I was going through all my photos from yesterday’s 5km race and I noticed that I caught three pictures of the Flash as he passed the people waiting at Pretoria Bridge. The reaction of the crowd to this speedy runner is quite amusing. In the picture to the right, you can see the people in the background laughing as he rounded the corner.

A few seconds later, he was checked out by another spectator as he ran past her…

You can make up your own captions.

I just looked at my blog and realized that it’s been a month since my last post. I think this is the longest break I’ve taken from blogging and given that it came not too long after having blogged most of the days in the previous month it might be safe to say that I suffered a bit of blogging burnout.

It’s not like I haven’t been up to anything. There have been lots of blog-worthy things in the last month, such as chasing an amateur radio weather balloon a couple of weeks ago and successfully recovering it from the St. Lawrence River (see Bob’s write-up and a mention on the LASA blog, too), the start of the 2011 dragonboating season earlier this week, and, of course, the recent federal election. But when push came to shove writing about these seemed too much like work. I may yet write about the balloon chase because there were a lot of lessons learned and I’ll probably mention dragonboating at some point, but it’s unlikely I’ll write about the election.

During the haitus I had a blog entry on geocaching published on the Local Tourist Ottawa blog, but even they had to chase after me for a two-sentence bio blurb. (Sorry Jessey and Amy!) I’m very happy with the way the entry turned out, so I may write some future content and see if they’ll publish it.

The arrival of the nice weather (finally!) has spurred on my interest to be outdoors, so I’ve been getting out to go geocaching more frequently. So far this year I’ve logged 65 finds, compared to 86 finds in 2010.

A recent edition of the Podcacher podcast talked about caching burnout. For myself, geocaching isn’t about the numbers, but there are a lot of cachers for whom it is. They have to hit that next milestone or do a 1000+ cache power trail or fill in the holes in their geocaching calendar (days of the year they’ve found a cache), all of which are excellent ways to burn yourself out because you’ll eventually find yourself caching to hit some artificial goal rather than caching to have fun. I think blogging can suffer from a similar thing where you find yourself blogging to ensure the calendar doesn’t have a gap or because you’re trying to increase your readership.

Neither of these are particularly important to me. If the little calendar on the left has a gap in it, that’s ok. If I don’t have as many readers as my friends who blog, that’s ok, too. While I am always happy to see an increase in the number of hits, ultimately I’m writing my blog for myself. I’m not using it as a revenue generation stream (if I was then there would be ads everywhere) so if only a handful of people read it, that’s ok.

But if you want to tell all your friends about my blog, I’m ok with that, too! 🙂

My day started well enough:

I suspect that it’s not going to end as well. I’m flying back to Ottawa via Chicago and already my first flight has been delayed by the better part of two hours due to the weather in Chicago. Fortunately, I have a long time between flights, so I should be able to make my connection. Some of my fellow travellers are not as lucky.

I heard there might be some snow in store for Ottawa, so I thought I’d share a short video of how I spent my Sunday afternoon.

When did stop signs become suggestions instead of a requirement?

I was waiting outside my friend’s house on the way to the climbing gym this afternoon and over the course of five to ten minutes none of the cars that went through a three-way stop down the road came to a complete stop. Many of them, in particular those that were turning right, barely touched their brakes before going through the intersection. Of those that did touch their brakes, they did what can only generously be described as rolling stops.

On more than one occasion at four-way intersections within a block of where I live I’ve pulled up to the stop sign and come to a full stop only to watch people from the cross street roll through the intersection as though their stop sign didn’t exist. Fortunately, I was paying attention so I didn’t get hit, but less attentive drivers could find themselves in an accident.

This problem has gotten worse over the last couple of years. A little more enforcement of one of the basic rules of the road is probably in order.