On Sunday, November 3, I ran the 10-mile Run for the Water through west central Austin. I completed in 1 hour and 30 minutes, at a pace of 8:53 min/mile. I used to be a lot faster, but that’s not bad for an old guy.

I visited my company’s office in Noida (Delhi) at the end of August, 2019. 

Yesterday afternoon I took a bike ride around our home in Pflugerville. I took this photo of a dry feed corn field at a break just outside of Hutto.

Dry corn stalks against the summer sky

I recently bought some black plastic aida 14-count cross stitch canvas, and I decided to try out the DMC Étoile embroidery thread. The result is two rangoli-inspired small projects. The original patterns can be found here and here.

My coworker Joel announced a few months ago that his wife was pregnant with their first children. I already had one of these projects underway with no intended recipient, so I actually managed to finish both of them within a couple of weeks of the children’s birth. I’ve been doing projects for children with these dogs for over 20 years. I think I’ll retire it. If I do more newborn projects, I’ll just have to come up with a different design.

A writer from MEL Magazine contacted me via a comment that I had made on a reddit question about whether men should run shirtless. My whole email interview got included in the article.

After I graduated high school in 1982, I spent the following school year as an AFS high school exchange student in Austria. This past weekend, I started scanning the hundreds of slides that I took during my year abroad, including the photo in this post of the village sign. Yes, I spent the year in a village called Großklein. For those of you who don’t speak German, groß = large, klein = small. Yes, I lived in big-little. Note that in Austria it’s common that if a new village springs up next to an existing one, they use the prefixes groß and klein to distinguish them. In the case, the existing village was named Klein.

I was a pretty early adopter of Gmail, and I got the username ‘stantaylor.’ Over the years, however, I have discovered that at least 3 or 4 other people in the world who share my name also think they have the my Gmail address–or at least people who are sending email to them think that they have it: one in Australia, one in the UK and at least one in the US. The latest is the one who signed up for Publisher’s Clearing House (TIL that PCL still exists). Or, based on the large volume of email that PCH has sent to this person at my email address, maybe someone who hates him signed him up, mistakenly using my email address. (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t someone who hates me because the emails are addressed to a different first name that shortens to Stan than my full first name). Another Gmail feature–filters–is saving me from the spam.

Last Saturday, Katie and I had a great time at the 56th annual Eeyore’s Birthday party, one of Austin’s most awesome traditions.

At work we celebrated Holi this year. A good time was had by all.