John Smoltz is on the Red Sox! Super exciting.

I decided to go back to my Man-O-War DC and make the ice mauls a bit icier looking. I can't tell if I'm happy with the effect or not but I think the models look better overall.

I've also started working on my Widowmakers. I'm mostly done with the easy, flat parts but their faces are starting to worry me. I've had a lot of success lately painting faces but the most recent attempt didn't go very well and I'm nervous about the four of these.

Widowmakers WIP

My Khador reinforcements arrived from ebay the other day. The Greylord Ternion and Koldun Lord will find themselves painted in the next month or two but the Kodiak will probably sit on my shelf for a while longer.

I also recently discovered that all of my old, horribly painted Ultramarines can be easily given a new life as Crimson Fists. When I was painting them I would paint each piece individually and then glue them together. Since the glue was paint on paint it is really weak and I can separate the pieces really easily. Right now I have an assault squad broken up and I'm going to buy some Simple Green to try stripping the paint.

My new (old) stereo arrived in the mail yesterday.

Everything seems to be in good working order and I'm totally enamored over everything being analog instead of digital. Initially I thought the record player or the receiver weren't working but my dad helped me to figure out the problem. I ended up ordering a preamp to help boost the output from the record player - not a huge problem at all and even now I can use everything.

Laura has been knitting like a machine. She recently finished two toys, one for me and one for her brother's friends' little kids. The beige, fat, dog is mine and the blue one is for the kids. She's currently working on some owls and I hear they're adorable.

Lisa and I had a pretty good 13 mile run this past weekend. Our overall pace was a little slow (8:45 per mile) but that's because we had a horrible first half due to ice being on all of the sidewalks. The second half we both felt great and kept up a very good clip. The weather is supposed to take a huge dip in temperature over the next few days and I'm worried about how our 14 miler this weekend will go.

Lisa and I survived our marathon this past weekend but just barely. We were cruising though the first 20 or 21 miles and we were on pace to finish about 4.5 minutes under my previous marathon PR of 3:35:12 when Lisa rolled her ankle pretty badly. I wasn't about to let her miss qualifying for Boston so we started alternating running and walking. I kept a close watch on the time and we finished officially at 3:39:03 to get Lisa her sub 3:40:00.

Prior to that incident her and I were flying along. We got a slow start trying to navigate all the people but we settled into something between an 8:05 and 8:10 pace all the way until mile 20. We had a few miles under 8:00 and a few over 8:20 but mostly we were feeling really good and steady. The course was very flat and scenic which helped to offset the lack of hundreds of thousands of fans and other runners. The biggest challenge for me was mental. Towards the end (even before Lisa rolled her ankle) the miles seemed to stretch out and it felt like ages between each mile marker sign. My cardio held up fine just like in Boston and I had some stiffening of my quads again but this was significantly less since there was no three mile hill to climb.

Overall the course was a lot of fun and I would have absolutely set a PR if I hadn't hung back to get Lisa across the line. However, I'm really happy with how the race ended and I'm really proud of Lisa for qualifying despite her injury.

mile	split	total
1	miss
2	17:51	17:51
3	8:18	26:09
4	8:13	34:23
5	8:08	42:31
6	8:10	50:42
7	8:22	59:05
8	8:08	1:07:13
9	8:11	1:15:24
10	8:20	1:23:45
11	7:46	1:31:32
12	8:06	1:39:38
13	8:19	1:47:57
14	7:52	1:55:50
15	7:56	2:03:46
16	8:04	2:11:51
17	8:09	2:20:01
18	8:05	2:28:06
19	8:06	2:36:13
20	8:11	2:44:24
21	8:21	2:52:45
22	8:27	3:01:12
23	9:21	3:10:34
24	9:45	3:20:20
25	8:27	3:28:48
26	8:35	3:37:23
finish	1:42	3:39:05

I started training for this during the second week in June and ended up covering 549.3 miles over the course of 18 weeks in training and the race itself. At one point during the training I missed out on a 50 mile week entirely and I spent a few weeks battling stomach problems that caused me to cut some runs short. Given all that, and the fact that I trained about 575 miles for the first marathon I am really happy with my performance here. I'm going to be running Boston in April again and I have some ideas to radically change up my training.

I took Monday off to relax and recover from the race and used to it finish off my next 5 Space Marines.

newest 5

all 10 that I've finished

I'm happy with how these guys are turning out. They're currently missing decals on their shoulder pads because I haven't figured out a good way to apply them. There is a good tutorial that I found online that I need to try out before I go wasting the decals that I need.

After rallying to tie the series 3-3, the Red Sox lost to the Rays on Sunday. It was a bummer but I'm glad they fought back and didn't roll over and give it to the Rays.

mile 13


finish!

I'll admit that I spent most of yesterday thinking about how sad it would be when the Red Sox lost Game 5 against the Rays. When I left work a little after 8pm and it was 2-0 bad guys I lost most of the enthusiasm I had for getting home quickly to watch the game. I stopped watching in the 7th inning when the Rays get a double steal on Paplebon to put men on 2nd and 3rd with no outs.

Apparently I should have more faith. The Red Sox scored 4 in the 7th, 3 in the 8th, and then sealed it in the 9th, and I missed it. I found out they won by reading the front page of someone else's Metro while I waited for the train this morning. I spent half an hour this morning at work reading articles about the win, but this one in particular does a great job of capturing the energy and intensity that I imagine accompanyed those last three innnings.

Now it's back to Tampa to play Game 6. Go Sox!

I spent several hours this weekend painting a Khador Juggernaut and this is the result (photographed poorly - they don't show the highlights that do exist however faint):

I had a lot of trouble conceptually highlighting the huge red armour plates. My typical strategy of line highlighting was pretty useless on the vast, flat expanses that needed to be highlighted. I went for what I thought would be natural highlights but I'm not satisfied. I don't think I executed my plan correctly and I don't think I have enough contrast for the highlights to be visible. The Warmachine rulebook has some good reference pictures and I'm going to try to use them to touch up this guy. I'm also thinking of trying to paint on some battle damage, but I'd like to get the highlights correct first.

I decided to enter a second army into the Tale of Painters on Librarium Online. In addition to my 1000 points of Crimson Fists I will be working on 500 points of Khador. The Juggernaut represents 100 points done already so my first month's submission is already take care of. Once I get those next 5 tacitcal marines done I'll have my Fists sumbission done for the month also so I think I'm in pretty good shape to take care of both.

Once these two projects are done I am thinking of doing some Cygnar models. The two that have really caught my eye are Coleman Stryker and the Journeyman Warcaster.

Coleman Stryker (image from Privateer Press)

Journeyman Warcaster (image from Privateer Press)

Khador has a feeling of steampunk Russion, and Cygnar has a knightly feel to them. I also really like the vibrant blue color of their armour.

My next marathon is coming up on Sunday. I think if I can run a 3:40 and help Lisa to qualify that I'll be happy. Somehow I managed to get a blood blister on one of my big toes; hopefully that won't be too much of a pain in the ass.

Spoony was in town this weekend for regionals. It was really good to see him. Since I had Monday off (hooray Chris Columbus!) Laura and I got brunch at the Center Street Cafe. It was really good and a lot of fun. Even though we've been dating for over two years now I still like going on dates with Laura.

The Red Sox have dropped two straight to fall behind 1-2 against the Rays. Hopefully they can pick it up tonight and bring it back to even.

I managed to assemble the next 5 marines while watching the Red Sox beat the Angles but I've been pretty busy lately and haven't had time to clean or prime them. I tried some more dynamic poses with these 5 - some of them worked and others not so much.

My taper jitters have come back. The runs that I'm doing as part of the taper have not been enough to eat up all the energy I have so I've been a little jumpy the past few days. My two runs this week have thus far been pretty good and I'm anticipating another good one this evening.

I watched the most recent debate and was generally unimpressed with both candidates. Neither one would answer a question directly and they just rehashed the same points from the previous debate. I think Obama won, but only because McCain lost worse.

While we're on the subject, I've been reading some more interesting articles about McCain and Palin. I'll be the first to admit my liberal bias, but I think it's worth giving these articles a read anyway.

A few weeks ago I sumbitted my Massachusetts voter registration paperwork and as the deadline approaches, I've been checking cityofboston.gov to see if they have processed my paperwork. They hadn't as of a few days ago so I e-mailed them but got no response. Since it is important to me that I be able to vote I called City Hall and asked about it. They told me I am registered to vote (hooray!) and that the online database isn't updated as regularly as their databases are.

Some photos from the 5k this past weekend:

The Red Sox won the World Series! Beth bought me a Dustin Pedroia shirt! Hooray! I'm very happy that the Sox won the series, but I'm also very happy that the whole thing is over with. There are lots of other things I want to be doing with my evenings that Red Sox games were preventing me from doing.

Yesterday I went for a phenomenal 5+ mile run. It was pretty cold and dark by the time I got out of the house (6:30pm, I hate the winter) and I was nervous initially that I would be too chilly to enjoy it, but I was wrong. For once in my life I dressed appropriately, so I kept warm the whole time. I ran pretty quickly and I did some experiments with my stride and pacing that helped keep me from getting bored.

Sunday night I made an attempt to cook a salmon steak for Laura and myself. I was nervous because I've never cooked fish before, but it turned out to be one of the most delicious meals I've ever made. The fish was flaky and moist and tasted delicious with the lemon I put on it.

Tonight I have a bunch of climbing on my schedule. I'd also like to try and finish my Wood Elf Archers, since my deadline of November 1st is rapidly approaching. I could finish them on Wednesday, but that is Halloween and there are rumors of Halloween themed fun on Halo that night, so I'd like to check that out.

Last night Spoony and I played a bunch of Halo and drank a lot with Laura; Laura and I were quite hung over this morning. I had big plans to clean my room, paint my Wood Elves, and generally be productive today but most of it didn't happen. I did paint for a little while but mostly I just sat around and played Halo.

Olga and I finally got together tonight. We have been playing phone tag for two or so weeks since she came back to Boston. Since the Red Sox are playing we went downtown to Whiskeys to watch the game, but ended up leaving before the game ended because it was very hot and the people were obnoxious. It was good to catch up with her and I'm really happy she decided to stay in Boston.

Tomorrow night Dar and Lauren (and possibly others) are going to come and hopefully watch the Red Sox win the World Series. I've never had a place that I was excited to show to people, so I need to make sure that I pick up the mountains of clothes in my room and clean up the mess from last night in the living room.

Despite earlier claims about the end of the climbing season, Tim, Matt Smith, Lissa, and I ventured back up to New Hampshire this weekend for a beautiful day of climbing. The weather was warm, the leaves were fantastic shades of red and yellow, and everyone had a good time. We all warmed up three climbs that were rated somewhere between 5.7 and 5.9, before each moving on to our larger projects.

Tim worked a huge 12c on a big overhang before getting lowered down into open space. Matt was on an 11c with a magic hold, and had some fantastic photographs taken by Lissa. I got on Jolt, a 10b, which is one half of a giant flake (the other half is a 9 called Dolt, which I did earlier in the season). I managed to do it with one rest on the rope; I had hoped to lead it cleanly but I am very happy with my one fall. I did the climb just a bit before sunset, which combined with the colorful leaves in the valley made it an awesome view.

I also did some good climbing with Laura at Metro on Friday night. We both did about two and a half hours of solid bouldering. The highlight of my evening was sending a 2+ (that felt more like a 4) after working it all night.

Also, the Red Sox won both games this weekend to beat the Indians 4-3 in the series. Next stop is the World Series on Wednesday.

Tim being lowered into space.


Matt winning the best photograph of the day award.


Me near the top of a very exposed flake.

The Lawrence Arms were very good. I like American Steel (the band that came on before them) but Laura wasn't so much of a fan.

The Red Sox, on the other hand, were somewhat less than good. They're currently down 1-3 in the series, which is a tenuous situation in a best of four series. Hopefully they can pull it off tonight and bring to a more manageable spot, but they need to win three straight.

Tim and I went to Metro last night. We warmed up on three 8's, then I jumped on two 10's, and an 11 (which I sent cleanly) before my arms went to shit. I climbed another 10, a 9, and an 8 but they were all pretty poor showings. Still, nine climbs in less than three hours is a lot of climbing and hopefully I can maintain that pace and get stronger. Tim wants me to focus on my footwork and try to take rests during climbs so I develop good habits.

This man set the world dyno record, but it has been questioned since he took a second jump off the hand hold. I'm pretty sure that he should get more points, and not less, for his second jump, but apparently I am in the minority.