For my friends contemplating their first tri, here's what I learned the first time around:

• A "sprint" tri has much shorter distances: typcially 1/2 mile swim, 12.4 mile bike and 5k run
• If swimming is *not* a possibility, you can do a "dri-tri" - run, bike, run instead of swim, bike, run
• If you find the idea of a mass start in the swim intimidating, find a race with a timed start

The big local race that provides all of these options is the Women's Only Tri & Dri-Tri in Sylvania, OH: http://www.trifind.com/re_32990/WomensOnlyTriathlonandDriTri.html. I've heard this race recommended many times for beginners, and personally found it to be a great place to start! Everyone in this race is so supportive it doesn't seem like a race - competitiors are cheering each other on!

If you're looking for a crew to train with in the Ann Arbor area, check out Joust Fitness. Their cross training is awesome, and Melissa's running coaching gave my 5k time a huge boost! Several Jousters participated in the Sylania tri last year, and brought home at least one medal. :)

A little girl went to her bedroom and pulled a glass jelly jar from its hiding place in the closet. 

She poured the change out on the floor and counted it carefully. Three times, even. The total had to be exactly perfect. No chance here for mistakes. 

Carefully placing the coins back in the jar and twisting on the cap, she slipped out the back door and made her way six blocks to the Rexall Drugs store with the big red Indian Chief sign above the door. 

She waited patiently for the pharmacist to give her some attention, but he was too busy at this moment. Tess twisted her feet to make a scuffing noise. Nothing. She cleared her throat with the most disgusting sound she could muster. No good. Finally she took a quarter from her jar and banged it on the glass counter. That did it! 

"And what do you want?" the pharmacist asked in an annoyed tone of voice. I'm talking to my brother from Chicago whom I haven't seen in ages," he said without waiting for a reply to his question.

"Well, I want to talk to you about my brother," Tess answered back in the same annoyed tone. "He's really, really sick... and I want to buy a miracle." 

"I beg your pardon?" said the pharmacist. 

"His name is Andrew and he has something bad growing inside his head and my Daddy says only a miracle can save him now. So how much does a miracle cost?" 

"We don't sell miracles here, little girl. I'm sorry but I can't help you," the pharmacist said, softening a little.

"Listen, I have the money to pay for it. If it isn't enough, I will get the rest. Just tell me how much it costs." 

The pharmacist's brother was a well dressed man. He stooped down and asked the little girl, "What kind of a miracle does your brother need?" 

"I don't know," Tess replied with her eyes welling up. I just know he's really sick and Mommy says he needs an operation. But my Daddy can't pay for it, so I want to use my money." 

"How much do you have?" asked the man from Chicago. 

"One dollar and eleven cents," Tess answered barely audible. 

"And it's all the money I have, but I can get some more if I need to." 

"Well, what a coincidence," smiled the man. "A dollar and eleven cents--the exact price of a miracle for little brothers." 

He took her money in one hand and with the other hand he grasped her mitten and said, "Take me to where you live. I want to see your brother and meet your parents. Let's see if I have the miracle you need." 

That well-dressed man was Dr. Carlton Armstrong, a surgeon, specializing in neuro-surgery. The operation was completed free of charge and it wasn't long until Andrew was home again and doing well. 

Mom and Dad were happily talking about the chain of events that had led them to this place. 

"That surgery" her Mom whispered, "was a real miracle. I wonder how much it would have cost?" 

Tess smiled. She knew exactly how much a miracle cost... one dollar and eleven cents... plus the faith of a little child. 

In our lives, we never know how many miracles we will need. 

A miracle is not the suspension of natural law, but the operation of a higher law.

-- This arrived in my email as a chain letter. I can't speak for its truth in the details, but I have witnessed enough similar situations to believe in exactly these sort of miracles. Keep believing!

Quick Background: One of my long-term volunteer efforts has been with a Michigan organization called Great Commission Air. Short-ish version is that a fellow female techie friend (Jennifer Rice) shifted gears from computers to planes, and I and my family have enjoyed watching the amazing transition. Their "long range plan" happened in a matter of months, and soon they were living overseas and living their dream of helping others. They happen to be in the states right now (that involves a much longer story about a crashed/totaled plane which they're on the verge of replacing), and they are willing and able to provide relief efforts to Haiti as Rob Rice (Jennifer's husband) described to me in this email today:

"Our good friend Tony Zarinia, Spirit Airlines, has a Casa 212 and a Twin Otter with crews that we can stage in Florida and start loading with relief supplies and volunteers.

We would have to fly them to airstrips other than Port Au Prince but we can get close. We need money to run the planes and buy fuel. I am confident that the supplies are going to be waiting in trucks at the airport in Florida. I am on my way now to NM to look at a U206 that GCA may buy and we would like to station either the 337 or the 206 (smaller planes) in Dominican Republic and ferry relief supplies and volunteers from there to the smaller airstrips."

Update 1/16/09:

For now, we are looking at being based in Puerto Rico to fly in supplies. Right now plans are tentative for Rob to depart on Monday for Florida where he will load up supplies and travel to an island off the coast of Haiti to help a school of 400 kids whom has 200 people sleeping on the grounds and report they have almost no water and food. This is exactly the type of need that will fall through the cracks without small planes to help.

Update 1/18/09:

Rob will be there 2 weeks to serve the orphanage and school and then can extend his stay or return. While he is there, he will investigate how to get GCA involved (right now, he is working as GCA by serving as a co-pilot).

I've tried more than a few tools, software and otherwise, to help organize my legions of to-dos. Two kids, a house, a business to run, a handful of volunteer positions and in general being an idea person, leads to way too many things to track/prioritize easily.

As far as software goes, I've recently tried (and given up on) Omni Plan, Remember the Milk, and IWantSandy. All have redeeming qualities, but none fit the way I work well enough to not wind up being work in-and-of-themselves. So I reverted back to my default system - post-it notes. 

But post-its don't practically capture the to-do's from an inbox, so it's not a perfect system. Today, a friend introduced me to a handful of tools that might actually work. (Thanks, Marisa!) She's been trying these tools (for the Mac) long enough to recommend them, so I'm brave enough to give them a try. Here's a quick list:

* The "coolest concept" is Concentrate - an app that essentially creates macros for different kinds of tasks. So when it's time for me to pay bills, I switch to that task and it turns of Tweetdeck and opens up a web browser with my bank website in it, and changes my status in IM, etc. The icon for the app is an orange - a play on orange juice concentrate which they have fun with. :-) It also saves your time on a task - so I'll be curious to see if it integrates with Basecamp. That would be another huge plus!

* The "task manager" is Things - an app that allows you to create a new task at any time by clicking control+space, and then allows you to tag and schedule the task in the same step. This allows you to create a task while in your mail program so you can easily cut and paste - and not use your inbox as a to-do list! Tasks can later be easily dragged and dropped to different categories, dates, etc. Aside from the ease of creating new tasks, this tools looks promising because it shows you only the to-dos scheduled for "Today" so the list doesn't become overwhelming. You also have the option to view tasks by tag, so if I had tasks tagged that I needed to discuss with Marisa next time we met, I'd pull out that tag when we meet and have an instant agenda. 

* The last tool is like "Finder on steroids". It's called Tap Tap. With two clicks of the command key, a window opens that finds anything on your Mac. It takes a bit of time to index, and a bit of time to configure, but I'm locating things much faster this way without having to load up my doc with gobs of applications, etc.

All of these apps include a free trial, so you can sample them before making a purchase. And they're all inexpensive.

Here's hoping you're off to a productive new year!

Catherine

My favorite small world story for this month is meeting Miguel da Rocha Cavalcanti from Brazil at the Small Giants conference in D.C. He's from a company called AgriPoint. They are a consultancy specializing in the brazilian beef, dairy, sheep and coffee industries. So even in D.C. I wind up talking about farming...  And it turns out that Miguel has been to Iowa State University (a short drive from my hometown), and wound up lecturing in an ISU sweatshirt when his luggage got lost in previous tour of the U.S! Funny the connections we make in this small world!

Follow Miguel @mcavalcanti because he has #GotMojo!

My Saturday morning was all set - breakfast and biz at Zingerman's (@ZingBakehouse)... Until I did the routine sleepy-eyed check of my Blackberry email. Thanks to a detailed heads-up from David Bloom (@factotem) I now knew that the cereal survey I completed almost two weeks ago wasn't just a one-time or two-time issue - my Twitter account had truly been hacked. Dang.

The true bummer was that I thought I had already fixed it, because I changed my Twitter password yesterday when I suspected something was up. But David got a spammy DM from me this morning, AFTER I changed the password. Not good.

However, I think I've got it fixed (for real this time), and I'll tell you what to do in case this happens to you - but before that, perhaps you can learn something from my mistake so you can avoid this situation altogether.

I'm reasonably careful about the stuff about the stuff I retweet - it comes from a source I trust one way or another. This case was a proverbial perfect storm that served as a nice little wake-up call for me.

This all started with a DM from a guy at Kellogg (or an impersonator - I may never know). Because we've worked with Kellogg and because the group we worked with was so impressive, I'd be glad to help them out however I can. (Honestly, I wouldn't have dreamed in a million years that the ecommerce division for a cereal company would be so innovative. I am in awe.)

Anyway, I didn't know the particular guy who sent me the tweet, but the profile looked real, and he was following me, so everything seemed to check out. The cereal survey he sent me included Frosted Flakes, and I since I believe Tony the Tiger is the coolest cereal mascot of all time, I'll vote for him, no problem. I'll even click the "ShareThis" (@ShareThis) button because I consider ShareThis a trusted a source, and never dreamed the next message I would see would be "Congratulations! All your followers have been notified!" (or something along those lines). Stomach pang #1.

Went to dm the guy that sent me the survey to ask him if he had the same problem, etc. and he no longer following me. Stomach pang #2.

However, no use crying over spilt milk at that point. The damage was already done. Surely it was a one- time thing. I posted an apology to my Twitter and figured that was the end of it, except for a string of entertaining updates about the favorite cereal preferences of my followers. A few followers told me they thought I had been hacked, but like I said, I figured it was a one-time thing and the cereal emails soon stopped.

A week later, I got another string of replies. Stomach pang #3 - they must be CONTINUING to spam my followers. Yikes. Better do something. Changed my Twitter password, figured all was well. The email from David Bloom brought stomach pang #4. I figured wrong.

Thank goodness Twitter had a nice little help page about how to fix a hacked Twitter account (http://bit.ly/XLvL4). Here’s the part that hadn’t dawned on me: I needed to change my password in OTHER Twitter applications, too.

Now the fact that TweetDeck (@TweetDeck) hadn’t been working yesterday, and that the API looked oddly pegged out made sense. I had just used CoTweet (@CoTweet) instead because there wasn’t time to contemplate the issue. Stomach pain #5. Why didn’t that dawn on me? Sigh…

So I changed my Twitter password, and tried logging back in. I got another message that I had been locked out of my account for too many login attempts. No stomach pains this time, though. That’s progress!

It’s not a fair comparison, but I thought of Linda Anger celebrating her hair falling out from chemo (http://bit.ly/1wXN5a), because that’s how she knew the treatments were working. In this case, I figured I was making progress, because someone was trying to get into my account and couldn’t – and I knew from the Twitter help pages that they shut accounts down for just an hour when this happens, so I wouldn’t have to wait long.

Tried an hour later to log in again – the account was still locked down. Tiny stomach pain #6 – what happens if they don’t stop trying to log in? How will I get back into my account? I’ll just hope it works next time I try…

It’s now almost 4 pm (how did that happen?!) and I’m back in my account. Got some stuff accomplished at Zingerman’s, but my coffee date will tell you I was terribly distracted by this mess. I’m just glad it’s over. I hope…

(P.S. I’m curious – CoTweet didn’t seem to be impacted by this, while TweetDeck was – does that mean that it’s important to use applications like CoTweet that use OAuth that securely manage API authorizations???)

We managed to get the "whole" family together today - my mom and her brother, and me and my brother - and everyone's spouses. My Dad and his brother were both drafted into Vietnam, and both served in the Navy - so Navy stories are not uncommon at family gatherings. But this time, the talk turned to a program that HyVee (a regional employee-owned grocery store) was running to send World War II vets to see the memorial in D.C.

It's a pretty incredible story - HyVee spent $250,000 to charter a plane and allow hundreds of vets from central Iowa to see the memorial - some for the first time. One of the guys who was able to go on the "honor flight" went to my uncle's church - and was there in Iwoa Jima when they raised they flag - he was close enough to watch it happen. How neat to give him the opportunity to visit the memorial! Apparently their plane was met in D.C. by quite a crew; it sounded like anyone who had any connection to the families showed up to meet them. It's not hard to imagine what a moving experience that must have been... And it wasn't hard to see that it was just about as meaningful to the Vietnam vets sitting around the dining room table.

Here's an article by the local news station with more details: http://www.kcci.com/news/19795916/detail.html.

Please note: HyVee is continuing fundraising to send another group of vets who weren't able to make the first flight. Details on the program and on making a contribution can be found at the HyVee site: http://www.hy-vee.com/company/community/honor-flight.aspx.