Finished goal of running the distance of 2,080 miles from Lafayette, LA to Washington D.C and back!!!...plus 339.1 miles


0.0 miles run this week.
Daily running average for the week is 0.00 miles per day.
Total amount run in the past 800 days is 2,419.1 miles.
Daily running average overall is 3.02 miles per day.

Day99 Monday 12/06/10

ran 0.0 miles
Something you may not know…Congress agreed to extend unemployment benefits for another thirteen months. On the surface, that sounds humanitarian and every bit like a giving gesture any government should be obligated to do for its people, but if you happened to be collecting these benefits for the past two or three years, with no disabilities to claim, I’m sure the decision made today must be similar to the feeling a working man or woman has when he or she works everyday and gets a raise or a pat on the back, only it’s different, because a lot of people or content to do nothing but collect from the government---and, statistically, these are people who vote for liberal ideas.

I like to do things. I like to set personal goals and to achieve things. I like to be challenged. I appreciate what I earn and the thing I like least is to ask other people or my government for help. Unemployment checks are a useful commodity for any man, woman or family who is facing adversity for a patch of time, but to grow rooted to the soil of the government and the idle nutrients it supplements some people with, for years, is more of a crime than a charity.
In the spirit of not simply complaining, but presenting a solution, too, I propose a deadline and a set of contingencies for these unemployment benefits to expire. As the deadline nears and some certain mouths refuse to stop sucking upon the teat of the government, present drug tests and more stringently documented efforts of attempting to seek employment. If a person cannot meet the minimal demands of being a contributing member of society then they do not deserve our tax money. And if genuine effort is made to contribute to society but opportunity is simply unavailable, no judgment should be held over any man’s or woman’s head, and they should be able to receive every bit of aid they need until they do find an opportunity.

I am trying to tiptoe over strewn eggshells that, obviously, no politicians want to address with any real sense of validity. It is a sensitive topic but I think this one fact speaks for itself: Long time recipients of welfare or unemployment checks do not, statistically, vote for Republicans. That being said, conservative ideas are not insensitive to certain voters, they are designed with the intention to motivate Americans to succeed and to not sit idly by.

1,832.3 miles to go.

Day98 Sunday 12/05/10

ran 0.0 miles
Today marks fourteen weeks. I am really bummed about not being able to run this past week but all I can do is take it one day at a time. Especially on the eve of making one hundred continuous days of running, something unexpected like this is disappointing but there is no use in dwelling on events that are out of my control. I actually have a stat for this week. The last day I ran was Monday and I decided that if my leg still hurt after that then I would stop running and make an appointment with a doctor. I am seeing the doctor on Tuesday and my leg does not seem to be feeling much better, so I am eager to get closure on what exactly the injury is. This week, or on Monday alone, I ran 2.7 miles, bringing my total amount of miles run to 247.7, averaging 2.53 miles per day over the past ninety-eight days.

Check back on Tuesday and I’ll post about what my doctor has to say.

1,832.3 miles to go.

Day97 Saturday 12/04/10

ran 0.0 miles
I’m in New Orleans for the weekend with my wife and her family and it is absolutely beautiful; sunny, cold (the way December should be), and teeming with Christmas shoppers. We checked out the shops on Magazine Street, saw the Christmas lights at City Park, got snowed on at Harrah’s, and ate some awesome food (CafĂ© Maspero was my favorite).

However, there are a couple of curious things I saw here. One was a homeless man who walked up to us and asked, “Do you have any change because Obama doesn’t have any?”

The other thing I saw was Christmas trees…everywhere; the nerve of some people to impose such a symbol on others. They were in homes, in businesses, in front of buildings, and two that I saw were even ninety or a hundred feet tall. Real trees, artificial trees, white trees, green trees, red trees---they were everywhere scaring and intimidating people back into their homes.

Back to the homeless man, his appearance drew pity and I avoided even beginning to think of what the cold night still held for his suffering, but I found his approach to begging to be both a clever pun and representative of America’s sentiment towards Barack Obama and just how deceiving his entire campaign was. Even this desperate, homeless man was convinced two years ago that Obama’s change was going to trickle down into his own tin cup.

Back to the trees; those colorful, ornamented and glowing trees of religious oppression and intimidation, with their popcorn strings and candy canes, that so many malevolent Americans maliciously cut down and put in their houses and businesses for the sole purpose of continuing a beautiful tradition of peace, harmony, prayer, thankfulness, appreciation, gift-giving, and a holiday that illuminates every child’s imagination more than any other day of the year, while making the hearts of adults, even the angriest grinch’s, every once in a while, glow as a reminder of why we are all really here.

See what just happened there? I switched it up on you to place emphasis on how ridiculous this “Christmas tree” debacle and “Merry Christmas” ban in America has become. What ties this whole post together is some news I came across today out of Southlake, northeast of Fort Worth, Texas, in which a branch of Chase Bank was forced to remove a Christmas tree that was donated by a friend of the branch manager. The artificial tree was assembled and decorated on the Monday before Thanksgiving and taken down one day later. Some complaints were filed by customers of the bank apparently leaving Chase Bank with no choice but to remove the offensive monstrosity of age-old American culture.

Happy Holidays!

1,832.3 miles to go.