Friday, September 29, 2006

Weekend Trip

Friday has arrived and tonight after Ultimate Frisbee we are headed to Spokane, Washington to spend the weekend geocaching and relaxing. Time to get out of Missoula for a few days and take a quick breather before we settle in for the winter. We have a long list of geocaches to find on our trip and this will be our longest road trip that we have planned for a geocaching adventure. It is around 200 mile to Spokane via Interstate 90 and we will be comeing back on Sunday on Highway 200 which is closer to 300 miles but a scenic route so that should be a wonderful way to travel home.

Do you sure install automatically the driver?

Huh? Do you sure install automatically the driver? This is what my computer asked me when I was installing the motherboard drivers the other day. Seems someone forgot to check the translation for English. Of coarse, being the brilliant person I am, I reasoned this to mean: Are you sure you want to automatically install the driver? To which I promptly hit the OK button and deemed myself a genious.

Here's one of my favorite pictures.

I took it when we were in Canada - but it's what was happening in the meantime that makes it a fun memory. When Andy and Amber came to visit us in Montana we went to Canada to go camping. Outside of Cardston, Alberta we found ourselves gazing upon a marvelous sunset and snapping photos when the breeze began to blow, and as is common in the Great Plains it brought about a uniquely obbious smell. That being a feedlot nearby. Thanks to Amber for the quality camera work and Laura for the commentary.



Have a great weekend everyone! Until again

-=Nolan=-

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Welcome To The Jungle...

...we got fun and games, we got every plant you want, but we don't know their names! That's the truth, I have no idea what half of the plants are that I have around the apartment. Last night we acquired three more additional plants, they arn't exactly small ones either. In fact, one is named Andre - as in Andre the Giant. That bring the number of plants in the apartment to sixteen - I had two more, but they have not survived due to several different cirumstances.

The challenge right now is to figure out where to keep all the plants so they can get enough sunlight. That's one of the back things about a basement apartment - the sunlight isn't easy to find. The house sits looking to the northeast and our backyard faces the southwest, so we don't get a lot of sunlight until later afternoon - and then it suddenly the sun is behind the mountains. I do enjoy having the plants around the house though. It is amazing to me how much more inviting they make a home look. Likewise I have taken a greater appreciation to homes with landscaping or lack of for that matter. I have also found it interesting how the plants respond to temperature changes and humidity changes. During the fall my skin becomes very dry, and I can see when the plants begin to experience the lack of humidity as well.

Here's the new plants waiting on the deck to go inside. A little creative mind will be needed to properly place them, but you know me, I can think as obscure as possible when needed.Yesterday afternoon I was checking out the garden, at least what remains of it. The pumpkins are rippening nicely and I even spotted a few more strawberries turning red. We have a bunch of potatos and carrots to pull as well. As I was weeding through the potatoes I was surprised by something unexpected. "What's this? It can't be! Wow, a cucumber!" There it was, growing right under the potato leaves. This whole time I had thought that the cucumbers were a lost cause, but looks like we are gonna get one outta the deal. Ha ha! I guess, one cucumber for a ten cent bag of seeds isn't that bad - can't buy one at the store for ten cents anyway.

The pumpkins really spread out as well. One plant even grew nearly the entire distance of the side driveway. You can see it was a pretty lengthy vine - and yes, you can see Brooklyn was encouraging me to keep kicking her tennis ball while I was taking pictures! We thought we only had two orange pumpkings, they look really good too. They are well rounded and firm - we have two more additonal pumpkins that are growing at the end of the long vine you can see, they are not orange though.

Well, like I said, we thought we only had two orange pumpkins. Turns out we have three - one was hiding, just like the cucumber. This one was under some pumpkin leaves and had started growing between the decorative stump and the railroad tie I placed for the edge of the garden. It was in a tight space, and it's a little deformed from the restrictive room. It is also a lot smaller than the other pumpkins, but a pumpkin none-the-less.



Laura made it back to Missoula in one piece. I picked her up at the airport at 11:30 pm - it is amazing the number of people flying with animals and carrying pet crates around at the airport. I sat in front of the airport for 15 minutes and counted three or four come out the doors, need I remind everything this was at 11:30 at night? Maybe that isn't odd, but I found it amusing.

To round off the day's good news, the street cleaners came by and have our street looking much better. We were in need of some cleaning around here, a lot of pine needles, leaves, rocks, and plain ole' garbage. Thanks Mr. Streetsweeper!Until again

-=Nolan=-

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Adding A Little More

The weather here in Missoula has been wonderful the past few days. 70 all day and 40 during the night. These are the type of days I could go for all year around, unfortunatly that seems to be only about 20 days out of the year that we experience this type of weather. The rest of the time it is too smokey, foggy, or down right cold to enjoy a good day outdoors. Sure, there is plenty to do, but you know the type of day that is perfect and you are not too hot and not too cold.

Heres the motherboard awaiting the arrival of my processor. You put that on the white square and then put a fan on top of that to keep it cool. Heat is a bad thing when it comes to computers - you don't want them overheating or they will be ruined - sometimes they even melt.

The processor, or the brain of the computer, isn't very large at all. In fact, by looking at the picture you can see that it would be fairly easy to lose if you were to misplace it before installing it. Also, you should never touch the pins on the back side of the processor - they are very sensitive and they bend easily and in that case you have yourself an expensive item that does not work. After installing the processor the cooling system is securing into place as well. The aluminum cooling is then placed on top of the processor, which is cooled with a fan that blows air over the aluminum - the aluminum draws heat away from the processor, thus cooling it. Now, there are other ways of cooling a processor such as water cooled systems, but those are usually quite expensive and involve a lot more work!

Here's the motherboard with the processor unit ready to go. The fan is plugged into the motherboard. Oh! One thing I forgot to mention about installing the processor to the cooling system. You need to use a thermal adhesive when connecting these two - I am not exactly sure why, but I should look into that. I just know bad things could happen otherwise.And for those who havn't checked out the blog in a few days, I have gained the ability to post video segments onto my blog. Check out Monday's blog of the skateboarding! I might try and see what fun things I can come up with but until then I will just post some old video I have taken. Here is some video from the Thorofare hike we did a few months back through Yellowstone. WARNING people who become motion sick easily, namely my mother, should take into consideration that the video is usually poor quality and lacks stability of frame - heck, I shot the video as I was hiking with a 55 pound pack on my back, I wasn't exactly strolling through the park. Sorry, no audio on this video either - but tune in tomorrow and I promise there will be.



I leave you with that. Wednesday looks to be a rather slow day for me, although a lenghty one at that. I will be playing Ultimate Frisbee from 6:00 until dark. I will jet home for a shower and supper before heading out to the airport at 11:30 p.m. to pick Laura up when her plane lands. The report from work is that there isn't any for the day, so I will be finding my own around the house.

Until again

-=Nolan=-

Monday, September 25, 2006

Video Update!

Hey, I finally got my YouTube video to work, and now I can blog VIDEO! Hurray. Here's some of the skating video I took from yesterday to go along with the pictures I posted. It's Tony Hawk and Neil Hendrix. Hit the arrow button to play it - this will be slow if you are on dial-up.


Until again

-=Nolan=-

Up & Running

This is my first blog from my NEW computer! Woo hoo! It's up and running and it is super nice! I opened up my old computer to take out one of three hard drives plus my tv tuner card and found a lot of dirt and dust inside of it! That's bad news bears - you don't want dirt and dust inside of your computer because it builds up on the electronics and insulates them, which eventually causes them to overheat and malfunction! So, I will be taking that outside and blowing it out with some compressed air.

The new computer went together quite nicely. I only ran into one hitch along the way, my RAM wasn't installed in the right slot - but that was easy to fix. The picture shows some of the parts I put into the computer, they include the motherboard, video card, ram, card reader, processor, dvd+-rw, hard drive.

The case came empty, except of the power supply. This is what it looks like without anything inside of it. I had to install the motherboard to the case - that's a little tricky, but nothing too difficult to do. I will add some more photos of the computer being built in future blogs, I won't bore everyone with the exciting world of computers.

Friday night, Laura and I took our neighbor and met up with some of the chemistry students, then drove up to the Blue Mountain Observatory. We went to the last star show of the year and we looked at some star clusters through the large telescope. It was a lot of fun, although it was rather cold for everyone that didn't take along the proper clothing. We went up to 6,000 feet where it had snowed during the week and it was about 45 degrees. We we left Missoula it was still a warm 60 degrees, so everyone was ready to return to the cars and start the heater for the drive home.

Saturday Laura prepared herself for her trip to Morgantown, West Virginia. She even did some cleaning around the house so I could make a mess of it before she got back! What a wonderful wife huh! We did one geocache on Saturday, well actually we tried two, but I'll explain later. The cache we did find we drove into the Blue Mountains, just west of Missoula, and walked 1.23 miles to the cache. The cool weather made for a nice walk into the forest and along the way I nearly stepped on a 'sneaky snake' who was sunning himself on the pathway. I thought it was a stick and at the last moment I had to take a skip to miss stepping on him! He wasn't too concerned with us, probably too cold to do much anyway. If you know some Tom T. Hall you might know the song Skeaky Snake - it's a fun song and it can get stuck in your head really easy. Here's the lyrics, sing along if you know it!

Boys and girls take warning, if you go near the lake
Keep your eyes wide open, and look for sneaky snake
Now maybe you wont see him, maybe you wont hear
But he'll sneak up behind you, and drink all your root beer

And then sneaky snake goes dancin, wigglin and a-hissin
Sneaky snake goes dancin, gigglin and a-kissin
I dont like old sneaky snake; he laughs too much you see
When he goes wigglin through the grass, it tickles his underneath

Well, sneaky snake drinks root beer, and he just makes me sick
When he is not dancin, he looks just like a stick
Now, he doesnt have any arms or legs, you cannot see his ears
And while we are not lookin, hes stealin all of our beer

And then sneaky snake goes dancin, wigglin and a-hissin
Sneaky snake goes dancin, gigglin and a-kissin
I dont like old sneaky snake; he laughs too much you see
When he goes wigglin through the grass, it tickles his underneath

I particularlly like the part that goes "When he is not dancin, he looks just like a stick" - that's exactly what I said when I jumped over it. "Whoa, I thought that was a stick!"

Anyway, we found the geocache and headed home for the Husker football game. At half time we left for Wal-Mart to get some groceries for my bachelor time - groceries being frozen pizzas and such. We stopped by to find a new geocache on our way to the store, but it was getting too dark to find it and we ended up deciding to find it another time.

Saturday my shotgun rebate arrived and I now have $30 back in my pocket. I also recieved my official swan tag from the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. That season doesn't open until October 14 and runs until Dec. 1 so we are going to be planning a trip to the Great Falls area for some hunting.

Sunday, I dropped Laura off at the school at 7:00 a.m. and then came home and worked on my computer some more. At noon I grabbed my camera and headed out the door to the new Missoula skate park. I realized as I was heading out the door that I had been so fixed on working on my computer that I forgot to eat breakfast and lunch so I went to the park a little hungry. I stood around for an hour and fought the massive crowd of people estimated around 8,000. The reason so many people were there was because Tony Hawk and Bam Margera were there to promote the new skate park. Tony Hawk is one of the big names in skateboarding and Bam Margera has become nationally famous for his MTV show Viva La Bam. Here's some pictures from the vert demo. I stood here for about an hour and a half to get a good spot for the show, then the show lasted about an hour and a half. After the street skating demo it was 5:00 when I got home and boy was I hungry!
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Tony Hawk interview
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The vert ramp
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Tony Hawk & Bam Margera
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Tony Hawk in the vert ramp - check out the crowd
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Tony Hawk doing a 540 (1 1/2 times around)
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Tony Hawk and Dennis McCoy - they crossed in the air!
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Dennis McCoy doing a flare! A flip with a half twist.

I had a great time at the skate park and it's fun to see these guys in person after watching them on tv for many years! Hopefully it isn't the last time I get to see something like this. Until again

-=Nolan=-

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

The Snow Has Returned

**Blogger wasn't working for me yesterday so I have combined yesterday and today's blogs.**

Our camping trip to Flathead Lake was a good time. We didn't stay in a cabin, we actually stayed in something called a yurt. I had never heard of a yurt before but I quickly become familiar with it. According to Wikipedia: A yurt is a portable felt dwelling structure used traditionally by nomads in the steppes of Central Asia. Lucky for us the yurt was heated and waterproof because it rained most of the day Saturday and the outside temperature was about 45. We played some board games and kept ourselves entertained while it was raining. We had to cook outside though so that was a little tricky with the rain, but we managed. The blue cup from the Yellowstone hike even made a return appearence when hot cocoa was made! That was a nice warm up from the cold and wet weekend.

We did some geocaching on the way back to Missoula - we took an intersting trip through the mountains and had a nice drive. We had to travel through some single lane logging roads again, that seems to be a reoccuring thing for us.

Here's a picture of the sunrise over Flathead lake on Sunday morning. The clouds are over the Mission mountains and blocking the snow, otherwise you could see the snow across the lake. Wild Horse Island is in the middle of the picture, the lake looks quite small but the island is actually right along the shore line and it is about 8-12 miles across the lake.

I checked on the swan tags today. Laura didn't get a tag, but I did! Hopefully we will be able to get into some swan hunting when the season opens!

Breaking news - just moments ago the UPS man dropped off my computer! Sorry to cut this blog short, but the excitement of the computer and the swan permit is almost too overwhelming! Until again

-=Nolan=-

Friday, September 15, 2006

Bits & Pieces

Friday and no work. It's cold and raining again so we didn't even bother to waste our time today. I beat a level of my game Roller Coaster Tycoon and had some food so I could blog and start packing the car for the weekend trip. Suddenly this morning it hit me like a ton of bricks - I am going to miss the USC vs Husker game! NO! What was I thinking? Simply put I guess I wasn't thinking. I am gonna set the VCR and the DVR (Digital Video Recorder - that's my computer) to record the football game and I will watch it Sunday evening or something. Then again, maybe I won't want to watch if things turn out bad for the Huskers. GO HUSKERS!

I ordered some parts for my computer yesterday as well. Here's what I will be recieving in 3-7 days. The tower will be empty - it is a Diablo tower and just looks good, it's really a cheap one and probably not worth much, but it comes with a 400 watt power supply which was a plus.Next up is the Motherboard. This is like the skeleton for a computer. It is what does all the support and moves things around. It is also what everything plugs into - when you look at your computer from the back you only see a small amount of the motherboard, just the plug-ins, but there is a lot happening inside. This is the Epox 9NDA31 socket 939 board - which for most people means nothing, but it explains a lot when you are buying a computer in pieces. Take note on the socket 939 part, that's gonna be used again.
So in order to have that motherboard (the skeleton) work properly you have to have a processor (a brain to control it!). This is the brains of the operation. It is the AMD Athlon 64 3500+. What does that mean you ask? Well most computers work on 32 bit processing but the new age of computer will work in 64 bit and be much faster. While a 3.8 ghz processor is fast, a 2.2 ghz processor (like this one) can keep up with it because it is operating with 64 bits. That's the short of it, there is A LOT of factors that go into the equation but that's the fine lining. This is the most exciting thing about the new computer by far! At least I think so anyway. This is where that socket 939 comes into play. You can't just mix and match a processor to a motherboard - they have to have the same socket to work. It's like a wrench or screwdriver. You have to have the write attachment to get the best results.
You would think since the processor is the brain that it would have memory as well, but that's not the case. It only thinks, it doesn't save anything. Just like a human brain, the computer has different parts to remember stuff. The memory of a computer also helps it think faster - it's like the eyes. Take this example - imagine you have a dozen books open in front of you and you are working on some research. The memory determines now fast you can read those 12 books - however, you don't read them one at a time, you read all 12 at the same time and then put it all together. Seems complicated doesn't it!? That's why the more memory you have the happier the computer will be - otherwise it would take A LONG time to read all those books. Wouldn't it be nice if we could read 12 books at the same time? I would have done all my readings in college if that were the case. Ha ha! Opps, I forgot mom reads this - I meant to say I would have read more books than required and done bonus work. Yeah, I never missed a reading assignment.... Quickly moving on, here is the memory I got - with a $20 rebate. I kind of cheaped out and only went with 512 MB of memory. My current computer has 768 MB of memory so that is something I will save up some more money for and then upgrade later.That's the major extent of my computer that I ordered. I have a lot of other stuff stocked up over the years to add to the computer once it gets here. One thing I wanted for my new computer was an internal card reader - so I don't have to plug the digital camera into the computer. I can just take the card out and put it into the computer. I have a few different card readers on the computers I already have, but I have to plug them into the back and it creates a lot of clutter so I felt an internal one would be best. The interesting thing about this card reader is it can be used internally or externally so I'll be interested what that will be all about.What excitment huh! Ok, so only a vast few find excitment in talking about computers and electornics like I do. I decided working on the computer while Laura was gone to West Virginia would be my best bet to tranfer all my files from one computer to the other. That will take quite a long time - but I will be working, playing frisbee, and working on my computer so that should take a lot of my time up. Time for my to pack some things for the trip and look up a few geocaches as well! You know we can't travel without taking time for a geocache or two! Have a great weekend and everyone cheer for the Huskers! GO BIG RED! Oh yeah, can't forget the Alma-mater - GO LOPERS! Until again

-=Nolan=-

**Bonus points to everyone who caught the title and understood the pun. Ah, computer geeks.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

The Cold Has Arrived

High noon and the temperature outside is a cool 47 degress. Yeah, that's right not even 50 outside. The high today is 55 but I don't think we will get there. I only managed to work 2 hours this morning - all in the rain. We did some maintenance on a downtown park area and then decided not to go do the electrical work of installing landscape lighting during the rain. So home I came to do some on-line shopping for my computer parts. I had a great computer all picked out and decided I would wait until today to buy it - jumped on the internet to order it and they are out of stock and won't be selling any more. AH! So back to square one for me. I've spent most of the morning looking and deciding what to do now. I arrived home in time to catch the last half hour of "Talk of the Town" out of Kearney, Nebraska and get a few moments of news from the area. Then I turned on the tv and watched Live with Regis and Kelly before ending my morning with back to back episodes of The Cosby Show.

With the cooler temperatures approaching it looks like the garden will be finished for the season. Laura and I picked 2 strawberries from the strawberry plant I saved from a landscaping project this spring. It was great to have some strawberries straight from the garden, even if it was only a small one. There are a few more strawberries coming along and we have a few carrots and potatoes we will be picking and making a stew or crockpot meal out of. We have 3 orange pumpkins as well and a few more that are green right now. You can see the wonderful strawberries sitting on the arm of my Adirondack chair.

It is snowing in areas of Montana already today. We might get a snow flake or two falling from the sky over the next week, the lows at night are in the lower 30's and the high for the next 10 days is in the lower 60's as well. Laura and I are planning on going to a cabin with some of friends. It won't be a very warm trip, and it will probably be a wet weekend as well, but we will make the most of it and have fun.

Not too much more to report from the Montana front. Just getting by day to day right now - need to get a new computer to make things even better though. ha ha! Until again

-=Nolan=-

Friday, September 08, 2006

Already The Weekend!?

Whoa! That was a fast week wasn't it? I think so. I was surfing the net tonight and realized it has been a few days since I last blogged. So what exciting news does Nolan have to share with me you ask? Well I hope you are sitting down because I have nothing to share. ha ha! No, there has to be something I can share... Let me put you on hold while I think - here's a picture while I contemplate. It's the full moon the other night as it came up over the mountain through the smoke filled sky.So Wednesday Laura and I went and toured a house we liked that was for sale. We definatly like the small size of the house and it needed a lot of work, which is what I am looking for to keep me busy. The house was near where I play Ultimate all the time and in the valley so running would be much easier to do as well. It is about 2 miles from the college so Laura would have an easy bike ride as well. However, the even though the housing market around the country is falling, the Northwest - Missoula included - is still sizzling. The asking price on the house is $210K and that is one of the cheaper houses we have found. Yes, that's right, over $200,000 for an 800 sq. ft. house, 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, unfinished basement, single car detached garage, needing reshingled, carpeted, painted, floorboard, and misc. details... Oh yeah, no landscaping of any sort either. Did I mention this is a cheap house around here? I find it pathetic that when we see a house going for close to $200,000 we think we might have ourselves a bargin.

Thursday at work we started moving topsoil at a commercial building near downtown. It's been a little difficult to work with all the traffic and lack of space. I was driving the Bobcat around moving dirt and I drove over the curb to dump some soil, as I was backing up I backed off at an angle and dropped a front tire and back tire off the curb at the same time. That's a big no-no when driving the Bobcat. The tractor leaned back and the bucket went up in the air as I leaned forward to try to correct the balance of the machine. It came crashing back down on the curb and finally settled and I gave a big "Yee haa!" and put a hand in the air because this cowboy held on for 8 seconds! After nearly rolling the machine over I drove a little more carefully for the rest of the day. The guys got a good laugh out of it, but think I am a little crazy. I drive the machine into the big dirt pile at full speed to scoop up as much dirt as possible - today the foreman told me I looked a little too crazy. Eha, nothing new I guess.

After work this evening Laura and I took a quick nap and then I went to play some Ultimate Frisbee. The days are getting shorter here so we only get about an hour and a half of play time. I managed to play almost the entire time and managed to keep breathing even with the thick smoke in the valley.

I don't know what Laura and I are going to be doing this weekend. I think we might try to find a cache or two and then who knows from there. We bought some clearance plants at Wal-Mart last week and they need to repotted, so that will be on the to-do list.

Until again

-=Nolan=-

Monday, September 04, 2006

What A Laborous Day!

Well, as usual Labor Day weekend has turned into exactly what it is - LABOR! Oh sure, everyone says it is a day off of work, but it's actually the last chance to get things done before fall and winter set in. This weekend Laura and I got a lot of things done too. Saturday we cleaned up the house and relaxed most of the day. Sunday was the day that put the hurt on!

Sunday morning we woke up at 7:30 and packed a small lunch and out the door we went. Up until last year I went on an annual canoe trip down the Dismal River - I probably went on that trip 10-12 years straight. Once we arrived in Montana it was a little more difficult to make it back to Nebraska for the canoe trip, so we climbed a mountain last year. We decided a hike or climb was a good way to spend our day this year too. We arrived at the trailhead to the Rattlesnake Recreation area at 8:30 and started our hike. We went past an old abandoned cabin along the trail - that was pretty cool to see. When we canoe the Dismal there is an abandoned house along the river that is neat to see as well - what a coincidence. Well, long hike short, we did some geocaching but we only found 2 of the 4 we went after. We hiked to the wilderness boundary and turned around because it was getting hot - around 90 - and our feet were starting to bother us. We climbed 3 ridge lines along the hike, the first was over 1,000 feet and it was straight up - no switchbacks like on the M hill that is so popular in Missoula. Once you climb the ridge you have to go back down as well - I think that's worse than the climb - but we climbed about 5,000 vertical feet during the hike - then of course we had to go back down 5,000 feet as well - so there's 2 miles of hiking in itself. When we arrived back at the truck the GPS said 17.9 miles of hiking - add the 2 miles of vertical climbing and that's a 20 miler folks.!.!... Needless to say, even in the semi-decent shape we are in, we were hurting last night. Slow movements and slower reactions.

This morning we hit up Wal-Mart, one of the first times we have gone to Wal-Mart in the morning and we were there early enough to beat the crowds. Usually we head for Wal-Mart no earlier than 9:00 p.m. to avoid massive chaos. We made it home and put away the goodies and started cleaning out the garage. I was skeptical if we would actually attain much from the task, but we actually cleaned out A LOT of space! We rearranged a few things and around 3:00 we were finishing up. I might try to get some pictures of that - it's impressive!

Laura had some work to do at the labratory tonight, so I came with her. I was going to play some Ultimate Frisbee while she worked on her experiments, but no one was around when I went to play, so I came back to have a bite to eat with her and surf the internet - and blog! And that brings things up to now. We have cleaned up the lab office and I fixed some computers and set up a printer in the labratory for the experiment computers. It's approaching 9:00 p.m. and I am looking forward to heading home and having some ice cream and cake before hitting the hay. I have been looking at building a new computer lately. My computer at home is starting to become an older computer and I can only update so many things before it's not worth it any longer. So I am looking into building a new computer in the next several weeks. Perhaps I will keep everyone updated on the progress of the new blogging machine! Ha ha!

One last note, I am going to add a facebook 'badge' to my links menu on the right side of the page (maybe for some of you it's at the top of the page) but it has my profile picture, name, and recently added pictures linked with it. I think you can click on it to see my facebook profile - if you havn't heard of facebook before it is like myspace.com were people can meet and share pictures, facebook is based on school social networks though - I would be a member of University of Nebraska at Kearney, more specifically the alumni group. It's a hot item with college age kids these days.

Work tomorrow and Laura says we still have an hour left here at the school so I am really looking forward to that snack now! Until again

-=Nolan=-

Saturday, September 02, 2006

September Is Zeptember!

Ah, September! Traditionally it is one of my favorite months of the year. Cross Country is under way and so it the football season, soon hunting season will be open for waterfowl and the air has the hint of fall in the air already! The past several nights we have had temperatures below 40 and Butte even saw 27! Brr, it's still summer!

We finished up our big job at work and now we are going to be doing some small jobs for awhile. It is going to be nice to be working in different places around town. The air was so bad the other day that an warning was issued for air quality. Today however the air is crisp and clear and things are looking good around here. We went to Wal-Mart this morning and picked up some plants and a set of chairs and table for the deck. Everything was on clearance so we found ourselves some good deals! Most of the day is going to be spent listening to the Huskers football game and planting the plants.

You might be wondering about the title today - Zeptember? The classic rock radio station is paying tribute to Led Zeppelin this month and they have declared September as Zeptember. I thought that was a pretty good deal!

Now, as I promised, here is my tribute blog:

It's not often that you get companions who will stick with out day in and day out when you use them and abuse them daily - sometimes twice in a day. Sometimes I would wake up at 5:30 a.m. to take them out, and then I would be back at 4:00 p.m. in the blistering sun to give them a pounding. Why would they stick with me for so long you ask? Simple, they are my running shoes! That's right, some of the most reliable companions a runner can have. In my case, I am talking about my Reebok Premier Road Lite running shoes. I picked up these shoes at JCPenney, yeah that's right! I started running in these shoes about a month before my senior cross country year (2004) - and I have been using them ever since. Yes, I have a new pair waiting for me to run out of these shoes, but they are just going to have to keep waiting. The other day, while Laura and I were finishing up a run, I got to thinking about how far these shoes have taken me and all the places they have ran. My senior year of Cross Country we ran in South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado. For track we did it all over again, in some cases more than once. We ran in bright sunny skies with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees, rain, sleet, snow deeper than we could run in, winds stronger than we could run against, and races on occasion. Sometimes we would run three times a day, we would run time trials and sprints in them as well. So here's some math to show how well these shoes have done... I started wearing them in July of 2004 and during that month I ran about 160 miles, August, September and October were months we ran close to 70 miles a week, that's 280 miles a month already they should have been retired! So far we are up to 1,000 miles. During the off season of November and December I usually did somehwere around 150 miles a month - 1,300 miles - when Indoor Track rolled around we would do about 50 miles a week, or 200 miles a month and that lasted until March (200 X 3) + 1,300 = 1,900 miles. Next we have Outdoor track where we would be doing about 60 miles a week (240 miles a month) and that was March, April and some of May - about the first 10 days so I will call it 75 miles. (240 X 2) + 75 + 1,900 = 2,455 MILES! I have ran on and off since retiring from the collegate running world, I even took these shoes on my Yellowstone Backcountry trek - that was 70 miles in itself, so I have easily put 2,500 miles on these shoes. Those are some reliable shoes!

Until again

-=Nolan=-