I woke up at 5:30 this morning. On iChat, Rob said: “Twilight isn’t until 6:30, dawn isn’t until 6:50.” Then he asked if we could go running later in the day.

Well, okay. But just this once.

Generally, I like to get my exercise out of the way early in the day, so that I will be sure to do it. Also, I am terribly selfish and want to use my kids-in-school time for something like writing. But the writing has really sucked recently, and I hoped that, as has been promised by so many people extolling the benefits of exercise, a mid-day run might spur me on to great thoughts.

(I actually deserve a prize for the amount of exercise I do, given that I get few to none of the benefits claimed by it. Weight loss? Ha, I’m doing 15-20 hard miles a week, up and down hill trails, and my weight hasn’t budged. Energy? Exercise makes me tired. Very, very tired. So tired, in fact, that a doctor made me go get blood work, because he said, “No, it’s supposed to invigorate you.” I’m now on thyroid medication. I still get tired during runs though.)

We met at Rancho San Antonio, a simply gorgeous nature preserve. We have our “usual” run there, which is about 4.5 miles and involves running up a hill. (You can use the Rancho Runner and plug in “1aef3upstu3fea1″ to check out our run.) Usually when I exercise in the middle of the day it’s in a nice indoor gym, cooled by fans at the very least. But this was outside at 11:30, sunny, warm but not too warm. I warned Rob to expect a not-great run: “We’re not going to be able to do this in our usual hour and two minutes. Just so you know.” My other excuse, at the ready, was that I had just walked a mile and a half taking Sophia to school.

We started off and my legs felt like they were made of lead. I thought, I’m going to have to ask him to do the short 3 mile run. (Yes, I’m actually at the point where five miles is the default and three miles is light. Woot.) I didn’t get any peppier on the way up, although I was able to wait for our walking breaks (going up the hill we do four minutes running, one walking) and not make my own, the way I have, er, once or twice in the past. I did apologize to Rob for going slower than your average garden snail on the way up and he said, “Enh. I’m not in this for the speed record.”* Rob has been having an easier and easier time with our runs, because over the past couple of months he’s dropped 43 pounds, mostly due to the liquid diet he’s on, but also because he’s become Exercise Boy — he does these three runs a week, plus takes a three day-a-week exercise class at the Fitness Center.

We got up to the top and then began the long run down. We don’t take walking breaks on the way down because, well, gravity’s doing its part and we feel obligated to take advantage of it. I thought I’d need a walk when we reached the bottom, but instead we kept going. Several times during the mile back to the parking lot I found myself thinking, “I can’t do this. I need to walk. In just a second, I’m going to ask for a walking break.” But I didn’t, and soon we were back at the bridge to the parking lot.

Rob looked at his watch. “You were right. We didn’t make a hour two.”

“What was it?” I expect

“An hour one.”

Wow.

I mean, I felt like hell after that run, but evidently we’d done even faster than we ever had before.

And even if I don’t get anything else done today — and, to be honest, it’s kind of looking like I won’t — at least I’ve done that.

* – Not a direct quote. Where other people are concerned, they rarely are, to be honest.

Today’s the day for Sophia to return the library book she took out of the school library, and in our rush to pack up the house (the floors are finally getting finished! yay!) I think we must have packed it somewhere.

Great: in school three weeks, I’ve already marked her as “The kid who loses school library books.”

Now that I’ve, you know, told it that I’m using MovableType. (Duh.)

Really fast feedback on the ME mailing list too…

(Convert Line Breaks?)

This is a test of MarsEdit, the weblog entry editor from Ranchero. They also do NetNewsWire, which is my new favorite app, as I’ve just discovered RSS feeds. (Yes. I am behind the curve on everything. I am still trying to figure out ringtones. I am an old fogey.)

I don’t know if I really need an automatic entry writer/uploader — isn’t that what BBEdit is for? — but maybe it’ll be the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Update: Hmmm. Needed to do some editing of the posted entry, because there’s no “Title” on the MarsEdit menu. (Same problem I had with MacJournal.) Off to see if there’s a fix somewhere…

First I’m a year behind with “blogs” and “blogging software,” and now this: at long last I’ve discovered the joy of RSS feeds. I have been using Blogrolling to maintain my list of blogs, and you can see I still have a gigantic list of blogs over to the right. But if you’re wondering why your blog was on there and is no longer, I’ve probably moved it to my RSS and Atom newsreader, NetNewsWire.

And if you don’t have an RSS feed on your blog. Make one. ‘Cause I’m gonna stop reading your blog, and so are a bunch of other people.

For those of you as ignorant of RSS as I was a week ago, RSS (who cares what the acronym stands for? but if you must know, it stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a way to distribute the headlines and content of…well, just about anything. Blogs, news sites, updates to the Wikipedia.

I was refreshing my Blogroll 20 times a day, to see if the little “updated” icon showed up next to a blog. And sometimes I’d already seen the post, but the updated icon stayed there for the requisite number of hours, during which time the blog might have updated again. Then for a couple of weeks (it seemed), Blogrolling was down, so there were a whole bunch of blogs I never visited, not realizing they had been updated. And I kept visiting other blogs over and over again, hoping to see if they’d been updated.

I don’t need to do this any more. Now I click the “Refresh All” button in NetNewsWire and it shows me the headlines of new articles in my favorite blogs. And if the blog is syndicating using RSS 2.0, I get the whole entry. If it’s using RSS 1.0, I get the first paragraph or so, at which point I click the link and new tab with the blog opens up.

I’m slowly trying to delete the blogs I have a feed for off my Blogroll. I’m frustrated by how many blogs don’t use RSS: if your host doesn’t provide RSS/Atom support, I think you can sign up with Feedburner to make a feed. And if you don’t have any good RSS reading software, like NetNewsWire or Safari, you can use Bloglines.

I guess the downside of all this is that now there’s instant notification of new posts, which means my desire for even more new stuff grows. But it’s way cool and I’ll be very annoyed with you if you don’t syndicate.

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I told Darin I was using NetNewsWire instead of Safari to read blogs using RSS. He sighed and said, “Well, at least they’re using WebKit.” (A project Darin also works on.)

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Update: Apparently my RSS feed looks wonky. Waaah. And how come certain headlines keep showing up as new, even after I’ve read them? Do they show up as new if they get edited or something? (Corrente is an especial offender: its headlines are always renewing themselves.)

And I was going to attempt to explain the differences between RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom — but why should I, when there are better-informed people out there to do it for me?