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pi day.
If you didn’t already know, there was a span of time before writing this blog but not too far in the distant past when I spent a lot of my creative energy drawing a web comic called This is Pi Day.
It centered around the conceit that Pi Day, March 14th or 3-14, reflecting the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi, 3.14, was a great day to eat pie, the pastry, and was in fact the classic “dad joke” day.
The comic was about dad jokes, parenting, and other stuff that semi-autobiographically chronicled the tween years of my daughter’s life. It’s greatly exaggerated for the sake of the gags, but like any good fiction there is a thread of truth therein.
Happy Pi Day!
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while I worked.
…and my daughter had the day off from school, she baked.
Tomorrow is Pi Day. March 14th. 3-14, if you write it out the proper way to look like the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi, 3.14…
She baked a pie.
It is an apple pie, with ingredients she found stuffed away in various cupboards, pantries, and freezers.
While I worked the smell of fresh apple pie wafted through the house.
Tomorrow is Pi Day.
Tomorrow.
There is a fresh apple pie on my countertop filling the house with lovely apple pie smells, and it must wait until tomorrow.
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burning up the trails.
Sunday run day and I hit another milestone today… two, in fact.
First, if you’ve been following the saga of my knee injury from the second half of 2022, I climbed past the 10k mark recently and this morning posted my first 11k+ run. Ten klicks has always sort of been my maintenance distance, the distance I run when (a) we’re too lazy to plan a longer route and (b) we’re not training for any kind of race… over winter, off season, that kind of thing. So, posting something with a number bigger than 10 is a little milestone worth celebrating following my knee injury recovery.
Second, I haven’t written much here about it, but in preparation for a summer of hard running and marathon training I’ve spent the last six-or-so weeks on a bit of a pre-training health kick in an effort to shed some of my covid weight. This morning I weighed in and I was down 15lbs. Which is big, and 75% of my goal leading into an Easter timeline.
Burning up the trails and burning up the fats. Not bad for a random Sunday in March, huh?
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bakin’ bacon
For a guy who loves cast iron, and should be taking every opportunity to cook up a pan of bacon to re-season his favourite frying pan, I gotta tell you that the discovery of “baking” my bacon has been a minor local miracle in our house.
Not that we eat a lot of bacon. Once a month, maybe. It’s more of a treat than a staple… y’know the price and the calories, and the whole eating healthy thing.
But I’ve got a small pan of bacon in the oven right now, six strips stretched over a wire rack atop a foil-lined cookie sheet at 400F and the smell of it wafting through the main floor of our house… and there will be so little mess afterwards I almost feel like I haven’t earned it.
All that sizzling and popping and wiping down the thousands of grease splatters is fun and all, and scraping the congealed bacon fat from the pan after it’s cooled on the stovetop for six hours is a complete joy… but.
I’ll tell you now, I think I might just be a bakin’ bacon convert.
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running a gauntlet
Runners tend to lean into hyperbole when it comes to training challenges.
To run a gauntlet is traditionally a kind of punishment or public trial.
In modern slang, it usually means tackling a challenge in an overly gruelling way, adding an extra level of demand to something that is already tough enough on its own.
For example, I could have tonight just gone out into the neighbourhood, ten degrees below zero in light snow and wind, and run a lap around the main road loop.
Instead, I went out into the neighbourhood, ten degrees below zero in light snow and wind, and ran a lap around EVERY road along the main road loop, in and out of every side street, rounding out every cul-de-sac, and weaving along every meandering turn I could find.
A three kilometre run turned into a run three times that distance, with numb toes to boot.
Maybe not quite a gauntlet, but a heckuva challenge for a late-winter evening.
