I spent Friday fielding questions about Gov. Palin at work; my office mate is from Delaware, so our room is VP Central. What a bizarre turn of events, seemingly getting more bizarre by the hour. We had a quiet Friday night, catching up on some more episodes of Mad Men, which gets better with each one. We really appreciated the three-day weekend, especially as Aimee heads back to work, with students, this week, and the end of summer is finally here. We caught Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Hamlet 2 at the ArcLight, both enjoyable, and ran in the Nike Human Race at USC last night. We got up for the 8:30 start time at about 6:45 in the morning, got dressed and found parking in the vicinity of the surprisingly deserted USC area. All of the race tents were set up, but there just weren’t that many people there. We encountered a few folks dressed in the tell-tale red shirts as we got closer, but it was apparent something was up by the time we got to the starting chute. Sure enough, some people yelled out the window of their car, “It’s tonight!” Neither of us had bothered to imagine that the race might be at 8:30 p.m. rather than a.m.… So, we drove back home, and had the rest of the day to sort of sit in a holding pattern and wait for the race. I ended up getting a lot of work done, but we both felt pretty silly for having gone all the way down there twelve hours early.



The race itself, once we finally got started, was pretty great. It was fun running at night, though it might have been a little better without quite so many people – 13,000 or so? Every half mile or so another musical act from around the world entertained us, and the course was well-marked and lined with water stops. I didn’t quite beat my best time, but I had a decent finish, and was happy with my result.



And on a completely unrelated note, I’ve finally had some time this weekend to tackle a long-stagnant project. Just in time to mark the tenth year I’ve been collecting these photos, I’ve finally, finally moved all of my Coffee Shack photos over to Flickr. Since I started collecting them, in December of 2008, I’ve wanted to put them on a map, and also keep better track of when I took them, as they tend to come and go with the seasons, and Flickr is a much better way of doing just that. So, I’ve moved everything over, added a bunch of new shacks that I never had time to put up on the original site, and will continue to add to them on subsequent trips home. I’d sort of run out of steam to add new shacks during the last few trips because I couldn’t be sure which I’d already photographed, but having the photos on Flickr will make keeping track of the changes a lot easier. I’ve got more than 150 up right now, and I’m sure I’ll be adding more in the future.