My three months

Apparently blogging has become a quarterly event for me. I think during my last blog, I was about a month into classes. Classes this quarter turned out to be a ridiculous time commitment. For my first time since starting my masters, i took two night classes. I wanted to power through the last year of class and finish by this march. Sadly, it turned out that both classes had fairly time-intensive projects, so I was spending nearly every night after work and every weekend day working on my projects. The good news is that I passed both classes and only have one quarter with a single class left!! I have been working on this part time for about 4.5 years, so this is going to be a pretty big relief when it is done.

Also this past quarter was Kristin's last quarter of law school and she presumably has graduated (the professor have something like 4 decades to post final grades). Congrats Kristin! And, she has started a new job full-time, so congratulations again!! The bar is looming in her future though, so there hasn't been much time for celebration. but we found time to squeeze a little celebrating in...

So much to talk about...My car has been progressively burning more oil on startup, so I finally did something about it today. With much help from vince, we were able to change all the valve stem seals which I am hoping will stop the oil burning. It was a pretty crazy procedure cuz I had both my cams out sitting on the bench and basically all parts of the head off without removing the head. Things seem to be running well, but I won't know for sure until I start it on a cold morning, because that is when it was smoking most. We did adjust the valves and it got rid of some of the tapping in the valvetrain, so that was good. ohh and it still runs.

What else... ohh yes... running. lots to talk about here as well. i ran the ben franklin 10k a couple months ago, and I got a pretty big PR. I checked and my last 10k PR was a measly 44:41, but this time I got a 42:11. I felt pretty good the whole race. I think I went through the first 2 or so miles with Steve G. from philly runners and then he took off from there. No miles I ran were over 7, so I was quite happy with the race. My mileage the past couple months has been down (probably 15-20 a week), but I have been getting some quality intervals in. I have been running 800s and 1600s with a guy from work over lunch at a nearby park. I think they have been helping my speed a bith, because I have been comfortably able to run sub 8:00 for some longer distances (i think i did an 8 this week at a fairly comfortable 7:50) so that has been encouraging. I at least plan on doing the ugly mudder at the end of february and the Caesar Rodney half in march, so I need to start upping the mileage. I can't be petering out at mile 10 again in this caesar rodney. A PR is a must.

One other development on the running front... New Balance stopped making my shoe, the 1221, or at least updated it, so I tried on a couple other pairs of shoes and just went with the upgraded model, the 1222. Apparently one of the upgrades they made was to make them blister little toes on the outside. I have been wearing some normal cotton socks, so I may try the thin, smoother running-type socks tomorrow. See how that goes. Also, I logged into the cool running website and tried their running log. It seemed allright, but apparently they are so concerned about your informations privacy that they just delete all your information for the next time you try to log in. doesn't seem like much of a log if it actually doesn't keep a log of anything. similar to seinfeld's problem with rental car agencies who are extremely good at taking reservations, but aren't as good at holding them.