Here are slightly more than a half dozen things before Thanksgiving.

1.
Have you listened to the new Joshua James album yet? If not, you should. I promise you'll like it.

2.
Our Thanksgiving holiday starts today, and I am indeed grateful.

3.
Mike Doughty has a new album, too--The Flip Is Another Honey. Don't tell him I said so, but there are things about it that sound like his Soul Coughing days. And generally, I mean that as a good thing. There are some interesting covers here, and I'm not sure about how I feel at the album as a whole, but there are some things I like about it--I guess I'll have to spend a bit more time with it.

4.
I ran a new 5k PR a week or so ago at the City of Winter Garden 5k. I ran 19:33, which took 9 seconds off my previous best time. It looked like lots of the cross country team from West Orange was running in this race, and the pace at the start was pretty quick--5:00/mi for the first bit.

I settled in as quickly as I could to run 6:00/mi for the first mile--the plan was to run a 6:10/mi effort, but to actually run 6:00-6:05/mi for the first mile since it's a slight downhill. Lots of people went out fast, but by the time we hit the first mile marker, people were starting to fade. Me, too, looking at the splits, but not as much as other people were fading. About half a mile in, there were somewhere around 25 people in front of me, which had dwindled to maybe 18 or so by the mile.

The pace slipped a little in the middle of the second mile as we were headed uphill, but I moved up pretty steadily during the second mile and most of the third, and was in 7th with about 400m to go and 8th and 9th right on my shoulder, when my left hamstring tweaked a bit--just as we were making the turn toward the finish. I managed to fend off one of the two on my shoulder, but the younger one--one of the high school xc runners--got me by two seconds.

5.
So for the last week, I've been rehabbing the hamstring again, and looking forward to running in the OUC Half on December 1.

6.
Regarding the promise I made in #1 above: What I should say is that if you don't like the new Joshua James album, I'm not certain that we can be friends.

7.
My classes have been reading and discussing Emerson--primarily "Self-Reliance" and "The Divinity School Address." I enjoy reading and teaching Emerson's work, but mostly, it makes me want to read Thoreau.