Many apologies for not blogging of late. Mer and I have been in the midst of moving, which takes a surprising amount of time to do. Additionally, I did not have internet access at the new house until yesterday.

The moving process went smoothly. I took a load of stuff in my hatchback everyday that I went to work. That took care of most of the smaller stuff (but still took many loads!). A week ago Saturday (the 14th), we rented the CVCA box truck and moved all of the big furniture. Sonotmu and OrangeJoJo drove all the way from Chicago to help (which was kind of them). Sonotmu and I started moving heavier stuff early (about 7:00), and we kept moving stuff until about 3:30. We got everything up in two trips, and we had help from several CVCA folk, for which Mer and I are very grateful. OrangeJoJo, Mer, and a CVCA friend dusted everything before it came in to the new house.

After the move-fest was done, we headed up to Aladdin’s restaurant in Hudson, where Sonotmu and I had all three meals in one sitting. We were all dirty and nasty, so we sat outside. I was particularly resplendent in a “shirt” that was more holes than fabric.

So, we have been at the new house for a little over a week. We are still making frequent trips to the old house, which we listed for sale on Saturday. We still have some minor cleaning to finish up, and we still have one storage area and the garage to clean up. It should be done by the end of the week.

I love living within walking distance of CVCA. I have been able to run home to see Mer at lunch twice, and walking home from work instead of a 45-minute commute is really great.

Our staging area for moving things in the new house was the basement. We decided to put our library on the top level of the house, which is three small stairways away from the basement. Not a big deal, but it is surprising how far away the library is when you have to haul THIRTY boxes of books up the stairs. Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be English teachers….

Oh – I’ll continue the France travel narrative as soon as I unearth my notes.

-or- Gettin’ there, gettin’ round, gettin’ home

We really did have the experience of planes, trains, and automobiles on our France trip. To start the journey, we were meeting Mer’s parents in Orlando (where they live). We flew from Sonotmu’s favorite airport, CAK (Akron-Canton), to Atlanta via Airtran airlines. We then had about a four-hour layover, and then we took the fairly short flight to Orlando, also on Airtran.

The Airtran flights had something new to me – all of their planes now offer XM radio. XM radio is satellite radio, meaning you can pick any of (for Airtran) 30 or 40 stations to listen to, including stations specializing in folk, broadway tunes, 60s, 70s, etc. The Rev will have to make this his official airline, since they were also broadcasting ML Baseball games. Since I was trying to read, I chose to listen to the 80s station. For some reason, folk music (my first choice) demanded too much of my brain for me to read, something that 80s music does not need to do. I could happily listen to cheesy music from my high school years and still make progress on my books. So the flights passed very agreeably.

Fun fact I learned from the 80s station: they played the B-52s’ “Love Shack.” This is not surprising, since the B-52s were fairly big (hair) in the 80s. What WAS surprising was my learning from Meredith that the song was “Love Shack.” Since I was a teenager in Maine,and I had an accent, and everyone around me had an accent, I was sure (and still think of it this way) that the song was “Love Shark.” Those of you familiar with the Maine accent, try saying “Love Shark” a few times, and see if it does not come out as “Love Shack.” In as much as the lyrics make sense at all, Love Shack makes more sense than Love Shark, but I still think of it fondly as Love Shark. “Love shark, love-love-love shark! Love shark, love-love-love shark! Love shark, bayyy-aaa-beeee!”

We met up with Meredith’s parents with no trouble, and went back to their house, where we had a very nice dinner of sloppy joes. I was so hungry, I had three. After supper, I was very delighted to discover that Dale had upgraded his modem to a DSL line. I took advantage of this by checking e-mail, blogs, and Facebook. It was a great relief to have high-speed internet. I also took advantage of it the next morning to find a store (Kohl’s) that Mer wanted to go to to get some last-minute supplies. Since our flight was taking off in the early afternoon, we had time. We borrowed the car, and ran the errands. While we were out, Mer let me go to Target and pick up a new 8-megapixel camera for the trip. My old camera had broken a few weeks ago, and we figured taking pictures of France was worth getting a new camera. I picked up a Canon PowerShot A630, and I am very pleased with it.

We were picked up by a limo service and taken to Orlando’s airport, again with no problems. We got on a US Air flight to Philadelphia, but we only had a 90-minute layover, so I could not dash into the city to get whoopie pies at the market. We actually made our connecting flight in a different terminal with no difficulty (Mer and I were not sure that 90 minutes was going to be sufficient to get another flight). We did board a little late (the flight was overbooked, so the boarding process took about an hour). Then, we had to sit for about an hour while mechanics tried to fix the toilets on the right side of the plane. They got them to work as long as the pane was above 16,000 feet, so that was okay. Then we waited another 30-45 minutes while they unloaded some cargo off of the plane because now we were over weight. The passengers took this with welcome good humor, and we took off about two hours late.

Because the plane was full, none of our traveling party were able to sit together. While that was less than ideal, it was okay. This fight also had something new for me on a plane – individual 7-inch LCD TVs in the seat in front of you, in coach! I was able to pick from a number of movies to watch. While I did read quite a bit, I also managed to watch a movie I had been meaning to see, Stranger Than Fiction, a movie about a real man’s life being controlled by a fiction writer. It was not a great movie, but it was well done, and I enjoyed it, especially for “free” on a plane. I read some more, and finished the last part of the flight up with The Lion King. The food on the plane was fine – I had a nice pasta-and-cheese dish; breakfast was a donut-like thing that must have horrified any French on the plane. The flight was smooth – only about 5 minutes of turbulence at one point. I did not get any sleep on the plane (I can rarely sleep on a plane), and I could always see a thin line of sunlight on the northern horizon when I looked out the window on occasion.

In the actual airport, customs was a breeze (we actually never even saw a customs agent for some strange reason), although since we were being picked up by a limo service, we did not have time to change money. This turned out to be fine, since ATMs turned out to be plentiful and as cheap or cheaper than currency exchanges. We never did change any money at all.

The limo driver spoke almost no English, so Mer and her mom did most of the talking. The drive through Paris would have been more interesting and memorable if I had not been up for 22 or 23 hours. We got to our hotel just fine, only to discover the rooms would not be ready until 1:00 (it was currently 11:30). So began the process of exploring France; more soon….

Here is the map of our vacation. Each different color is what we traveled each day (we started and ended in Paris, and traveled counter-clockwise). I’m guessing we logged about 1,700 miles in 11 days, but that is just an estimate.

(The map is from Lonely Planet – I could not find a good open-source map).

-Or- How to survive on 20 different variations of ham and cheese.

We were in France 15 days (including travel days). That gives a decent amount of opportunities to see what the fuss is about French foods.

The quick and dirty: bakeries, really good; restaurants, okay.

French evening meals (and I think this is true for much of Europe) in restaurants are based on menus. I know this sounds “no, duh,” but the menu is a one-price for three (or more) courses. The menus are fairly limited in what they offer. The carte (what we would call a menu) is a la carte. Any way you look at it, French restaurants were fairly expensive: typically 8-20 euros, which is currently 12-30 dollars per person. You do NOT want to order a drink at a French restaurant – sodas cost 3-6 euros, and these were always just a normal can or bottle of Coke. $5-9 for a bottle of Coke? Ouch!

Back to the food: Most restaurants would have omelettes available – these were good and cheap. Many restaurants also had very thin crust pizza (most European pizza is about cardboard-thick or less). In some restaurants, you could get frites (french fries or “chips”). I almost always could fall back on these when I did not want fancy sauces and meats I don’t think of (and the occational  offering of snail). So, most French restaurants allowed me to have nice simple fare, but I never did eat any “real” French food as the main evening meal. I did eat and enjoy dessert crepes (chocolate crepes are nice).

We also found a Chinese restaurant toward the end of the trip, which was very welcome. It appears that the French do very little with chicken in their restaurants. The chicken and rice I had were very very good. We also ate at two Italian restaurants. The meal we had near Notre Dame in Paris was exceptional Italian.

The French excel in their bakeries and baked goods. The breads at every meal (including breakfast) were excellent. We rarely ate lunch, but when we did, we always got it at a bakery; most bakeries offered sandwiches on baguettes, or made of flaky pastry crust. it was half a game to see how many different ways I could eat ham and cheese (at least six different ways – maybe more).

French breakfasts were simple – breads and croissants with spreads, and sometimes cheese. But where the French displayed their cultural superiority was the fact that at EVERY breakfast, and in most restaurants, I could get hot chocolate. It was considered as normal as coffee and tea. Many times, the hot chocolate was so dark they served it with sugar on the side. It was always made of warm whole milk. Ahhhhh.

French pastries were exceptional as well. Mer and I had dark chocolate tarts several times, and these were drool-worthy. The French also decided it was worthwhile to fill their éclairs with chocolate filling. They were right to do so.

So, all in all, we ate well in France. If the supper choices were a tad limited for my fussy palate, this was more than made up for by a country where pastry shops easily outnumber gas stations. Well done, France!

Mer and I are getting ready to move into our new home near CVCA – we hope to be fully moved in within the next 10 days or so. It is a little small, but I’m pretty sure I can squeeze my brother Sonotmu into the basement when he comes to visit.

I saw many cool and wonderful things in France, including French KITTIES!

The first kitty I encountered was pacing itself for a busy day, in Honfleur.

Then, this kitty felt at ease in the protection of the walled city of Carcassonne.

The best kitty-fest was in Orches, where our B and B had a momma kitty and two adorable kittens. The used a small pipe in the wall of the house as a kitty door. It was so cute!

The last kitty we saw on the trip was from the very German-looking town of Eguisheim, which had more flowers per square foot (meter?) than any town I had ever seen, PLUS one kitty!

It will be sad to see Sonotmu and Jolene move to France, but where else can Jo live?

I have found the Wii to be as entertaining as I had hoped it would be. Mer and I have had several friends over to play two-on-two tennis, and Mer and I have played a lot of tennis against each other, usually splitting games.

For solo play, the best game in my opinion is baseball. And there is the source of my frustration. The Wii has arbitrarily assigned a point value of 1000 to be “pro” level. I made my way up through the “minors” easily, reaching 993 points with no losses and only one tie (once I figured the game out). Then, at 993 I faced my first pro team. Suddenly, the batters would not swing at the garbage pitches I threw. If I put it across the plate, they hit the ball. The pitchers suddenly threw lots of splitters, which it turns out I can’t hit.

So, after four games against pros or near-pros, I have lost four straight games. I think I have only scored two runs in those four games. Today, I scored one run on three hits, and gave up five runs. It was not even close. To make matters even more fun, the computer randomly assigns errors to teams, either fielding or pitching. My team had four errors to my opponent’s none. Sheesh. My score has dropped below 900, and I’m looking forward to facing a non-pro team again. Soon.

We closed on our new house today. It is odd – all the legal and financial stuff happens in the weeks before closing. On the actual closing day, the deed gets “filed” (I assume not in the circular file). So, on a day when you spend thousands of dollars and commit to up to 30 years of payments, you get a phone call congratulating you on your file going through. Strangely anti-climatic.

We’ll probably move in the first week in July or so. It will be nice to walk to work.

The city of Cuyahoga Falls and a local chapter of the Hibernians throw a ***FREE*** Irish Festival every year, with three days of music and food and dance. I’ll blog more about that later, after I’ve been to a few more acts (we went last night for about an hour and a half).

BUT, starting this year, they also added a 5k race. I kept looking at the weather forecast (which was looking cool and dry), and I kept thinking about the 3 seconds I needed to break 20:00 in a 5k. I asked Mer to let me run this race, since I was still in shape for a 5k, and after some pleading on my part agreed to let me enter (we need to be careful about money, and the race cost $20).

So, the race was today. The day was indeed cool (probably about 60 degrees at race time), and was low humidity. I had also gone out and bought new shoes before I knew about the race (my old shoes were about 14 months old and were getting pretty worn to run in), so I had that in the plus column. There were about 100 racers at the start line, but I got near the front, and after a cute “Good luck, Sweetie!” from Mer and a command to “Go!”, the race started. I ducked around a few runners and found myself in the front pack. We had a slight bottleneck through a road barrier that was still up from the festival, but that did not mess with my pace or stride. I was still passing people, and found to my surprise that after about 5 minutes I was firmly in the lead pack. I felt good. The sun was out, but most of the course was shaded. There was a small uphill at the start, and there was a brisk breeze in my face, but I felt good, and since it was an out-and-back race, I knew the wind and the small hill were going to be in my favor for the last half of the race.

I was still surprised that as we neared the turn-around area, I could still see the lead police car. I was starting to feel a little tired, but the race was half done, and I was about to get the wind at my back, and my pace was holding up. There was a small but slightly painful hill near the two-mile marker, but I talked myself through that (my running mind is always about getting to certain minutes – “just get to 15 minutes” and such). There was a fairly long straightaway that led to the home stretch, and that required some mental games as well. I was really starting to feel tired once I got to 15 minutes. The “just get to 16 (or 17 or 18) minute mark” alternated with a fairly steady “Please, God, help me!” While my legs and breathing were okay, my body was tired. I don’t how much God gets invested in my running, but I managed to keep going. I turned onto the final road, and was still struggling, but knew I would be okay if I just kept my pace steady. I managed to do that, and with yells of encouragement from my supportive and loving wife, I finished.

Official time: 19:35
8th place out of 109 finishers.

See the results here.

Yes! First sub-20 in more than 15 years.

Many thanks to Mer for her support of an obsession she does not understand, and thanks to God for making the human body so that it can do some pretty cool things.

I can now relax for a few weeks, and then switch my attention back to distance training for an October half-marathon.

An interesting note on the age classes this time. I was in the 30-39 group, and guys from this group finished 1,2, and 4, so no top-three finish for me in my age group this time (I came in 4th out of 21), but that is fine since I got my personal goal.