Back To The Grind

After using up my spare blog ideas I am back to writing about what has been going on in Jacksonville. Caroline was gone last week for a spring break vacation to New York. SPRING BREAK WOHOO! she went with her mum and got to see some of the best bead stores and wool stores in the big city. She also caught up with some old friends and had a really fun time. She saw the filming of some new fashion show on Bravo and an episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (guests include Mike Meyers and Anna Kournikova, Musical guests All American Rejects). while she was gone I tried to tidy up the condo with little success. We had a soccer game on Wednesday at 900 pm. We had tried to get it switched to an earlier time but apparently the other team didn't want their star player to miss the game. So the game was played as scheduled and we managed to get our asses kicked. With our one sub to their sixish we were getting worked from the beginning to the end. We had a couple of chances but nothing stuck and it ended up 11-0. We had another game this afternoon and despite our extra players it was a similar result. I started the game but was running on empty from the start. I started on the bench for the second half and when I came on I was actually playing decently in defense but the game was well gone by that point. We ended losing 8-0, I believe, or something to that degree. The other team actually had the gall to complain that we were taking to long retrieving the ball after they kicked it over the goal for the umpteenth time. They had one of their subs kick over an extra ball and were telling us to put on one of our subs to get the game going. We waited for our player to return with the ball and then kicked it in.

My interview for pharmacy school is this Friday and I am both excited and nervous. I called last week to set up my specific time, and left a message for the secretary to call me back.. When she did I set my time for 930 am. After the phone call I returned to my window at the front of the pharmacy and finished with the patient I was entering prescriptions for. I then thought I should email Caroline to let her know what was happening. When I opened my email I already had an email from Robin (my former boss who now works full time at the College of Pharmacy) telling me she would see me at 930 on the 3rd. I called my parents a couple of weeks ago and asked them to buy a University of Melbourne tie and send it to me. You would think that something like that I could just order on my own from their website. Truth is I could, but they wanted $30 in postage which I considered excessive. So the call was made and then relayed to Dave who was staying in St Kilda at the time. He went to the Bookstore and purchased said tie for me and then sent it over with the latest Triple J Hottest 100 CD, which was much appreciated. Postage on those two items was $28, so maybe I was wrong. Anyway I have the tie and my suit is just back from the dry cleaners, so Friday is the big day.....

Miss One

I missed last week not by accident but just because I couldn't get it together enough to write anything. I did however have something to write about. I ran the Gate River Run last Saturday. I think it was the third time I have run the 15km race through Jacksonville. The website has a feature where you can search previous years results, so after I looked up my official finish this year i had to go back and check on my previous attempts. This year I arrived early and got to the start line moments before the 5K charity run began. I waited behind the barrier and watched those runners take off before we were allowed to move up. The start chute was roped off with the top 200 seeded runners in the front and then a second group before the general entrants. I managed to squeeze into the front couple of rows of the general entrants. When the cannon went off to start i was able to cross the line within 30 seconds which was much better than the couple of minutes that it has taken me the last couple of years. I got through the first mile in 8:35 which I thought was a little slow but a decent beginning. My training had tailed off over the previous two weeks because of sickness. My whole goal was to just get through the run. As I passed the 5K mark at European St Cafe in San Marco, I was somewhere around 25 minutes which is a little slow, but with 10K to go it is understandable. I rounded the corner to run up River Rd where our friends Travis and Diana live. I wasn't sure if they would be out watching at 9am on a Saturday morning. They had set up chairs and were cheering on the runners with their neighbors. I waved as I passed and got an enormous cheer. The resulting surge of adrenaline kept me going for the rest of the race. Soon after that I heard another runner near me ask his friend if they were on pace to break eighty minutes. The positive response made me make sure that I stuck with these guys for the remainder of the race. We passed through San Marco and continued past Bishop Kenny High School. I ran through 10K at about 52 minutes which is pretty fast for me, I think. The best 10k time i remember running was 46 minutes something in the Barwon Banks Fun Run. It was also the only time I managed to beat my Dad in a race (note he had been sick before the race and whatever time he managed to run was probably his worst). My pacers kept my going up to the Hart bridge. As we ran up the bridge I slipped back from the one guy i was still with, the others were behind us. Coming off the bridge I was still trying to catch him but didn't want to blow it all out on the descent. As we rounded the corner to turn toward the stadium I was still holding back for the finish thinking we were going to turn into the stadium again. I saw the big screen and was trying to watch a little to see where that last turn was. Then I realised there was no final turn and the big screen was the finish line. I turned it on and managed to finish in 79 minutes, breaking the 80 that my pacers were worried about. I missed out on the top 10% finisher caps that they were handing out but i was very happy with the time. Of course this means that I will need to put in some training and finish faster next year.

Google

I have been using up all my ideas for random posts to fill in for when nothing exciting has happened. Unfortunately I have to use another one because I have been sick this week and don't feel like writing anything. As a result this post is not so much a this is what happened this week as it is a list of what i have been looking up on GOOGLE. It is not necessarily a definitive list because sometimes I am not logged in to google when I look things up, but it is a good representation of what a broad range of information I have needed.

can cats eat peanut butter? - We had to give the cat some pills and this worked with Fenway but we wanted to check it was okay for Cat too. We ended up force feeding it to her anyway
sun herald melbourne
hussey - I saw an article on Yahoo about Mike Hussey. Unfortunately at work I can't get those articles so I googled him to find it
cartoon soda can - Our trivia team (and old soccer team) are named the Stubby Holders so I was looking for a picture that i could adapt into an emblem for the team. No luck so far.
cartoon can - This search didn't give me any good pictures.
axes - I watched a show on the history channel about swords and axes so i was looking for pictures and info.
Gate River Run - Just trying to find out some extra info for the race next week.
Caloosahatchee - This is the site of a triathlon but it is in South Florida, too far away.
Xterra races - This is the triathlon race held at Hanna Park last year. After I got my bike for my birthday last year I earmarked this as my first triathlon. I figured it was in July so I would have plenty of time to train. Alas the race is not on the schedule this year.
Triathlon Jacksonville - I was looking for other races to replace the Xterra but as of yet I haven't found one. I may go up to Jekyll Island for the sprint version of the Turtle Crawl triathlon.

New Soccer Team

We played our first game with our new soccer team on Sunday. It was a lot of fun. We won 4-2, so that always makes it easier to enjoy. What happened was that Caroline was not happy with the BASL team she was playing on (or not as was the case). After talking to a couple of team mates she agreed to start a new team, even with me it didn't seem like we had enough people but another team was struggling to get numbers as well and we merged to form a complete team. It is seven a side with a minimum of three girls playing. We now have five girls and eight guys on our team and our second game is on Wednesday at 9 pm against the Wolfson tema which interestingly enough has four or five Shands doctors playing on it. I particularly want to beat them because they added one player from our corperate games team who I think is not a good player and yet they didn't ask me if I was interested in playing.

We played for our other team later on Sunday. It was not the disaster i was anticipating but we still lost, 2-0. We actually played really well but the other team has three or four subs and we had none. I was planning to stay back on defense but ended up playing forward. I had a couple of good chances at the beginning of the second half but shot straight at the keeper. With almost a whole mihute left of the game I took a ball to the face from about a meter away which was the perfect way to end the game. We only have one game left in that league and then I dont know if we will be playing there again.

Tuesday 3rd March update: The soccer ball to the face has given me my first ever black eye. Before you get all excited and expect to see a cool looking foto, let me explain. The ball was coming up and snapped my head back so the bruise has formed on the top of my eye not the bottom. So if I raise my eyebrows you can see it, but otherwise it is hidden.