Long hills

Monday night was a night of doing 'long' hill repeats.. The plan was for 400-600 yards, 3-4 times.

The hill I ran the week before thankfully is a good half mile longer, so to get to a long hill, I just keep running up. And up.

Blah.

So, the start & stopping points netted out to a .29 mile hill length I was running. Elevation looked like this:



My goal was to not blow up the hill the first time up, so that I had some gas in the tank at the end.

Splits wound up being a 9:38/mi pace, a 9:40, ending on a 9:20.

Overall run was 4.11 miles in 40:20 (9:48 pace).

Glad that's over though. :)

Tuesday was an easy 4 miler, which was around and around the indoor track. The guy I met at the gym a few weeks ago looking to run a marathon next year was there, though, so I did my 4 miles with him. He invited me to a 4 mile run a couple of towns over on St. Patty's Day weekend.. I guess a bunch of folks from the gym will be there, all wearing yellow shirts. Sounds good to me.. I just need to figure out how to adjust my plan, because I have a 20 miler that day.. Hrms.

Oh, and the girl that witnessed my incident at the gym was there last night too.. I got some sort of look from her. I'm sure it was one of awe and admiration.


Before I sign off, a couple of beverage reviews...

First up is Peet's house blend coffee.


(I previously tried their Major Dickason's blend.)

Both blends were a hookup from my brother in law (thanks man!). He's on the quest to find the ultimate cup of coffee. Given the quantities I consume, I'm certain I can't have the ultimate cup half a dozen times a day or whatever, so I settle for less. :)

I liked the house blend, but not as much as the Major Dickason's.. The house blend was not bitter, which was a very good thing. You can make a nice and strong cup of coffee, and not have that awful bitterness. It also was very fresh.. The beans were listed as having been roasted the week before I got the bag. I think the house blend was a little lighter bodied than the Major D's blend. Still, a very good coffee. (Peet's, I'm willing to do whatever for free coffee :) )

The other beverage entry for today is this:



This is Wells Banana Bread Beer. I love trying new things. I saw a bottle of banana bread beer in the store, and I said "Self, you've never had banana bread flavored beer. Give it a shot"

So.. my impression.. It had a distinct smell of banana bread. Absolutely. The carbonation was pretty light, but the beer had a nice rich color. Tasting it, you could definitely taste the banana bread. It had a fairly dry taste to it, and I see from the website that it's along the lines of a bitter ale, which certainly fits.

It's something I could drink a bottle of, but wouldn't want to have them all night long. An interesting experience, though.

I gave the bottle to my wife to smell the scent of the bananas and such. She was quite unimpressed, to say the least.

Keep on rockin'.

Free Coffee

See, you're excited.. Free coffee! What's not to like?

Yes, I received an e-mail at 11:30AM, Monday morning, with the subject line of "Free Coffee This Week!"

(Normally, I'm not a fan of the exclamation point in the subject, but "free coffee" warrants an exception.)

So, yes, we did indeed have free coffee. We're trying out this new coffee brewing system from Keurig. It has these "K cups", which are little plastic (more on that later) cups, containing enough grounds for a single cup of coffee.

You put your K cup in the machine, put your mug in underneath, hit the button, wait 30 seconds, and your coffee is done.

Unlike our little pod coffee maker at home, this is pretty hot coffee when it comes out, too.

The flavor of the coffee was really good. Most of our samples were 'Green Mountain Coffee', and were quite tasty. Far better than the swill that you can get from the vending machine or from the "cafeteria".

Plus, the water sometimes runs funny colors here. Yellow.. brown.. Makes you second guess about drinking.


The only downside to the K cups is that they seem to be very non-green. They're all individual plastic containers with tinfoil over the top, and you throw them into the garbage. Not green.. I'm not too big of a fan of that. (At least with the pods, I think they'd biodegrade pretty easily)

So yeah.. I was stoked. It was like having free drugs here.

So, at 2:30PM on Wednesday afternoon, I go over for another cup. All gone. I'm sad.


I guess we'll see how well the trial went over, and if people will pay for this.

Not a bad weekend

Went out for dice baseball on Friday. I started out the evening by going 3-1. Sweet. Of course, I dropped the next four. So, 3-5 on the night. Not stellar.

Saturday morning we decided to break out a new gadget. A couple of years ago, I got my wife one of those 'pod' coffee makers.. The idea being you could make a cup or two of coffee quick & easy. I was thinking she could take it to work, and I got a stellar deal on it.. The maker and a couple of bags of pods for $10.
Yeah, it sat in a box. For a long time.

But, we busted it open Saturday morning and gave it a shot. My review of the 'Home Cafe' is this.. (granted, ours is a few years old now.. so, maybe this has all been fixed) Neat idea, ok execution. The maker tended to spit coffee in little bits around the cup. Not a lot, but a bit messy. More noticeably, the coffee was warm, but not hot. My wife likes a bit of milk in hers, so once you do that, it really needs to be warmed up. Furthermore, I felt the coffee was a bit oily (I had the Columbian Supremo of Folgers).. Neat toy, though. Easy enough to wipe up the counter and throw the cup of coffee in the microwave.

It was easier than making a whole pot or the like. For instance, I got up before my wife on Sunday, felt like a cup of coffee and went to the pod, rather than farting around with the pot, filter, measuring, etc.

Back to Saturday, I logged 3.6 miles running. Pretty non-eventful, but I felt reasonably good. Sunday, my feet hurt a bit, probably that tendonitis hasn't gone completely away, but it wasn't terrible. I wanted to do 4-5, but we were supposed to be heading out.

I also got cleared by the doctor to resume doing pushups. Although, I can't do too much too fast (who, me?), or I'll develop some tendonitis there. So, I did some bent knee pushups. Midway through, I realized that I had no idea how to do bent knee pushups, and spent some time working out the proper position. It wound up being a success, but I kept it pretty light. I'll try some more tonight.

On Sunday, I met a friend of mine out, and we watched the Jets game. Damn Jets. They were supposed to win! I suppose it's my fault.. I had told someone that this week was "a lock". Sigh.

At least the Red Sox aren't in the World Series.. :)

Better than the weekend Joba Chamberlain had. C'mon.. what are you thinking?

Coffee Makers

Speaking of coffee..

We just got a new coffee maker. The old one crapped out after 10 years. I figure that we got our money's worth out of it. 1-4 pots a day for 10 years.. yeah.

The breakdown was quite odd. The power cord wound up melting while plugged into the wall. I suspect that there were too many broken wires overall in the electrical cord, and it eventually overheated, trying to throw the current through the intact paths.

It was sad.. an old friend that was just the way I liked.

So, yes. We got a new one. Wound up with the same brand. We got this pot (Mr. Coffee) from Target.

Absolutely nothing like the old one. I truthfully hate the damn thing.

Where to start? Well, when I went to plug it in, leaving the pot in the same place as the old one, I discovered the extension cord is probably a foot long. That's nice, I can't hang myself with it. It's not very functional though. So, we have to angle it underneath a cupboard to get to the outlet.

Of course, when it's angled, you can't open up the ultra large stupid looking top to fill it or put in the grounds.

So, as you curse the stupid thing and unplug it, you move it to the side and open it up. Of course, opening it up causes all sorts of condensation to drip off the top.

A 'feature' of this coffee pot is listed as follows: "Brewing Pause 'n Serve lets you pour a cup of coffee while the coffee maker is still brewing."

Yeah. My old one had that. It worked really well. There was a lever in the back. With the pot in the machine, the lever was opened, coffee dripped in. Remove the pot, lever closes, no drippage.

This one has this spring-tension knob right above the pot. You pull the pot out, you're getting drippage. Pop-pop sizzle-sizzle right onto the warming element. Consistently. Even after the coffee is done.

Speaking of, I really liked my old one which would beep when the coffee was done. But, that's minor. I can live without it.

So yeah, I'm not a fan of it. Maybe this one will die quicker than 10 years.
I miss my old coffee pot.

Coffee

I love coffee. Lots of it. It was really an issue for me in high school. I was mere steps away from hooking up an IV filled with coffee.

So, one of my brother in laws mentioned a new coffee to me. I hemmed and hawed, and he actually was kind enough to send us a pound of it.

Previously, we'd been drinking Tim Hortons as our everyday morning coffee. Very nice grind, very good flavor, decent price. (As an aside, the Tim's stores absolutely rock. Too bad we don't have one closer than an hour away...) I can say nothing bad about this coffee.

But, what was recommended was Peet's Coffee. I received a bag of Major Dickason's Blend (roasted on 9/10/08). This was billed by my BIL as Starbucks without the acidity.

He was spot on. Props to him. I kept the coffee in the freezer until we finished up some loose coffees and the remainder of our Tim's coffee.

A very strong flavor, but it didn't bite like Starbucks often does. I'm honestly not a huge fan of the Starbucks coffee. Some of their more 'out there' blends are good, but the run of the mill stuff is just 'ok'. Making it strong just because you can isn't really necessary. It's about balance and flavor. But, I digress.

Good flavor, a reasonable grind. Not ultra fine, but far better than you're going to do at home with a $15 coffee grinder. The taste was strong, but smooth. Very very enjoyable.

Anyways, the Peet's stuff rocks. Anyone from Peet's, I'm willing to sample whatever you want to send.

Keep on rockin', just like Peet's.