Mr. Polehn writes

This Friday Amanda and I celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.  It took us a bit but we eventually decided we should go on a trip and to somewhere neither of us had been before.  I've always wanted to see ancient ruins and love Starwars.  Enter Tikal, one of the most famous Mayan sites and home to the rebel alliance's Yavin 4 base. I don't travel much.  I don't like traveling much.  I don't even like thinking about travelling.  It’s not that I don't want to see exotic places and do interesting things around the world.  I just don't want to deal with any of the headache of getting there or any of the less than desireable things I might encounter along the way. I'm pretty good at negative visualization, what some people probably call worrying.  I’ll call it being prepared, though it still feels an awful lot like worrying.  I guess it's how I deal with the unknown.  I can't predict the future but I can take what I know and thin...

Some background First off, I should explain why I, a grown man living in the United States in the early 21st century decided to read a book written to British boys at the beginning of the 20th.  A few times I told someone I was reading this book I got a queer look (or innuendo about what “scouting for boys” meant).  So here goes. My oldest daughter had just started to be involved with Girl Scouts .  She had been to a few meetings and my wife and I were discussing whether she should really be involved with one more activity.  That’s probably the opposite of how things should go, but it is the sort of thing that happens more often than not in our house. Anyway, this led me to reflect on my own experiences with Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts.  While I didn’t last very long in Boy Scouts I realized that Cub Scouts was probably one of the most important things in my life at the time.  There were a lot of good memories from the kids in my Webelos group. ...

Earlier this year I made a few goals for myself.  One was to run .  A lot.  The other was to write , a lot more than I have.  Sorry to say I haven’t kept either of these really well.  Sometimes life get in the way, sometimes things don’t work out the way you hoped, sometimes you set the wrong goals and sometimes you just plain fail.  I’d like to say life got in the way and things just happened, but I have to be honest. Running Major failures in the running department.  As you can see from the graph below, things were going pretty well for a time.  Right on track.  However, around the 30k per week mark I started to have nagging shin splints.  Not so bad that I was ready to give up running (the proper cure for shin splints) but bad enough I knew I should back off.  So I did, only to later end up with shin splints before during and after every running session.  It was finally bad enough for me to realize I needed to lay it off...

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn is probably one of the most cynical takes on American history ever written.  It is blatantly and openly biased, intentionally seeking to tell the stories that the author feels aren't told through the traditional narrative of US history.  Despite being openly antagonistic A People's History is full of citations from first hand and second hand sources as well as quotes from other published history texts.  In other words it takes many of the bleakest points in American History (chattel slavery, native genocide, worker suppression) and does a great job proving that, yes, things really were "as bad as all that."   On the whole I'm happy to read a starkly different telling of US history, especially in relation to our foreign policy.  Zinn leaves little doubt around the imperialistic ambitions of many of the United States military conflicts (especially the  Mexican American and Vietnam Wars).  He i...

 Earlier last month Oregon Secretary of State Dennis Richardson announced his plans for a constructional amendment to place the task of redistricting into the hands of an independent commission.  Currently Oregon is one of the many states in which redistricting is handled by the legislature themselves.  Democrats in the state were quick to reject the plan as a Republican power grab, an attempt to gerrymander the state.    In 2011 something that hadn't happened for several decades occurred in Oregon.  The legislature was able to pass a redistricting plan without challenge from the Supreme Court or the Governor.  This is especially surprising because the House of Representatives at the time was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.  The redistricting bill passed with a wide margin.  You could say that the redistricting plan of 2011 was bipartisan, but were districts still gerrymandered? Gerrymandering in Oregon? ...

Running goals Since setting some running goals  for the year I've increased my weekly distance by about 10 km more or less meeting my target distance for each week.  I've also done better than I expected at improving my pace so far.  I participated in the Cherry Festival 10k run where I had a new personal record time for a 10k (57:46 according to strava ).   However, this last week I've started to feel sluggish and worn out every run.  I've been running three times a week since I started adding distance.  One of those runs for the last several weeks has been a 10k.  Last weeks pace was the first time since I started that I did not make my pace goal  I felt pretty miserable all week.  I think it's time to run four times a week at shorter distances and not have a weekly 10k until it's a necessity to reach 40k per week goal.  I'm only about half way through my goal of building up to that distance per week and I don't want ...

The Dalles Cherry Festival is coming up (Saturday April 22nd this year).  Despite the cheesiness and the crowds, this is actually one of my favorite "local holidays."  The 10k run is one of my new favorite traditions.  The run has been around longer than I have and goes right through where I grew up.  It's about time I started to "enjoy" it. """April 22nd – 3k and 5k are out and back, with a nice uphill at the start. The 10k does a LOOP, with rolling uphill the first half, then enjoy the nice 9+ miles of downhill to the finish.  Paved, scenic, orchard country roads. Awards to the top 3 in each age division, all runs. Great random prize drawings! Proceeds will benefit TDHS Cross Country Teams. Registration forms available at The Dalles Chamber office.""" If you're following along at home and can convert customary to metric in your head a run with 9+ miles of downhill is a comically long 10k.  Despite the obvious typo this is...