This past Memorial Day weekend I ran the Buffalo Marathon & successfully completed it with a chip time of 3:29:53 (8:01/mile average pace), just reaching the goal I’d secretly set of a time somewhere in the 3:20s and besting my previous 2007 Niagara Falls time by nearly 9 minutes. Overall, I finished 124 out of 710 full marathon finishers & 8/43 in my age group. (Detailed results can be found by following the link from the results page.)
After 4 apartments in three cities after graduating college & with the amount of gray hair I’m starting to show, I figured it was time to buy a house. A couple months of looking later, I ended up purchasing the one below:
The house is located in North Boston, NY. Most people who I work with gasp at how far away they think it is when I tell them this, as most of them aren’t familiar with the Buffalo Southtowns, but I’m literally within walking distance of both Hamburg and Orchard Park. When I first visited this house, I was focusing on searching in Hamburg. After looking at several in the Village of Hamburg one day, my real estate agent & I headed to this one. As we left the village & passed the Hamburg town golf course, I began to wonder where we were headed. When we crossed under the 219, I didn’t think I’d have any interest in living in the area, but once I saw the house, I loved it.
The 219 turned out to be it’s saving grace as well – I’m two farmers fields & a row of houses away from the Boston State Road (aka Route 391) entrance. A ride to work at UB with no traffic and good weather takes 25 minutes (it will take longer in the winter). Coincidently enough, the distance from work to the house is 26.2 miles (the distance of a marathon). While I do have do have a Hamburg address & pay Hamburg school taxes, the selling real estate agent had mis marked the house as being in Hamburg – had she listed it correctly as being in North Boston, I probably never would have looked at it.
The house was built in 1958. It is a 3 bedroom ranch of ~1100 square feet, with a car and a half attached garage. The roof was put on in 2006 & fresh paint and Berber carpet was put in right before I purchased it. The inside is very bright, with floor to ceiling windows in the (updated) kitchen and a picture window in the living room. The bedrooms are a little on the smaller size, which was one of my fears, but since I’ve moved in, I’ve had no problems with their size. The yard is 90×225 (a half acre) and has a large shed and an in ground pool!
Additional photos can be found in my House Gallery, but none of them seem to do the place justice.
I’ve been running with the Nike+ setup for my iPod Nano since this past December. Since then, I’ve used it for nearly 50 runs & 365 miles. (You can see the results on my Nike+ page.) After all those miles, I think it’s time for a review. (more…)
This past Saturday, I did some shopping in stores around the McKinley Mall in Hamburg. It was a miserable day, with lots of rain. Late in the evening, the weather broke & the sun shone through brightly from the lake as it settled. In doing so, it formed the most brilliant, double rainbow I’ve ever seen.
Unfortunately, I only had my cell phone camera with me & the photos contain lots of power lines – they don’t begin to do the rainbow justice – but here they are:
Both rainbows formed complete arches over the mall, but I wasn’t able to capture that with the cell phone camera.