A 10K before a 10K

Waking up albeit late in the morning, I thought to myself, "Why not go running outside on a nice San Diego Winter's Day?"  Of course, after eating a great breakfast of pancakes, eggs & rice + fruit, and an hour of digesting, we went out around noon for the usual Miramar Lake Loop.  I wanted to make it an easy 10K so I did an out and back here and there rounding it off to 6.5 miles.

It's always a pleasure to have my wife Adelle run with me and truthfully, I was only expecting her to run 1-3 miles but after jogging two solid 11 min/ mile, she decided to keep on trucking. I ran ahead of her and then turned back in order to catch up with her then went ahead again. This was my way of reaching my 10K goal prior to this Sunday's Cardiff Kook 10K and I did it. It was hot, I felt okay, but for the first time in a long time, my ankles were feeling loose. I'm taking a breather today, mostly stretching but I'm excited and can't wait for this season's first 10K. As always, I'm going for under 60 minutes. If I get near 55, I'll be in heaven!

A Beautiful 10K by the Bay!

After yesterday's 30 minute run on the treadmill, I felt good for another, longer run. I figured out a good route along the bay and plus, Adelle and I could enjoy some San Diego sun. Running from our apartment and finally getting on the Embarcadero, we set out at a good relaxed pace for 3.1 miles.

When we reached our turn around point, we took a quick break, then started our way back. Watching the Garmin, I noticed that Adelle and I ended up running the second half at a slightly slower pace which was a let down, but hey, we have nine weeks right?! I was able to snap this quick pic of Adelle wearing her San Diego Dodge Rock 'n' Roll Marathon Long sleeve training tech shirt and the awesome weather that we got to enjoy! Check it! I was also able to take a quick picture of the Petco Park from the new pedestrian bridge that goes from the stadium to the Hilton. Good stuff all around!

Now what stinks is the GPS readings and recordings. Compare the two maps below and you'll notice that the Garmin Edge 500 didn't "find" me right away even though it said that it captured my location and the sporadic mapping through downtown is a little off. More or less, with the data from Google Maps, my Garmin Edge 500 and my Nike+ Pedometer, I ran a solid 10K.

View Larger Map

Disneyland Post Apocalyptic Crowds

Initially scared by all the news and various media reports that Disneyland was closing and not letting people in due to ovehwleming holiday crowds and even friends warning me that they were close to going insane, driving up to the happiest place on earth was a little bit of a concern.  If you know me, I'm always down, so in the end,  we charged ahead.  Amazing weather to boot, it was a great day!  We didn't really have time to explore certain areas of the park but all in all, we did the "important stuff" minus the water rides.  We even got to hang out with JP and his high school friend Frances. One thing that both Adelle and I never did before was the Toy Story ride and experience the Wonderful World of Color Show at California Adventures.  That show was pretty darn awesome.  They even had a dedicated Tron: Legacy bit choreographed.  Great stuff.

Web 2.0 and the Posterous New Blog

Intro:

I recently signed up for a posterous site, http://adellelijah.posterous.com, to host both Adelle and I together in one cloud space and in doing so, I actually ended up creating two more different posterous sites, http://adellelisa.posterous.com and http://elijahnicolas.posterous.com so that we can post on an individual basis.  Adelle actually didn't like me posting my stuff to "our" site so I decided that we each needed a separate one for self preservation.  I'll just admit it already: I am a posting whore.

Over the last few months, I've been using the Thesis Wordpress Theme in order to help with Search Engine Optimization on elijahnicolas.com.  I love the simplistic layout of the Thesis Theme so much that I even ended up buying the commercial license to use on Peak Interest (www.whatspyi.com) as well as my fiance's blog (www.adellelisa.com) which she is very hesitant to update but at least it's there.  Over the years, I have graduated from the Blogger platform hosting a multitude of different sites, to trying out joomla for a hot second to finally settling down on wordpress as my choice for a content management system.  Of course, twitter came around along with friendfeed and now posterous all within the last year or so and I indulged.  All the while, I was only looking for that singular reasonable mean to have all my personalities talk to each other and reflect each other's status'.  With posterous, I think I may have found the perfect solution!

Body 1:

The basic idea of Web 2.0 was to forge a design template that allowed for an easy GUI interface for those that weren't code savvy.  It was to provide a simpler means to update ones' online mediums / personality sites and in doing so, collaborate with others in the virtual arena.  That's my personal spin in layman's terms.  If you want the "real deal," here's Wikipedia's here.

Posterous has done just that.  They simplified the entire process.  They have taken out the horrific means of uploading to an FTP site or Content Management System and instead substituted it with the easy medium we use everyday: e-mailing.  You can "attach photos, videos, MP3s and files" to your e-mails, send it off to space and boom...it's that simple!  You could always do that on Blogger.com with text and photos and use a not so great plug-in with WordPress, but with one touch, I can upload a picture with a small post to my posterous account directly from my email address, it detects where I want it to go and publishes instantly without a hitch not only to posterous, but to anywhere else that I'm connected to be it my facebook, blogger, wordpress or even twitter account.

I was thinking of having it update my actual wordpress blog, but that's when things started to come together in my head.  I finally drew somewhat distinct lines.  I have come to the definite conclusion that my posterous and mobile blog are one in the same.  That's almost a no brainer, with a slight difference that the blogger site has a black background and posterous has a white one.  Posterous and my trelijah mobile blog are just quick snippets of my life.  Twitpic and twitter are just even quicker moments that I deem "3rd class" per say.  Of course the hierarchy of it all would be a long post, such as this one, on elijahnicolas.com, a picture accompanied by a posterous moment then a tweet.

Conclusion:

It is however convenient to have one place to update every personality, but duplication starts to become rampant and I don't want that to happen.  For now, I guess I'll keep trelijah going along with elijahnicolas.posterous.com and maybe with time, just end trelijah.  But as I always keep on saying, you can always count on me for some type of update.  That's enough.

p.s.  I had to edit the template of trelijah to fit the new format of pictures.  I like them in the full form.  Nice stuff!

"His Story"

Over the last two months, both Adelle and I have been making our rounds on the phone or meeting our friends and family in person, telling them the good news! If you haven't found out already, YES...WE ARE ENGAGED!!! The actual date was June 26th, 2009. We have yet to update our facebook profile statuses due to our own stubbornness to announce it there so in the meantime, we're just in a relationship!!! I'm going to start this off by telling you MY story.

Back in Spring 2000, at a Memorial Day BBQ that a mutual friend had invited me to, we crossed paths at the potluck table.  I asked her what her name was, we exchanged brief hellos, and when I mean brief, it's the shortest of conversations. It went something like this:

Elijah: Hello! I'm Elijah. I go to Revelle. How about you? Strange girl across the table picking up chips: I'm Adelle. I go to Marshall. Bye!

-- and she walks off because she has to go sit down next to her friend on the grass on her little towel.  Granted, I weigh about a 140 at 5'11", am wearing khaki short and a Structure Polo with some Dr. Marten Sandals.  I guess you could have just imagined a tool or a dork, or both combined, but she basically gave me the straight hate!

The night continued without any further contact which then transitioned into what ended up being a bonfire.  As the ocean air began to chill, another mutual friend from Atlantis Hall, which happened to also be my dormitory, wanted to head home.  She said that she needed a ride, and being my awesome nice self, I obliged.  Little did I know that her "friend" wanted a ride too.  I thought, "What the heck?"  (I actually didn't think that because I am a nice guy.)  Good thing though, because it just so happened that her friend was Adelle.  We got into my 1985 Turbo Diesel 300D Mercedes, cranked up some surfer-punk music and drove up the hill back to campus.  I was into the punk music contrary to popular belief that I would have been all into hip-hop / rap, etc I too also liked alternative, punk, and metal.  I dropped off Adelle first at her place and then Alice and I walked back to our hall.  That was that...

let’s go fly! Palomar Airport (KCRQ) @ Pinnacle Academy DA40

Fast forward 3 years later, July of 2003, I turn 21.  I'm living it up the leftover high that was my birthday party, heading out every weekend, hitting up all the bars between Downtown San Diego and LA -- it was just crazy fun and definitely costly, but I always refer the 6 months that ensued to as "dirty 21 fun!"  Turning 21 helped me grow a pair and I started to ask a few people out.  To my surprise, some said yes and I thought to myself why didn't I ever talk to girls earlier?  You see, I didn't really "talk" to girls.  I mean, I talked every now and then, perhaps a peep would leave my mouth, but I was always too shy to take it any further than a simple, "Hello.  How are ya?"  I promise when I have a son, he is going to grow some balls and not miss out on his high school dances like I did the first year or so.

Well, it just so happened that I had a friend who convinced me to take "Human Sexuality" with her during the 2002 Fall Quarter.  I signed up, got into the class but was confronted with a slight disappointment that she didn't make it in.  Do I just drop it or stick it out even though she isn't here?  She was a junior and I had a lot of credits already, so it wasn't like I needed to crash the course.  I didn't even need it as I was Management Science major.  I also happened to run into a bunch of old friends from freshman year and while I got distracted with them, my other friend never made it into the class.  Good thing I guess because we probably might have continued our random get-togethers.  It's not like that at all either...really.  Shopping, the occaisional dinner.  Just keeping it kosher at all times.  But onto the climax!

A few weeks pass and I finally had my chance to talk her.  I definitely recognized her and thought that she was cute for sure, but at the time, I wasn't looking for anything more than a study buddy.  Seriously!  So, with that, I finally was able to reintroduce myself, but I made a big error.  I went like this:

Friend: Adelle, this is Elijah, Elijah, Adelle. Adelle: I think we've met before at a picnic. Nice to meet you again. Elijah: Oh yeah, we met your freshman year?! Adelle with a confused look: What year are you? Elijah: I'm a 4th Adelle: so am I!? (weirdo)

Well, I follow her onto the UCSD shuttle bus that takes us to our respective automobile location, sit near her and just start chatting it up.  We have a final coming up, so I pull out the study card!  I got the digits easily without a hitch and filed it away in my pocket.

a cowgirl and an “astronaut”

I didn't call her either till about 2 weeks later the night of Halloween in Downtown San Diego. I had to really convince her over the phone to that she should be coming out being that it was our first year as 21 year olds celebrating what usually becomes a night of drunken celebration. She met up with us and that was that. We continued hanging out and one day, we realized that we were dating. The rest is history.

I proposed in Atlanta after she had rode the aircraft that I was flying back from Toronto. I landed and did the announcements.  It was just all put well together.  I even had the flight attendants have her wait behind and then told the captain that I wanted to get a shot of us in the cockpit.  While he was taking the 2nd photo, that's when I popped the question.  Happy engagement babe!

truly surprised her since she just woke up from a 2 hour flight

she says yes & my Captain can barely click the camera fast enough

Past Weekend's Haps

The Chargers couldn’t lose because they had a bye week, JR and Veronica had their wedding shower, Adelle convinced me to head out to Disneyland before our pass privileges were set to expire, I got a chance to hang out with Dr. Nourani in Downtown San Diego, and I did a little work in finishing up my migration to my new MacBook Pro.

Disneyland was definitely a great highlight as the lines were short allowing us to ride what we wanted (California Adventures’ Soaring is still the best), the apple pie caramel apple was a delight and the biggest plus was seeing one of my college roommates as a Jedi Knight Instructing young Padawans on stage at a Disneyland show!  Mr. Stephan Oyoung, without a doubt has the best job.  Working 4 days a week teaching kids how to rid the world of the dark side with light saber techniques, what more could you ask in a post graduate occupation?!  Two thumbs up and kudos to you Jedi Oyoung.

On the day of voting, I got to witness a new dawn in Downtown with yet another college buddy, Dr. Nourani and was readily entertained with his residency stories.  I mention a new dawn only because it was about the time when Barack was making his acceptance speech and McCain ending his bid. Bobby's stories make me wonder where I would have been at if I did do a post-bac program in lieu of flight school.   We ate at Marsala (an Indian restaurant of course) which was tremendous but a bit overpriced then made our way to Altitude Sky Bar where we got to see the Madonna Concert without the Madonna.  Good times all around, but once again I find myself commuting back to work.  It’s been a while since I’ve been at the crashpad.  I can’t wait to get the band back together.