Manuals are Boring

I think my body is starting to get re-acquainted with the concept of exercise. After not really engaging in much physical activity at all since last August when I’d go jogging at my brother Aaron & Eve’s place near Lake Minnetonka in the Twin Cities (apart from some flag football last fall, of course), I decided it was high time to make at least a wee bit of an effort to get back into shape. Sunday afternoon I decided to head down the gravel bike path that leads from my apartment complex and goes along the edge of the White Golf Course for aways and by some marshes, through some woods and over a couple bridges. I hadn’t ever been down there before, so it was kinda fun discovering some new areas. My only goal on Sunday was to run for 10-12 minutes, since it was the first time I’d gone on a run since August and I wanted to kinda ease myself back into this whole working out thing. So when I’d been running for 11 minutes (probably somewhere around a mile and a half, but who knows) by the time I got back to White Course I figured that was good enough. Mission accomplished. But oh boy was I sore for the next couple days, my body was definitely not used to running really at all.
I’ve been rather bored in Walker this week, trying to plug through at least a few chapters of the mind-numbing SCIPUFF manual. I don’t know how much I’m getting out of reading this, or how much I’m supposed to get out of it, other than perhaps becoming vaguely aware of the existence of certain functions and capabilities of the program. As a result of being bored I’ve been finding other things to do, like going on a 2-hour lunch with Daniel to Green Bowl (neither of us had been there before, but it’s an awesome create-your-own-stirfry restaurant with more than 20 different sauces — Daniel was in heaven) on Monday, going to Sports Cafe for wings yesterday for lunch for an hour and a half with Daniel & Jeff, going home early yesterday afternoon and listening to the Twins game on the radio while uploading a few new picture albums (from my East Coast road trip in Spring ’05 with Josh, Zach, John & Ben) to my Photos page this afternoon (I’m planning on trying to get caught up with all those this summer, especially since I’ve been at PSU for 9 months now and I still don’t have any Penn State albums on my site). I figure once Joel gets back into town next week he’ll actually give me something slightly more productive to do. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try looking at how to code some FORTRAN 90 for a change of pace.
At the PSCG Bible study Sunday evening, we watched the second half of the movie “The Gospel of John.” I didn’t see the first half the week before because of studying for finals, but I thought the film was very well done. The dialogue was 100% from the Gospel of John, with nothing added and nothing omitted, making it hard for them to stray too far away theologically. 🙂 I think I may go out and purchase that film sometime, I enjoyed it.
Monday evening after work I went down to the Sports Cafe with Jacob to catch the Twins-Rangers game on ESPN, as it was the first Twins game that had been shown on national TV so far this year. So we put on our Twins gear and sat at the bar in front of the big screen, while playing some trivia. Our team name was “Torii Hunter for President,” which drew a lot of confused comments like “who’s that?” Sigh. Anyway, we did fairly well in the first half, but then fell from 3rd to 7th before the final question, which went all in for but lost. The sad thing is that if we’d just bet nothing we would’ve wound up in third place, le sigh. After the game, which the Twins lost 6-4, I went up to Jeff & Vic’s place to watch “24,” which they had recorded on TiVo. Yes, I’m so hooked that I can’t miss an episode for any reason. Especially not now that there are only three episodes left this season. And everything went to hell in a handbasket this week too, aaargh!! Stupid Miles.
Yesterday afternoon, even though I was still sore from Sunday’s run, I decided to go out for another jog. Still trying to ease myself back into shape, I only did the same exact run as Sunday, and also in 11 minutes again. And oddly enough I’m not sore anymore since I did that, so that’s a plus. I’m gonna try to go jogging/running 3-4 times a week, and get back to the point where I can do 3-5 miles without stopping. A fairly modest goal, but we’ll see how long my motivation lasts. 🙂
Last night I also conducted a grand experiment in the kitchen, or at least it was for me. A couple months ago I saw my roommate Emre making something easy and tasty, so I tried to reproduce it as best as I could from my memory, and it actually turned out pretty well. I just sauteed some mushrooms and a pound and a half of chicken breast cut into small pieces, and combined them with some spicy orange sauce from Wegmans and put it over rice. Pretty easy and pretty tasty, if I do say so myself. I think a reasonable goal for this summer is also to get a bit more adventurous in cooking, and learning how to do more stuff. I’m finding that when I’m not feeling horribly pressured time-wise that I actually enjoy cooking, especially new things with no recipe that miraculously turn out fine, haha.
Last night I found this pretty good article on populism by Jonah Goldberg. I especially love his comment describing democracy with an analogy to cornflakes somewhere in the middle there, he’s hilarious. 🙂
Well, who knows what I’ll be up to tonight. Perhaps hangin out with Daniel watchin a movie and South Park and whatnot, we’ll see. There was supposed to be a few people playing trivia down at the G-Man, but I guess they decided on poker instead, oh well. Peace out.