Had a nice (albeit quick) meeting with Dr. Corboy, who checked over my knee/ITB and said it would be OK for me to run in the HMSA 25K (the 2nd of the Houston Marathon warm-up series) this Sunday. YAY!

Dr. Corboy checked my knee and confirmed that my problems were IT band related. I have some fluid in my knee, but nothing that should prevent me from running on Sunday….and more importantly, in January. She showed me some stretches to do, said I should stop at water stops to stretch if necessary and gave me some info about a Rice University professor who created a sports injury website explaining IT band syndrome.

I’m so happy that Dr. Corboy practices at Baylor Family Medicine. She specializes in women’s sports injuries, particularly those related to running…..and best of all, she’s run at least 11 marathons herself!! She said she and her husband (also a runner, and a physician at the clinic) are training for the Tuscon Marathon in December, so she won’t be doing the 25K this weekend. I really, really wanted to talk to he in more detail about her Marathon training strategies, marathon experiences, experience treating female athletes, the types of injuries/problems she sees most often in women runners, etc…..but she was late for another appointment and I had to get to the office.

I’m looking forward to seeing my fellow Houston Running Bloggers and fabulous Houston Striders at the race this Sunday!!

• The repairs on my beloved car are complete, and I’ll be able to pick it up tomorrow. Allstate has been pretty good about handing this claim. I was expecting things to be much more complicated since the guy who hit me had no insurance, etc….but everything’s been very smooth.
• I’m having some serious allergies this week. My eyes have been red and itchy, and I haven’t been able to wear my contacts for the past 3 days. I’m feeling a bit loopy from the liquid Benadryl my boss gave me and I’m about to leave to attend a Council meeting. This should make for an interesting Council meeting.
• I’m finally buying a digital camera. No more relying on my crappy cameraphone. Plus, I haven’t been able to share pictures of my “new” (adopted her in September) kitty, Blossum. She’s so sweet and very, very cute.
• My fish tank is rocking. I may also start breeding/raising killifish from Thailand and Pseudomugilidae rainbowfish from Papua New Guinea. More fishgeek info to come.
• I’m still in the process of moving escapevelocity over to Wordpress. I’ve set up a temporary working site, started tweaking the settings, giving myself a crash course in CSS and PHP (surprisingly much easier than I thought) and generally just getting orientated to the WP admin interface. This is all happening “behind the scenes,” so until the new WP site is setup, you’ll continue to see this website in its current Blogger setting. I do have to say, I’m excited about the changes and the new overall look for escapevelocity.

Overall, I think Texas - and the South - gets unfairly judged by people (who really should know better) who think it’s all cowboys, rednecks, KKK and GWB clones. Sure, if you drive through super rural parts of east Texas, Alabama, etc., then you’ll find that. But you’ll also find that in super rural areas all over the country, not just Texas or the South. People also want to apply these stereotypes to places like Houston, Austin, San Antonio and even Dallas (my least favorite Texas metropolis). Sure, I loved the years I spent in NYC, but I’ve also become pretty happy here in Htown.

But tonight, I’m (sadly) reminded that Texas is, indeed, a red state.

Twenty six percent. That’s the measley percentage of voters against Proposition 2, which amends the Texas constitution to ban gay marriage. Of the 12.3 million registered voters in Texas, only 452,000 showed up to vote….and only 117,000 of us were against Prop 2. That’s pathetic.

My only consolation is that I found some Sabritones while shopping at Big Lots. Mexican puffed wheat snacks. Yum.

*sigh*

After almost 5 days of being broken, escapevelocity is back online. Some of you may have seen my cheesy “help, escapevelocity is broken” welcome page. The troubles started with a Blogger error message that would pop up everytime I tried to publish a post:

After a bit of research, it appeared this error message was related to ftp access priviledges. I hadn’t made any recent changes to either my Blogger or webhost settings so this didn’t make any sense, but I went ahead and made the recommended changes to my Blogger account - changed the ftp address to the actual IP address and a few other tweaks. No luck. The rest of the week was spent emailing back and forth with my webhost’s technical support department, trying to figure out why my account was suddenly blocking anything from Blogger.

In the end, escapevelocity was fixed with voodoo magic, and I am in the process of moving to Wordpress. Stay tuned for updates.