Scott Adcox

Doing More With Less Since 1972

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Magic Tree House Series For History And Making Connections

August 14, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Pea is obsessed with Mary Pope Osbourne’s Magic Tree House series right now. If you aren’t familiar with this series, the stories revolve around Jack and Annie, two young siblings who travel through history (and sometimes space) to help an enchantress collect stories and lift spells. I won’t give away more plot than that. Each book is 10 chapters long, and the “missions” they go on are in groups of four books. It’s the perfect bedtime reading for Pea. She can’t read them on her own yet, but they help stretch her vocabulary and are a great way to introduce some history. Plus, by reading a few chapters at a time we can spread the reading of stories over days instead of minutes and go through the exercise of recalling what we’ve already read before starting each night.

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And she gets completely lost in the stories. We read three or four chapters each night, and she loves to look ahead at the pictures and try to predict what’s going to happen next. At the end of each book, she loves to go get the next book in the series and see where Jack and Annie will go next.

Keep in mind, she’s five years old. Bug is three and doesn’t quite appreciate the depth of the stories yet. I think her exact words were, “Jack and Annie aw bawing!” And of course, New Baby isn’t a huge fan either since these books aren’t very chewy and don’t have large colored photos.


Last night, something really cool happened while we were reading Magic Tree House #22: Revolutionary War on Wednesday. Pea was looking at the front cover photo of Jack and Annie crossing the Delaware with George Washington, and I was reminded of this post I wrote a while back. I was telling her how I used to lie on her bottom bunk and read a big-grown-up story about the same thing we were reading in the Magic Tree House adventures.

Just like Bug doesn’t quite get the stories on the level Pea does, Pea doesn’t understand how cool it is that she and I sat in the exact same spot and enjoyed the exact same story. Isn’t it cool that she will very likely read this story at least three or four times? I have no doubt she’ll go back and read the Magic Tree House series on her own when she’s able. She’ll also learn about the Revolutionary War and the Christmas night crossing of the Delaware when studying history (non-fiction). And if I am able to influence her, she’ll also catch it again in the historical fiction version I read last year.

We’re already on the hunt for the next series of books we think she may like. Anyone have ideas for kids who love Magic Treehouse?

On The Paul Ryan Pick

August 14, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Idea for a drinking game: a shot of espresso every time you read the words “Paul Ryan” and “math” in the same sentence.

If this guy goes all Ross Perot and starts showing a bunch of charts and graphs printed onto sturdy cardboard, he’s done for. But if he can show those same charts and graph in a Power Point with carefully selected fonts at a Lunch and Learn with free turkey sandwiches, chips, and sodas…well, then his message can’t help but resonate.

I also wonder if the fact that his name is “Paul” factored into the decision at all. Maybe there were hopes that name in itself would carry a few votes?

Technology Class Failure. But…

August 13, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We started school officially today, and Ana charged me with doing a technology session for Pea. I had this grand idea of having her come up with a 6 paneled comic strip that she could create with this cool and simple comic generator I found. Um…yeah…I still forget sometimes that I’m working with a 5 year old attention span. We spent about 15 minutes on that. While it’s a really cool (and free) tool, it takes too long for kids that age to get any results for their efforts.

Lesson learned.

But I was able to salvage our time by doing something that was really easy, entertaining, and hilarious. Why not start with helping her get familiar with a computer keyboard, right? And what if we could work in some sight word exercises, vocabulary expansion, and foreign language practice too? Pea’s Spanish has been suffering lately. She understands fine, but refuses to speak. I think I may have stumbled onto something that will help with that though.

Silly Sentences and Google Translate

 

I wrote some silly sentences on paper, then Pea typed them into Google Translate. She tried to read all the sentences, and she could get most of the words, but I made it just hard enough that she couldn’t read it on her own and was so ridiculous that she wouldn’t get the joke until she listed to it. She loved hearing the silly sentences in Spanish and actually ran to repeat them to Ana. She actually chose to speak Spanish.

Now the challenge is to keep coming up with silly sentences and working the same words over and over until she can read them on her own. She’s already pretty good at finding the letters on the keyboard, but it’s good practice!

August 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Yesterday I tweeted:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/sadcox/status/233294724465844224″]

And today @sallaboutme alerted me to this:

Till I Reach The Highest Ground

August 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I love data analysis. Here’s a look at a snapshot of my week 17 volume and pace comparisons from three different 18 week training periods.

Notes:

  • The other two periods were 2003/2004–I’m much older now.
  • I’m down 20-25 pounds now from where I was for the other two periods.
  • I’m running 3 days/week now instead of 4 back then
  • In 2004 I pretty much stopped training at the end of the program…only 50 miles of running the last month, and that included two 20s. That doesn’t come into play here, but explains the different performance on race day between 2003 and 2004.

I don’t plan on doing this often, but I’m hoping it puts me in a good frame of mind to set a PR.

Week 17 Comparison:

  • 2003: 16.35 miles @ 9:37 avg
  • 2004: 22 miles @ 9:33 avg
  • 2012: 20 miles @ 9:12 avg

I’m so glad that I know more than I knew then.

Marathon Training 17 Weeks Out

August 2, 2012 / / 2 Comments

This is the second week of training using the FIRST program. So far, I like the feeling FIRST gives you of not having to run seemingly every day. But man, there really isn’t any space for relaxing when you are running. Every one of these is a real workout.

I’m a little behind the schedule due to being sick in the first week, but there really isn’t a way to skip workouts in this program. I’m running every other day until I’m back on the schedule, which should happen next week.

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Wednesday

Key Run #1: 13 minute warm-up, 6 x (1 minute fast then 2 min. easy), 13 minute cool-down

Thursday

Mountain bike

Friday

Key Run #2: 2 miles easy, 2 miles @ 8:15-8:30 pace, 2 miles easy

Saturday

Rest, light swim

Sunday

Key Run #3: 9 miles @ 9:15 pace

Monday 

Cycle: recovery

 

Michael Phelps Rant

July 30, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Dear citizens media of the United States,

Michael Phelps doesn’t owe you a damn thing. He doesn’t owe you/us/anybody another gold medal or an explanation about “what happened”. Stop using words like “disaster” and “disappointing” to describe anything he does or doesn’t do at the Olympics.

Ditto for every other athlete competing there in every other sport.

Ditto for every other athlete competing at any other level.

I swim, but I’m not really a swimmer. My longest workouts of an 18 week triathlon training plan are about what real swimmers–even the ones who are a long way from being Olympic athletes-do as a warmup before their main set. And I go about half their speed.

And they do this daily.

At 4:00 am.

And again at 4:00 pm.

For years.

With no real off-season.

What these athletes do is nothing like the trip to the gym that most of us take to “work out”. They aren’t chatting with friends between sets, listening to a 10 song playlist and calling it quits, or watching “Saved By The Bell” reruns on the screen of the cross trainer while they work to the point of almost sweating. I’ve had swimmers who weren’t even D1 level tell me their stories about swimming through their teammates’ vomit floating on the surface of the pool and having their goggles fill with tears from the pain they were suffering during training.

During the cycling road race, I heard one of the commentators mention an East German training tactic of putting a cyclist on the trainer in front of a concrete wall and having them ride for hours looking at nothing, just to build mental toughness. How mentally tough do you have to be to spend all your training staring at a black line on the bottom of a pool?

So, in closing, get off the guy’s ass. He’s been staring at the bottom of a pool for 20 years. So what if he wanted to coast into this Olympics with (relatively) little training and just enjoy the experience of being there and have some fun? He’s done this long enough to know he’ll get what he earned, and that’s something he has to come to terms with on his own (*UPDATE* Coach Vance points this out better than I did after Phelps’ post-race interview).  He’s smart enough to know that he isn’t going to be the best in the world for the next 300 years either.

He doesn’t have to answer to anyone but himself.

The second we see swimmers jump into the pool and splash around like idiots instead of actually trying to win a race, it will be time to complain. Until then, anyone who is “disappointed” when watching (from their sofas or broadcast chairs) any of these athletes’ performances should hit the off button, get up , and go do something about it themselves.

Rinse and repeat for NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA sports, and all little league competition.

</rant>

 

So Use Google Plus

July 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

From Miguel Silencio

I’m sure I’m not alone in receiving those emails with ‘FW:” in the subject line. That’s why I continue to lose interest in Facebook. It has increasingly become a place where many people post everything from the ‘net they deem neat.

I remember telling someone 4 or 5 years ago how Facebook was so great because it wasn’t all spammy like MySpace. That and, “your mom isn’t on there”. Guess where your mom is now? And feel lucky if people are posting the forwards on Facebook instead of continuing to email them. My prediction is that it’s about to get a lot worse…wait and see what Facebook’s earnings are today. Now that they’re beholden to shareholders, something’s going to have to be done to increase their revenues.

There will be ads. Lots of ads. Right along-side all that useless content.

Invest a week into really using Plus. I mean really using it. It doesn’t disappoint.

Well…unless you want them to open up the API. Tick tock.

Already Missed A Training Run – Right On Track

July 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Who would have ever thought I’d wake up with a cold the day of my first training run?

I was very tempted to go out and try to run anyway because I really don’t want to start a program that way, but I thought better of it. I’ve actually tried that before, and I did not have a speedy recovery. I generally don’t go back and pick up missed runs in a training program because they are so small in the big picture. However, I’m trying a three day a week program for this race, and I think I’d be better off skipping one of the cross training days and making sure I get my runs in. I’ll just push the long run out a little further and I can be back on my planned schedule within a week.

Then again, the run I missed was an interval workout. Maybe I could skip it…just this once.

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