I just saw the doctor this morning about my foot. He says it's healing nicely, and I got a less bulky bandage that makes it a little easier to walk.

He also told me that I should be able to start running again in about six weeks. So, to celebrate my return, I'm going to do the Boo! Run for Life on October 12th, a 10K to benefit the Dean R. O'Neill Renal Cell Cancer Research Fund.

It should be fun. West Potomac Park is a nice, easy 10K course. It's flat and there's plenty of room. And it will be good motivation to get me running again.

The busted foot is not feeling too great today. I've been icing it, and moving my ankle around to keep the blood flowing, but it's still bothering me.

So, I figured I'd try out the Tylenol 3 that they prescribed for me. I finished the work I really needed to get done this week, had some lunch, and took two of them.

Well, that was disappointing. Friends had assured me that Tylenol 3 was pretty good stuff - it would definitely take care of my foot.

Unfortunately, they were lying. I think it made me a little drowsy, but it sure didn't help my foot much. The only thing that really seems to help is icing it, and that's only for twenty minutes at a time.

So, I'm left here to complain about it. Fortunately I have lots of practice.

You'd think being ordered to sit around the house and do nothing would be great, but it sure sucks. The bright side of the surgery is that I haven't had any pain to speak of, at least not yet. It's uncomfortable, but not really painful. Haven't touched the drugs yet.

The downside is that, despite having work to do, I'm already bored out of my mind. I've made progress with the report I'm working on for my real job, but it's not interesting work, and it's hard to stay focused.

I had my bunion removed this morning. Right now, I'm sitting on the couch with my foot up, wondering how much it's going to hurt as the anesthetic wears off. They told me it would be six to eight hours, and the surgery was eight hours ago. Right now I mostly just feel pressure. They wrapped it pretty tight.

If it hurts, I have some great drugs, so I should be fine. But I'd rather not have to use them. I guess we'll see.

If you are looking to have surgery, I highly recommend the Center for Ambulatory Surgery at 19th and L NW. From beginning to end, everyone was friendly, helpful, and professional. I can't speak to the results yet, but so far so good.

Too bad it's the All Star break - this would be a great time to watch some baseball.

One of the nice things about having a pregnant wife is that, when a recipe calls for white wine, she can't help you finish the bottle.

Just kidding.

We have a bottle of white wine, a 2006 Primaterra pinot grigio. So, now we can calculate the Complaint Hub Wine Score.

1. Alcohol Review gives it 3.25 stars. We'll convert that to a 100 point scale, multiplying by 20 to get 65. They say it costs $7, and it was on sale at Whole Foods, so we'll give it a PPD of 9.29. That's a pretty decent score.
2. It's Italian, so no California Penalty.
3. Again, no Australia or New Zealand Bonus.
4. It's got a pretty solid label. It's a cheap wine, so I don't expect much, and the label is different, but it's not doofy. Plus 10.
5. Multiply by Planck's Constant.
6. Planck's Constant is really small. No one wants a wine score in scientific notation. So let's open up Open Office Spreadsheet and do some formula magic. First, let's take the arc cotangent, which gives us 1.57. You can quibble about significant digits in the comments.
7. That's still not a good number. So we divide one by the natural log of that, which gives us 2.21.
8. I'm not a huge fan of white wine, so let's multiply by 50 and subtract a 25 point White Wine Penalty.

Then we round down, because the digits after the decimal were never really significant anyway. And we're left with 63.

So you see, this is clearly a good wine rating system, since it's right in line with the score from another website!

The wine tastes fine. Not too sweet, not too dry. It pairs well with a seitan picatta from Veggie Times. It probably has some flavor notes of something. Maybe fruit? White's usually have fruit notes, right?

In conclusion, it's a nice value at $7.

Just got back from our final sonogram appointment. The wife's placenta, which was too close to the cervix at the last appointment, has migrated into a perfectly normal spot. Had it not moved, we would have had to schedule a C-section, which we really didn't want. I mean, sure, if it's the choice between C-section and serious danger to mother or child, we'll take the C-section.

Anyway, we're both quite pleased. Her more than me, I imagine, since she's the one who would have had her stomach cut open.

If you guessed this guy, you win! Your prize is that you get to come by and ice my foot for 48 hours after I have a bunion removed from the joint of my left big toe. No, my foot doesn't look like the one on the Wikipedia page. Mine isn't nearly that bad. The joint is just a little red and sticks out a little more than it should.

I've been having some pain in my foot for a while. I thought it was related to running, but it turns out that running was just making it uncomfortable, not causing it. Bunions, it turns out, are hereditary. My sister had one removed maybe last year, and says the surgery wasn't too bad. I'll be off my feet for two days, then I get to wear some special shoe/sandal thing for 4-6 weeks, and then I'm fine. It doesn't sound too terrible.

And in the meantime, I'm free to do what I want on it - I can run and jump and dance and all that. Not that I do much dancing. But the only restrictions on what I can do before I have it removed are my own level of comfort, which is nice.

I got a Cherry Coke out of the machine down the hall to drink with my lunch. I don't drink nearly as much soda as I used to, but every now and then I can't help it.

This time, I should have been more careful in my selection. It wasn't actually a Cherry Coke - it was a Cherry Coke Zero. That means they've taken out all the delicious high fructose corn syrup and replaced it with carcinogens that fool your tongue into thinking you're consuming something sweet.

I know my view on this is a little extreme, but I'd like to see Coke and anyone else who wants to use aspartame and sucralose and all those other non-food products have to put a big disclaimer on the package, like a cigarette warning.

WARNING - this product contains a chemical substance posing as food that is not, in fact, digestible by humans. It tricks your taste buds into thinking it's sweet, but it is all a lie. Also, there is non-trivial evidence suggesting it causes cancer. If you still think it's better than high-fructose corn syrup, go ahead and enjoy.

The fifth annual Race to Stop the Silence took place yesterday. I ran it last year, too, finishing in 55:04. This year, I reached my personal goal of a sub-50-minute finish, coming in at 49:38.

There are more pictures here, thanks to the wife. She and the mother-in-law and Phil came to watch on a brisk early morning, and I was glad to put on a good show.

The course was moved from West Potomac Park to Anacostia this year, and I wasn't expecting much. But the course wasn't bad. It was a 5K course, two laps, which wasn't ideal. And I was afraid it would get crowded. But with only 428 runners (I finished 166th overall), it didn't get too bad.

I don't have any more races scheduled for this year. I'd like to get a pace time under eight minutes (This one was 8:01) as my next goal. Maybe I'll find another one before it gets too hot.

Homemade Seitan recipe
If you're in the same boat as I am, where you don't really eat a lot of meat at home, but when you cook something like a stir-fry, you like to have meat-like lumps of protein. But you also don't like to buy heavily processed meat substitutes. Well, you'll like this recipe.

It's really easy to make. The vital wheat gluten flour and nutritional yeast flakes can be tough to find. I got mine from iHerb.com, and you can get them from Amazon, too. And you must bear in mind that this stuff looks kind of disgusting as it's cooking - you're basically putting a doughy blob into water and simmering it for an hour. It looks like something you'd put out at an elementary school Halloween party, telling kids it's brains.

The recipe makes a lot. It instructs you to cut the dough into three pieces before you simmer it, and each one ends up being a pretty good-sized hunk of meat substitute. I made stir-fry with one chunk, and we ate it last night, and both have lunch for today. The other two thirds are still in the fridge.

And it's quite good. I'd heard that some vegetarians/vegans won't eat seitan because it's too much like meat. I did not have that reaction to it. It's probably a little more meat-like than typical store-bought extra-firm tofu (I think I have more hyphenated compound words in this post than anything I've ever written), but you aren't going to sneak this in to a dish and fool meat-eaters into thinking it's steak.

According to the comments on the recipe, it sounds like you can do a lot of tweaking the recipe for different dishes. Since the seitan soaks up a lot of the broth in which it simmers, I imagine that you could play around with the flavor a lot. And I'm sure we'll try.