New post? New post! New post? New post!

Angel's out of town, dinner's been cooked, I'm done studying for the evening, I don't care about what's on TV, and daylight savings time has ended giving an extra hour in the day. A fertile environment from which to birth the first new post here since nursing school started. To dispense with the essential updates: Nursing school is good, if super busy. At first I thought it was going to be impossibly overwhelming, but then I sorted out which reading I actually need to do, and which classes I actually need to study for, and things seem much less hectic now. I occasionally even get a chance to do something other than watch online training videos on how to insert things into various orifices. Mostly what I do with my free time is: 

1) Plan what I'm going to do once I'm finished with nursing school. The BIG EXCITING GOAL is to walk (run?!) the 500 mile Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain in Summer 2013. I'll have a rare moment of freedom from work before I start as a real live Murse, Angel will have time to build up vacation time to get off the necessary 4 - 6 weeks that it will take, and we have a couple of other friends who want to do it. It's going to happen! Here's some dude's video about his Camino:

2) Run. I finished the Bellingham Bay Marathon on the 27th of September in 3:31 which was a PR, and also in bad running conditions on one of the windiest days of the year. I planned to do my first 50k on the second weekend of October that I ended up backing out of b/c school was overwhelming. I wish I'd done it, b/c I could have coasted from marathon training (I'd done a couple of 26+ workouts so was in shape for it). It works out though, b/c Angel's working her way back from an injury (PR for her today in a half-marathon in St. Louis!), and I've bumped down my mileage to fit into my study schedule. We're meeting in the middle, and hopefully I'll have myself back in marathon shape by second quarter. Today's run doesn't bode well for that - after 70 minutes running at Discovery Park my bowels decided that they were going to evacuate themselves immediately, but the rest of my body was a 20 minute run from the nearest bathroom. So, I sat for a second to get control of myself, then walked/jogged gingerly to the toilet and decided to quit a bit early.

3) Watch inspirational videos about running, like this one:



4) Think about going somewhere far far away. A lot of times I'm thinking about going back to New Zealand, which is what I was doing today when I came across this video from Scribe, which is full of scenes from the Christchurch devastation post-last year's earthquake:



It sucks to see all of the damage in real time, I think for the first time (I'd just seen photos before). Christchurch decidedly did not look like Detroit when I was there, and I'm hoping the recovery is going well. As usual I really want to go back. And I want to run the Kepler Challenge while I'm there.



But that's a side note. The point here was that while I was watching the Scribe video, it reminded me of this Macklemore video...



... which brings up the fact that the PNW and NZ have a lot in common - not least of which is a large number of old school-ish positive rappers who write music about how much they love their homes.  They should do songs together.  Also trail ultras. Uli Steidl lives in my neighborhood. He wins those things. I want to run the White River 50 someday.

But first two years of learning why people are crazy, and how to tell if someone's going to have a heart attack, and what it means when whitish-red fluids leak out of them, and whether or not to panic when they do.