After watching Garden State last night, I had some family issues on my mind and I took some time to call home today. As it turns out, my dad is going in for hip replacement surgery this week. At least I found out before hand.

I shouldn't be surprised that information doesn't flow to me that well. Most of my family isn't well connected to the internet and don't really care to be. Since I'm an ocean away, contact is relatively sparse.

I certainly hope that everything goes well. All surgery, no matter how common, is scary to me. All invasive medicine is scary.

I've been meaning to get a new volleyball for a while. The one that I had was painful to work with. In the store, it seemed fine, but I couldn't handle hitting it for more than half an hour on end. So I finally got myself down to Sports Distributors and picked up a Tachikara. I remember a few of the club teams using them down in Christchurch, and having spent a bit of time with one down at the YMCA over the last week, I'm more than happy with the feel of them.

Now to find people who want to spend as much time with the ball as I do.

I wasn't even out that long. I had my heartrate monitor on for the trip and I recorded the time that I was out there. 1:36:40. Of course, I'd be stupid to think that it would take longer than that for the sun to get to me. But now, I've got a bit of heat coming off of my forehead, and I'm going to be applying aloe at regular intervals for the next while. I was hoping that I would have learned after the last one. Actually, I think I hope I would have learned after each last one.

On the other hand, I have something to look forward to now. I was talking with a friend of mine and had mentioned City To Surf down in Christchurch. She's keen to do the running part and suggested that we head down for that. I'd love to. It will give me a target for training and it would be nice to try to beat my time last year (but I can't remember what it was). There hasn't been any announcement for when it will be run this year, but I'm expecting it to be in the first couple weekends of March.