The Past 16 Months in 16 Points

What can I say, it's been over a year since I've written. Let me explain what has gone on since then. No, there is no time. Let me sum up. (Excuse blatant Princess Bride reference).

1) I'm continuing to throw things farther. 63.79m in the hammer in 2008. Hopefully more in 2009.
2) Through an odd sequence of events, I'm a photographer for Eishockey News Magazine, a German (yes) hockey magazine. I get to take pictures of the Minnesota Wild (NHL) and have had some pretty kickass experiences doing it, like shooting from the bench 3 feet away from the players and coaches.
3) Cause of #2, I bought a really expensive lens for my camera. The one that I said I couldn't afford, oh, like 3 posts ago. I still couldn't afford it.
4) I got invited to an "Emerging Elite Coach's Clinic" (expenses paid) at the US Olympic Training Center in sunny Chula Vista, CA. I met and learned from some olympic gold medalists. You know, no big deal.
5) My buddy St. G got married in the Prov(idence) in the summer of 2008. Out of my group of friends from camp, 2 are now married. Coincidentally, the last two that any of us expected to get married. No offense guys.
6) I started grad school in the fall of 2008 at the University of Minnesota for a MS in Water Resources. 2 more years of college, woo!! Unfortunately, it's not the same as undergrad...
7) I started my 5th year coaching the throwers at Macalester College and College of St. Catherine. My throwers are tearing it up this year.
8) I became an unofficial photographer for the St. Kate's athletic department. I shoot their games, give them my pictures for the website, and then they plug my website for parents to buy pictures. Quality gig.
9) I set up a website to attempt to make photography a self funding hobby. Easier said than done. But after 4 months I'm out of the red! At least as far as website setup goes...
10) I threw at the US Indoor Track and Field Championships in Feb 2009, my 3rd year in a row. Got 8th. Competed OK, but wish I got a better mark.
11) I saw most of my extended family for the first time in ages over the summer of 2008 in Lake George. It was great to reconnect, especially with the younger cousins who actually are their own people now and pretty cool to talk to.
12) I spent Christmas/New Years 2009 bouncing between Albany and New York City (ok Jersey City) and I wish I could spend more time with my friends out east.
13) I got addicted to Battlestar Galactica cause of my sister. There's 2 episodes left in the entire show! Great show, it'll be sad to see it go but a relief now that I don't have to spend time watching it anymore.
14) My roommate/land lady has spent the past month redoing her bathroom, which is about, oh, 12 inches from my bedroom door. Almost done! And I don't get to use it...
15) Backing up a bit...went skiing up at Lutsen Mountain last year. Yes, they have skiing in Minnesota, but the double black diamond trails here are equal to about a purple squares in NY, which are probably like the green circles out west.
16) I'm on spring break!! Which is probably why I'm spending time posting. See you next time...as always, no promises. :-)

Happy Christmas!

Sorry for the lack of posting. I've got a lot going in the winter time. Work is still work. Track is going very well. I've got some pretty promising athletes who have been working really hard and I'm excited to see what kind of results they produce. I opened up my season with an OK mark, considering that the circle I was throwing out of felt like glass. That, and everybody put chalk on their weights to make the mark easier to see. I understand the point in doing that, but people, please, you don't need to cover the thing entirely. And if you do, you can hit it on the ground once to get the excess off. So the circle ended up being glass with chalk in it. Slippery? Nah... Anyways, next meet in a few weeks at the U of MN. Hopefully it'll be more fun...

My sister convinced me to update cause I haven't done it in, oh, 6 months. So that's that. See you in another bit of long time.

IAAF World Championships

So I've come across something that will make the next 10 days of my life incredibly useless. Well, there are several things, actually. Firstly, and this has contributed to making the past two weeks of my life somewhat useless, is Scrabulous. It's a way to play Scrabble online. And on Facebook you can have multiple games going at once. Currently I'm 20-3. Not bad for somebody whose family still thinks he has a 4th grade reading level (except his sister, who he beat thrice already :-P). Or maybe she still thinks this, but hey...I'm over it.

So the bad news is www.wcsn.com. It's a website that broadcasts sporting events that don't get mainstream coverage on network channels. It shows gymnastics, international basketball, swimming, etc....AND track and field. The IAAF World Championships (track and field = 'athletics' in the rest of the world - kinda like the metric system, I guess) started yesterday. I paid 4.95 to get the web broadcast for the whole month...what a deal! They broadcast live and then put their whole live feed online so you can watch it later too. Unfortunately, broadcasting live means live from Osaka, Japan. Osaka is 14 hours ahead of me currently. This morning I woke up at 5:45am to watch the hammer throw qualifying rounds. Then fell back asleep for too long. It's awesome....on weekends. What happens when something I really want to watch is on at 8am when I am working? I won't be able to keep myself from looking at the results, plus the USATF sends me really useful daily updates (OK I got 4 today, perhaps more than daily) but they have the results in the subject line of the e-mail!! So if I don't watch it live it'll get spoiled. Grr...Oh well. They actually show more of the throws than I expected, but they did deviate from the final 4 throws in a really good shot put competition to show the 5th heat of the heptathlon 200. Even the announcers kept saying, "I don't know why our directors are showing this. This heat is inconsequential, and Adam Nelson is stepping into the circle for his final attempt!" Argh. Throws get no justice. What else is new.

I also got in on the FANTASY TRACK AND FIELD for the Worlds. It's like fantasy baseball, but with far less appeal and excitement (for most, I'm pretty pumped). You get 20 athletes on your team, 10 per gender, and they all have to be from a different country. That's the part that makes it interesting. I'm currently tied for last with a bunch of other people right now, but none of my people are out and I think I've got some really good picks. Anyways...that's that for now.

Oops....

Wow, last post June 4. I guess it's now into August. Oops. Sorry everybody. I know there are people who check this thing routinely, so I just wanted to write something quick (I promise) to let you all know that I am still alive. Here's what's going on.

My summer so far has consisted of the following:
1) Little field work so far.
2) Lots of writing permits.
3) Visiting my old roommate Mike in NYC.
4) Dano's wedding at RSR....something about a bouncy bounce?
5) Running more instead of lifting lots (killer 8 mile weeks!)
6) Scrabulous!!
7) General hanging out...
8) Society of Engineering Companies Softball Tournament
9) and, as a result of #8, the company softball team.
10) USATF Level 2 Coaching Education - 1 week long. Just like college again. But learning track!

So that's that. Doesn't seem like much, but I still can't seem to find lots of time on my plate. Oh well. Pre-season for me for track starts in a few weeks so that should keep me busy. Bye for now everybody....

Excessive Orchid De Jour

"Excuse me, what is the soup de jour?"
-"It's the soup of the day"
"Mmm...that sound good. I'll have that."

Dumb and Dumber. Man, what a great freaking movie. Anyways, here's the orchid de jour. It's not really de jour cause you know as well as I do I will not post anything tomorrow, so don't get excited. This one's a pink lady slipper. I was driving back the DIII Track and Field National Championships (where I saw some old SLU/NYSCTC throwing buddies which was awesome) in Oshkosh, MN. I left Oshkosh at 7am, cause the SLU team had to catch a plane early that day, so I left at the same time. At 7:15am I got a warning for doing 65 in a 55 outside of Oshkosh. I guess there's nothing better to do at 7:15am on a Sunday in Oshkosh. Oh well, at least it was just a warning. So then I decided I had to do something cool, so I set out on my trip home on a course that would take me through Chequamegon (pronounced Che-wom-e-gon, I later found out) National Forest in north central Wisconsin. I stopped at a nice little recreation area/campsite that I thought would be a good place to meander through the woods and look for wildflowers to take pictures of. I got lucky when I happened across a really nice spruce bog. Well, "happened" is misleading. It's kinda my job to find bogs, so you could say I'm naturally attracted to them now. Regardless, I wandered around in the bog for a bit and found some really cool stuff. Bog walking, as it's known, takes some technique to a) not fall down b) not drop your camera or - perhaps most important- c) not manage to break through the moss layer and disappear into the bog, which, I imagine, would be a big drag. On a random side note, I kinda hadn't planned on this so I wore sneakers. Surprisingly bog water is very clean, and as an added perk I got clean sneakers out of the deal. So, to make a long story short (too late), here's my orchid de jour. Pink Lady's Slipper. Enjoy. Quick plug, I started a new online gallery at Artist Rising.com. There's a few other pictures on there, more to come I promise. :-)

Pink Lady's Slipper - Cypripedium acaule

Uh oh....I got a new toy.

So my toy about this time of year last year was to buy myself a nice digital SLR. I ended up taking a bunch of pictures of plants as I wandered around Minnesota for work over the summer of 2006. They came out pretty well, but taking pictures in the shaded woods became an issue. This summer my company proposed on some really huge T/E (Threatened and Endangered) species surveys way up north in the bog and peatlands. I was so pumped for this, cause literally all you do is wander around for 6 weeks looking for plants. I called the photographing part of it. I knew if we got it I would be in some really cool areas, and obviously looking for really cool plants. I decided I was goint to buy a nice macro lens for my camera that has a wider aperature so I can take pictures in darker areas. Turns out we didn't get any of the really cool jobs, but because I was so pumped to get my new lens (and also frustrated for not getting the work) that I bought it anyways. The thing is awesome, I love it. So much so that I forsee this becoming a problem for several reasons. First, that I will now take pictures on my job sites instead of working in a timely manner. I mean, taking pictures of stuff I see is part of the job. But is it excessive to spend 15 minutes taking pictures of a rare buttercup? Suffice it to say I am really good at rationalizing. :-) The other reason why this is bad is because now I can see how much difference it makes having a good lens. 99.9% of the time in photography you pay for what you get, and good equals expensive. So as much as I like the setup I have now and it works really well for me, I can now see how nice it would be to own one of these. That would be more for sports photography. I know I can't spend that much on a camera lens, so I've decided I have to make at least half whatever the lens costs by selling pictures before I get one. I've got a ways to go. So...you know....if you want to help go here. Shameless plug.

Anyways, summer is pretty much here (at least the weather thinks so) and along with it come the trilliums. My sister and I have a sailboat that we named Trillium. And I rememer going through the flower book to find a flower we thought looked pretty. So, in honor of Trillium...here you go.

Just a little bit of irony?

OK so I was watching the news last night and they started out with a story about global warming. Apparently the world's leading scientists (According to whom? You mean the leading scientists with your opinion?) released another report detailing the effects of global warming (again). Polar ice caps melt, coastal water levels will rise, and ocean temperature fluctuations will cause the poor little penguins and dolphins to relocate to new places. Can't you just hear Morgan Freeman's voice in the background? "There will be no offspring for this mother penguin this year. She begins the long, toilsome journey back home, her three hard weeks worth of work wasted..." Sob sob.
Anyways, they followed this story with the first look at the weather where they talked about record low temperatures across the U.S. for Easter weekend. I just had to laugh out loud, as not 30 seconds earlier they were talking about how we can't stop this global warming juggernaut and all hell will break loose very very soon. Come on now kids, isn't that just a little bit ironic?