The Adventures of Cowboy Hazel

Book ~ After work today I headed down to Columbus Circle for a presentation and book signing by Christopher McDougall. He gave an entertaining talk and then, when I brought up a copy of the book for him to sign, wrote this inscription: “To Robert — I smell a fast Delaware Marathon in your future. As Caballo says, ‘Easy, light, smooth and fast.’” I know they have to write nice stuff, but still it’s cool. I’m looking forward to reading the book.

Bratwurst ~ At the signing, I met TK of Pigtails Flying (from whom I first heard about the event) and we grabbed a bite to eat at a diner afterwards. I ordered a vanilla milkshake and hot dog with sauerkraut. That was a mistake. The sausage was inappropriately large and the sauerkraut was disappointing, to say the least. I was so excited for greasy, old-school American food it was a real let down… I’m glad to say the conversation was much better than the food. It was a little strange meeting someone who’s blog I have read for so long. Although I’d never met her before, I knew a random assortment of tidbits about her life and she about mine. It was nice to finally match a face to the words.

Bag Balm ~ For those of you who haven’t worked with livestock before, I’m about to let you in on a fantastic secret. There’s this ointment they make for cow’s udders up in Vermont that cures just about anything. It’s called Bag Balm. On our 15 mile run in the rain Saturday, I foolishly wore a plain cotton t-shirt and, as a result, experienced the worst chafing ever. There’s a chunk of skin about the size of a quarter missing near my collarbone. I got home from my 5 miler today and the whole front of my shirt was orange from the blood mixing with the rain. The bag balm has helped the pain a bunch, but the smell of it is really starting to get to me. It’s one of those smells that you can’t decide if it’s good or bad right away — But, after three days of constantly having it around, I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s more bad than good.

Barking ~ My neighbor’s pit bull has not stopped barking for like three days. It is seriously out of control. I’m usually pretty good about being able to zone out noises but this is starting to make me batty. I can’t even figure out how the noise is getting in, first of all — I have brick walls in between me and them. Who would have thought a dog barking would travel through that? Well, let me tell you, it does. It’s almost enough to make me want to commute to the office… Almost.

Best Running Log ~ Let me end with a plug for my freshly revamped and renamed running log site: BestRunningLog.com. If you’re looking for a simple way to get stats from your running data without having to depend on a single device, this may be for you… If you want to read more about the site, you can check out this post I wrote on my business blog.

On the surface, today seemed like any other day. I woke up, had some coffee, worked for a few hours in my pajamas, went out for an afternoon run along the East River, came back and worked a few more hours, then flipped on the Yankees game and made some dinner. But, in reality, today was very significant. For the first time in over a year, I was employed.

A few weeks ago, I talked with my biggest client and told them that I was going to be moving to Philadelphia this fall unless I had found a job here in the city first. I really wanted to keep working for them, but it just wasn’t making sense for me financially to be living in this, the most expensive of cities, just doing freelance contracting work. I was tired of not having health care and vacation and holidays, all those wonderful things that I had always taken for granted before going out on my own. Fortunately, they were able to bring me on board. The last thing that I wanted to do was have to go out and find a job in this economy. Plus, I’ve been doing work for them for over two years now and, for the most part, love what I do. I get along with everyone, there’s very little drama, and they only make me commute once or twice a week. Sweet gig. I’m very happy to have it.

Still, though, I worry about being here in Manhattan with the economy the way it is. I get my shit done at work and don’t piss anybody off, so I imagine that I’ll be fine as long as the company is fine, but who knows how long that will be? It seems like companies are dropping left and right. All you hear about is bankruptcies and closures. How could I possibly afford my rent if my new employer goes out of business and I’m out of a job? I’m still paying back debt from the Miami and Boston days (when I had really shitty jobs) and don’t have any sort of savings. It’s scary stuff.

So, now I’m trying to figure out where to live after my lease is up. A big part of me wants to just stay here because moving would be such a pain in the ass and also because I really love my apartment. Sure, I don’t need a big one-bedroom with a loft and a fireplace and sixteen foot ceilings and brick walls, but I love having it. It’s so good to have my own space and not have to deal with anyone unless I feel like it. And then there’s the hassle of changing all the paperwork. I not only would have to change my address on all my personal stuff, but all my business stuff too. (I’m keeping Ink Plant open and will continue to do small contract work on the side.)

I’ve been running the numbers, looking on Craigslist, talking to a potential roommate (a buddy from school) and have come to the conclusion that I could pretty easily shave $600 a month off my monthly expenses if we move into a two-bedroom apartment. We could even stay around here in the neighborhood, I wouldn’t have to move to the boroughs or Jersey or anything like that. $600 a month is huge. $7200 a year. $20 dollars a day. That’s like a weekend trip every month, or a couple nights of eating out each week, or, if I manage to save it all up, a decent start towards a down payment on a house.

What to do? What to do?

It has come to my attention that I haven’t posted anything up here for almost two weeks. How come? Well, a couple reasons. First off, I’ve been busy. But I’m always busy so I guess that’s not really a good excuse. A better one is that I’ve really been trying to limit the amount of non-work time that I’m spending at the computer lately. Unfortunately, I am forced to spend like 80% of my life working in front of this computer screen, so I’m making a conscious effort to not spend the remaining 20% here as well. That means I’ve been writing up here less and reading less of your all’s blogs out there in blogland. Don’t take it personal. Finally, I just haven’t had a hell of a lot to blog about lately. My running has been mediocre and unexciting. Same goes for my whole non-running life. There have been some big work-related decisions/changes, but until everything’s set in stone, I don’t really want to talk about them up here. I guess that’s part of it too — A lot of the shit that’s been chewing on my mind lately is not really stuff that I want to share with the world. I mean, it’s just so tough to write when you know that anybody (think about that… anybody) could stop by.

Well, I have the next 4 days off, so I might write something else up here then. I’m planning on doing a bunch of work on my network of sites and hope to make some good progress on the new running log I have in the works (be excited, folks, it’s gonna be good). So maybe I’ll have some news about that. For now, let me leave you with a couple links:

http://twitter.com/cowboyhazel — The whole 140 characters or less thing is more my style lately.

http://www.coolnessquiz.com/ — I relaunched one of my favorite old sites. It’s completely pointless, but can provide a couple minutes of entertainment. Give it a whirl…

I haven’t been much in the writing mood lately. I’m still not. So, this is gonna be short. I just thought I’d throw a quick recap of my goings-on lately in case anyone out there is interested.

~ I finished the week with 36.7 miles at an average pace of 6:56/mile. I feel like the increase in speed more than makes up for the light mileage. The only disappointment running-wise came late in today’s 13 miler when I bonked and couldn’t keep up with Antonio. I still finished the run, though, at a respectable 7:06 pace.

~ About two hours after that, I had my first football game since high school. It was fun. We lost, though, which sucked, but it was a scrimmage so it doesn’t really matter. I only had the ball thrown to me once, but I caught it and was happy about not fucking up the play.

~ We went to some dive bar after the game and drank a bunch of beers. That was weird — drinking at 2:00 in the afternoon. Brought back memories of college (or Boston.)

~ Work’s good. Busy as always. I’m moving hosts (again) on all of my own sites so I’ll be busy working on that tomorrow.

~ One of my best friends from back home drove down (from Westchester — not back home) on Thursday and I made dinner. It was a good time but I forgot to put the onion in the risotto so it was pretty bland.

~ I bought a new bottle of Johnny Walker today. I love that stuff. And I have no idea how I went so long without knowing that I liked it.

~ Pasta’s almost done. Let me go eat. Have a good weekend!

A collection of unrelated (or seemingly unrelated) thoughts and events that have occurred to me within the past few days:

~ I woke up early this morning to make the weekly trek down to my client’s midtown office only to find that the door was locked and the lights were off. I sat in the waiting area on their floor for twenty minutes before finally giving up and heading back outside. After leaving the building, I noticed that the city seemed unusually quiet. I picked up a paper to see what was going on and saw a advert for a President’s Day Sale. Ah…

~ Unfortunately that didn’t mean I got a holiday. It just meant that I got the opportunity to get back on the subway, head back uptown, and start my workday an hour late (even though I woke up two hours early.)

~ Only employees get holidays.

~ They get health insurance too, which would be nice. Though, dental is more in the forefront of my imagination right now as I have a killer toothache. I’ve been trying to ignore it, but it’s getting worse and worse. I realized today that I’d have to make an appointment even though I can think of about a million other things I’d rather do with my money/time. I also decided that I need to find a new dentist. My old one is on Park Avenue and charges outlandish prices (it was like $700 to get a cavity filled and my teeth cleaned my last visit) and now that I don’t have insurance, that’s not gonna fly.

~ I bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red today. That gets mention for a few reasons: 1.) I gave up on my whole not-drinking thing after seeing that it did nothing to improve my running ability or keep me from getting sick. (All of January, I only drank twice, both times just a couple glasses of wine with friends and by the end of the month, I felt like crap.) 2.) I really wanted Johnny Walker Black but held back. Apparently, I can control my spending every once in a while. 3.) This was the first time I’ve ever bought a bottle of Johnny Walker. It seemed like a very adult thing to do. When I drink whiskey, it’s almost always Jameson. I’m still not sure what prompted the switch tonight, but I must say that I’m enjoying it. Maybe it was because we were talking about Braveheart the other day… 4.) Johnny Walker Red is a hell of a lot of fun to say. Not as fun as Johnny Walker Black, but still fun. Seriously. Try it.

~I haven’t run on a Monday since the first week in September. I love having the set day off. It gives me a sense of structure.

~ I was sitting in the laundromat tonight, waiting for my sheets to dry when a little girl walked up to me and held out a Hercules action-figure. I looked up from my book, somewhat confused, and shook my head no. She didn’t say anything but instead put the toy down on the table in front of me and walked off.

~ I miss the long pointless rambles like this I used to write to myself all the time when I lived in Boston. I feel like this blog has made me more conservative in my writing. I used to go off on long post-modern binge-writing sprees but now it’s all race reports and watered down, family-friendly accounts of my days. No wonder nobody reads it.

~ I killed three mice last week. That was a horrible experience, but it had to be done. I wish there was some way of just making them leave without having to kill them. But, since there’s not (and they were keeping me from sleeping, not to mention making a huge mess of things), I kept experimenting with trap techniques until finally figuring it out — put the peanut butter on the normal “pad,” but also put some way back at the back of the trap. They get greedy and go for that.

~ In an effort to avoid all the steroids hype that’s saturating SportsCenter lately, I’ve been channel surfing on my lunch break instead of heading straight to ESPN. Today, I found a documentary about the ice rats that live on Mount Kilimanjaro. It was fascinating.

~ I’ve been reading the same book for a month now. Thomas Pynchon’s V. It’s not capturing my attention at all. He introduces approximately eight bizillion characters and I didn’t want to take the time to diagram them out so I’ve been rather lost. I’m just trying to get to the end of it because I’m stubborn and don’t stop reading books until I finish them, even if I don’t like them. I’m very happy to say that I’m almost at the end.

~ Antonio and I had an amazing “recovery” run on Sunday. We did a loop of Central Park in 42:31, a 7:03 pace. We planned to run significantly slower than that and both tried to slow down a couple times, but it just wasn’t happening. The day was just too nice and there was too much positive energy floating around the park to not run fast.

~Tomorrow will be my first solo run in almost two weeks. I’m looking forward to getting a little quiet time out by the East River to collect my thoughts. I love running with other people, but it’s nice to be able to have that extra concentration that comes with being alone every once in a while.

~ I’m sleepy. Good night.

I got on the uptown 3 train at 96th Street this morning after my run without paying too much attention to what was going on.  It wasn’t until after the doors had closed and we began moving that I noticed that I was the only person on the car.  Not only that, but I couldn’t see anyone in any of the other cars either.  It was eerie.  And when it stopped at 110th Street, nobody was even on the platform.  It was just me all alone, the whole ride.  Maybe it’s an omen, I thought.  Then again, maybe I’m just looking too hard for omens, hoping that one will appear…

This conversation from earlier in the week was just too good not to share with you all. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did: (You have to see the linked photo to get the full meaning.)

J: hahaha. on the radio some guy just said that he wants to apologize to this person

Me: The Flight of the Conchords guy? Why?

J: he kinda looks like you in that photo. and yes, the blonde guy.

Me: You’re saying I look like Lisa Lampanelli? Fuck you.

J: i really have not done anything since i came in at 8:30. i’ve had this stack of work literally on my lap for the past half hour.

Me: Yeah, I need to start being a little more productive too. TTYL.

J: thick toes you love?

Me: Totally toxic yodeling llamas.

J: the thimble yelled loudly.

Me: Transvestites take yaks’ lives.

J: teachers touch young lesbians

Me: Telephones transmit yellow lies.

J: theologians take your liver.

J: hate to end the fun, but thought you might like this article. bible buddy

Me: That’s terrific, yelled Lampanelli.

J: you just took that to a whole ‘notha level.

Me: Thanks. I try. Seriously, though, I gotta get some work done. So, talk to you later.