A Tail of Two Cats in the City

We got super lucky recently with an invitation to stay at a friend's place in the Bronx and cat-sit for her during her holiday vacation.  It coincided with a weekend that we were already coming down for a holiday party with Ron (thanks Ron!), plus Christmas weekend when we didn't have solid plans yet.  So I get 2 weekends in the big city and John gets that, plus the weekdays in between.  Score!

Our first night downtown - 'tis the season to brave the crowds and see the amazing lights and skating rink at Rockefeller Center:

And giant Christmas tree!

The Music Hall nearby:

The Bronx cats are Leo the kitten (a.k.a. "Monster") and Lulu the cat (a.k.a. "Sweetheart but pretty boring compared to the little rug rat").

I tried a photo shoot with Leo, but it was really difficult to capture him in one place, even at a higher shutter speed... he's just so curious!  And funny!

This worked for a few seconds:

Lulu was much easier:

Leo even came after the camera itself:

Play toys helped - it only took about 10 shots to get this:

Sigh...

OK, back to the city - Rockefeller Center rink in the daylight:

St Patrick's Cathedral:

Globe Man:

Could the Cash Cab be going past us right now??  We should keep an eye out...

Buildings are wrapped and ready for the holidays:

We spent the afternoon wandering around the Museum of Modern Art - fabulous!

Who doesn't like puppies?

A Christo piece - much smaller than others we have heard about:

Claes Oldenburg - the first sculpture of his I've seen that seems to have melted:

I looked at this and thought "huh, looks like moules-frites from France" (mussels and french fries) - and sure enough, that's what these are:

Modern art!

After a week of work, I'm back in the Bronx and ready for more sightseeing and walking and running around town.

Merry Christmas, y'all!

Weekend of running

Yesterday we drove up to Camp Dippikill for the "Adventure Race" run that the Albany Running Exchange hosts each December. We were excited that John was able to experience it this time. Last year was great fun and craziness, and this year did not disappoint.

This time 106 runners started out sitting on the dirt road and then taking off our shoes and holding them in the air. When we all had our shoes off, the RD said "Go!" and we raced to put them back on so we could start running. John apparently never unties his shoes anyway, so he just slipped them back on and he was the first to stand up and start running. I was thinking I was doing well with the Salomon slide laces, but I wasn't as fast as John! I followed him around the cabin and joined the initial rush into woods to follow pink ribbons wherever the race organizers decided to take us.

John led the way for a while and eventually the fastest guys caught up and passed him. John said he had a lot of fun with the obstacles - walking on logs over creeks and ponds, using trees to climb rock faces and descend steep drops, and scrambling up and down steep inclines. Most of the race involved off-trail travel through the woods (with a few trails thrown in for recovery), up and down big and small hills, trying to keep track of the pink ribbons.

Based on my experience last year (and being not quite as enamored as John about the obstacle traversing), I followed the more common approach of finding ways around the obstacles while not losing track of the course. There aren't any real rules, as far as I can tell, except to generally follow the pink ribbons until you end up back at the start.

Which mostly involves an hour+ of anaerobic, pell-mell running through the woods, trying to keep from getting whacked in the face by branches (usually from people immediately in front of you, although some were self-inflicted) and trying to keep from going off-track or getting run over by someone right on your tail. Like a free-for-all orienteering event where you don't have to think about the actual navigation part. Not your average running race!

I saw one woman pass me early and she was running fast enough that I didn't think I would catch her (I didn't). I also followed a group of guys on a rare trail section and I think we were all so happy to be on a trail that it took a bit before someone noticed that we were no longer following pink ribbons all of a sudden. No pink, no pink! I yelled at the next guy running toward me after I did an about-face to run back the way we had come. We spotted the ribbons over to the left and rejoined the frenzied masses on the right course.

Apparently a few folks made an even bigger error and did not actually go back to fix it. This somehow involved cutting off a big chunk of the course, because toward the end I passed a woman running relatively slowly. That was weird - I had to check that she had a race number on (she did). It didn't make sense that she had gotten by me on the little detour that had cost only a couple minutes. I guess it was possible. But then there were more slow people, I passed another woman I had not seen before, and a total of 3 women beat me. I have a suspicion that I could have been the 2nd-or-so woman if things had gone correctly (John also told me he passed a ton of people running much slower than him near the end, and that made no sense to him either, especially the women that had never passed him but were now ahead of him - he had started at the front and didn't go off course like it did).

In the end, it was a race for fun, so we didn't fret over it. After all, everyone seemed to be free to make their own decisions about the obstacles, so it's not like you can get hung up on the fairness of the results. It's all good :)

We got in a few bonus miles when our car ran out of gas (which I can't find any way to blame on John, perplexingly) and met a nice fellow runner named David who helped us make the final couple miles to a gas station and then back to the car. Thank you David!!

Today we ran the HMRRC 15k road race around U-Albany and the state office roads. Back to my road running roots! That was fun, especially with sunshine and blue skies, starting slow and easy and gradually speeding up to race to the finish line. I haven't run a 15k in so long I don't even know what my PR is :)

I've spent the rest of the day going over possibilities for winter-spring racing. Looks like another fun mix of running (roads and trails), a winter adventure race, snowshoeing, XC skiing, even a Ski-O event. It's a challenge figuring how to train here in the winter, but at least it usually involves doing different and interesting things. Just gotta stay warm! So far, so good...

Beard family visit to Albany

John and his parents rode Amtrak from east Texas via Chicago to Albany - 2 nights on the train! They got to see a lot more countryside than we normally view on plane flights between TX and NY.

John drove them over to Cooperstown to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame - they are big baseball fans, so this was a special treat. We're lucky that we live so close to it.

I'm not sure what this is about, but I guess the exhibits were NYY-heavy:


This is better - at least get the Bo-Sox in on the action:


I got to join the crew for the short journey over to Massachusetts to see the Norman Rockwell Museum. It sounded like something rather interesting, but turned out to be a really special place that we all enjoyed tremendously.

On the other hand, I'm not sure what this is about (on the front lawn):


Ready for our visit to the museum:


A toy train running around a diorama in the front lobby:


We couldn't take photos in the rest of the museum, but we really enjoyed the guided tour and then wandering through all the rooms reading the stories behind the paintings and Saturday Evening Post covers. NR was prolific and talented, and we learned a great deal about his life and art.

Then we took a tour of downtown Stockbridge where Mr. Rockwell used to live and work. They just happened to be doing a recreation of one of his scenes of Stockbridge at Christmastime, that was quite neat.

The car with the tree on top from the painting:

Modern art:


There were many classic cars parked along the street as part of the painting recreation:



And some carolers at the Red Lion Inn:


We had a super visit with Jenny and Jerry - thanks for making the trip to Albany!

(Don't) Let It Snow

This happened shockingly early in Albany:

Happily, it melted quickly and only once since then I've seen slight flurries that gave up as soon as they hit the ground.

Last week a big storm blew through the northeast right before Thanksgiving. The weatherpeople were very excited. I woke up to rain and didn't think much of it.

That is, until I started driving north to my parents' place in VT the next day - it didn't take long to start seeing white stuff on the ground. It got more substantial the further north I drove.

Friday after Turkey Day, we ignored the stores and went up to Bolton Valley for some snowshoeing. Snowshoeing, what?? Completely unexpected to me - luckily Dad mentioned that they had been shoveling the driveway (what??) so I grabbed my boots as I was walking out the door in Albany. Mom supplied the snowshoes and the cute puppy dog, and we had a fabulous outing in the sunshine, with blue sky and white trails.

Renee demonstrated how she can fetch Mom's hat in return for a treat:


Bam, it's winter.


Amazing amount of snow all in one dumping:


Finishing up a fun day on the trails:

Back in Albany now - phew, it's still only brown here. John, it's still safe to come visit :)

GUR NOLA

Time for the Big Dance! The crazy, fun, always full of surprises, entertaining, tough, interesting urban racing national championships!

We traveled to New Orleans for the Great Urban Race semifinals and finals races last weekend, and as always, GUR put on a top quality race that we will be talking about for years to come. And it's always the most fun when we spend the weekend with our urban racing buddies. Y'all rock!

Some of our friends at the start - Darin in the Twisted X jersey, Spencer taking a photo, and Dave listening intently to the announcements while John preps his gear:

Kip wrote an awesome race report, complete with pictures of the clue sheets, if you want to see that at http://www.kipley.com/uc/gur2011neworleans.html.

Right before 9 a.m. we collected a clue envelope and waited for the "GO!" signal before ripping it open to see what was in store for us on this beautiful Louisiana morning. Hmm, the charity drop-off up north on Canal Street is an obvious initial destination. Nothing else stood out, so we jogged out to Canal Street to look for a trolley and discuss for a minute.

No trolley, but no other obvious plan of action, so we started north. John astutely noticed the center square of the tic-tac-toe could be obtained in a nearby cemetery (and maybe we'd get lucky with a trolley after that). So we sped over to find an above-ground tomb showing a birth date prior to 1900. This may require a zoom to see the date:

We ran back to Canal Street and greeted Jim and Darin who also appeared to have the same idea about the cemetery, hi guys! No trolley - wait, there's one WAY back there. We decided not to wait and took off running instead. It never got close behind us, but John kept an eye out while we ran.

It was fun greeting a couple other teams along the way. The first checkpoint - Chickie Wah Wah! (too funny) - was mostly empty when we arrived to learn that we needed to wait in line for a dance lesson. While we waited, we hunted around for the specific slogan ("This is not that kind of place") for this picture:


Other teams arrived, and the volunteers set us up as a group on the dance floor. We got a lesson in some kind of swing dance (maybe?), then they started timing us for 3 minutes of dancing. We seemed to get better at it, but I guess that wasn't really the point - after 3 minutes they let us go.

Right as we got out the door I realized that we also needed a flyer (I may have heard the team behind me talking about it, not sure), so I ran back in to grab one from the table. Several different flyers were sitting there in piles, and I'm not even sure how they verified that each team completed the dancing task once a crowd started gathering. Mostly I was just in a hurry, so I grabbed one with the restaurant name on it, and we took off again.

No trolley. Well, except the one we could see up ahead of us but couldn't catch. We ran further north on Canal to Jefferson Davis Parkway. Sheila told us there was one CP in each direction, so John picked a right-hand turn and we ran over to the beer garden while I checked the clue sheet. Geez, why are we getting to a BEER checkpoint before Jim, Darin, and Robyn? That didn't seem like great planning on our part :)

On the other hand, the challenge wasn't about the beer, per se. It was about unscrambling a whole bunch of letters to make 8 different names of local Abita beers. At least we were given the 8 starting letters. But all the rest of the letters were scrambled all together, not one line at a time. I read the letters in to Sheila and we got to work on the research, Sheila online and us at the nearby beer cooler reading off possible beer names.

Several seemed pretty obvious (Jockamo, Purple Haze, Turbodog) and we liked Andygator for one of the A's. Vanilla looked good for the V. But then we started getting stuck. While working through the remaining letters, we took a minute to locate the poster for our photo at this location:


Jim and Darin (aka Brew Masters) showed up, and later we also saw Kip and Dave. A huge crowd of confused teams was gathering. People were making guesses, so I tried a couple too. The volunteer with the answers gave no hint of what was right or wrong. Someone (Jim/Darin or someone on the crew) came up with SOS for the S, which was a good guess. "Light" was also a guess, for the L. We had a second "A" left, maybe Amber or Abbey Ale. But we had a bunch of letters that didn't seem to help - something with gold or good or lager? They weren't making this easy.

We knew we were losing all kinds of time, and we were bummed to be so close (at least we thought we were) and not able to figure it out. Finally we cut our losses and left. Maybe the crew would come up with something while we were still in the area.

We ran across Canal St to the other Jeff Davis checkpoint at a tattoo place for a picture with Bruce Willis (hope this wasn't one of our friends from 2009):


I volunteered to get the temporary tattoo, so I went to the side room where a very nice and efficient (thank you!) man applied this to my arm:


Trying to read the clue sheet with the other hand didn't work too well, so I had to call John back for a little help. Soon we were done and out the door. Much better, finally a fast checkpoint!

We ran back to Canal Street and a few blocks north to the Walgreens for the charity drop-off. As we approached it, we saw a trolley heading the other way back toward downtown. Bummer, we were not hitting the trolleys at all that morning.

Just then Sheila came on the line to tell us that the beer checkpoint was solved! Jim and Darin had cracked the code! Well done, y'all! We had been missing "Vanilla Doubledog", a special edition beer that wasn't prominent anywhere we all were looking. Wow.

Jim and Darin were on their way up to Walgreens as we ran back to the beer garden. Thanks y'all! We ran in and got our stamp (the volunteer was still really coy about it until he FINALLY gave the OK). Done with the northern CP's, only wasted, hmm, maybe an hour on that? Not something we expected to recover from, but we had to focus and get through the rest of the course before we could consider the consequences.

Time to move! And hey, there was actually a trolley a ways up the street, coming our way for once. We waited for this one and started mapping the rest of the points. It was nice to finally catch a break, and we were happy to wait to get on board. We talked about skip options and which order to get the rest of the points. Carrying a balloon around the remainder of the course seemed like something we might save for the end :)

Back downtown, we jumped off the trolley to get running again. John led the way over to Tchoupitoulas Street and we paused briefly to get our picture with a street sign that contains at least 13 letters (tic-tac-toe square):


Not far from there we found M's Cafe where we had to answer questions about the New Orleans Saints. Not too hard. And fun to find out that their mascot is a Saint Bernard.

A couple blocks away was Lucy's Retired Surfers Restaurant (funny!) where there were tables set up outside for our next challenge. We had to "flip" a plastic monkey and a plastic mermaid into a glass, using little plastic surfboards. The volunteers were great with getting us set up and explaining the task, and soon we were off and flipping.

Amazingly, I was the first to score. The monkey was apparently easier to predict than the mermaid that John was working with (although that didn't stop me from flinging monkeys all over the table and the street in the process). Eventually he flipped a mermaid into the glass, so we gathered up the whole kit and kabboodle - monkey, mermaid, surfboards, flyer - and we were on our way.

Continuing down Tchoupitoulas, we found the Preservation Resource Center for CP11. While waiting our turn to do the challenge, a volunteer led us over to this pretty dollhouse for our photo:


We watched the teams ahead of us doing a balance pose, and jumped right into it, but the volunteer made us start from the beginning. Joining us was another team from the dancing challenge - hey, I know you! Hopefully I didn't step on his feet this time around. The volunteer was all calm and slow-like and "Hi, my name is Alex, and I will be your yoga instructor today". I was all in a hurry-like and "That's-great-I-love-yoga-let's-get-this-show-on-the-ROAD-ALREADY!"

He guided us through a couple trust balance poses which were actually pretty cool (and only slightly harder being sweaty), and finally we were done.

We took off to cross Magazine Street, didn't see a bus anywhere, so we ran up to St Charles to try our luck with the other trolley.

Nope, still no luck. Time to run again! We ran along the trolley line for a ways until it was time to turn off toward the Magnolia Mansion where we were handed umbrellas and beads (?) and a flyer and were told to pose for a photo:


We worked on stashing everything as John led the way back to St Charles. We decided we were skipping the checkpoint on Magazine - which turned out to be Juan's Flying Burrito, my pre-race CP guess. I never guess right! At least we didn't miss a free Chipotle burrito AGAIN. Someday we'll get us one of those...

Anyway... hey, there's a trolley that is actually going our way! Run, John, run! He did catch it and we jumped on for a nice breather. Another bit of trolley luck, and we'll take it.

After a few blocks we got off to run over to New Orleans Party and Costume. We were making a Mardi Gras mask, cool! "If crafted carefully, it could last until Mardi Gras" - yeah right! We smeared on the clue, dunked it in sequins, piled on 10 feathers, and sprinkled on the glitter - done! Good thing I didn't have to wear this to the finish line.


The volunteer offered to pop the balloon for us to carry (thanks!) but he only managed a small hole for a tiny leak. Once we got outside, John took care of that right quick, and the loud "Bang" scared a lady next to us - sorry 'bout that!

We ran up Camp Street and over to the House of Blues on Decatur for our Carnival Krewe trivia game. I managed a couple of small errors but we eventually got our stamp and then this photo:


We ran right quick to the finish line to find some friends (old and new) with 4 musical instruments...


...and a couple of Cafe du Monde hats for us :)


Word was that there was still a spot or two open for the Elite Eight. This was pretty amazing news, apparently many people also got very stuck on the beer unscramble. So we went to dump all of our stuff on the check-in table to get a verdict.

And the verdict was ... we were missing a flyer. Remember way back at the first checkpoint with the dancing where I almost didn't grab a flyer? Well, I was supposed to get TWO of them, one for the location and one for the activity (the Jitterbugs folks). And just like that, our day was done.

Well, that was pretty sad. Not much more you can say about that.

On the (very) bright side, 3 other Austin mob teams made the finals, we got to help in the afternoon, and Kip and Dave won the whole darn thing! Now THAT'S an amazing way to wrap up a weekend!