Saturday, July 21, 2012

New 7 Mile Route

Last week was my first official week of marathon training.  In order to build up to being able to do 26 miles I have to increase my long run mileage by 1 mile or 10% (which ever is more) every week.  When I do the math this means I may not be able to make it for the Long Beach.  If I do it means I'll have to cheat and skip ahead which is not really a good idea.  Cheating just means opening yourself up for injury.  If I'm not ready I won't force it.  There are other marathons.  I wanted to do that one again because it is obviously most convenient.  Also I feel like it beat me last time so I'm itching for some payback.  So last week was a 6 mile long run, today was a 7 miler.  This is the farthest I have run in quite a while.  Probably over a year.  There sure are a lot of hills in Signal Hill and Long Beach.  I'm sure I am running up and down more hills here than I was in Chino Hills.

I have an interesting situation happening at work right now.  My supervisor is going to be leaving to go on vacation about a week before we are to deliver the project.  That means it is completely on me to get it done.  This is also a project that I came onto late so I am not totally familiar with it.  This could prove to be a challenge.  The main thing I am looking forward to is a vacation that I scheduled starting July 30.  I really need it.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Quick Brownie Tip

Never, ever, eeeeeeeeever use olive oil when making brownies.  I was looking forward to having a day off tomorrow, but inevitably work asked me to come in.  Like always I said yes.  Then I thought about it, and decided to say no.  I really want to hang out with Derek tomorrow. 

Monday, July 2, 2012

Inflation

I was bored this morning so I decided to google a few prices of things like milk and gasoline for the year that I first started working, 1997.  Then I determined how much I could buy back in 1997 for a single hour of work versus what I can buy now.  This is what I came up with so far.

1 hour of work in 1997 would buy me 13 gallons of gas, today I can buy 10 gallons.  The same ratio exists for milk.

In 1997 it took me 55 hours to make enough money to pay my rent.  Today it takes me 67 hours to make my mortgage.

One thing that I found interesting is how difficult is to find historical information about prices.  I tried to find out what a Toyota Corolla cost in 1997.  I couldn't find it.  Tuition at UCI.  Nope.  How bout a Big Mac?  Not readily available either.  In this information age you would think that there wouldn't be anything you couldn't find out in 5 minutes on Google.  Perhaps there are still secrets.