eva

Check out this kid’s hat that I made! It’s going to my niece for her third birthday. The pattern is from knitty.

So that you are not all depressed like me about Shannon Harps, go look at the Seattle PI pictures of the day. Baby puppies, baby polar bears, and a surfing cat.

No crime in Seattle’s Capitol Hill has hit closer to home than the New Year’s Eve slaying of Shannon Harps. She was 31, moved to Seattle several years ago, bought a condo in Capitol Hill, and was walking home from Madison Market at 7:00 PM when she was stabbed to death near the Group Health hospital on 16th Ave. It was an apparently random crime. A man was seen running from the scene but the police did not have many leads.

I am 31 next month.

I moved to Seattle after college and bought a condo.

When I lived in Cap Hill, I shopped at Madison Market all the time. And walked home.

What if there’s a new serial killer on the loose, targeting lone 31-year-olds? What happened to my old neighborhood that used to feel so safe? So I every day I pore over the Seattle newspapers looking for news that they’ve caught Shannon’s killer. Today brings good news. DNA evidence has linked a mentally ill man to the stabbing. I thought I’d feel relieved. Instead, I feel infinitely, infinitely sad. For Shannon. For the intractably mentally ill and their families and caretakers. That lynch mobs still exist (read the reader comments at the end of the article and you’ll see what I mean).

King County cut its mental health services budget last year around this time due to state budget reductions. It’s just not glamorous to care for the violently mentally ill. How many of those state budget dollars got reallocated to fashionable “green” initiatives, mandated by yours truly the Washington state residents, through our legislature?

I’m all over the map with Hal Higdon’s training schedule. I ran my Saturday long run on Thursday and a wimpy three miles on Sunday. But enough about running. From now on, my detailed running posts are going to be on Wise Runners, where a bunch my extended family discuss training. We’re all training for some permutation of Vancouver.

Adam and I had a great trip to Minnesota last weekend. We swam with my nieces and nephew, celebrated two toddler birthdays, built snow sculptures, went sledding, went out for Ethiopian food with the entire family, and went ice fishing for the first time, where our friends Pete and his dad Paul helped Noah earn his fishing merit badge. More pictures here.

Yesterday, I ran Greenlake with Adam. Today, three miles on the treadmill at the gym due to the downpour when I woke up. I was so bored. I would rather run in the rain next time.

I’m planning and tracking maps of my runs using gmap-pedometer.com, although I have been experimenting with Google’s My Maps and forgot about MapMyRun.com. I also hope that once my Garmin Forerunner 305 wrist-mounted GPS arrives it will have some nifty mapping software.

So I’m just going to lay it out there about coffee and potty breaks. Both coffee and running in the morning make me go number 2. My experiment today was to get up at 5:30 and drink my daily cup, wait an hour, take a dump, then run. It didn’t happen in that order today but maybe I can train my body onto that schedule eventually.

To prove I’m in shape to start my 18-week training tomorrow, I did 3.6 miles followed by a short swim at the Madison pool.

I actually meant to do only three miles, but my morning cup of coffee dictated that I detour to the nearest public restroom. How the heck do marathon runners work around this problem? Do you just work potty breaks into your finishing time?

Speaking of coffee, is it a performance enhancing drug? 50% of respondents in an informal poll of members of my household think so. But the running expert <a href=”http://www.jeffgalloway.com/”>Jeff Galloway</a> encourages drinking coffee before a run, saying “caffeine stimulates an early breakdown of body fat into free fatty acids and triglycerides, substances that can be burned as fuel. There’s also good evidence that a cup of coffee about an hour before exercise improves your endurance.” As a coffee addict I’ll take that and run with it (har har). But it makes me wonder - where should one draw the line between natural vs. artificially enhanced performance? I’m going to eat fewer Snickers bars and french fries over the next five months to alter my health and performance;  but the daily cup of coffee is actually totally consistent with my non-training lifestyle. What do you think?

Holy crap I just signed my lazy Christmas self up for the Vancouver Marathon in May.  I better start running again.

Woman doesn’t want dog in bathroom during couple’s shower

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004097917_webshower28.html?syndication=rss

Adam and I just returned from a tour of the East Coast mostly for my friend Kelly’s wedding. We hit Boston, Maine, New York, and Hoboken and were honored to visit many friends and family.

Most surprising event: A late night appearance by Dave Chappelle at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.

Chris Rock showed up too, but while I was impressed that he appeared, I think he was using the Tuesday night crowd to practice his jokes.

The healthcare system is about to self-destruct. I say this because, while I enjoy my job very much, I was forced to fill out a 20-page online questionnaire so that my company could save something like 7% on healthcare premiums. The questionnaire started innocently enough, asking typical questions about family health history and so on. I tried to be honest. Then I got to this question:

This question inspired me to give bogus answers for every remaining question on the survey, including whether or not I consistently drive more than 15mph over the speed limit. I am now a depressed, reckless driving, wide-from-top-to-bottom chain smoker with extremely low blood pressure and low cholesterol.