I had lunch today with a friend of mine that I've known longer than anyone else. Jerry and I went to elementary school together and other than a couple of years in middle school, finished up high school together as well.

It was good to catch up with him and laugh about old times; girls, surfing, trying to impress girls with our surfing, etc.

Campaign ads are very effective. I hate all the candidates now. Job well done.

When a family friend pointed out that I haven't updated here since before our wedding in March. It dawned on me that while I've maintained the site itself (e.g. updating the main page or some of the content-specific areas), I haven't posted anything here in quite a while.

Most of the reasoning behind it is that I've been so busy with work lately that I've had little time for me. This has happened before and I came to hate the company where I worked as a result. I'd love to say it's not happening again now, but that would be simply untrue.

All of my spare time has been split between getting settled in our new home and coaching my current marathon teams, which are training for the Nike Women's Marathon (San Francisco) and the Baltimore Marathon, both in October. This doesn't leave me any time to relax, unwind, or update this blog.

And I need to change that.

When I ran the Disney Marathon earlier this year, I had a horrible run because I was on the verge of exhaustion from working 65-70 hours per week for the two months leading up to it. Because I had a slower run than expected, I had plenty of time to think about how angry I was at myself for the way I had let myself get sucked into work. I'm working about the same amount now, and I feel it every time I run. If I don't get ahold of it in the next couple of weeks, I won't see the improvements in my running that I'm hoping for this year.

With that said, I'll try to post here more often and keep the site more current. For that matter, what's the point of having one if it's outdated, right?

I'm getting married in a month.

After more than four months of training and preparation, I ran the Disneyworld Marathon with my Team in Training group, finishing the 26.2-mile course in 5 hours and 22 minutes. Jen was not far behind me, finishing in 6 hours and 14 minutes. All 10 members of our team (and two coaches) crossed the finish line just as the five members of our half-marathon team had done the day before.

Everyday, as I drive to or from work or run errands, I must see 75% of the people at stop signs roll through them, and that's if they even slow down at all. The ones that are stopping are doing so because a car is coming and they can't blow through the intersection. Hardly anyone around here stops at a red light before turning right anymore.

Almost every time I run down the road on which I leave, someone comes flying out of one of the condominium or housing communities and nearly runs me over. Worse, they look at me like I'm completely insane when I point at their stop sign after they slam on breaks 15 feet past it.

To put this in perspective, I watched a stop sign a couple of blocks from my office for about 10 minutes one afternoon a few weeks ago. Out of 50 cars, only 4 stopped. That's more than 90% of the cars that ran the stop sign.

We live in such a world today that everything has to be right down to the wire. News has to be delivered 24 hours per day via SMS, people have to be accessible at all times via their Blackberry, and they simply must get from one place to the next in no time flat, because they're obviously oh-so-damn important.

I realize that the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office is stretched and the patrol units are running from call to call. I also realize that this leaves virtually no time for proactive traffic enforcement. But seriously, how did we let it get this lax that nobody even cares if they run a stop sign or a red light these days?

How is it possible in this day and age that government websites do not have their domains duplexed?

If I visit http://census.gov, I get a page not found error.

I have to actually go to http://www.census.gov for it to work..

How stupid is that?