Having fun at the Albuquerque Sunport

In case you have trouble reading my handwriting...

Reasons the Albuquerque Airport is Awesome: 

1. It's a SUNport, not an airport.
2. It has a bi-plane from 1914 (almost 100 years old!).
3. There are portraits memorializing drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs (wearing police badges!) mounted on the wall.
4. It was free WiFi.
5. There's art (paintings, sculptures, ceramics) everywhere, including 20 giant wooden ceiling beams across the main entry hall, each painted (and carved) with a different animal or design.
6. The lines are practically non-existent.
7. It's really colorful (like most of New Mexico).

With all the heft of a grizzly bear

As you may or may not know, I seem to have ended up in Fort Sumner, New Mexico (population: 1,031). I have work to fill my days (and running, and cycling...), but I also have a lot of free time. So I decided to fill it with some exercises from The Daily Create, which is part of a free, online digital media course I stumbled upon.

Instead of doing today's create, I chose a recent one I found more intriguing: Celebrate the 600th Daily Create by expressing "600" in a drawing that doesn't use numbers.

 Some ideas to illustrate 600 as...

• ...an age (think: Methuselah)
• ...a crowd of people/insects/deer
• ...discrete feathers, or frogs, or pieces of popcorn (popped v. unpopped kernels, by volume, could be interesting)
• ....a weight. Hmmm, what weighs 600 lbs?

A grizzly bear!

He's kind of nervous about getting weighed at the doctor's office, for obvious reasons.

And of course, a grizzle bear would have a driver's license. I used "600" in here but...who cares?

Happiness is Contagious: A playlist for running 100 miles

I recently ran my third 100-mile race. One of my favorite things about running 100 milers - in addition to the pain, the beauty, the heightened emotions and experiences which are inevitably fuzzified by memory's fickle biologic devices, the chafing, the crying out of misery, the crying out of joy, and the dawn light - is the warm fuzzy feeling I get from the selfless, seemingly limitless support my friends, family, loved ones, and total strangers shower on me.

And an overlooked element of that support is the music that, thanks to modern technology, I can take with me up and down mountain passes.

Out of the many races I do - trail, road, relay, ultra - hundred-milers are the only ones where I use headphones. Why? Because 24+ hours is a lot of time to spend with your own head. My prime directive during a 100-miler is to stay happy. If I'm happy, I'm running (or hiking, as is more often the case) well. Trouble starts when my mood dips.

With the help of friends and family (Amy, Robbie, Sarah, Kayanna, Anat, Helen, Kaya, all the Wirfs-Brocks), who shared songs that make them happy, I put together this playlist: 267 songs, 17+ hours of music, an artesian well of happiness. And it worked. This playlist, which has been evolving since my 100-mile debut last year, was an especially important "member of my crew" at Cascade Crest last weekend, where I ran without a pacer until the last four miles (thanks, Mom!).

So, here it is! (Sorry, you'll have to scroll.)

View in Google Drive

I included the years in there because it's mildly interesting to see the chronological distribution of the music. That data is iffy (sometimes it's the year of a re-release, because it's from iTunes), and not available for every song...yet!