Very tired this morning. Yesterday was the election for the Rector (President) of the Autónoma. Why don't we have a system like that instead of the hierarchical dictatorship we "enjoy" all the way up from the DH to the President. Anyway, each candidate has a team and my collaborator here was part of one of them - he was running for Vice Rector of Research. The idea was to go out for dinner to celebrate or commiserate depending on the results, which were supposed to come in around 9:30 pm. Well, "our team" made a reasonable showing but didn't make the next stage - since no one candidate got 50% the two top teams are in a runoff. The percentages were something like 35, 30, 28, 7. So, this being Madrid, we got to the restaurant at 10:30 pm and we were early. Hamilton's in Logan is usually closed by 9:30 - places here are barely open so early. We finally sat down around 11:30 and the food started arriving around midnight. It was a great place, typically Spanish, everyone squeezed together with lots of noise, smoking, wine, etc. The Spanish can hold 5 or 6 different conversations simultaneously and a lot of them are also on their cell phones at the same time. My Spanish simply shuts down completely under such circumstances. Being a vegetarian here is not easy - even the vegetarian looking things like beans have industrial quantities of chorizo in them. Some Spanish vegetarians consider jamón to be a vegetable. Anyway, I settled for bread and some very nice roasted veggies (which is what you always get if you're a veggie here, except in actual vegetarian restaurants). Ended up leaving at 2 pm and got to bed just a bit before 3. So when the alarm went off at 7 it was hard to get up but I imagined that empty entry in the blog and bit the bullet. Took the GPS and managed to do 1 mile at 8:30 pace with 1/2 of that at 8:00 (it was slightly downhill). Overall pace just below 10 but that included a couple of stops and there was a strong headwind for the first couple of miles.
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