Another late version of SMLR.   Sunday mornings have been my sleep catch-up day, so SMLR gets bumped right.  I’m still on the “post-every-week” wagon though…

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My coffee this morning is Henry’s House of Coffee – Kenya.  I ran across this coffee in Safeway, and decided to give a go.  The roast is a good intermediate light-medium; it has the light roast crispness, but with a bit of that medium-roast roastiness on the back end.   It is very smooth, and I think I’ll keep drinking it this week.   As my coffees tend towards the light-light end of the spectrum, I’m actually enjoying this little bit of roasty variation.

Note – this is the fourth SMLR coffee review, and so far they’ve all been positive.  That’s selection bias – I only drink coffees I like.  But I will branch out, I will assume some risk and try new, unknown, or sketchy-looking coffees.  And I will power through the occasional bad coffee, ruining my Sunday morning in the process, in order to provide you detailed reviews of what not to drink.    I have a request in for chicory-coffee, so that may be coming soon.

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I really want to try paragliding.  It probably won’t happen anytime soon, but it’s on my short-list of hobbies to take up someday.  I don’t think it’s really a thing in Hawaii, so it’ll likely stay in the queue while we’re there.

I have some experience skydiving, and although freefall is inherently exhilarating, I really prefer being under canopy.  Paragliding is like skydiving, minus the skidiving – it’s just the under-canopy part.   And the “harness” – what you sit in under canopy – is designed (in paragliding) for comfort; it basically looks like a air-filled recliner.   Plus, if you do it right, I understand you can stay airborne for long periods of time.  The canopies are designed to keep you up, unlike traditional skydiving canopies, which are designed to get you down.    When I get a few minutes and the right environmentals, I’m going to take it up (no pun).

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My 100 miler is this coming Friday.  Thursday is a travel day, then the race starts at 6am Friday.  It runs through the mountains from Logan, UT to Fishhaven ID.   I may jot some pre-race thoughts down during the 2 hour flight from San Jose to SLC, and post them Thursday evening.   Check back Thurs/Fri for pre-race thoughts.

Speaking of race-blogs – I recently perused some other peoples’ ultra-marathon race recap posts.  I had an epiphany: race recaps are boring!   It’s not boring to write, but man is it boring to read, even to a fellow runner.   “I ran such and such section, legs hurt, I ate some food, I was tired, legs hurt more, etc etc etc, then I finished and was happy.”  That’s pretty much all race recaps in a nutshell.

As such – I will try to mix mine up a bit in my next one and depart from the standard form race recap.  I’ll still capture the experience, but in a way that is interesting to read, not just write.

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Finley and I have a few daddy-daughter bonding activities, but her favorite by far is picking up dog poo.  Or more accurately, helping me pick up dog poo.  We call it Poo-patrol, and we go on patrol every few days.

We have a good division-of-labor system:  she is the “searcher/locator” and I am the “scooper/bagger.”  She is pretty passionate about it.   It’s kind of a like an easter-egg hunt, except with unsavory, stinky, and misshapen eggs.   She’s got a honed locator system, and can now discern a dry turd from a brown rock.  We still haven’t quite learned that foot-stomping a dog poo does not make it go away, but we’re getting there.   I realize that one day she will learn to be self-sufficient and will no longer need or want daddy’s scooper/bagger capabilities, and will set out on her own solo poo-patrols.  It will be a sad but proud moment.

The dog-turd community in our backyard is pretty resilient, and regenerates itself to a healthy population size within a few days after poo-patrol clearance ops.  Left unchecked, it would quickly overrun us and turn the backyard into a brown lumpy soup – like beef stroganoff but not as good.   It would be a tough task for me to try to take on alone, but I have my daughter to help keep the poop in check.  I don’t know what I’d do without her.

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Podcast of the week:

American History Tellers – Cold War Series.   I got turned on to this through a class I took last quarter, as a way to get smart on the Cold War for a project I was working on.  The American History Tellers podcasts does several mini-series, each focused on a different theme from American history.  The Cold War series is seven podcasts long, each one about 40 minutes.  It is told mostly narrative-style, so it’s very easy to listen to.   I think it does a good job capturing the big issues from the Cold War, which are many and complex, in a style that is easy to follow.  It conveys a few things notably well:  the domestic civil atmosphere in the 50s and 60s during the red scare, the second-order effects of nuclear testing and the arms race, and how it ties related themes (like civil-liberties) to the ideological contest between capitalism and communism.