Charmaine and I traded cars this morning so she could take Julie and Jess around Highland, Alpine, Cedar Hills, and Pleasant Grove.  The plan was to find something great at a local garage sale.

I went to help Kyle and Megan move into their new house across the street.  As I arrived, one of the guys helping said, “You have impeccable timing.  We’re done.”  That wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough.  I helped them carry their big TV downstairs into the theater room under their garage and then they really were done.  BG, my next door neighbor, had seen their moving truck early this morning and made a few calls to get some guys over to help.  It didn’t take long to unload their truck with 7 guys helping out.

I was now quite a bit ahead of schedule, but that was good.  I figured I could get some things done at work and maybe have time for swimming, so I made sure to bring my swim bag along for the trip to Orem.

As I stood outside my locked office door, it dawned on me that the key to said door was on the keychain to the car Charmaine was driving.  They probably wouldn’t be done hitting garage sales until close to noon, so there was no reason to head back for the keys (it was only 10:30).  And that is how I found myself swimming on a Saturday morning.

500 Free warm-up
5 x 100 Free @ 2:30 (coming in between 1:05 and 1:15)
200 Free easy
200 swimming under water (as few breaths as possible)

I’m starting to think I need to define my workouts before I get to the pool so I don’t wind up messing around or talking myself into a shorter workout, etc.

When I got back home, Charmaine and Julie were talking about keeping workout logs.  I wound up getting roped into setting up some blogs for them on Perrykids.com.  I guess I better get on that.

Despite the lack of blog entries, I have actually been swimming.  I swam Wednesday and Thursday.  I even mixed it up a bit and did some over-unders and some sprints.  My fastest 50 was 0:30, which is pretty sad, and my 100 wasn’t any better at 1:05.

I’ve had a serious lack of computer connectivity as of late.  We just moved into our new house and I have only setup the phone and wireless.  My old Power Mac doesn’t have wireless, so I won’t be blogging from there until I wire up the ethernet jacks and buy a new switch for the basement.  Even my work machine has been down a lot lately.

I’ve finally given up on getting XEN to work with my NVIDIA card.  I can hardly wait until AMD releases the ATI driver stack as open source and forces NVIDIA to do the same.  What a bunch of morons.

Josh finally moved from Windows to Linux at work as well. Corey was helping him get all setup on his Dell Precision 380 (the same machine I have).  Josh was complaining about how hard it is to setup Linux on these boxes (because they can’t include the proprietary NVIDIA driver in the distribution).

After giving up on getting XEN working with NVIDIA, I decided I might run Windows as the base and then do something like colinux or parallels on top of that.  I decided to be a bit bold and dropped in my Windows Vista RC1 DVD.  It booted up and said it couldn’t install because I don’t have a hard drive.  I wasn’t extremely surprised that Vista doesn’t have a good set of drivers yet, but I sort of thought they would be in the “Release Candidate.”

After failing with Vista, I decided to put Windows XP back on the machine.  I figured that should be easy, since XP was pre-installed on the box when we bought it.  Booting with the Windows XP CD yielded the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death).  It became extremely clear that it is easier to install Linux than Windows, at least on relatively new Dell hardware.

So I thought there must be some drivers I have to install at the beginning of the XP setup so that it can succeed.  I quickly installed Kubuntu and went to Dell’s website to find the drivers.  There are no less than 6 drivers that I have to supply during XP setup to get this thing to install.  What a joke.  And to make this process easier, Dell has packaged all their drivers in self-exracting archives that only work on Windows.  So without a Windows machine I will not be able to get the drivers that will enable me to install Windows.  Brilliant.

I decided to stick with Kubuntu.  It does almost everything Windows does, plus a whole lot of things that Windows can’t even hope to do.  If only it had a better groupware (email, calendar) client.  I can’t stand Evolution.  It crashes about 35 times a day (not exaggerated).  For now I’m using rdesktop to connect via RDP to a virtual windows machine running on a headless box in another office.  Then I have Outlook on that machine.  It’s not ideal, but it sure beats Evolution.

Wow, almost nothing about swimming in this post.  Oh well.

The last few days have been crazy. We have been slowly moving out of our apartment and into our new house. As I’ve said before, this has made many convenient excuses. Today almost turned into another one, but I finally broke down and swam a little today.

Last night we slept at the new house for the first time. It was a rough night. The new house has all new sounds that I’m not used to yet. Plus I ate way too much for dinner, which made me feel too hot for most the night. This led to not getting up early enough to swim before work.

We had professional movers pack up the rest of our stuff today at 1:00. Knowing this was on the schedule, I headed over to the apartment around noon to help pick up and get the last few things ready for the movers. By 12:45 there wasn’t much else I could do and I figured I would head back to work. This is when I had the breakthrough. I hadn’t showered in the morning and was feeling pretty gross, so I talked myself into swinging by the gym (I had my swim stuff in the car) and taking a shower. By the time I got to the gym I had convinced myself to at least get in the pool and swim a 500. By the time I was in the pool I knew I wasn’t going to leave without doing at least a partial workout. It felt really good to be in the pool again.

300 Free warm-up
5 x 100 Free @ 2:05 (coming in between 1:10 and 1:15)
200 Free easy
50 Free fast (0:30)
200 Free warm-down

After that last post, I decided to get some work done. Soon after starting to work, I realized that everything was broken. I decided I might as well swim a little. I went to the gym, got changed, went out to the pool, only to realize that my goggles were not in the swim bag. I must have left them in my regular workout bag, which was in my locker. Instead of going back to my locker to hunt down my goggles, I decided to borrow Charmaine’s goggles, which were in the swim bag.

My goggles are red. Charmaine’s goggles are green. It makes a difference. When I swim with Charmaine’s goggles, it seems fairly relaxing. When I swim with my goggles, I feel driven. I find this very interesting. How can the color of the lense make that much difference? And yet, it does.

500 Free warm-up
5 x 100 Free @ 2:05 (coming in between 1:10 and 1:15)
100 Free easy
6 x 50 Kick @ 1:20 (coming in at 0:55)
100 Free easy
50 Free fast (0:32)
100 Free fast (1:05)
100 Free warm-down

We had a big mandatory company meeting this morning. I wanted to be there a little early, so I decided I wouldn’t get up to swim in the morning. I didn’t sleep very well. There was a lot of rain and other random noises throughout the night. I kept waking up and wondering what time it was.

The meeting went well, but it spawned some other meetings that happened right after the first meeting. This led to my being in meetings until about 1:15. At that point nobody wanted to go lift weights, which was fine with me. I wanted to swim anyway and it worked out so that I could. I didn’t want to be away from work too long, which made a nice excuse for cutting the swim a bit short.

500 Free warm-up
5 x 200 Free @ 3:45 (coming in at 2:40)
100 Free easy
200 Free warm-down
———-
1800 yards