Watch Repair and EZ Runnin'

In a burst of technological wizardry, I managed to take apart my old Polar HR watch and replace the battery. I eventually got it back together again, and it might even be watertight. We'll see. I will admit that it took three different tries of screwing down the backplate on the watch and reopening it to get all the buttons lined up and ready to rock. I accomplished all of this without using too many "special purpose" words, which was a major victory. While doing all this, I discovered that the little set of tiny screwdrivers that I've had for a while are pretty substandard metal. They all stripped out their tips while I wrestled with the repeated closures of the watch, and that caused some significant angst. Once I switched to my eyeglasses repair kit, though, I found a screwdriver made of stout enough material to accomplish the job, and that made me happier. I took a few minutes to make sure I knew how to do elementary stuff like starting and stopping a run and taking a lap split, and then I was ready to go. Such are the excitements of a day here at Casa Clement. Note to Self: Procure a set of higher-quality micro-screwdrivers. :-)

Garmin finally responded, by the way, and it looks like they are treating my watch repair as a warranty issue, so I'll be sending the 305 to Kansas tomorrow to be rehabbed. Hopefully, it will get back before I leave for a beach vacation in a little less than 3 weeks.

After all that, it was a relief to simply lace up the shoes (clean and dry after the rainy run on Saturday) and head out into the 'Hood for some EZ HR running. I was shooting for 40-50 minutes today, as I slowly ramp up the mileage on my solo running. Once again, the idea was to keep my HR fairly low. I ended up doing just fine. It was weird wearing two watches (harkens back to those days before the 305 Garmin), but it was no big deal. I scored 5.2 miles, 50 minutes, more or less, 9:35/mile. It was a good little run and served the purpose.

Some good tunes today between the gym and tonight's run on the iPod. The coolest thing was that tonight on the easy run, the iPod kicked things off with James Brown ("Please, Please, Please"), and finished up with Little Richard ("Good Golly, Miss Molly"). It just doesn't get any better than that! In between, Frank Zappa(!), Chicago, Creedence, Cream, and even Harry Nilsson ("Me and My Arrow"), among many others. Music is my favorite drug, that's for sure.

Oh, yeah, I fired up the Father's Day waffle iron and used the fancy chocolate chip waffle mix that they gave me with it to whip up some evening sustenance for my kids. They gave it all a big "thumbs up," so that's pretty cool. I'm more of a regular waffle guy, but I must admit that the fancy ones were pretty tasty. Next time, I'll make up the batter from scratch (for which I'll get to use the digital kitchen scale that I also received on Sunday), and I'll report the results of that experiment as they occur. I'm thinking blueberry for me, maybe one plain and one blueberry...we'll see. So many choices in this life.