In our current apartment, we live on the 9th floor.  We also have a patio, which is awesome.

Kristine and I decided that we should have a patio garden, and so after a handful of trips to Lowes and to Oaks Gardens, we have flowers, herbs, tomatoes, and peppers growing in our patio “garden”.

Here are some pictures:

More after the jump!

Then, I spent some time analyzing the metadata of the pictures, and adding additional tags to the photos.

Finally, I used Photoshop to crop squares out of the pictures, and posted them all in a grid.

Enjoy!

Back in November of 2009, I decided that I needed some kind of fitness goal. I was involved in intramurals and used to walk a lot around campus back in college, but since that point my daily exercise now normally consists of video games.

I decided that the Broad Street Run was the way to go. It’s a 10-mile race in Philadelphia that’s been held for more than 30 years, and the course is a simple straight line down Broad Street, starting up near Onely Street, a slight curve around City Hall, and all the way down until you hit the Naval Yard.

I started training post-Thanksgiving, giving myself about five months to go from my couch to a ten mile mark. So, how do you get from zero miles to ten miles? I asked Google.

I found a site with two good pages. One talked about how to go from nothing to a 5K (3.1m) in about 2 months, and then the second page talked about going from a 5K to 10 miles. Perfect! I mapped out my weekly plan for when and how much I needed to run each week, and set out to work.

Unfortunately, I didn’t stick with the plan. As a busy man who is always parasailing with movie stars, I would sometimes push out or completely skip workouts. Here’s a chart comparing the max mileage I should have been doing against an approximation of what I actually did.

I haven’t been keeping on track with the pace I wanted, but what I have noticed is that I can go much longer distances at a higher pace without stopping or slowing down. When I started, I could hardly go a 1/2 mile without slowing down to a walk. Now, I can get through 2 miles at a high pace when I run outside, and can easily get through a 5K on a treadmill without slowing down.

In the meantime, I also found a running group that I joined, called KOP Runners.  It’s a small group of relatively new people to running, and it was a great fit for my beginner status.

Skip ahead to April. I’ve been happily chugging along with training, but haven’t done any races yet. I set out a schedule to quickly ramp up distances in the final month leading up to the Broad Street Run.

04-11-10: Penn Colleges Against Cancer 5K – 38:03 (12:15 min/mi)
04-18-10: Valley Forge Revolutionary Run 5-Mile – 54:14 (10:51 min/mi)
04-26-10: Miami Beach Boardwalk Run 8-Mile (Self-Timed) – 1:35 (11:57 min/mi)
05-02-10: Broad Street Run 10-Mile – ???

I’ve also found a great iPhone Application called RunKeeper, which uses the GPS in your phone to ping your location, and give you real-time feedback on speed and mileage.  It also has LiveTracking of events, so the goal is to use it during the Broad Street Run to let people know where I am at the race (and where to find me if I collapse during the race).

Bookmark this link and follow my progress on race day! http://runkeeper.com/user/coreyhulse/activities

I’m hoping to finish the race in 2:10, giving me a 13:00 min/mi pace.  Is it fast? No, of course not. But it will be an accomplishment for someone who’s idea of exercise is watching sports on TV.

Update: I’ve completed the Broad Street Run!  2:01:52 (12:11 mi/min), beating my anticipated time by about eight minutes.  When I got to the final mile, I gave it a push to finish in under two hours, but I new I had to pace myself properly.  However, this gives me motivation to come back next year and try to get it under two hours.

So what’s next?  I’m debating doing a half-marathon, and there’s the Rock n’ Roll Half-Marathon in September.  Hmmmm… Stay tuned, sports fans.

Yes.  Yes it has.

Things have been crazy busy as of late.  There’s been a lot of travel the past two months, especially in August, where I logged over 8,500 miles by airplane.  September, while not as crazy, still had three trips by plane and included a very crazy weekend of moving out of Center City Philadelphia to a new home in King of Prussia, PA.

And even though I haven’t updated the Project 365 site in a while, I’m still taking pictures, and look to hopefully have some spare time in the future to get them all processed and uploaded.

In the meantime, I wrote a feature on my other site, Awesomeopolis, about the new facial recognition features in Picasa 3.5, so you should check that out.

A lot of offense by both teams, including a beauty of a grand slam by Angel Pagan.

And, as luck would have it, I was able to snap a picture as soon as it left Pagan’s bat.

All in all, a good time.  Let’s Go Mets!

After combing the desert to decide on the pictures, I’ve come up with 36 of them.  Enjoy!

2005 – 4th of July – Philadelphia

2005 – 4th of July – Philadelphia

See more pictures after the jump!

2007 – March 25 – Virginia Tech Ring Dance Midnight Fireworks

2008 – 3rd of July – Manasquan, NJ

2008 – 4th of July – Philadelphia, PA

2009 – 4th of July – Philadelphia, PA

However, one things I have been able to keep up on is my Project 365 site, a photography project I started in January where the goal is to make sure you take a picture every day.

And here it is, July 2, and out of 181 days, I’ve only missed two so far.

You can access the site here and look at things in reverse chronological order. However, one of the great things about doing the pictures in WordPress is that I’ve been able to tag photos so that they can be grouped together into different themes.

For example, here are some of my favorite tags:

• Animal
• Before and After – (Currently only one set, but I’d like to do more)
• Bowling
• Chicken Tikka Faces – (What happens when I play with my food)
• Fail – (For the days when I goof and don’t take a picture, I make a photoshop to commemorate the fail)
• Food – (43 of the pictures from the first half of the year are of food!)
• Outside My Window – (Looking out of my window on the 18th floor of my apartment building)
• Roots – (I had a baby spider plant that I put in a clear glass, and I’ve been taking periodic pictures of it over the past few months.  You can really see the roots develop!)
• Seasons - (The goal is to take a picture from the same spot in Rittenhouse Square during each season, and I have Winter and Spring so far)
• Self-Portrait
• Technology

I’ve also been inspired lately by a story about Jamie Livingston, who took a Polaroid EVERY DAY from 1979 to the day he passed away in 1997.  Mental Floss has a very nice write-up about the site if you’d like to read more about it.  This would be really awesome if I could keep this up for 18+  years.

And, for your viewing pleasure, I’ve used the collage feature of Picasa to put together a quick grid of all the pictures that I’ve taken so far.

• Started the week in Las Vegas to celebrate Kristine’s birthday.
• Saw Phantom of the Opera.  It was alright?  Lots of blinding indoor fireworks.
• After my bad In-N-Out experience the week before, followed it up with a very tasty In-N-Out experience.
• Tried country fried steak for the first time ever.
• Lots of travel! LAS to PHL (2173 miles flying), then PA to NJ to MA to NH to NJ to PA (820 miles driving) .
• Bowled a 490 in the last week of the season, our team got crushed 17-8, and we didn’t make the playoffs.
• Had McDonald’s for the first time in a long while.  It was a bad choice.
• Watched my younger brother graduate college from Franklin Pierce.
• Got roped in to clearing out my brother’s dorm room after the graduation ceremony.
• Took my siblings to a local park in New Jersey.
• Tweet of the Week: “My brother Billy, 11: ‘Why doesn’t the iPhone keyboard flip when you turn it sideways when texting?’ Good question, Billy. #iphonefail”

• Bowled a 645. In my league, there are four quarters, and the champion of each quarter plus the two runner-ups in total points make it to the playoffs.  We’re currently in second place and there is one week left.  There are 25 points up for grabs, and we need to win by 9 points to take first place and make the playoffs.
• 2260 miles of flying this week.  PHL to BNA to LAS.
• Awesomeopolis went viral with our “Badass TV Character Bracket” when we got linked from a USA Today blog post.
• Had a bad experience at In-N-Out.  The grilled onions were burnt and ruined the burger.
• Slowly catching up on Season 3 of How I Met Your Mother.