Took a drive around this afternoon to check out some old sights, and made a stop by Krispy Kreme to get some hot and fresh glazed donuts. You know they are going to taste amazing when you see that the Hot Sign is on. This is also the sight of the Krispy Kreme where I once ate one full dozen hot glazed donuts in forty-two minutes. The trick: drink water, not chocolate milk. I believe, however, that I am beyond the days of rising to such challenges. It is unfortunate.
Saturday afternoon I went for my longest run in Virginia ever, a full eight miles. I took the long route through Austin Ridge that I once tried but had to give up on and head back before reaching the end. It is a mentally tough route, because you have to commit to going at least six miles to make your way all the way to the end and back, since there is no "circle" or "loop" to keep you close to your starting point. It is much easier to run now that they put in more sidewalks, but it still has a treacherous hill right before the six mile mark. I managed to make it through and add another two miles to the end. Afterwards, I caught up with some old friends from high school, and took a walk through the old neighborhood basketball courts. Apparently our neighborhood has "roughened up" since the good old days, as they now tore the rims off so you are not allowed to play basketball anymore. These were the original courts where my first basketball nickname, "Apokalipse" (intentionally misspelled) was designed, due to the fact that whenever I happened to make a fantastic basketball play (usually a game winning three (I wasn't that good back then)), we encountered some strange weather event. Generally in the winter, it would either immediately start snowing, or we would have a snow storm in the next couple days. Once, when I earned a thirteen-stitch scar on my right elbow playing football in the field next to the courts, the entire state was hit by a hurricane two days later that cut out power for 1-2 weeks depending on where you lived. And this is a true story—it was Hurricane Isabel, the costliest and deadliest hurricane of the 2003 season, look it up. The scarier thing, is that although the occasions became much rarer when I got decent at basketball, this year when I had my best outing since 2010 at the HPER, I walked out to find a surprising 1-2 inches of snow on a day no one had predicted an actual snowstorm (merely a mix). Winter is coming...
North Stafford now has new painted rocks out in front of the school that a lot of the schools have. We never used to have these when I went to school, but some of the newer schools started to put them out (i.e., Colonial Forge). I am not sure how I feel about having the rocks there. When I was in school, certain groups of individuals whose names shall remain shrouded in mystery (i.e., it was different people each year) would splash Colonial Forge's rocks with bright colored paints annually (we and Colonial Forge were not the biggest fans of one another). While I will not publicly condone the vandalism, and it was much more fulfilling to simply eliminate the Eagles from playoff contention on their home field in the Class of 2006's last road game, it does seem a bit of a cop-out to just put up our own rocks. We never needed them before, why now? On the other hand though, they do look pretty cool. And they do show much better in the blue and orange than Colonial Forge's drab colors, or Mountain View's "we are trying our best to copy Virginia Tech" colors. While visiting the school, the back gates were open so I had a chance to walk around the practice fields and see old gravel paths I used to walk every day to start the long two-a-days and after-school practices. Those are the fields where I was run, hit, and hollered at, but, most importantly, where I learned the game of football. And though it has been eight years since I last stepped foot on that turf, those fields still smell like football.
On Monday I moved into my temporary residence for the week in Pentagon City just before my first day of work tomorrow. I will be staying at the Residence Inn until I can move into my permanent summer residence at Georgetown University Law Center. The rooms at this place are amazing, it is basically a full studio apartment with kitchen, couch, desk area, and king bed. And it is a much closer location to the SEC than good old Staff-Town. Hopefully it will be a good first week of work, and I should be much more well rested without the multiple hours of commuting to do each week! It will be great practice for the rest of the summer, when all I have to do is walk across the street from GULC to Union Station.
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