Happy New Year - 2010 recap

Good bye 2010

Wishing you all a very happy and prosperous New Year. 2010 was by far a better year than 2009 for me. Last week was filled with celebrations including Sandy and my 19th wedding anniversary, Alia’s 16th birthday, and Christmas celebrations here and in Bayfield.

The picture here was taken on 12/27 as the sun rose over Madeline Island. Looking out the window I noticed this tall glowing spike over the island. I’m sure it’s just a jet plume, but it’s kind of weird how it is not even and just ends. This was really impressive a few minutes earlier as the sky was darker, and the spike was brighter against it. It changed quickly as the sky brightened, but the picture still turned out OK.





Running:

I was able to get enough runs in the last weeks of December to be able to reach my revised goal of 2100 miles for the year. Not a bad number considering I was again forced to take most of 8 weeks off from running in July and August. I ended up getting a new Garmin for Christmas. Santa brought me a new 305 with heart rate monitor. I will start using it in January. I have never trained regularly with a heart rate monitor so that will take some getting used to if I choose to do it. I also see there is some new software with it to keep track of my runs automatically. There also is a way to log manually if a run isn’t done using the Garmin. This is why I didn’t use the old Garmin log. Now I will have to decide if I want to change or keep using my .XLS spreadsheet for logging.


Some stats for 2010
27,271 miles on the Odometer as of 12/31
2105 running miles
279 running events
288 hours and 06 minutes of running
7.54 miles length of average run
1 hr 2 min time of average run
74 miles highest week
247 miles highest month
40.5 miles average week
175.5 miles average month
238 miles on the treadmill in 34 runs (7.0 mile average)


Miles by Month
Jan 243.5
Feb 241.5
Mar 204.5
Apr 228.5
May 247
Jun 174
Jul 117
Aug 113
Sep 187
Oct 117
Nov 98
Dec 134


Hunting:

I was not able to get out hunting now for well over a week. This is the first time since early October when that has happened.  I did get out fishing last week with my brothers Todd and Scott, cousins Randy and Dusty, uncle Arthur, and Randy’s friend Brian. It was an awesome day. I bet we caught between all of us maybe 70 fish. Most were thrown back, but we took home 19 fish between all of us, all over 24 inches with the biggest probably about 30 inches. Todd, Scott and I took home 16 of the fish so we had lots of cleaning to do. The picture is of just the fish we took home. It was a great to catch so many fish and to spend time with all these guys.



I know a lot of people didn't have a very good hunting year again. For me this was one of my best ever. I spend 365 days a year thinking about, planning for, and actually going hunting. I may have spent fewer hours in the woods than normal, but that’s only because I was able to be successful early. My food plot layout and crops again turned out well, but I think I will plant one section with all clover since that seems to be what the deer like best. I was able to get 5 deer so far this year. Three with a bow and two with gun. The two nine pointers I got with my bow on back to back weekend was definitely the highlight. I also had chances at lots of other deer both bow and gun hunting so it was an exciting season. There are still ten days left in the season so there is still a chance for more if I can find the time to get out there.


Gardening:
It was a mixed year for the garden. The vegetable garden again turned out lots of produce this year. The interesting thing was I never had to water the garden once all season. The rain came down regularly and in the right amounts. This has never happened before and is not likely to occur gain. The apple, peach, and cherry crop were terrible this year. The hard freeze we got on Mother’s day weekend killed almost all the blossoms and ruined the crop. The watermelon and pumpkin crop were really good. I had all the watermelon we could eat and harvested over 100 large size pumpkins. Winter is the time to plan for next spring and go through all the catalogs again to order for next year. Last year I waited to long and some of the new variety of seeds I wanted to get were already sold out. Hopefully I can get my order in a bit earlier so this doesn’t happen again.