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This weekend was a busy one with both my Mom and Amanda’s birthdays to celebrate.
For my Mom’s birthday we met at Bangkok 54 in South Arlington. I’ve heard good things about it, and passed it many times on the way to the Arlington Cinema n’ Drafthouse but never eaten there. The food was good, above average for some of the Thai places that I’ve eaten. On the other hand, I can confirm the common complaint that the restaurant is on the noisy side, and it wouldn’t hurt to investigate some noise dampening.

Amanda’s birthday celebration spanned two weekends. If you haven’t checked out my Flickr photostream, pictures from last weekend’s limo excursion out to the Leesburg wineries is up here. Last night we celebrated again with more friends in DC at one of our favorite places, Matchbox. Of course we got our favorite sliders with addictive onion strings, washed it down with a few De Koninck beers, and followed it up with a few more at Buffalo Billiards in Dupont. Busy weekend, but ready for this week to get started.

I did it. I completed the Army Ten Miler for the second straight year in a row. This time was much more challenging than last year mostly due to my lack of sticking to a training schedule. Despite my best efforts to post here in order to force myself to run more frequently – work, school, sleep, TV, and basically anything trumped training days. This time around I only ran 136.6 miles over 22.4 hours in 6 months. The breaks in the chart below is when I was lazy.

Unlike last year, the weather was brutally hot. You know you’re in for a long day when you’re hot before you even start running. Last year the temperature was nice and cool, almost cold, which is good because you heat up a ton over the course of 10 miles. Unofficially, I finished in 103 minutes, which works out to be 10:18 per mile. Not great, since last year I finished in ~95 mins, but I was just happy to finish at all. Unfortunately one person didn’t make it through the oppressive heat and passed away at GW Hospital. You can read about that here.

Right now, I’m not sure if I’m up to running it three times in a row. I have 6 months to sit around, get fat and decide later I suppose.

Update: Official Results are in – 92:56 total time!

It’s old, but I stumbled on it again today. Love the piano.

Yesterday proved to be a very successful day for this little site o’ mine, primarily because of the India video that I posted on Vimeo. As much as I’ve tried to not talk about my site in public, mention it in passing at work, or just shamelessly promote it – it really is exciting to have more people to interact with. Yesterday I received about 7-8 times as much traffic as normal which garnered 2 random comments. I never get random comments.

Anyways, this is as good a time as any to draw attention to some additions to the info intensive sidebar of mine. I’ve added in an “I Like Music” section, which is a feed of the songs that I stumble upon while listening to my favorite internet radio site, Pandora. My Pandora profile is here, and my personalized station that you can listen to is here. Pandora has a great database of information about any artist, song or album along with links to buy the songs on Amazon or iTunes.

I’d also like to call attention to 2 new additions to my blogroll. Two friends from JMU and Luray, Ben Markowitz and Chuck Bowen. Ben’s site is a blog with a link to his portfolio, and Chuck’s is a frequently updated movie review site. C-bo is extremely knowledgeable about movie history, directing and always has a eye for a good movie.

Anyways, check out those two sites and keep an eye out for what I’m digging on Pandora. Thanks for reading!