Finally. I’ve managed to get the web site updated with the trip to Mardi Gras/New Orleans pictures and my Katrina pictures. It’s certainly felt like it’s taken forever to get it done but they are finally up. Hope you enjoy.

Went back to the foot doctor today and since I’m not getting any better he wants to try some new type of therapy that I totally can’t remember the name of. To get it done I need to get hooked up to some kind of machine that they only have one of in the entire metroplex. If I decide that this is what I want to do they have to book an appointment and the machine will make a trip to his office where I’ll get hooked up to it for a one time treatment which will require four weeks to recover from. Apparently it stimulates the area by breaking down any scar tissue and then it allows the body to naturally heal itself. (Sounded awfully painful to me.) Of course none of this would be covered by insurance and I would have to pay for it out of my pocket which wasn’t exactly selling me on the procedure.

So I declined the super treatment for now and I’m going to take a wait and see attitude for another two weeks to see if it gets any better on its own. I’m kind of hoping with taking some more time off and giving it some rest it will start to heal on its own. Just so I wouldn’t leave empty handed this week he did give me a boot that I’m supposed to wear for the next two weeks whenever I’m walking. (Kind of like the ones pictured here.) Great..

I’m not going to worry, this will just give me time to focus on swimming instead, maybe I’ll try and do a little cycling and see how that feels, and I’ll cheer Jen on during the half marathon race.

I’ve missed a couple weeks of posts of half marathon updates. Jen is well on her way to having a good run. On the weekend she went for the long run of an and hour and fifty minutes and this weekend she has to do another run about the same length and then it’s all down hill from there.

As for me my half marathon is over. I went to the doctor again Friday and he added some home made orthotics to try out in my shoes and then he wanted me to run again this weekend. So I went out and ran again this weekend and I feel worse today then I did last week. So back to the doctor this week but at this point I’m really not sure what he’s going to do for me.

I’m slowly getting the web site updated. (Slowly being the operative word here.) I just got finished organizing all the Hurricane Katrina pictures. I have a couple pictures that Jen’s dad took when he got back into the city after a couple of weeks after the hurricane and then we took over 100 pictures of the neighbourhood and the lower 9th ward that I’ve put together for a six month review. So my plan is to get all the New Orleans trip pictures finished up by this weekend. (I’m pretty sure I said the same thing before last weekend too.)

I was reading a blog the other day and the author was tagged by another blogger with creating a “top 4 things of Los Angles” list. One of the subcatagories was “Four LA-Themed Shows I Love(d) To Watch” and number four on the list was “Emergency!” Ah, the childhood memories came flowing back, this was one of my all time favourite shows when I was a kid.

With just about every show ever created popping up in DVD I tried to find it about a year ago but came up empty. After reading that post I was all inspired to give it another shot and did a quick search on Netflix and….(queue heavonly music) ahhhhhhh (end heavonly music) the first two seasons have been released! I couldn’t contain myself and added all 11 DVDs to my netflix queue.

There is just no denying Emergency!

Ride along as paramedics Roy DeSoto (Kevin Tighe) and John Gage (Randolph Mantooth) and their colleagues from Squad 51 coast through the streets of Los Angeles saving lives. Far from being glamorous, however, their jobs are stressful as they race against the clock, rushing patients to Rampart Hospital and taking action on the spot. But these emergency workers soon learn that humor is the best salve for wounded spirits, if not for injured bodies.

I’m just sitting in front of the tv watching the academy awards so I thought it would be as good as time as any to post an update. I haven’t exactly been keeping this up to date lately since I just haven’t been able to find the time.

The last couple of times I’ve sat down at the computer the only thing I’ve been doing is trying to get the New Orleans pictures together which hasn’t been exactly going smoothly. The original pictures from our camera are really big, 3456 x 2304 pixels and they have incredible detail. They obviously need to be sized down to fit on the web site and I’ve been reducing them to 425 x 283 pixels and the quality of the resulting resized image is absolute crap. It’s really bothering me, so much so that I’ve been obsessing over it for the last three days. So far all my research and articles I can find on the web have pretty much said yup, picture quality is going to suffer when reducing pixel size, nothing you can do about it. So if anyone out there has any brilliant ideas on how to resize images for the web without sacrificing quality let me know because I haven’t been able to figure it out.

Anyway, I haven’t posted a half marathon training update in a while. Since we were out of town last week there wasn’t much to update since I took that time off. After coming back I still didn’t manage to do anything since I was a bit lazy then on Thursday morning when I planned on going in for a swim I ended up getting paged at ten to four in the morning and had to work the issue right through until about six so I didn’t get to do anything.

The last time I went to the doctor he said I would be ok to start running last week so today I went out for an easy run. Well it stunk. Besides being out of running shape so in the first couple of minutes I was huffing and puffing and felt like I was going to bust a lung but by the end my ankle was on fire. It honestly hurt just as bad as it did three weeks ago when I stopped running. I have another appointment with the doctor this Friday so we’ll have to see what he has to say.

Jen ran well this weekend. Yesterday she went 7.98 miles (in 1 hour and 27 minutes she adds) so she is well on her way to having a strong race. As for me, I’ll have to see but things don’t look so good now.

Happy Mardi Gras! We just returned from our trip to New Orleans to visit Jen’s parents and celebrate Mardi Gras. Even though we weren’t there for actual Mardi Gras day we still managed to get in two nights of parades and I think Alex managed to see six or seven of them. He really got into the spirit of it and loved trying to catch the beads. We ended up coming home with two bags of beads plus some assorted cups and a couple of small stuffed animals. I took a bunch of pictures which I’ll have to sort through and post this weekend.

We also took a number of pictures from Hurricane Katrina damaged areas which I’ll work on putting a write up together and posting the pictures as well.

Yesterday’s post was titled “Running Update” but I ended up going on about Andrew and how he was doing so I thought I would give a quick update today. Yesterday and today he has eaten pretty well and he has managed to keep all of his food down. He was up quite a bit last night and had a really hard time getting back to sleep so I’m going to cross my fingers again tonight and hope that he has a better night.

Alex was invited to a birthday party for one of his friends from school today. They had the party at a place called “EncouraGYM.” It’s very similar to Gymboree where they have play equipment set up for the kids to play on and this particular one also had a number of different bound houses.

The party was at three in the afternoon which as it turns out isn’t the greatest time for Alex. On the way there he fell asleep in the car so when we got there we had to wake him up, (obviously), and he just hates being woken up from a nap. I don’t know what it is but it takes him a long time for him to return to his normal self. For the first twenty minutes or so of the party he refused to leave our side or go out in the gym and play with the other kids. Jen had planned on leaving Alex and I there so she could go to the store to return some stuff but with Alex clinging to her side she couldn’t leave.

He really reminds me of myself when I was a kid. When he was finally ok with leaving Jen’s side he still didn’t get out there and start playing. Instead he sat off to the side just watching what everyone else was doing, taking it all in before he finally decided that he would get out there and join everyone else. Once he was out there he had a great time but it took a while for him to warm up to it.

I had a flashback to when I was kid about his age and was in a YMCA program. One of the activities that we did was swimming and I refused to get in the water. It was a daily ritual. Put on my bathing suit, sit on deck in the corner and refuse to get in while everyone else had a great time, then get dressed again. I remember on the very last day I finally mustered up the courage to give it a try and it was so much fun and I was disappointed that I had missed out on all this fun.

It’s still cold here. It hovered around the freezing point most of the day and I had to scrap the window on the car this afternoon before we could head off to the birthday party. I think our house must use a whopping inch or so of insulation since it is absolutely freezing in our house too. Jen and I are currently sitting upstairs in the computer/train/office/play room which is the by far the coldest room in the house freezing our you know what’s off. No, I’m not just hanging out here and then complaining it, Jen has some school work she needs to get done and I’m braving the artic temperatures to provide a little moral support and occasionally supply some computer support.

Being so cold I’m really not too keen on the fact that tomorrow morning is my day to swim so I’ll be up nice and early heading off to the pool. I always swore the moment I had a choice in the matter there was no way I was going to get up early to swim, especially in the cold…..

Went to the foot doctor yesterday and the verdict is at least one more week with no running. My ankle is feeling a lot better but when he started poking around he was able to find a tender spot. Two weeks ago during the original appointment he prescribed some anti-inflammatory medicine but left the dosing information off the prescription. So for the last two weeks the pharmacy and doctor have been back and forth trying to work it out and yesterday I was finally able to pick it up.

Andrew hasn’t been feeling too hot lately and we’re really not sure what’s going on. For the last couple of days he just hasn’t been able to keep much of anything down like he has some kind of stomach thing going on. We’ve been to the doctor two or three times recently to have him checked out and each time they haven’t been able to find anything. On the most recent trip we thought that he might strep throat since he refused to eat anything but the test came back negative. Since that visit we’ve had to cut back his food intake so on Thursday we only gave him non-milk liquids, yesterday we started with a little rice cereal, and then today we continued with the rice cereal and added some carrots and sweet potatoes.

He’s managed to keep his food down since we started the reduced food diet. Even though he has been keeping it down he’s still not a happy kid. Last night he was up at least three times and each time it took about an hour to get him back down to sleep. Jen’s been the one staying up with him during the long night sessions so she’s getting pretty worn out. When he woke up this morning around 5:00 I tried to put him back down without much success so I took him down to breakfast with me and gave him some rice cereal and then managed to get him down to bed before I left for work.

I’m crossing my fingers and hope that tonight will be a better night. Tonight Alex was complaining that his stomach was hurting so we are really hoping that he doesn’t have the same thing.

In unrelated news the weather here has been kind of crazy around here the last couple of days. On Thursday we had a low temperature of 40 F (4 C) and a high of 83 F (28 C). 83! It’s the middle of February for crying out loud. Then today, not two days later, the low was 22 F (-5 C) and the high was about 28 F (-2 C ) and we are under a winter weather advisory.