THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

Well, we’ve been spending some of our evenings cleaning out the basement. It really is amazing the amount of crap that we have been carting around for (at least) 5 1/2 years.

We’re nearly done and it is amazing how big our basement is. And clean! Maybe when we’re done we’ll take some pictures.

I have been trying to be good and down-size some of my stuff, and have succeeded for the most part. I do have 2-3 boxes of “keepsakes” – but I’ve gotten rid of some of the stuff, and at least the stuff that I did keep is now in nice plastic water-tight boxes.

One thing that got the axe today was a copy of a Mormon “good one” from my mission called the Book of Lemuel. I thought to myself, “Self, there is approximately a 500% chance that this is on the Internet somewhere”.

Ayup.

Another thing that didn’t make the cut was my good ol’ Dan Miller for Council sign.

But it got a pic for posterity.

The background, for those of you who don’t know. Back in the day (I’d say 1993 or so), a gentleman named Paul D. Miller was running for North Olmsted city council. As is typical for folks running for office, he put signs around town urging people to vote for him.

I forget who had the idea first, but my friends and I ummm borrowed some of his signs. We figured out that if you took the D from his middle initial, the a from Paul, and turned the u upside down, you could spell Dan Miller for council.

I put one of these signs in my front yard, and probably my favorite memory is that one of my mom’s friends (Julie Jakuszeit or whatever her last name is maybe?) called up my mom after seeing the sign and said “I didn’t know Dan was old enough to run for council!?!?” Good times…good times…

As Carolyn pointed out while we were cleaning, this sign once held the position of honor above our bed (on Fenwick). Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

I would also like to point out that I got all the way back upstairs and realized I had taken a picture of the Paul D. Miller side and had to go back downstairs

As I have mentioned before I recently switched exercise log providers from Active.comSuckyWebsiteMcSuckerson.com to RunningAhead.com. And of course, by “switched” I mean that the aforementioned sucky website took over the site that I was using, “converted” all the data, and made us start using their website, which sucked in comparison. Oh, and they lost (or at best misplaced) half my data.

As I have not mentioned before, I seem to like to start my blog posts with “As I have mentioned before” or some similar turn of phrase. Just thought I’d point that out.

Anyways… I finally got around to updating the little link on the side of my blog to point to the new site. I also renamed it from “Dan’s cycling log” (which had itself a few months ago been renamed from “Dan’s running log”) to “Dan’s exercise log”.

One of the other cool features of RunningAhead.com is that they provide a few cool “widgets” to put on your blog. I have put one on there listing my last 10 workouts. You can see it over on the right of the blog with the links. So, at the time of this writing, you can see that my latest workout (this morning) was 2.3 (actually 2.26) miles running followed by 200 yards swimming. You can see that I have also done some “elliptical” workouts. This is Dan-speak for “other”. That is one of the things I don’t like – there’s no place to put in custom workouts. They have an “other” section, but you can only choose elliptical or spinning. So my “elliptical” workout on 1/3 was weight training and the one on 1/1 was for playing football (I have chosen to convert exercise like football or basketball at approximately a 50% ratio – so I played football for a little over 2 hours, so I counted that as 1 hour of exercise).

They also have a blog widget where you can put total distance and time on your blog. This would have been very handy for my 1000 mile goal (completed with room to spare!!), but the tragic flaw is that it only allows you to display one method of exercise, rather than the sum of all of them. So I can show that I’ve done 1113.9 miles of biking (since I started), or show that I’ve done 140.4 miles running, etc., but not the sum total of all of them. That’s actually my major beef with the site in general – it seems like it was primarily designed with a one-sport athlete, not a ultra-cool triathlete like me