’ve always figured that the low lighting every night is just a timer of some sort to make people think someone lives there. But when I saw the van’s lights on, I tried knocking on the door of the house. Nobody answered, but when I started walking toward the sidewalk, I heard a tapping on a window.
I looked back and saw that the blinds on the front window had been opened a bit. I couldn’t see much inside, but I saw a red digital alarm clock reading 10:30. I waited.
After about 30 seconds, the guy came out of the house and thanked me for pointing out the van lights.
When I came back inside our house, I said to Eileen, “so that guy is our neighbor.” Only took three years to figure that one out.