Happy father's day and a few other things!

1. I am so grateful for my dad. He is and has always been someone I can turn to for encouragement, support, and guidance. I have been very lucky. I LOVE my dad and I show him and tell him every chance I get. He is the one who tells me all the time it is never too late to start something new! Even though I never voiced it out loud that I was thinking about graduate school, also thinking I was too old to go for it, whenever we were alone, my dad always had encouraging words for me to take a chance, to step outside my comfort zone, to try and find my happiness again. I think the happiness and satisfaction I feel right now in my life, for a large portion, is because of all his encouragement. I cannot tell my dad enough times how much I love him and appreciate him.
2. Our small running group is going strong. We have met three weeks now. I picked a reservoir for us to run around where two loops is a 5K. The first week my two best friends and I met around 6:30 in the morning. The weather was amazing. I run with them, keeping our speed to around 13 minute miles. They were able to keep up for two rounds and didn't need to take walking breaks. Then they walked while I run another two loops. That was my third week running six miles. Thankfully, my friends enjoyed the run. We then went for a big breakfast, and it was so much fun sitting there and talking.
   
   Last week J was in town and I told my best friends that he was going to join us. So their husbands decided to join us to make it a couples run. We started later in the morning, so that my friends' kids would wakeup, have breakfast, and have a babysitter, before their parents can head out. It was raining the entire time we run, we were soaked wet. J and I run five loops. After the run we decided to go home, clean up and then meet again for lunch. We had a great time, and J fit right in.
   
   This week it was the three of us again. We run the first three loops together, averaging 12 minute miles. Then I took off for another two loops and finished in little over hour and half, 92 minutes and 14 seconds to be exact, lol. The weather was great, a bit on the cool side and enjoyable. We then went for a over an hour breakfast and were done by 9 am. I just love this time of the year when you can feel you have accomplished a lot by 9 am, lol!
   
   The coming Saturday is our first race. Yes, my best friends also registered for the race and so we all shall run it. We are starting together, but probably are going to separate, since we decided to push ourselves to run our best run. Hopefully it would be lots of fun. I am getting a bit nervous, but I am glad I would be with my best friends! J shall be here next weekend.
   
3. According to my mom's scale I have lost over 6 pounds in the last five weeks. My skinny jean is becoming more comfortable. I thought it was my imagination, lol, I thought I was getting used to it, but I have lost weight. I am really happy with this loss. I am very surprised at the rate I am losing now; as I am getting closer to my healthy weight, I am losing faster! I think there are three factors helping me lose weight at this stage: detox I did in April (I shall write about it in detail later), running over 25 miles a week, and drinking lots of water. Of course I am still following a vegan diet mostly, so I think that helps too. I like to lose another 6 pounds to go under 120, and then I am letting my body decide on the rest.
   
4. My research and project are not proceeding successfully! I have been getting distracted easily; working in close proximity with few other people who are very sociable and like to discuss their works often, is enjoyable and distracting at the same time. It had not help that my fellow lab-mates kept interrupting me to ask questions about the tool I told them I know well and offered to answer any questions they might have. They have been asking the same questions over and over again! Not having a deadline, or weekly meeting with my professors to keep me accountable, has also contributed to the difficulty of staying motivated and concentrating on my work.
   
   I know it is not a good time to slack off. I needed to make changes! As a starting point, I asked my lab-mates to email me their questions, and I told them I would get the answer to them that same day, but might not be right away! I also created a Q&A page with the questions that had already been asked and the answers I provided so that they could refer to that page before sending me their questions. Even if they decided not to read that page, I could easily get the answer from that page when replying to them. Hopefully, this would take care of the problem of questions from my fellow lab-mates.
   
   I have also been thinking, starting tomorrow, I should go the library in the morning, to have a quite uninterrupted few hours to read and think about my thesis/project. Then make it to the lab around lunch time, since I enjoy being part of our little group, having lively people around me. This way I am getting my work done, hopefully, but I am not making myself be alone and isolated all the time. Also, I have decided to try and write at least a page of my thoughts and understanding of my morning readings every day.
   
   Hopefully these changes would help me progress better.
   
5. About the Syrian blogger I talked about a few posts down. I can't believe how wrong I was! According to the last post, the blogger was not Syrian, was not Arab, was not a woman, was not in Damascus, and was not captured and jailed because of the posts in that blog! In the last post the blogger apologized for the fiction that he had feed his readers in the name of truth, said he was a male, who was writing from Istanbul, Turkey, and his name apparently sounded Westerner! I never had a chance to go read that post, by the time my Syrian born lab-mate told me about it, the blogger had deleted the entire blog. According to my lab-mate he did not even understand the damage he had caused, how he had discredited other authentic bloggers, who were putting their lives on the line by blogging, while trying to inform the world what was happening to them, to their families, to their neighbors, and to their countrymen, describing how their government mercilessly kills young, old, men, women, and children, opening fire in the residential area, killing whoever was in front of them. But my lab-mate thinks even that last entry is a lie! She thinks the person behind the blog was in fact a woman who had Syrian ties, and who is living and going to school, in Scotland, since the IP address she used repeatedly at one sited that has been published it, is from the University of Edinburg!
   
6. A few weeks ago I received an email from a former colleague, who is looking for a job! He was one of the two colleagues that I thought they would never have a problem of finding their next exciting and challenging jobs. They both implied that often they are approached by headhunters, former colleagues, and people they meet at various conferences they attend, asking them to consider other opportunities. The colleague who emailed me apparently has been looking for a permanent job since January, while still consulting. Apparently his consulting job concluded in mid May, and since then he has been looking for a job fulltime. I am very bothered by this. I am thinking if someone like him has been seriously looking for a job for over a month and has not been able to land one, I am in a bigger trouble than I thought I was. I shall write more about this later.