Are you gonna get the best of me? We will see.

I don't want to complain since I certainly don't have the most stressful job possible, but life tends to get busy when you make weekend plans.  Krista and I near are going out to Purdue on Thursday night to attend a Neil DeGrasse Tyson lecture and then on Friday, I head down to Nashville for the weekend and to meet Shannon.  I'm hoping it'll be because life is certainly keeping me busy with all sorts of other stuff.  Take today for instance.  I was only on campus for a few hours.  I got in around 8:30 and did prep work until class at 10:00.  From 11:00-12:00 was more prep work instead of going to chapel since I want to get ahead since I don't have any time over the weekend.  After that, I worked at the food pantry across the street until 2:30 and they kept me busy the entire time.  That was followed up by a trip to the grocery store before going back home and getting in what was supposed to be a six mile tempo run.  I went out too fast and ended up doing four at tempo before walking for half a mile and doing an easy run for the rest of the way back.  Since then, I made dinner and have been doing laundry and dishes and I really should try to get in prep for Friday's Linear class so next week isn't as packed as this one, mostly because I'll be leaving for the weekend again to go up to Grand Rapids to finally take in ArtPrize.  Can it go back to being summer?

Gimme Toro, gimme some more

When you can barely bend over to pick something up from off the ground in class, it becomes pretty obvious that adding legs to your weightlifting workout for the first time in two months two days before you have to do a pace run is one of the dumber things you've done lately.  At least, that's what I was planning on writing before I busted out four miles in 28 minutes this afternoon.  I even felt like I could have done another mile or two at the same pace pretty easily. I have no idea how I did it either, as my hamstrings hurt just now as I walked the two minutes to the mailbox.  The temperature having dropped from the mid-nineties to the upper sixties in the past couple of days most certainly helped.  Perhaps I also was just hoping to get home before my right thigh actually exploded, leaving me to stump my way home.  Who knows?  Either way, this will probably lead me to doing something that's actually dumb, like signing up for next May's Flying Pig Marathon if my half goes well in October.

Should I not care and sleep the whole day through?

In our connections (new membership) class at church, by pure happenstance, I ended up sitting next to a math professor from Taylor.  The thing that stuck with me though is that his wife was in disbelief that as a single guy, I'd make the effort to get up early enough on a Sunday morning to make the 20 minute drive to church so I can be on time for the 8:30 a.m. service.  She told me to sleep in while I can, no doubt the words of a mom desperate for sleep because she has four children ranging in age from five years to two months old.  Thanks for the advice, but 1) Yay! Someone thinks I'm not going to die alone! and 2) no thanks.  The biggest accomplishments I have for this year all came from times I got up early.  The vast majority of my training for this spring's 50k came when I was up at six so I could be out running by seven.  The average start to my day for the four days I spent hiking outside Gatlinburg was probably about six as well.  D.C. and the cabin don't really fit the narrative because I probably spent those being lazy and sleeping in until about 7:30.  I'd love to claim that this is a "I'll sleep when I'm dead" thing, but I take way too many naps for that to be true.  In fact, thinking about this caused me to resolve to become more active - less naps and afternoon reruns and more enjoyable running and cooking experiments and just more doing in general.

My first chance to implement this mindset came yesterday.  Mondays call for an easy run and yesterdays was supposed to be five miles.  Ever since about halfway through the 50k training, my running attitude hasn't been great. I'd get up and think "Ugh, how many miles today?".  Why? Why would I do this to myself?  If I'm not enjoying running, what's the point?  That's when I decided I have to be more active in enjoying running.  I got home yesterday and briefly considered not going because of the heat.  My car said the temperature was 95 and sure, it may have been out in the sun, but that's where I would've been running so I'm counting it.  After that half-second of doubt, I got my attitude right, changed clothes, put on my shoes and started running.  I got a few looks from people who thought I was crazy, but nobody said anything.  Did I succeed in enjoying my run? Of course not.  Running in 95 degree heat is crazy and probably stupid and dehydration sucks unless you like having your face taste like salt.  I did, however, not let myself dread the run at any time and I didn't get discouraged when I went slow.  I'll take that as a success and carry it over into today's 1/3 mile repeats in the similar heat.  To that, I give a mostly not sarcastic Huzzah! UPDATE: I'm not running today.  Repeats in 99 degree heat is absurd.  I'm stupid, but not suicidal.

Finally, I think everyone in central Indiana is married.  There were no single people at AU's new faculty orientation.  There were no single people at the church connections class.  I'm starting to think there are about six attractive single women over the age of 25 in Indianapolis and I'm scared I've met them all.   

Little Men Come When Anything Goes

Xanga caved and decided to start charging everyone for blogging space so I've been forced to move somewhere else as seriously, who pays for blog space?  Anyway, I'm disappointed because now I have all of those blog posts since 2006 saved in html format on my laptop where they'll never be read again, much like all the evidence of my love of washed up punk bands and long walks on the beach.  If you got that joke, congratulations on being Jon deHaan.  No, I won't explain it to the rest of you.

Anyway, my stream of consciousness thoughts on life have now moved over here to blogger after searching for somewhere where I could still have the dexter21 moniker, but alas, none could be found.  The guy who's currently using it here on blogger is an Indonesian(?) guy who made eight blog posts last August.  Yeah, pretty sure I'll deserve it more in about a month.

I'm not going to make a big deal of switching blogs because this isn't some big new opportunity for a new start.  I'll just keep on going from where I left off and you're all screwed for context.  Sorry.  So here we go.  Another new semester has started out here in Anderson and I'm excited for my classes.  I'm thrilled to be teaching higher level stuff with linear and diff eq.  I just need to make sure the diff eq guys don't realize I'm basically keeping just a couple classes ahead of them since I don't remember half the techniques that I'll be teaching.  Also, I'm teaching two sections of Finite again, which doesn't thrill me, but at least it doesn't require much, if any, prep work.

Beside that though, I've been going through an interesting range of emotions lately.  While new classes starting is exciting, there have been some frustrating/disappointing experiences from the summer as well, mostly resulting from my utter lack of discipline both physically and spiritually.  How fast my mood turns around may correlate directly with how quickly I can recover that discipline.  The good news is it looks like I'm hopefully getting back on track.  Gallivanting all over for pretty much all of August didn't really help either as now I miss that freedom just to get out and go wherever my heart pleases.  On the drive home tonight, I decided the thing I most wanted right now was to chase the simple beauty of sunsets covering mountains which is an awesome thing to do and thoroughly impossible in central Indiana.

Okay, one last thing about Xanga.  I do miss their "What are you listening to?" feature since I've decided to keep the last couple months pattern of using song lyrics as titles.  For the all of you that don't recognize this post's lyric, it comes from the Offspring's Kick Him While He's Down off of Ignition.  Check out that album.  You're welcome.

More to come soon, I promise.