Pampering for Prevention

About 8:55pm last night my wife's cell phone rang. On the other end was a local TV anchor calling to inform Brittany that the entry she had submitted on behalf of my mother in a promotion that KSN is running in conjunction with Oasis Salon & Day Spa and St. John's Regional Medical Center had been selected to receive an all-day spa package at Oasis. The promotion was in search of people (women) who had been effected by breast cancer. My wife heard them talking about this event (called Pampering for Prevention) and decided to enter my mom - who after losing her dad to complications from lymphoma last November lost her oldest sister to breast cancer in April of this year and is now dealing with her husband (my dad) being treated for skin cancer (which, for the record, does not appear life threatening).

We had no idea if she'd be considered, but the call came and she's now scheduled to spend Friday at Oasis doing all the things women enjoy doing at a spa (don't ask me for a list, I'll sound stupid trying to say some of those words).

Mom called about 20 minutes after Britt got the call from KSN - KSN had called mom to let her know. She was really excited.

Rumor has it KSN will be interviewing the three winners at Oasis on Friday (I'm not sure if this will be a live feed at 5pm or recorded). I don't think my mom knows that yet, and I'm not sure she's going to be too excited about it, but I think she'll be fine.

The Tulsa Run and a Feminist Rally

Brittany and I went to Tulsa this weekend to participate/compete in the 30th Annual Tulsa Run. The short version of how that happened is that one of her brothers decided he wanted to run it and asked if we would. A few days after we registered for the race (at my wife's insistence) Gavin called to say he had hurt his knee and couldn't go. Not unlike buying discount commercial airline tickets, race registration fees are non-refundable, non-transferable, non-anything-you-might-want-to-do-with-them-so-either-come-and-run-the-race-or-we're-keeping-your-money-anyway!

So we went.

The race itself went well. Brittany ran it in just under 1 hour and 20 minutes, some 6 minutes faster than she ran it 2 years ago (this is a 15km or 9.25 mile race by the way). That's almost 40 seconds/mile faster, which in running is a very significant improvement. She did well in 2005, she did really well this time, I'm very proud of her (and would have been proud of her regardless of her finishing time).

I ran my fastest time on this iteration of the Tulsa Run course (before 2002 the course was different - same length, different path - and much faster, so it's hard to compare the two, because the old course had virtually no hills, this one does) at 57:03 (net, 57:11 off the gun). I was fairly satisfied with that. I just missed placing in the Clydesdale's division (any guy over 170 is eligible, I figured why not). Though I was the 3rd Clydesdale to cross the finish line, they use age-graded times to determine places, so some older steeds who actually finished behind me got all the hardware because it's somehow harder to run fast when you're older or something. Not bitter. I was 12th in my open age group, they give out trophies to the top 10, so I just missed that as well. I did come home 45th overall, which is the highest I've ever finished in the Tulsa Run field overall - including years where I got an age-group award. The only hardware I came away with was the finisher's medal and the 60/70 cup. The cup is the real perk of doing the Tulsa Run, it's a coffee cup they give to all the guys who finish under 60 minutes and the ladies who finish under 70 minutes.

Now, the best story of the race was this. Very late in the race (like 500m from the finish line) I started coming up behind a young woman. Experience told me she was probably in the top 5 overall women in the field and then with 200m or so left we passed a picture op checkpoint (they set up this archway and stage photographers to take pics of all the runners). As we did, I heard one guy with a camera say to the other, "2nd woman?" Translated, she was the 2nd overall among the women. I eased up next to her (at this point, there are no sudden movements), spoke to her (encouraged her that she'd run a good race, this isn't uncommon, though it can result in hyper-ventilation at that stage of the race).

As I started to move past her I start to hear it. Women in the crowd started screaming at her not to let "him" (that would be me) pass her. Great, I'm sucking wind as hard as I can, trying not to fall down in the last 150m of the race and suddenly I've become the object of ire for every woman in the crowd, I'm that guy who is trying to keep their sister down or something crazy. Thoughts at this point in a race aren't very coherent, but mine went something like this, "Crap, now I have to beat her to the finish line, I can't let a girl outrun me in the home stretch. Man, I hope she doesn't have anything left, cause I'm out." So with that I took off for all I was worth, thankfully I had just enough of a burst to convince her it wasn't worth the effort. The guy just in front of us heard me coming and accelerated just enough to keep me behind him, but I did outlast the girl. I was half expecting to be beaten by a mob of angry women after the race, but thankfully the finishing area is protected. I think the lesson here is don't be near any of the top 10 women in the field near the finish or you become the bad guy.

Update

Just a quick update on an item I mentioned last Friday. The local NBC affiliate did get the NLCS score from late Sunday evening correct this morning, unfortunately they had Arizona winning instead of Colorado (who actually won and now leads the series 3 games to 0).

Beef Anyone?

I've been trying to decide exactly what to put in this post since shortly after 5am. I've got a couple (3) of sides of beef to cook here:

1. Local television sports coverage. It's horrible, across the board, it's bad. Now, I would say that when it comes to getting information about local teams (high school specifically) it's a necessary evil, but the FCC really should bar all local TV stations from making everyone dumber by trying to report on major college and/or professional sports.

Case in point, this morning the local NBC affiliate reported that Arizona had won last night's NLCS game 1-0 over Colorado. In fact, Colorado won 5-1. Now you might be thinking this was a really late game out west. Well, it was 4-1 Colorado at about 9:45 last night when I went to bed. I know they aren't going to update anything between the 10pm and 5:30am broadcasts, but at least check it before you go on the air at 10. Even better, don't do local coverage at all on major sports, pay ESPN or Fox Sports or someone else who does sports coverage for their programming. Really, we'll all lose less brain cells in the process.

2. Joplin stoplights. First, there are far too many in this town (I maintain that Joplin is more like an overgrown small town than a small city because it lacks cross-town expressways, but that's my personal bias). They just keep putting them up. For the love of everything good and holy stop it!

Now, I will give the city props for the fact that virtually all of them are on sensors (this is good) and that the ones downtown and some over on Rangeline become flashing signals at night (also smart). Aside from the overabundance of lights my other issue here is with the aforementioned sensors. Too many of them are not biased toward the predominate traffic flow. What I mean is this, the sensors in all directions at a light are equally sensitive even though the bulk of the traffic is on one street, not both.

For example, there is a light at Junge (13th) & Maiden Lane Avenue (long story). The light probably only exists because Joplin High School's football stadium and school bus lot are a few blocks east of Maiden on Junge and so there are buses that come and go from this area and I'm sure on Friday nights there is traffic with fans getting in and out. The problem isn't that the light exists, but that it will immediately start the change cycle as soon as the first car on Junge hits the sensor - never mind that there is several times more traffic on Maiden. So you end up with several cars waiting on the light to change back so that one car can get out onto Maiden. The sensor needs to be there, it just needs to have a delay so that it favors the traffic on Maiden. This is possible, there are other lights around town that do it (or appear to).

3. I was appalled to learn this morning that Al Gore had won a Nobel Peace Prize for his "documentary" titled "An Inconvenient Truth". I wasn't surprised, nor did I care when he won an Oscar for it. That was expected, it was merely Hollywood expressing their political point of view. I have 2 issues with the folks handing out the Nobel awards.

First, the film has been found by a court in London to contain factual errors and/or exaggerations. See, when you make up the information or spice it up to make it more powerful, that's called a drama, a work of fiction, not a documentary.

Second, Al Gore is a huge hypocrite. I don't have an enormous problem with people who have private jets or live in large homes that consume large amounts of electricity - but Al Gore does and yet he's among the chief offenders. Pot or kettle today Al?

Let me be clear on this, I'm not saying global warming doesn't exist or that it's not important. I think we don't really know the full extent of what effects our activities are having on the planet yet and it needs to be looked at. Clearly it's unwise to continue with activities that are immanently detrimental to the planet. I just think the Peace Prize proved two things with this award: 1. it's political, because the science behind Mr. Gore's film isn't great, 2. it's irrelevant, because they made such a poor choice in giving it to Gore.

Burritos and Campus Ministry

As they say, anything worth having has a cost. And so it was for Brittany and I last night.

In an effort to recruit interns for next summer, I contacted the campus minister at the Christian Campus House at Missouri State University and he invited me to attend one of their regular Tuesday evening gatherings to plug the program. Since it's only an hour away and Springfield has 3 Q'doba locations I figured it was worth the effort. Then Dave (Embree, who is the campus minister at CCH) told me they started at 8:01pm and would be done around 9:30pm. You can see the dilemma starting to take shape.

Nevertheless, my wonderful wife agree to tag along - let's be honest, she was only in it for the burrito - despite the guaranteed late night. So we went.

First stop, Q'doba just off the James River at the Kansas Expressway exit (odd name for that road, it runs north and south - not west toward Kansas - and is chock full of traffic lights - "expressway?"). We pulled in between rushes and quickly received our bundles of goodness. My new favorite is the Ancho Chili BBQ Burrito. It's like taking all that is right and good about a trip to Sonny's and wrapping it up in a super-sized tortilla with all the typical goodness of a Q'doba burrito. It's worth every penny - and every mile.

Second stop, Brittany's brother's apartment. Brayden is a student athlete at MSU (baseball) and lives with 3 of the guys from the team just off campus. We stopped by to see him for a few minutes since we were in the area. In that time we got to see him cook himself dinner - which involved actually using a skillet and the stove - and the clothes he'd bought for a career fair this week. He and one of the roommates were trying to figure out how to tie the ties they had bought. The roommate was making progress, Brayden was fairly willing to let me help him a little. He seemed pretty happy when I tied it (on myself) then slid it off still tied so that he could just put it on and tighten it - and I don't blame him, I had to have that done for me a time or two.

Last stop, Plaster Student Union - location of 8:01 (the CCH gathering). We arrived early and set up a small display. It was only a few minutes until I encountered several students who were familiar with CIY and interested in interning. One of the students had emailed me about it back in summer and is planning to apply. By the time I got to work this morning another one of the girls we talked to had already submitted her application. The program CCH did was a good one, the worship - led by Allen Tyger, an OCC grad - was good, the Bible study done by one of the female staff members was well done. I was impressed with the sense of community throughout the group (of probably close to 200 people). I've seen campus ministry events that were larger like that and ended up being very shallow and superficial. This one wasn't that way - kudos to Dave and the staff.

After the CCH gathering ended I got a chance to talk to Dave for a few minutes. He's a 30-year Campus ministry veteran. I always appreciate getting to hear the heart of a guy who is out there doing that. Campus ministry in the secular world is a passion of mine - because I'm a product of it. Campus ministers generally seem to have a solid sense of the importance of discipling and helping Christian students grow as they prepare for careers in the secular world. They tend to see every occupation as an opportunity to serve Christ and advance His Kingdom - even if it's not a position in a church or ministry organization.

All-in-all it was a great evening, well worth the trip and the 11:30pm arrival at home. I would have been tempted to sleep in a little today, but since Britt didn't have that option I didn't think it would go over well, so I made the coffee a little stronger and went on about my way.

Winning is winnning

Sometimes you have to win one ugly in order to get off of an "oh-for" slump.

That is just what my fantasy football team managed to do for me this week. With 2 players remaining in the Monday night match up (neither expected to light it up) I've secured a 31-23 victory over Seth who didn't have a quarterback or one other position this week due to bye weeks. Not exactly my proudest achievement, but it does notch that all important first win of the season. A wise man once said:

"You almost had me? YOU almost had ME? Ask any racer, any real racer (Yes, I lifted this from a car movie, no it's not Days of Thunder). It doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning is winning."

I suspect the folks down in Norman and Austin this morning would concur with that statement from the inverse point of view. It doesn't matter whether you deserved to lose or not, the only thing the voters care about is the final score and the rank (or lack thereof) your opponent carried into the game, well and maybe how bad the beating was (41-21?). Good news is that both teams are similarly motivated to kill one another this weekend at the "Red River Shootout" or whatever they call it. This might be the first time in history that OSU is ahead of both OU and Texas in the Big 12 standings at the same time. I have no intimations that's going to last.