Mark Twain

The weekend starts with a large dose of soccer at the new turf fields in Brentwood.   Soccer training and scrimmages never take a winter recess like they did years ago.  Kyle has to be at the field at 0930, and as things turn out, he scrimmages two Brentwood teams, and we don’t get out of the parking lot until just after 1pm.

  

Being at the field that long, I actually got two runs in this morning.  One run being about 2 miles around the perimeter of the fields, actually 2 laps around.  Another was an additional mile run of sorts that has a funny name.  Fartlek, which means "speed play" in Swedish,^[1] is a form of interval training which puts stress on the whole aerobic energy system due to the continuous nature of the exercise. The difference between this type of training and continuous training is that the intensity or speed of the exercise varies, meaning that both aerobic and anaerobic systems can be put under stress. It differs from traditional interval training in that it is unstructured; intensity and/or speed can be varied whenever the athlete wishes.

Drop off his friend Mike and then make two lunch stops (Kyle taco bell, and Luke Wendy’s).  The usual excuse, there’s nothing to eat in the house.  Whatever happened to eating leftovers, peanut butter and jelly or a tuna sandwich?

I don’t even make it home before my junior cheeseburger is finished, and once the chill is out of my body, I heat up a slice of pizza.  Work begins on the basement later than expected, but Luke lends a hand.  Kyle and Sue fell asleep on the couch watching…..wait for it……SOCCER.

I tried to shape the meatloaf into a VW Beetle, but it really isn’t going to work out.  Sue and Luke are once again on the hunt for shoes (Luke is hard to shop for), so another trip to the mall.  I continue in the basement throwing away a couple of hefty bags of crap, an old computer monitor, burned out dehumidifier and fan.  An hour later, my doorbell rings, and some guy asks if the stuff out by my garbage cans is being thrown out.  I say yes, and as it tunes out one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.  I guess there is some scrap places that will pay for the metal, glass, and plastic and all too happy to see that it will get recycled, fixed, re-used as opposed to ending up in the landfill.

This day in history “On this day in 1885, Mark Twain publishes his famous--and famously controversial--novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens) first introduced Huck Finn as the best friend of Tom Sawyer, hero of his tremendously successful novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Though Twain saw Huck's story as a kind of sequel to his earlier book, the new novel was far more serious, focusing on the institution of slavery and other aspects of life in the antebellum South.”

We encourage our children to read for fun or interest as opposed to just the required reading in school.  I remember reading for the fun of it, and still do, albeit mostly magazines, and on the internet.  If anyone is reading this and has a table saw I can borrow, let me know.  I am debating trying to cut the laminate boards with a circular saw.  The instructions say it can be done that way, and for creating lengths of boards it will probably be fine, but there are quite a few boards that will require the groove side cut off the entire length of the 48 inch boards.  A circular saw will be really tough to keep that straight and true for the entire length.

Photo of the day “Mark Twain”