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GAP Trail / Mars Sightings
(31 Oct 2018 at 23:21) |
Hello! Only some light updates this month:
We ran the inaugural edition of the GAP Trail Relay, which is a 150-mile relay race on the Great Allegheny Passage, a trail that runs between Pittsburgh PA and Cumberland MD or Washington DC, depending on who you ask. Actually even reading the Wikipedia article right now I'm a little unclear as to whether the trail formally includes the section between Cumberland and DC or not. Anyway, this race was from Cumberland MD to Pittsburgh PA, and I previously did a relay race ("Ragnar") from Cumberland MD to Washington DC (another 100+ miles), so I've got it covered.
The way these things work, you have two vans of runners (and their smelly clothes and snacks), and you cycle through them in order three times, with one person running a segment and carrying some baton or object (this time a slap bracelet) that is the only true athlete that travels the full distance of the trail. For this one we were missing one of the contestants, so some of us had to run extra segments to fill in for that ghost, and I had to do two in a row in the middle of the night (aside from not being able to see, the night ones are extra annoying because they make you carry lots of safety things). Anyway, it was a lot of running to do in a 24-hour period, about 31 miles for me, but honestly the hardest part is the waiting around and not getting enough sleep! The chief selling point for me was that I got to run a single segment that crossed the Mason–Dixon line, which here is also the Pennsylvania–Maryland border, as well as the Eastern continental divide. As you probably know I have a weird fetish for running across borders and other notable cartographic features, so this was a good one for the collection. We managed to finish the whole race under 24 hours, which seemed like a nice round number.
One more unrelated fun thing. We have been watching through Veronica Mars, one of Rose's favorite nostalgic shows. In season 2, it seems that someone in the decorations department has installed my fonts in their quest to make very believable mid-2000s high school desktop publishing posters:
Veronica Mars S02E09
Here we see Action Jackson, my most popular child, advertising the bake sale with Kristen Bell and Alyson Hannigan not even caring about those sweet bake sale deals!
Veronica Mars S02E05
This one was exciting because it's a rare sighting of "I Suck At Golf". Since this one is less obvious and obscured by cast, I put some original specimens there for comparison. It does look like this one was hand-painted using the font as a reference (notice that the lowercase 'i's are a little different each time) but there are enough distinctive features in that font that I can be pretty confident of the provenance.
Finally: I have been experiencing some server trouble this month and I'm aware that it's sometimes giving an error instead of showing you the radar you came for. Unfortunately I'm beginning to suspect a problem with the host (producing extremely slow disk reads), but I haven't had a chance to really sit down and try to debug yet. Sorry about that. |  |
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| You still have most of a day to post in November. |
I would never forget!
(Just kidding I often forget) |
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