Back from the Big Easy

Yup, our little weekend trip was a road trip to New Orleans during the height of Carnival (which culminates in Fat Tuesday - or Mardi Gras).

We saw two parades - a smaller one and then one of the bigger ones (Isis and Bacchus). At last count my daughters had counted over 200 strings of beads acquired during the trip. Along with beads we also got stuffed animals, frisbees, and cups. And no, we did not have to do anything "unfamily-like" to get beads. We stayed away from Bourbon Street and found some very family friendly places!

In relationship to my training I did a couple of things:
- ate horribly (they fry everything there)
- played with my new toy - an iRiver iFP-780

With regard to Thing 1, I have some major exercising to lose the excesses of the trip. And I can't run yet (more on that later). Now Thing 2 was pretty cool. I am toying with the idea of podcasting - at least, run casting. I do such good thinking when I run, I would like to capture some of that. And with 128 Mb, although I can't load up much music (I have the ipod anyway) I can record up to 7 hours of voice - plenty of time for whatever. Who knows, if it turns out to be half interesting, maybe I can report in to Nigel, Terry, Adam or Steve Runner :-). I am also thinking of doing some work related podcasts so maybe I can get my company to front some of the cash my effort.

I took it with me and recorded aspects of our trip, including some of the parades and driving in the truck (we took our camper and "camped" in a friend's front yard). Now I have some audio files to play with, not to mention an audio record of our trip. Pretty cool. It is still pretty lo tech. I will definitely need a microphone. And today, I also received my book "Podcasting for Dummies".

More to come I am sure....

Foot update: Today I was back with my physical therapist (PT). She noted that my heel has much more movement in it (it is supposed to move a bit, and it hardly moved when I came in). I am making great progress. However....she doesn't want me to run until my orthotics come in - probably in around a week.

So I continue the PT with workouts on the elliptical. Today I went out with my daughter for her running...I rode the scooter (you know, those Razor things?). I discovered more muscles I don't use that much...and found that it does not work well on uneven sidewalks. But we still got our running talk in together in our two laps around the block. Very cool!