Canapeel

My 2013 Lil’ Red Rubicon

First off, I never thought about having a red — make that a Deep Cherry Red — vehicle. As the sun has come out to play for spring, I’ve discovered that this is a really pretty color. I’m really glad I decided to go that direction. Something about the speckles in the paint really jazz me up. (That’s about as street as I get.)

I also chose to get a two-door this go ’round, instead of a four door. That has proven to be a good decision, although there are some definite differences. For instance, I tried to get in the back seat, and that is one tough proposition, even with the tilt forward seat on the passenger side. I thought I was gonna have to call AAA to rescue me.

Frankly, there’s not a lot of storage space with the two-door model. But, the back seat is removable, and I’ve had it out for a few weeks, enjoying the nearly empty interior. I have reinstalled it recently, just to use as a stowage bench until I can put a locking storage box in the back. You see, the stuff I lob nonchalantly in the back tends to roll around, and I figured I’d suffer a back seat for a while until I get a home for the stuff roaming around in the open cabin.

So… beyond the goodness that accompanies a new vehicle, what’s cool about this Jeep, especially as compared to my ’08 Wrangler Unlimited X?

Let’s start at the back of the new Jeep. One of the things that just killed me with the ’08 was with the swing gate. It wasn’t uncommon to have the gate open, only to have the wind or gravity (she’s a heartless old broad, or so I’ve heard Sheldon say) slam the thing shut… hopefully without my body in the way. There have been some aftermarket toys to keep the door open, and it appears that the Jeep folks paid attention. The new swing gate has a gizmo with a stop on it to hold the door open. Wonderful!

The little storage area under the rear carpet has even been improved. In the storage space are indents for the door hinge bolts and the bolts for the hard top, along with a little space for roof straps or other doodads. This is a really nice touch. To my eye, it kinda looks like the storage space is a little smaller, but there is a nice Jeep rug over the storage area, so maybe that’s a good tradeoff.

My last Jeep had both a hard and soft top, and frankly, I got pretty tired of switching them twice a year. In fact, until I busted the zipper on the back window, I’d just kept the soft top on. But I loved having the soft top available so I could drop the top and get the full airflow it afforded. When I first lowered the two-door’s top, I discovered just how much easier it was to raise and lower. The latch system and edging are much, much easier to deal with, and I think I’ll probably bust my knuckles a little less.

The doors also have a new harness latch. I’m not a huge fan of the locking mechanism on them, and I’ve already seen at least one thread on a Jeep site showing the locking parts broken off intentionally to make it easier to deal with the harness connector. While that’s not a bad idea, the good news is that with a two-door soft top, I have three less of those latches to deal with on a regular basis!

The interior on the Rubi is beautiful, sleek and black. It’s comfy, with redesigned seats that seem to hold my back and backside in just the right way. And there’s tons of power in the thing — one 12V outlet at the subwoofer, another in the dash, and a USB-style connector inside the center console. I also like the new autodimming mirror… it’s even got map lights!

I also put a Garmin nav system in the dash. I have two other Garmin systems — one for running and another for hiking — and this one plays right into those. Can’t wait to get it on the road, and see what it can do.

This new Jeep now has automatic headlights, which are pretty dang cool. I had those on my Chevy’s, but having that in the Jeep is a very nice feature. You can even set the Jeep up so that the headlights and foglights come on automatically — excellent!

Rubi also sports the new 3.6L Pentastar engine. I dunno if it’s the smaller body size, or the new engine, but this thing is like a rocket ship! It really has a lot of get-up-and-go, and is nowhere near as sluggish as my ’08 felt. And with the 6-speed, I’m enjoying the heck outta shifting gears while I travel. I’m all about process, and a stick is about as process-driven as it gets. My only complaint is that the shifting pattern has 6th gear being slightly offset as you slide from fifth. It’s very easy to accidentally slide it toward reverse from fifth… which isn’t a good thing. I’m getting used to it, but it’s not exactly natural.

In all, I really love this new Jeep. It’s a huge improvement over my ’08, and moving to a two-door really suits me. Woot!

I finally uploaded the data from my Garmin 310XT for the Undy 5000. Here’s the course map — enjoy!

The 2013 campaign begins today… Opening day for MLB begins today.  Woohoo!

The Cards don’t open until tomorrow night on the road in Arizona, of all things — you’d think they’d at least open us in the same time zone as the fan base!  Despite that weirdness, the focus tonight is on Texas with a new cross-state rivalry ‘twixt the Rangers and the league-changing Astros.  It’ll be weird not having the Astros in the NL central.  Bunches of history with them and the Cards over the last decade or so…

Tomorrow is only the beginning, and much like the NASCAR start a few weeks ago, I’ll be glued to the twists and turns through the long season that makes up the 2013 season.  Play ball!!!!!

Your intrepid author!

The Undy 5000 has come and gone, and I ran my race.

OK, so I didn’t set any land speed records, and I didn’t run faster than last year — slower by about two minutes, in fact — but I ran a better race this year.  I was crazy nervous about this race.  You see, this was my first race since Race for the Stars last summer, and while I knew I could run the distance from my treadmill work over the winter, it’s a whole different thing when pounding the pavement.

Add to that the cold, cold weather — about 35 degrees at racetime — and I was a nervous wreck.

Becky brought Bailey, which helped ease my nerves, and while we were standing there waiting to get going, a good friend of ours from work, Scott, showed up to run with me.  Now, I’d tell you that I’m probably taking great liberties with the phrase run with me.  I ran my 5km in just over 51 minutes; Scotty blazed the trail in under 30 minutes!

Like they say, even slow miles are better than no miles.  I’ll take my slow miles, any day of the week.

And my slow miles actually went pretty well.  The course is configured with the finish line sitting atop a rise.  Last year, it’s all I could do to sorta jog (and mostly walk) up that rise.  This year, I zoomed right up it.  Part of that’s probably that I’m in a little better shape this year than last year, but it might also be that I paced myself better this year.  Last year, I zoomed through the first half-mile or more in a big ol’ pack.  This year, I didn’t start in the big pack, and I kept a little more consistent pace throughout the whole course.

Once the race was over, I got a little post-race sustenance, and waited for the Survivor’s Ceremony.  This is a special time for me.  All the survivors gather at the stage, and are honored for their successful fights.  And once they’re honored, folks who’ve lost someone to CRC are brought up, and are honored.  It’s a moving, moving ceremony.  This year, though, the folks from the CCA added a little extra touch.

Each of the survivors got a finishers medal to honor us for running our race, and raising our funds.

I’m not one to toot my own horn, and I’m generally a little uncomfortable when someone does that for me.  This was no exception, and I had a tough time holding myself together when the gal put the medal around my neck.

So I’d call it a success, both personally and for the CCA.  I ran well and strong, I raised some money, and I got a medal.  There’s just not a much better way to start a Saturday morning!

Last year, I ran in the Undy 5000 just a few months after having been diagnosed and cured of colon cancer.  The Undy is a fund raiser for the Colon Cancer Alliance, who do a terrific job of awareness, advocacy, and support for colon cancer patients and caregivers.  I’ve been associated with them since shortly after I was diagnosed in 2011.

This year on March 23rd, I’ll be running in the Undy 5000 again.  And of course, I procrastinated getting my donation page out there, but it’s out there now, and you can find it here.  If you’ve got a spare shekel or two, and wanna put ‘em to a good cause, please donate them on my participant page, and know that my feet will be pounding 5K of pavement come March 23rd in appreciation of your donations!

Okay, so not everyone will get the Tamarian reference, but stay with me here.

A long, long time ago, I started listening to music seriously. My earliest memories of listening to music stretch back to sitting in front of my folks entertainment console in the very early 70s, listening to music on the rock stations of the time in Chattanooga (WGOW, WFLI, WDXB). I was hooked, and found a passion that has stuck with me. I started listening to my folks’ albums — Dean Martin, Trini Lopez, and The Fifth Dimension among many others.

Around 1976, Mom and Dad bought us a turntable of our own, and I began to grow an LP collection that I retained until the mid-80s. That’s when I figured out that my musical tastes were all over the place. I was listening to just about anything, and enjoying most of it. And then in the late 70s, I discovered Pink Floyd.

I’d never heard anything like their music. I fell in love with Animals when I first heard it, and then starting listening to anything from their catalog I could find.

When I was collecting records hot and heavy in the early 80s, I happened upon a quadraphonic copy of Wish You Were Here. And boy, did I want gear to play it on. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to hear that kind of music in that way. Remember, this was before surround sound and all its variants. By and large, if you listened to music, movies or TV, it was in stereo at best. Alas, the gear to reproduce quad music never fell in my hands, and like the rest of my albums, that quad recording was lost to the mists of time.

Fast forward about thirty years. Pink Floyd re-released remastered versions of most of their catalog in late 2011, with three of the recordings — Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall — released in “immersion” editions. Each of these three was released with tons of extra material like live versions, alternate takes, and some video material. For Christmas and my birthday, Becky gave me The Wall and Wish You Were Here immersion editions.

And in the Wish You Were Here set was that same quad mix!

With some excitement, I dropped the DVD with the quad mix into my blu-ray player, only to discover that my ancient Sony home theater unit couldn’t figure out what to do with that funky audio stream from the player. Urgh. I went back to the internet, doing a bunch of searching about this DVD, to see if I could figure out what I’d need to play this recording. As it ends up, my crusty old receiver just wasn’t up to it, and I needed newer gear.

Not being one who is well-known for his patience, I shot to Best Buy, with a Marantz receiver in mind after doing a little research. They had it, I brought it home, and after a long setup process where the receiver quacked like a duck to understand the acoustics of the room (a la Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory — about 45 seconds into this clip), I was finally ready to listen.

I laid on my back on the basement floor, one speaker off each limb like some whacky hi-fi drawing and quartering, and I listened. And I was stunned.

It’s hard to describe to folks who’ve had 5.1, 7.1 and other exotic soundfields available to them all their lives exactly what it’s like to hear a 35-year old recording as though it was brand new. That’s what this was like though — a recording I know backwards and forwards, and suddenly it was new again. I just laid on the floor, eyes closed, and let the music wash over me. There’s just no way to describe what that was like, but finally I understood what all the hoopla about these old mixes was all about.  (Now you can hit the link for the Tamarian reference.)

This is definitely the way music was meant to be heard, and you can bet I’ll be looking for more recordings like this!

It’s gotta be “It’s the End of the World As We Know It.”

Yeah, yeah, the Mayans may or may not have predicted the end of the world, the shifting of the poles, some cosmic alignment, or just plain demonstrated that they were a little shortsighted in their calendaring acumen. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter, but that’s with no research on my end.

Myself, I’m betting on… nothing happening. I’m planning to get up in the morning, survive past 5:12am, and go on into work, with a plan toward winding down early in the afternoon for a little Christmas break. I might even take some fritters into work.

I ain’t ‘fraid of no Mayans!

Today is the anniversary of one of the biggest changes in my life. A year ago yesterday, I had colon cancer. A year ago today, I didn’t. I was NED… “No Evidence of Disease.”

It’s really hard to believe that it’s been a year. I had really intended to use the gift of what I consider to be “bonus time” to do some big things. And I have done some big things, but I’ve still got plenty of road to travel.

So what were those big things for me this year?

I ran. For the first time in two decades, I ran. Now, I haven’t been very regular about it since the heat came during the summer, but now that the cold weather is here, I’m really driven to get back on the path.

I biked. I returned to the Katy Trail after a four year absence, exploring the new trailhead in Research Park. I thoroughly enjoyed this return, although I shoulda put more miles under my butt.

I started a new job. During my recovery from surgery, I accepted a new position within my company, returning to a team and technology that I left nearly a decade ago. It’s been a blast, and I have found a new joy in going to the office every day.

I returned to Florida. When I was a kid, I spent a ton of time on Pine Island in SW Florida. Becky and I returned there in September, marking at least 30 years since I was last there. And it was amazing! I desperately want to return to the island soon, and put some more “relax” in my soul.

Those are pretty big steps. This year, I have a few new things in mind, and I definitely want to expand on some the things I’ve learned through this last year. The thing that I learned through this is that I have more strength — with God’s help! — to tackle much higher obstacles than I ever knew I could. Remembering that and applying that to my running and cycling, as well as other parts of my life, is the biggest goal for this year.

Oh yeah… I’ll also try to write more here, and I’m thinking about taking up a “Project 365″ effort again this year.

Tonight, the NLCS begins, and improbably, the Cardinals have scrapped their way once again into the League Championship Series.

It was pretty doggone cool to watch the Cards pull a 2011-style comeback against the Nationals Friday night. I really had given up when they were down 6-zip in the 3rd. Unlike last year though, I kept watching, repeating my mantra that they only needed one run an inning to get back to even. And little by little, that’s what they did. And twice, it was a painful watch to see the Cards down to their last strike of the season… and then to fight out of it. Frankly, watching the air come out of the stadium once we tied the game, and subsequently going up by a pair in the top of the ninth, well… it was fun to see.

Is this the beginning of “twelve in twelve”? Maybe. Maybe not. But there are least four more games in Red October this year!