Schierer Space

At least for me… 8 miles in 69:30.
The first 2.3 miles felt ridiculously slow but clocked in at about 8:45/mile. Up to about 8:30/mile for the next mile. Looks like I maintained about 9 minute miles for the next 2 and half or so, but then made up lots of time at the end. About 8:20 in the long 1.5 mile downhill stretch, followed by a good strong 7:45 pace for the last mile.
I felt pretty good throughout with no cramps or particularly strong winded-ness. My feet hurt in a few spots, so I think I may need to retire my shoes. All told I’m feeling pretty confident for the 10 miles on 4th of July. Still shooting to beat 90 minutes with 80 minutes as my stretch goal.

Now that a full year has gone by, it is time to review our photographic growth chart…

We had lots of family and friends at the house to celebrate Nathan’s first birthday yesterday. The house is quiet again now (or at least as quiet as normal) so I have time to put up some pictures.

So just a few minutes ago I stopped Nate from spreading Cheerios all over the dining room. A moment later I realized that I had one stuck to the bottom of my sock. I pulled it off and without thinking… I ate it.

I mentioned this to K and she said: “Welcome to parenthood.”

I was trying to take a picture of something reflective, but instead ended up with a rather funky self-portrait.

Can you guess what I was taking a picture of?
(more…)

Just a few close-ups of tulips from this morning.

Earlier this week there was an especially beautiful day on tap so I took off work early and we went to the zoo. This was our first time to the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse. Nate seemed to notice the animals when they would move around and would get fairly excited. The rest of the time he would watch people walking by and point to things that caught his eye.
I, of course, took the opportunity to photograph the various animals and birds. This was a lot of fun, and quite challenging as most of the indoor environments were quite dark. The 70-200mm got quite a workout and I ventured into ISO settings that I normally don’t dare to use. In the end, quite a few shots were pretty compelling, but are not the highest quality due to noise or lack of sharpness from the lighting.

As we were about to leave, we noticed that on of the she-lions was right up against the Plexiglas. This was a nice opportunity to get closer to a lion than I remember being before.

Take a look at the gallery, here are some highlights.

Kahlua Fudge Ice Cream to be exact. Nate had his first visit to Kimberly’s Ice Cream over the weekend.

After a few small spoonfuls, K decided to go for broke and offered him her cone.

So he bit down on it.

He got baby brain freeze.

So he quickly learned to lick.

Ice cream rocks!

Other pics from the weekend too. Check out the recent picture updates.

I discovered today that we’ve somehow gotten off by a month on our Nathan albums in the Gallery. We, of course, managed this months ago (in like the 4th month). Of course, we should be in Nate’s 12th month now… not the 11th (as was previously in place). Age is a zero-based numbering scheme but the cardinal numbers associated with age are one-based. You’re immediately in your first year, which ends by turning one year old. So all of this geekiness aside, I fixed all of the albums and the links in the blog going back all the way to last summer. Unfortunately, this is a complete manual process.

The thumbnails displayed in the blog are interestingly enough permalinks, so the images are still visible after I change they’re albums. The links to the image pages in the gallery are not… they are ‘meaningful links’ like “Nathan/5th+Month/”. Unfortunately, this means that they break when the album hierarchy changes. Bleh.

I’ll probably look into changing this because this doesn’t really scale well into the future. I foresee all of Nate’s first year albums being organized into a new album when we break into his second year in a few weeks. This will require me to manually edit all of the links again. Bleh^2. I think I better figure out something better by then.

Nate and I helped Kristin celebrate her first Mother’s Day. Nate had some fun with chalk on the driveway (I helped a little).