Brenden LOVES lawnmowers. He pushes a toy one all over the house. When he sees or hears a real one outside, he gets excited and wants to watch it. I let him push mine around last week. Something tells me he won’t be so excited once he has to mow the yard for real. =)
Gas Buddy
I’m trying hard to talk about things other than my beloved iPhone, but I have to tell you about one app called GasBuddy that you can use, too. GasBuddy shows you where the nearest gas station is and how much it charges for gas. Obviously, it’s very useful if you’re out driving around and need to fill up. But even if you don’t have an iPhone, you can get the gas price data from GasBuddy.com and then head over to the cheapest station.
Interestingly, the fuel price data comes from the people who use the app and website, not from the stations themselves. As a result, on any given day the price listed on GasBuddy might be slightly off until someone updates it. However, I now have a fun new hobby: uploading gas prices for every station I find.
Yes, I’m a nerd. That’s why you love me.
Leg Update
A couple of months ago I wrote about my new rehab plan for my right leg. I’ve been using the Three Pillars of foam rolling, supplements, and exercises fairly consistently and with some success. When I go out to the park for a jog, I start with stretching and a 5-10 minute warmup walk. Then I run-walk 3.1 miles (5 kilometers), running for a minute or two and then walking a bit. The proportion of running to walking depends on how quickly my knee starts to hurt.
Compared to what I could do before the new plan, I am grateful and happy with my progress. However, I seem to have plateaued in my recovery. My goal is to run 5k or more continuously like I did a few years ago, but I can’t get there until the pain goes away. On the plus side, my thigh and hip muscles are growing stronger and more defined. Ever notice how runners and other leg-intensive athletes have a cool line on the side of their leg between their quads and hamstrings? I want that line. But I would rather break 30 minutes on a 5k.
Website Upgrade Coming
UPDATE: After much frustration, waiting, tinkering, and prayer, the upgrade is done. So far the only casualty is our Facebook statuses. I MIGHT be able to bring them back, but Facebook has recently made some changes that make it much more difficult to feed statuses to other sites.
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I have a confession to make that won’t be a surprise to many of you: I don’t actually write the code for this website. With help from Jenny, I write the stuff you read and also do some of the formatting, but everything else is produced by the software that runs the site, WordPress. After putting it off for a year, I plan to finally upgrade this software on Monday or Tuesday during my break. The upgrade is a bit complicated and risky, so I’m a little nervous.
If all goes well, you shouldn’t see any significant changes at first. I’ll just have some handy new features for producing the site. If something goes wrong, the site might be unavailable for a little while or possibly a long while. At least you’ll know what happened. =)
Trip to the Pumpkin Patch
On Friday afternoon we enjoyed the great weather by taking Brenden out to the Flower Mound Pumpkin Patch, a wonderful and FREE attraction on 1171/Cross Timbers. We took Brenden last year when he was still tiny, and it didn’t go very well:
But this year he had a great time, which means we did, too:
Here are several nice pictures, featuring a much happier Brenden than last year’s.
And So It Goes…
…as performed by the fabulous King’s Singers. Listed for the low C# at the end. We sang this in my first high school choir concert by junior year. I ADORE this song.