May 2, 2009

Nose to the grindstone

In my last post I mentioned a new job. For the last six weeks I've been working in a friend's law office helping with their municipal tax appeal business. It's been a pretty hectic time as I came on-board just a few days before the deadline for requesting an appeal of the 2009 property valuations. The phones were ringing off the hook and I was learning the business on the fly! I did quite well though. Now we are just as busy entering data, a lot of data, and preparing for the actual appeals. It's going to take months, which means lots of paid work but also lots of repetition.

May 2nd Group RideToday I got out of town with my triathlon club for a group ride. Excellent weather and good company for 60K. It was wonderful to feel the wind on my face and the road under my wheels. My next Ironman is less than three months away, it's kind of snuck up on me. I've got to get serious about my training! This is tempered by a need to restrict my swim training as I've managed to hurt my right shoulder rotator cuff. Tomorrow morning I'm taking my Marathon Clinic on a 33K long run, the final significant run before they head off for the Ottawa Marathon on May 24th. Last Sunday's 29K run went better than I expected, a comfortable pace that brought me home in 2:30.

Recent films: The Wrestler on DVD. An interesting character study, but the conclusion felt a bit forced. Mickey Rourke gave a great come-back performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Marissa Tomei's performance as the stripper Cassidy was brave as she spend a substantial chunk of screen time topless. I saw Safina Uberoi's documentary A Good Man at the Hot Docs film festival last night. The film is about a struggling Australian sheep farmer with a quadriplegic wife (he married her that way) who builds a brothel... You couldn't make that kind of thing up, could you? It was well made, but at times I was just shaking my head at the what they were going through. Perhaps an Australian farmer is the only kind of person on earth so inured to hard work and disaster that they'd be able to step up to a task like that.

Bahrain Grand PrixLast weekend's sparsely-attended Bahrain Grand Prix did not feature rain. It was hot, hot, hot and looked like a set from the first Star Wars movie... Most of the action was in the first few laps and the rest of the race revolved around tires and pit stops. In the end Jenson Button of Brawn GP was back on top for his third victory in four races. Sebastien Vettel's Red Bull car was unable to challenge because of traffic in the early part of the race but did hold off Jarno Trulli's Toyota. Lewis Hamilton kept McLaren respectable by finishing fourth while Kimi Raikkonen earned Ferrari's first points of the season with a sixth place finish. Next stop, Barcelona.

Final thought: Is this Swine Flu thing really just another regular flu or a real new health risk? "Regular" flu kills about 500,000 people a year, but they're mostly health-compromised already.

Listening to: Don't Let Me Fall by Lenka from Lenka.

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