kentcowgill.org/blog

So I was sore, but I lived.

And the next day I did the full plyometrics workout. Slightly modified to be easier on my knees, but not so much that I didn't have a good heart rate going throughout. And my knees felt fine later that night, and the next day, and the next. Of course, by "fine" I mean "still hurting, slightly sore, still feels like they're recovering". But to me, that's great. More on how great my knees are later.

The day after Plyometrics was Shoulders and arms, and Ab Ripper. I'm still taking shoulder specific lifts fairly easy - like anything involving the deltoids or rotators, and I'm aggressively increasing the weights on mid- and high-back exercises - traps, scapula, etc. And I'm also increasing aggressively for my biceps and triceps. So those are all sore. And of course I also had more physical therapy right after work, and the Ab Ripper routine afterwards. I'm increasing the amount of core reps I'm able to do with Ab Ripper, but not very quickly any more - it's hard work, and a tough uphill climb.

The day after that I did the Yoga X routine. Or at least, a half hour of it. I got started too late, and I worked up a really good sweat in that half hour. Lots of isometric exercise of muscles. Next time around I'll definitely do more of the Yoga, but I was feeling pretty beat.

About those knees - I was walking spike and decided to jog half a block on the way back. And I'm still walking fine the day after. Hooray!

Lisa was sitting with Matthew when Spike brought Lisa his ball because he wanted to play. So Lisa did some multitasking. Before we knew it, Matthew was laughing while watching Spike run back and forth, so we grabbed the camera as quickly as we could.

Full size video is here. Be sure to check out the rest of my recently posted video on my youtube channel.

I made it my mission this week to teach Spike how to "shake".

I only had to use a few inches from the jar of thinkly sliced snausages™, as you might've noticed from my photos.

My mom sent us a nice christmas gift, including a dog toy for Spike, and two catnip scented toys for Shadow and Butterscotch. Turns out that shipping catnip toys in a box with another plush toy will pretty much make it smell like catnip, too.

We were wondering why the cats were so interested in the dog toy, but then we noticed that Spike was a little more interested in the toy than normal. Turns out Spike enjoys the scent of catnip too.

We had to capture some of the fun on video.

Full size video is here

There's another one where we discover that it's the catnip, as well as the rest of my videos, in my youtube channel.

After Lisa and I got back from Thanksgiving dinner, we decided to take a few pictures of how well Spike was balancing in order to earn some tasty morsels of smoked turkey.

For the full size movie, click here

So, I'm officially an old codger now.

I busted a bunch of kids a few nights ago for hanging out way after curfew, way after the park was closed, and sounding like they were causing trouble.

It started simply enough - I was walking Spike at the end of the night. I got in late after the Perl Mongers meeting, so I was out at around 1:00am - right as the timed park lights shut off. I get to the park, I see a few kids walking towards me. Sorta. Seeing kids at night generally puts me a bit on the defensive - who knows what kind of dumb things get into kids' heads at night, so I proceeded cautiously until I saw that they weren't walking directly towards me any more. They were walking toward the now very poorly lit playground.

Spike does his business, I get busy bagging it. All the sudden I hear something behind me - it's a third kid. As I stand up and turn around, I realize he's just shuffling his way towards the same poorly lit playground. Ugh. I guess I was young once, so I understand.

However, at this point I no longer feel like it's a good idea to walk around the far side of the park, since I now know there are at least three kids most likely up to no good. So I turn back, walking slowly, making sure Spike has everything out of his system that he needs to get out. I keep an eye towards the playground, just in case anyone comes charging towards me. I see a few more than three silhouettes.

Then I hear noises which make me think someone has decided to empty the garbage cans by the playground and generally start vandalizing the playground. My mind is made up - I'm calling the cops. I have enough of a problem as it is walking Spike around the park because there tends to be broken bottles on the sidewalks. Not a big deal for me with my shoes, but poor Spike has no such protection.

I decided to test the timeliness of the cops' response - turns out it was pretty good. I decided I'd just walk back and forth on the far side of the park, but across the street. Not more than 5-7 minutes and I see the comforting blue and white cruising slowly past the park. They turn on the search light. Once the cops zeroed in on where the kids were all laying down (by now, they were trying to hide), they started to run. There must have been at least 15.

They made a beeline for the houses under construction across the street - the police tried to speed around the side of the park I was standing on to try to intercept the kids. Also I noticed another patrol car gunning it up the alley behind the houses the kids ran towards. A few minutes pass, the cops couldn't find them, but I watched them slowly walk out of the alley the cop car had zoomed up - they must have been hiding pretty good and let the alley cop pass them. I watched where they went. I was about to head home when the patrol car came by again, this time with his lights off. Good strategy, but it didn't pay off for him. I was going to flag him down to tell him which way they ran, but he turned up that street anyhow.

Again I started walking towards home, but then the cop made another pass. This time, determined to get some of those little stinkers in trouble, I flagged the cop down and told them where they went. I think he determined they had already completely dispersed, so he pulled away in the other direction.

No sooner than the cop is 15-20 feet away from me, and one of the little stinkers hurled a rock at me.

A rock.

A ROCK.

AT ME.

I heard it tear through some leaves, heard it bounce on the ground.

"OFFICER!"

He executes a quick 3 point turn, guns it towards me, stops long enough to hear me report the attempted assault, and he takes off after 'em.

VERY NEARLY A BOULDER.

At this point, I've had enough. It's 1:30am, the cop can't be watching everything, and the kids might come down another street and attempt to inflict more damage to me for calling the cops on them.

I walked back to my house, keeping an eye behind me, down the side streets, down the alley. I'm pretty sure they couldn't have been around to watch me go into my house. After all, they seemed to live in the other direction, and they have to worry about being spotted by a cop.

So what does this mean?

I might as well sit on my porch and yell at kids to get off my lawn and turn down the music.

Oh. I've already yelled out the door at people in cars with their music too loud.

:(

So I don't have much other excuse for this than to test out a few more capabilities of Text::Textile, my RSS feed, and I guess my vim wrapper for posting entries to my blog.

Spike and I were walking in the park last night, as we normally do, and again we saw a rabbit. They weren't twitterpated . In fact, there was just one. But I noticed he was fairly bold, and didn't seem to run away as easily.

In fact, the rabbit didn't seem to want to move at all. So it was fortuitous that I happened to have my cameraphone with me. Granted, I take it with me on every walk, just in case. But I thought it would be a good time to test how the "zoom" feature on my cameraphone actually worked. Also, it seemed in my viewfinder that I could hardly tell that the brown lump in the middle of the frame was supposed to be a rabbit.

Short story, it doesn't.

It more or less just "crops" an image. Same resolution, just smaller dimensions.

I was pretty disappointed.

The good news is that I can add images to blog posts fairly easily, and the formatting allowed by Text::Textile seems to be close enough to what it purports it ought to do. Also, the images show through just fine in my newsreader of choice, so anyone reading this via the RSS feed ought to see the fluffy bunnies just fine.

Also, turns out my vim blog post wrapper doesn't mangle intended Textile formatting, at least for images. Woo!

I was walking Spike this evening like I normallly do, and I saw some rabbits frolicking in the park.

I watched one run from one end to the other while Spike was busy sniffing trees. We turned around, and when we got near the front of the park⁷, I saw two rabbits together. They were doing a little (what I can only assume was some sort of mating) dance - one would run towards the other, and the one being run towards would hop a few feet in the air. Then after landing, it would run towards the other one, which would then hop a few feet in the air.

It was really cute.

And Spike never noticed until I started calling attention to them by taking pictures of them with my camera phone.

But even then, he fairly quickly lost interest, instead turning his concentration back towards sniffing trees.

And in watching the rabbits, I couldn't help think about the word "twitterpate", which I remember from when I was a little kid watching Bambi.

Knowing that invented words sometimes make their way into dictionaries, I decided to see if in fact 'twitterpate' made its way. To my dismay, it didn't.

But I figured it had to show up somewhere, so I googled for it, only to find that it made its way into the Urban Dictionary - but I was pretty disappointed when I saw the first definition refer to twitterpated as the feeling one gets from being "stoned".

⁷ I call it the front of the park because it's the side closest to my house. Whether or not it's the actual front of the park, I don't really care :)

Minding my own business, browsing my del.icio.us network, I see a webcomic -- which reminds me, it's been a while since I've seen XKCD. So I, click the 'previous' button a few times, and stumble on this gem.

Earlier today, I was walking toward the kitchen, Spike was looking at me, and I swear as I walked up to him, I pointed at him and I said exactly "You're a dog!".