Running by the Numbers

12 months ago I started training for my 5th marathon

9 months ago I made my marathon playlist

100 songs to inspire me to put one foot in front of the other for a grueling 5+ hours

8 months ago I took a 5 minute dirt bike ride that ended with 1 broken collarbone

6 months ago I took my sling off and discovered that my bones had healed, but my shoulder was frozen solid

50 hours of physical therapy later...

1 hour ago I laced up my running shoes, put on my headphones, hit play on my ipod and started training again for my 5th marathon.  As I ran listening to my marathon playlist the songs were both familiar and new just like my run.  5 months from now I sure hope they inspire me to run another 26.2 miles.

60s ad campaigns Don Draper would be proud of, you can't Pan that

I ran across these 60s Yamaha ads in an old motorcycle race program, they are pure vintage awesome. 

Pursue the good life on a Yamaha
What's more shocking than Pan chasing a naked nymph is that the price of this bike "a disrespectful $340".


  






























Join the Rotary Club
Oh how I wish I were part of this rotary club.  The ad says "These people know how to 'live'; and they know that with Yamaha sportcycles, jetting from poolside to jungle is a quiet blast in itself." I wonder which one of them is jetting to the jungle?  The genie or the Captain? 

Hunting for Fickle Fortune and Colorful Chaos

For the past 3 months I've participated in a Flickr Monthly Scavenger Hunt.  On the first of each month someone from the group posts a list of 20 items that you need to catch in a photograph. Some months have themes, some don't. It's been a blast to be creative with the clues that are provided and find subjects to photograph. 

As usual the October Hunt had some easy items like "Misty Morning" and "Blue Box".  And it had what I thought were some pretty difficult items like "Photography is not a Crime", "Turncoat" and "Fickle Fortune". 

I successfully found new subjects or photos from my archives for all of the Scavenger Hunt items.  Now I wait as the group votes on their favorites and hope that they pick my "Colorful Chaos". 

They Paved Paradise but is it Worth Wasting Film On?

El Camino College Parking Lot
iPhone Photo

Remember what it was like to wait until the specialist of moments to take out your camera and snap a picture?  If I look back at my prints they were almost all taken on special occasions or special locations.  I didn't take pictures of mundane parking lots back then, just birthday parties, weddings, graduations and summer vacations.

I've been transported back to that time with my Great Uncle Dudley's Vest Pocket Kodak Model B. After finding it in my grandma's closet I took it home and it sat on my shelf for a few years until I finally decided to see if I could buy film for it.  Through the wonders of the interwebs I easily purchased the 127 black and white film it takes and downloaded the user manual so I would have some idea of how to actually use it. 

Ironically the film and the cost it will take to develop will set me back about 3x the original $7.50 it cost to buy the camera when it was produced in the late 20s/early 30s.  But I think that's a pretty good deal to make me break from my comfort zone. 

Normally I take a ton of digital pictures, then carefully edit them selecting the very best to display to others.  When people compliment my photos I tell them my secret is in finding the few that I was lucky enough to get right.  As my grandpa says "even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while".  I didn't know that pigs ate acorns, but that's a story for another time. 

My film arrived and I successfully loaded it.  Not as easy as popping in a digital memory card, but not too hard in the darkroom G fashioned for me.  This weekend I took my camera to a motorcycle swap meet, thinking about all of the great photos I would take of the vintage bikes and how cool they would look on film. 

I took my camera out, walked around for a couple of hours, and did not take a single photo.  Suddenly nothing seemed film worthy.  Not the vintage bikes, not the rows and rows of spare parts, not the parking lot.  I took the photo above with my lowly iPhone camera. 

It seems strange to be editing my photos before I even take them, but it's a good exercise for me.  It forces me to stop and think about lighting, contrast, composition.  All those things that I learned in my high school photography classes but have chosen not to think about with the luxury of digital. 

Today I took my first photo, it was of downtown San Diego from Harbor Island.  A photo I've taken a dozen times so I know it's a good subject.  The viewfinder is a bit hard to see through, and it was hard to keep the camera steady.  So it's very likely that I will again edit the 10 or so photos that I'll get out of my roll of film.  But I'm loving the anticipation of waiting until I find the right subjects, and then again waiting for my film to be developed.  In the meantime, I have plenty of memory in my Canon for all of the parking lots that inspire me but aren't film worthy.



The Great Twitter Mix CD Experiment #twittermixcd

Dear Internets,

If a stranger on the internet asked you to send your address in exchange for a mix CD from another stranger would you do it? If you're nostalgic for the good ol' days and you can somehow rationalize that tweeting with someone means they're trustworthy then yes, yes you would.

Remember the days of mix tapes? If you go way back to the beginning of time your mix tapes were taped directly from the radio, waiting patiently for your favorite song to come on, fingers posed on the record button. Later you moved to the high tech dual tape player (aka boom box) and if you kept with it, you might have even lived through the days of taping your favorite songs from CDs.

You made mix tapes for your new friends, for your old friends, for your new loves and your lost loves. You poured your heart into those tapes, the songs, the artists, the lyrics, the order of the songs all painstakenly toiled over. Should I start with an upbeat song or end with an upbeat song? Does this song reveal too much? Will it look cool that I know this song or reveal the inner nerd in me? Oh the agony of it all.

Despite all that, when I got a tweet from @joshgrimmer asking if people were interested in exchanging Mix CDs with total strangers I jumped at the chance. We sent our addresses off to Josh and in return he sent us the names and address of our recipients. Just like I did in those tween and teen years I agonized over every song. My Mix CD pal was a guy, which made it even harder. I didn't want to put too much "chick" music in my mix, so I chose an eclectic mix of a few of my all time favs - some Spoon, some Wilco, some Sufjan Stevens and some Radiohead. Some new favs - Phantogram, Avi Buffalo. With a dose of Sharon Jones to round things out.

When my own Mix CD package arrived in the mail I couldn't wait to listen. But I couldn't listen, because I was too busy being blown away by the care my Internet pal had taken in making my Mix CD. He included hand written liner notes describing every song. Here's a little snippet of the glorious descriptions that @KevinSemicolon included:

I don't know who wrote the "Shame," but I love two things about it: The crazy,
butt-shaking bass line, and the line "she cleans her nails with a paper clip,"
because if you've never that, you've never had a soul-killing office job.

After many listens my three favorites remain the same.

• "Last Night I had a Dream" by Randy Newman. For 30+ years I thought Randy Newman's best song was "Short People". Simply put, this song rocks and in my mind Mr. Newman has redeemed himself from all those years selling out with sappy Disney tunes.
• "Mexican Blue" by Jolie Holland. As a huge fan of The Be Good Tanyas, how did I not know about this song? It makes me sad and happy at the same time.
• "I Don't Care Anymore" by George Harrison. With this song George is now in competition for my 2nd favorite Beatles slot - this is a coveted spot that both Paul and John have occupied depending on my mood. Sorry Ringo.

So was the great Twitter Mix CD experiment a success? Well, after mailing my Mix CD I waited, and I waited, but I never heard back from my Mix CD recipient. At first I was a bit bummed. I started second guessing my choices. Maybe I shouldn't have started the mix with Dan Bern, and maybe the Ben Folds Five was too expected and could he have taken The Clash's "Straight too Hell" too personal? But in the end I realized that I'm not in high school anymore. If a stranger doesn't return the affection I put in my mix that's really ok, after all, I didn't have to spend hours slaving over a hot tape recorder. I'll still listen to my favorite songs, and now I have a few more that I would have never known about had I not put my trust in an Internet stranger in hopes of getting something in return. And yes Kevin, I have cleaned my nails with many a paper clip.

Sydney on The Rocks

Just spent the past 5 hours adding locations to my flickr pics, now I'm too tired to actually write about what I saw at The Rocks. My photos of Buildings, Bicycles, Bridges and Bananas will have to tell the stories all by themselves.  Start talking Photos from The Rocks, Sydney.

Three Sisters and the Blue Mountains

A few days after arriving in Sydney we were ready to venture outside of the city and brave driving on the wrong side of the road.  We headed to the Blue Mountains - which are about 70 miles west of Sydney. 

We didn't know what to expect as we headed up the mountain in our tiny blue two door speck.  It wasn't long before we were surrounded by forests of eucalyptus trees. 

The views were spectacular, like the grand canyon with trees, the most famous view being the Three Sisters.  There is a story behind the name that has to do with an indigenous Australians myth, but alas it turns out that the myth is completely bogus made up for us tourists. So basically the sisters are three very cool rock formations formed by erosion of sandstone.

From the Three Sister's Lookout we could see in the distance a tiny railroad and two sky ways - so we headed over to the aptly named "Scenic World" to check it out and take some Scenic World photos. 

Scenic World was once a coal mine and is now a world full of scenic activities, I can't do them justice if I try to describe them here, so if you're interested you'll just have to check out the rest of Katymcc's scenic world photos from the Blue Mountains with special bonus video!