We're now in Santa Monica, where we've been for a few days. We've seen some friends, visited family, been to the L.A. County Museum of Art, where my favorite painting in the world -- "Red Orange White Green Blue" by Ellsworth Kelly -- used to be displayed. Sadly, it's not there anymore, having gone back to the Norton Simon museum.

Ach. That was disappointing - I just googled Ellsworth Kelly and saw a bunch of his other pieces and they're not nearly as nice.

Anyway. Yesterday we went to the beach in Malibu and sat on it for almost three hours. My wife and daughter enjoyed it far more than I did. I can't really get the hang of sitting on a beach. Apparently I am happier when doing something productive.

Last night we had fish tacos with one of our friends and then walked him down to the Promenade where Fahrenheit 9/11 is playing. We didn't go for several reasons: because it would have been hard to get tickets at the last minute (though there were scalpers there -- imagine that, scalping a $9 movie ticket!), because it would have annoyed the baby to sit still in a dark room for two hours, and finally because we weren't interested. Christopher Hitchens tears the movie apart in Slate. Perhaps that's as good as watching it.

Nothing much planned for today and tomorrow. Brunch, I suppose, will happen at some point today. We went to bed so early I got up at 3:00 and couldn't sleep again, so I read The Postman again. It has some redeeming characteristics, but it's clearly more of a concatenation of short stories than a novel. (Though not as bad as Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey's two-short-stories-sewn-together-into-a-novel.)

Am I rambling? What else do you expect in the morning?

Anyone interested in what the upcoming Canadian election means for the states should check out Colby Cosh's primer for Americans. Somehow it has the tone of the opening crawl of a Star Wars movie ("Canada's conservatives, fractured into two parties by 15 years of regional quarreling, had just reunited." sounds not too far from "Striking from a secret base...") but it's nonetheless informative.

We are now in San Luis Obispo, going south to LA today. Weather has been wonderful the whole trip: the only rain we've encountered was on our way out of Alberta, on the east side of the Rockies.

We're now in Sunnyvale, CA. Yesterday was stunningly gorgeous and today it's overcast - typical. Here are some of the things I've been thinking about:

It looks like the economy is improving. I saw a lot of interstate truck companies advertising for drivers, more than I remember from the past few years.

Washington state has free coffee at highway rest stops along the 5.

Salt Spring Island, BC is really very beautiful. But strangely, it costs more to take a ferry from the mainland to Victoria than to take a ferry from the mainland to Victoria and then from Victoria to Salt Spring Island. It's the same on the return - Victoria to the mainland is $50, but only $22 if you started from Salt Spring. If you're on Victoria headed for the mainland, and you have two hours to spend, you can save $30 by going to Salt Spring first. Weird.

We met a guy who works for Microsoft in their search engine team, trying to make a better search engine than Google. On the drive south from Seattle, I asked my wife, "Why does Microsoft keep trying to eat other people's lunch? It's not like Google is making operating systems."

She replied, "If Google made an operating system, would you install it?"

We're off on a two-week driving vacation, and we won't be back until after the election.

This weekend we were at a hippyesque nature and stuff retreat, and while hanging around the campfire the subject of Malcolm Azania came up. A terrible thing it was, really, and especially the publicity.

Someone actually said, "The Liberals and the Conservatives paid somebody a lot of money to dig that up."

And I had the singular pleasure of saying, "No, actually, I know the guy whose website it was published on, and it took him like seven minutes to get that link."

So, the prior post (below) was all about my time. Now about the actual experience of the race: it was actually fun. Most of it is on a trail in the creek valley, and it's cool and shady down there. There had been some light showers in the early morning but they'd cleared up by the race time, so it was sunny but not too hot. (When the sun comes up at 5:00 AM and beats down for five hours, it's HOT.)

I ran alone again. I started out running near my running partner, but I lost him at the first or second turn trying to avoid the kids on bikes and the 3k walkers. I don't really know why, but apparently I'm a solitary racer even though I don't particularly like training alone.

Today is the 60th anniversary of D-Day, and I thought about D-Day and the second World War while I was running. When I was running up a hill near the end, I thought: "60 years ago some guys were trying to climb a hill on a beach in Normandy, only they were carrying their pack and weapon and getting shot at." It's cheesy but it helped me keep running.

I ran in the neighborhood 8k race today. Finish time was about 52:40 -- I don't remember the exact number, but under 53 minutes. That's not a particularly respectable time for an 8k.

Last year I ran my first race - a 3k 'fun run' - which I didn't realize meant no real timing. So I don't know what my time from that was, but I'm pretty sure it was over 20 -- around 22 minutes. That's so slow it's not even a respectable time for a 5k.

There's a formula that you can use to predict race times given your times for two different length races. A simple-minded approach would be to just make a linear relation between time and distance - if it takes 20 minutes to run 5k, it'll take 40 to run 10k. But because a runner slows down with increasing distance, that tends to underpredict finish times. So the formula accounts for that by including a term that relates the excess time in the longer run (e.g., if you run 5k in 20 minutes and 10k in 45, the excess is five minutes) to the difference in distance. There are some logs in there too. Anyway, my point is, there's a table I could put my times and distances into.

But there are two problems with this. First is that 3k and 8k are not standard race lengths so the table probably doesn't contain entries for them. The second is a bit more serious. If I run 8k in 52 minutes and 3k in 22 minutes, the excess time is NEGATIVE 6:40, so I can't use the formula at all. The excess time would make a negative contribution to the total race time, and because of the long distance it would be a rather large contribution. It would predict that I'd run a marathon in something like 1:40:00, which is world-record-breaking and excedingly unlikely.

On the other hand it means I'm better at running this time than I was last time.

When you've lived in a neighborhood for a few years, you start to recognize the real estate agents who work it. There's So-and-So from Realty Executives, the lady from Sutton, and That Guy from RE/Max. Even if you're not planning on selling soon, you have a more-than-academic interest in the agents that work your area.

The other day a new agent came to our area. Debby Carlson, representing Team Martin Realty. No wait, that's an election sign. Could have fooled me:

The sign on the right is an actual real estate agent's sign. But hey, maybe the Liberals have hit upon the perfect backup job in case they lose the upcoming election: they can become a real estate company! They already have an agent everywhere in Canada... and they have some nice property in Shawinigan.

For completeness, here's the one person in my neighborhood who admits to being a Conservative supporting the Conservative candidate, Rahim Jaffer:

My wife left this afternoon for an all-weekend women-only retreat. She took the baby, so I am FREE until Sunday afternoon.

So far I have: