Jan 13, 2014 - Teaching again!

Soon after we landed here, I thought about teaching a Japanese Conversation course through some Continuing Ed program.  Last Fall, I decided it was time to pursue it.

I've been teaching for the huge majority of my life - helping other kids in my elementary school classes with math, the high school drama kids with whatever I knew about theatre, etc.  And then I went to Japan.  And I was teaching all the time.  I learned a ton.  Maybe 7 tons.  A lot.  And I taught the Gospel.  And I taught English.  And whatever else I knew and could share, I did.  And I realized I was good at it.  And I loved it.

So when I returned to the States, I went to college and naturally started tutoring everything I could.  And then as a freelance interpreter/ESL instructor, I did the same for a year.  And then I took time off to be an engineer, have a bunch of kids, and start a career.  And then I wrote a Japanese Conversation course.  And it went well.

So now we're here, and I finally interviewed with the head of the local Continuing Ed program in early December.  And she green-lighted me!  The flyer arrived in area mailboxes last week (20,000 copies), and there I am!  I'm really excited.  The last few days I've been mulling over how to approach the class: language-centric?  Culture-centric?  How-to-get-along-as-a-traveller-or-business-person-centric?  I'm no longer concerned about any of the directions.

I have recently decided to poll the class on the first night and understand where they want to go with it.  But regardless, we'll start with a full session of written language introduction.  And they'll all leave being able to say 'hello' and 'what is that?' and 'this is a book'.

It should be a blast.  I'm going to put a copy of the flyer up in the break room at work later this week.  I want to get at least my 6 minimum students to get the thing off the ground.  And then I'm committed.  I'd like to eventually be running a Japanese 110 and a 210 series concurrently, just one night a week, 3 hours in a row.  So class starts in March, and I've got about 6 weeks to take the materials I've written over the past 20 years and coalesce the textbook out of it.  I've already got a language textbook - it's the other stuff I have to build.

Lots o' fun and lots o' work for the first time, and then just fun afterward.  And I do expect to eventually leave the semiconductor industry.  Best to plant the seeds of the second career earlier, gain relevant experience, and make a little extra cash now.

Jan 12, 2014 #2 - Random musical ruminations

Entry #2 for today, because the one I wrote at 3 this morning was really about yesterday.

I was up until about 7, then tried to get a few hours sleep and get on a normal sleep schedule.  I had slept so much by Friday morning that my back was hurting, and I entered a 24-hr period where I'd be up for 5-6 hrs, sleep for 2-3 hrs, and repeat the process.  Today's goal was to get back on track for a normal work week.

We are still going through boxes of stuff, as I supposed most people are.  We happen to have many boxes of books that don't fit on shelves because I'm a bookaholic.  So I was moving these books from cardboard boxes in the basement to plastic boxes in the basement and came across a box full of familiar-looking binders.  But I wasn't sure why they were familiar until I opened one up and saw sheet music.

Sheet music.  And not just any sheet music, but sheet music for "Axel F", arranged for barbershop quartet.  And "Three Chanteys", arranged by Marshall Bartholomew.  And "Lady Let the Rolling Drums", a musical setting to Tennyson's poem about women allowing their men to go and die on the battlefield.  And "Ward, the Pirate" by Ralph Vaughan Williams.  And close to a hundred others.  Some were arranged by members of my quintet, the Morning Stars.  Some were by pros.  Some are a hundred years old, some are new.

I have really fond memories of rehearsals with that group of men.  They were stand up guys, all of them - Nick, Jake, Evan, Jim, and Christian.  We weren't always a quintet, the lineup changed, like it always does in musical groups.  But we would all take our musical folders, and stand in a circle and sing to each other.  We had a lot of really good times and made some great music.  One of the best investments of my time and energy I have ever spent.  They are the closest friends I've made through Church in my life, with the exception of the Hawkins family.

Another, and much more recent, investment came by chance recently.  I thought my PS2 had broken when it wouldn't work on my new TV.  I tried a new cable, no luck.  Tried the Wii, it was fine.  So I decided to give up on the PS2 thing entirely: to buy some games on the PS3 and start afresh.  And then I saw a PS2 with Rock Band for $40 on Craigslist.  That game was always intriguing, but not worth $200 to get into.  For $40, I'd give it a go.  3 weeks after Christmas, we have Lego, Beatles, and Rock Band 2.  Libby loves the drums, and she'll sing as well.  Aria is our guitarist.  Katrina will sing, but hasn't worked on an instrument.  I'm starting to get the drums, starting to be able to keep a beat with one hand independent of the other hand.  It's a ton of fun.  Libby loves Yellow Submarine.  Jake started playing drums tonight.  He's no good yet, but he'll get there.  Libby keeps trying, and she'll get it, too.  I see an electric drum kit in our near future.

We collect instruments that don't get played like some people collect cats.  We're the crazy instrument family.  We have a lovely piano, a kids electric guitar, an adult electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, an electric piano, a kazoo, a harmonica, and now a set of Rock Band instruments.  The drum kit makes the most sense to add to our menagerie.  For us crazy people, anyway.

But it's just awesome to see the kids have so much fun with a video game that teaches them something.  I love the reductionist way of turning sheet music into colored buttons that come at you.  It's very different than reading sheet music, but tells the same story.  If I could only get the Beatles harmony vocals to give me sheet music notes, then I could sing it better, though.  I'm old school I suppose.

Anyway, music is great.  I'm pretty much over my sickness, got in my first run in 3 days this morning (5 miles, 7:19 pace), down to 203 lbs (down 32 lbs since last May), sorted some financial stuff out, removed the track lighting from the bedroom, and cleaned up the random garbage from the woods.  Then I did 2 loads of laundry, sang some Beatles, helped Aria with some graphing math, and now I'm pretty much ready for bed.  It's a good life.

Jan 12, 2014 - Bipolar weather

I woke up Friday not feeling well.  It was the same thing that everyone else in the house has had over the last 2 weeks.  I thought I would escape it, but no luck.  It's a flu thing, with some stomach nastiness.  It didn't hit me as hard as some others, so I'm grateful for that.  It was still unpleasant.  Haven't had stomach cramps like that since I was a kid.

At any rate, the week has been one of crazy weather again.  Lows near 0, 3 inches of snow on Thursday night heading into Friday.  Saturday morning I woke up to nearly 60 degrees and hard rain.  The Christmas lights came down on Friday, Saturday they made it into a box in the basement.  And Katrina and I installed some shelving in the kitchen.

Going through some papers in the basement, I found the old binders from the Morning Stars.  I sang through some of the songs in my head as I filed the music into folders.  I really loved doing that.  I wonder if I could restart something like that...on my "want" list for sure.  But I'd have to get all new stuff for SATB instead of TTBB, because it would almost certainly be a mixed group.

2 pics for today.  One is Friday, an incidental pic that I took while taking down Christmas lights.  And those are snowflakes falling that you can see.  And the other is a deluvian rain from this afternoon.

Jan 6, 2014 - Feeding the beast

What beast?  The oil furnace, of course!

No chance to blog yesterday.  It was warmer yesterday, still nice and brisk, though.  Katrina and the kids stayed home from church because of the stomach thing she and Christian had.  I went in to teach Sunday School, and we discussed what the kids needs to do, be, and become to be ready to serve as missionaries.  It was a good discussion, deeper than some we've had recently.

As one of the kids was saying the closing prayer, my phone vibrated in my pocket.  I left right afterward, and as I left the building, I checked who it was.  It was Katrina.  So I called back, and she told me that the furnace had stopped working and that we had leaking pipes in the basement.  2 thoughts came into my head: 1) How bad could this possibly be?  In the worst case, how bad could it have gotten in the last 10 hours, and how long would it take to fix it? 2) Is there really anything broken?

So I went straight home, and assessed the situation.  The furnace was the biggest thing.  If we don't have water, we can survive.  Without heat on a 25 degree day, we're not in good shape.  So I checked the power to the furnace, it was off.  Katrina had flipped the breaker to be safe.  So I turned it back on and walked down to see if I could see any lights going.  There wasn't anything visibly wrong, so I reached down to the red button and pumped it a couple times.  10 seconds later, I heard it kick on.  I went up stairs, and in 2-3 minutes, we had warm air coming out.  I'm guessing an air bubble got in the line or maybe a little snow got in the tank when we had it filled on Friday.

So that was a good thing.  Easy fix.

The leaky pipe took some more investigation.  The pipe is the dead end for the line that used to feed the hot water boiler.  Many houses in the East have radiant heat, with a furnace that heats water, and the water is piped throughout the house in water radiators.  They look like baseboard electric heaters in the West, but circulate hot water instead.  There must be a logic to it that I don't understand.  At any rate, the house used to have that kind of setup, and the pipe that fed the system is still there.  There is a stem pipe that comes off the main cold water line, then a valve, then a nipple.  The nipple was leaking.  So either the valve had gone bad, or the nipple had gone bad.  It was just dripping, not squirting, so no worries.  There was a bucket under it already, and it was fine.

Once the house had heated up a bit, it stopped dripping.  So there's a seal in there that is leaking by a bit when it gets cold.  I 'll replace it on Wednesday.

The takeaway from this?  Something I've thought repeatedly about this house:  I love that everything is visible in this house.  The full basement gives me complete visibility to wiring and piping without getting dirty or staring at desiccated opossum remains and other unpleasantness in a crawlspace.

The work week this week is crazily busy, but short.  I worked a half day on Sunday, 12 hrs today and tomorrow, and then a couple hours on Thursday, and I'm done.  I'm preparing for our monthly meeting with customer management, and it's an intense effort.  The team members all put their best foot forward, and we always have a good product.  But it takes effort to gather the information, shape it, and package it in a way that is useful for us and our customer.  So that's what I'm working on.  Made good progress today.  Tomorrow I should be ready for the premeeting.

Pics: the leaking nipple and Hopewell Junction.  I was out picking up something at the local hardware store.  Not Home Depot!  We have one relatively close, but we've got a local odds-and-ends hardware store as well as a building supply store closer.  I love both of them.  As I left the store, I was struck by the Hallmark Village I was walking through.  So I snapped a photo.

Jan 4, 2014 - Reason #1 Why I Love New York

There are many reasons why I love New York.  The distance from my birth family and friends is tough, and I do miss biking and the proximity to real mountains.  But otherwise (and this is truly truly true) I love it here.  I'll catalog random reasons why over the next year.  These are obviously in random order as well.

Today's reason is sledding in my back yard.  We have a nice sledding hill, and today I made a good run down it.  Libby enjoyed it later.  It has a corner in it, which I reinforced with additional snow, and then I added a berm at the end.  My entire life, sledding has been something I get to do once or twice a year, and it's a whole day affair.  We've had 2 good sledding snows already this year, and this snow is still powdery soft.  It was lovely.  Libby and I both had a blast - about 30 minutes of sledding and running up hill is about all a person needs.  Then it's time to come inside and do something else.  Jake did some sledding, too, but he made his own track.

Lovely day.

Jan 3, 2014 - The oddness of fitness

A late night last night made for a later morning this morning - an 8am start for me.  My first 2 hours of the day were spent clearing the snow from the driveway, and then a 4 mile run on the treadmill just to prove to myself I was really insane.  I had intended the run to be 8 miles, but had to cut out halfway in.  The left knee was a little odd (probably due to the long trail run yesterday), and I didn't want to push it too hard.

Then, in line with my New Year's resolution to be more present with my kids, I spent an hour in the Lego room, sorting through Legos and preparing to start building a large Lego car.  My objectives right now are a working steering wheel and locking doors.  It is going to be a much-larger-than-Lego-scale vehicle.  It was nice to hang with Jake and Libby for an hour.  Then I made pork chops for the missionaries for dinner and delivered it.  And now my day is about done.

The subject of today's post is one I've meant to write for quite a while.  Here are some odd things I've learned through my process of weight loss and training since March:
1) weight loss happens all over your body, not just where you think you look chubby.  I was surprised to find the rubber gloves I wear at work fit much better than they used to - I used to have to wear the XL gloves or my thumbs would get sore.  Now the L gloves are perfect.  Who knew I had hand fat?  Weird.
2) shirt sizes are determined both by weight and length.  My long sleeve shirts are L, or the sleeves are too short. My short sleeve shirts are now M, or the chest is baggy.  It's a problem I'm happy to have.  I've had an M shirt for 10 years that I have been unable to wear for 8 years.  It is now my favorite shirt.
3) I read in a book recently that intense exercise is addictive.  I find that I do have withdrawal if I skip a day.  I get jittery, and can't wait to spend some energy working out.  I can concentrate better and work longer more comfortably now than I used to.
4) The protein shake thing works.  I started drinking a chocolate whey powder, and I think it's helping to bulk me up a lot.  I thought it was snake oil.  No longer.
5) Strength training helps with distance.  This was a real surprise.  I trained for the first Tough Mudder solely on the treadmill.  It never goes above a 4% grade on a program.  The second Tough Mudder is on a ski slope, very hilly, very steep.  So I've started doing my 5K short runs with a 10% grade for much of the distance.  It is quickly exhausting, and I can't go very fast.  So I settle in for a 10-minute pace for a mile or so at the 10% grade.  It's kindof like doing a couple thousand single-leg squats in a row.  Now I routinely find myself in reach of record times on my flat runs of 3, 5, or 8 miles.  The only thing I've changed is adding the elevation to the shorter runs.
6) The endurance mind game is all the same.  Whether running or biking, you reach a certain point of zen, and the most complicated thing going through your head is  "Is this how fast I want to go right now?"  At first, learning to run, how to warm up, build a cadence, etc, takes time and concentration.  And then muscle memory takes over, and your mind is free to defocus on details.  I expect swimmers experience the same thing.  I hope to find out in the Spring.   I have my sights set on a triathlon in 2014 (a small one, not an Ironman)
7) A marathon doesn't scare me from a muscle perspective.  My knees couldn't take it, but I can certainly keep up a 6 mph pace for 4 hours in a day.

Despite my long history with biking, I think the last 7 months of running and strength training has changed my body more than those 10 years of consistent cycling.  It's a holistic thing, and fascinating to experience.

I took my new snowshoes for a spin this afternoon, and had a Grizzly Adams moment, looking back at my snowshoe prints and our snow-covered cabin in the woods.  Snowshoes are cool.  My mom has great taste in Christmas gifts.

Jan 2, 2014: Today, on the Appalachian Trail...

I worked a long week this week - 6 hrs + church on Sunday, 12 hrs Mon, Tue.  Then a New Year's party on Tuesday evening, followed by 12 more hrs on Wed, followed by watching my Ducks'defense shut down the Texas Longhorns' inept offense for an entire game.  I got to sleep at 11.

We've been hearing all week about a huge snow storm and cold snap that is supposed to hit us late this week.  Temps falling from 65 on Sunday 4 days ago to 20 on Thursday.  The snow storm (some are calling it a blizzard) arrives Thursday (that's today!), and Friday's high is supposed to be 10, overnight low of -7.

So I woke up this morning at 8 after this crazy work week, knowing it's going to dump snow in the afternoon and stay well under freezing all day.  So I did what any rational person would do: I put on my running shoes, a stocking hat, and went for a run in the woods.  It appears I may be the only rational person in the Hudson Valley, because there was nobody, and no sign of anybody, on the trail today.  I started at the SW end of Canopus lake at 8:30.  It was 11 degrees.  Cooler than previous outings which were both about 22 degrees, but not unreasonable, thinks I.  I have a set of good gloves, my stocking cap, a t shirt, a long sleeve biking jersey, long biking leggings, running shorts, a medium jacket, and a backpack with water, 2 cold sausages, and some peanut butter candy.

The lake is not suitable for swimming.  First, it would be instant hypothermia.  Second, there's a layer of snow falling on the lake's frozen surface.  So you can't swim in it even if you are immune to hypothermia.

So I got on the trail.  It was lovely.  The forest is gorgeous all decked in white.  It's like the negative image of a picture in a coloring book: everything is outlined in white instead of black.  I think that NY natives are spoiled - they have no idea how lovely the outdoors is when it's covered in snow.  They only think of shoveling snow bad traffic and things.  It is really stunning to be out there, though.  I covered the trail as quickly as I could.  This is not a good section for running.  It's very rocky, lots of climbs up outcroppings and then descents down said outcroppings.  This is the most technically difficult section of the AT that I've done.

The trail here goes along the West side of Canopus Lake, and mostly follows the higher ridges.  The lake is usually visible through the trees in the winter.  In summer, you probably can only get fleeting glimpses of it.  I was surprised to meet a canyon of green in the middle of winter.  It didn't last long, but it was cool.













In the woods, you can usually hear water before you see it.  I heard this gurgling brook near the top of the ridge line, and the trail ran right across it.  It was a huge spring: rocks on the trail covered it for maybe 30'of trail.  There were icicles on logs spanning the water, and little islands of ice and snow on the rocks sticking up out of the stream.  Gorgeous.

My minimum goal for the day was to reach a certain dog-leg in the trail near the North end of the lake.  I'm doing the AT mostly solo, and mostly in little chunks.  So I end up covering 1-4 miles of trail, but running/hiking 2-8 miles.  Some trail segments are longer than that, though, so I have to hit them in 2 sections.  This is one of those.  I knew if I completed this hike to the dog leg from the South, then I could get to the dog leg from the North on a different day.  I got to my goal in a little less than an hour.  I was not prepared for what I'd see.  It blew me away.

It looks like the Hudson River, but it's not.  And it also looks foggy, but it's not.  It was somewhere between 9-13 degrees for the entire hike, and a light to medium snow was falling most of the time.  I had brought my backpack because I expected to take off my coat and hat and some point like I had on my first cold-weather trail run.  It was not to be.  10 degrees and a slower pace is a completely different experience than 22 degrees and running.  They stayed on.  I kept moving after I'd reached the overlook, hoping to make my next leg shorter.  I got about another mile in before I could feel that it was time to return.  The forest had changed from the shorter, skinnier trees at the ridge line to taller trees, reaching up from the floor of the ravine for sunlight.   It was 3.75 miles in, and I needed to get home eventually and get some other things done.

The return trip was shorter.  Or it felt shorter, anyway.  I tried to cover it as quickly as I could.  I had done my exploring, now I just needed to clean up and finish the job, which I like to do quickly.  I was also starting to get hungry (I don't eat before these early runs), and I also realized that it was really really cold.  It was like biking, when I realize that I'm going to need to make time to stop, get a drink, and eat a snack before I start to bonk.  This time it would be the cold that would be dangerous.  Writing it this way sounds really dangerous, but it's the opposite: when you've spent a lot of time pushing your body in a physical way, you understand when it's telling you, "I'm fine now.  But if you don't go toward somewhere warm, I might not be fine in a while." It was telling me "I don't have hypothermia yet.  But if you don't get warmer, I will soon have hypothermia." 

I like the warnings, and I heed them.  I ignored them once, on a bike ride in early Spring a few years ago.  I ran completely out of water and blood sugar, and I could feel my body shutting down certain things because my legs had to keep pedaling.  Although I was able to set down for half an hour and let my blood sugar return to a functional level and make it home, it was a scary experience that I did not want to repeat.   So I turned around and tried to move faster home.  I ran where I could, kept my hands in my pockets as I ran and walked, and soon made it back to the overlook, where I indulged in a selfie.  A little more than a mile from the car, I lost the trail.  I'd been following a mix of the trail markers, the obvious trail, and my own footprints (there weren't any others), and I realized that although it looked like I was on an obvious trail, I saw no footprints,and no markers.  I had the lake to my left, so I knew I could get back to the car no matter what.  I use MapMyRun to log these workouts, and I pulled it up to see that I was indeed off the beaten path.  I backtracked about 50 yards, saw the trail markers, and I was back on my way.

I get back to the car at 10:30, about 2 hours for 7.5 miles.  The rest of the day was busy - I got home, showered, went grocery shopping, bought the parts for a generator cable, spent some time cleaning the pantry, did a load of dishes, made dinner, put up some brackets for curtain rods, put away dinner, logged my pics on FaceBook, lifted weights, played a little Rock Band, printed some AT maps, and now this blog post.  I should be really tired, but I'm not.  

Christian and Katrina aren't feeling well tonight.  I hope they feel better in the morning.