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To absolutely no one's surprise, my February RunKeeper stats were considerably off from my January stats.  Still, considering the crazy hours I work when the Alberta Legislature sits, I'm quite happy with a February total of 178.14 km, which is 110.7 miles. That gives me 477.44 km total so far in 2012, which is 24% of my way to my 2,000 km cardio goal for 2010. Which isn't bad considering we're only 17% through the year. I'm ahead of the pace!

So life on the island got worse for the women: it rained all night after the last Tribal Council, kept them up all night, soaking wet and put their fire out. In the morning, the women ran over to the men's camp to warm up next to their fire, which was protected by their shelter. The reward challenge was a memorization game for a fishing supply kit and a canoe - which would be useful to get back to camp after all the rain. The women got their first victory of the game with a 5-0 rout of the men. When the women got back to camp, they had trouble starting their fire again due to the torrential downpour, and begged the men for an ember to give them a firestarter. The guys did, but fairly reluctantly. The guys wanted to take the canoe out for fishing (after the rain stopped), and the girls were reluctant. Negotiating ensued. Well, the women bickered amongst themselves, they went to commercial and nothing was really settled. The next day, the sun came up ...

For various and sundry reasons, I didn't give this new release by Kutless a lot of attention in the lead-up to the album's release. I'm a bit hot and cold on Kutless - generally I like their stuff and I've even gone to see them in concert, but I enjoy their worship albums about a billion times more than their standard rock albums. I've long felt that Kutless would be better off just doing worship-oriented music - I mean, "What Faith Can Do" is a classic and it's truly one of my favorite songs ever. But then the folks at New Release Tuesday gave their new album, Believer , a five-star review and raved that it was the best thing these guys had ever done. And I tend to give the NRT guys a lot of respect. So over the weekend, I ... umm ... tracked down the album (it's all on YouTube) and gave it a digital spin. Gosh darn it, if the NRT folks weren't right. This album is AWESOME. Melodic, beautiful, sweet, honest, passionate, touching ... Believer ...

Teams had to go to the town square where they had to find a courier. We learned early on that Mr. Clown from the Clown Team had battled and beaten cancer twice. That's usually a bad foreshadowing omen - when we learn something deeply personal about a team, they're going home. All the teams gathered at the square overnight waiting for the courier to arrive on horseback. They got a clue to the Detour - build a solar kitchen and boil a tea kettle, or gather firewood, load it on a donkey and deliver it to a pottery workshop. Everyone did the solar panel task except the Border Patrol Agents, Art and JJ, who drove around looking for the donkey task only to realize after driving around that they'd driven past it. "Can this get any worse?" one of them exclaimed, which is usually a total editing trick to say, "Yes, it's going to get a lot worse." Meanwhile, back at the solar panel challenge, we literally watched people boil water. I hope the next challenge in...

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The women, fresh off a meltdown at Tribal Council, held a team meeting and elected Sabrina as their leader. Somehow, they managed to fight over not WHO would get food, but HOW they would get food. Amazing. And the food gatherers then went swimming. Tree Mail delivered a do-it-yourself reward challenge that involved un-knotting ropes to win a tarp. No Jeff. The men won. The men set to work to build a shelter with their tarp - except Colton, who rolled his eyes a lot. And then he went to the girls' camp and helped them build a shelter there. And somehow he managed to annoy the girls as well. Sabrina compared him to a "virus." Oooh. Harsh. Colton declared to the girls that he didn't care about the game or the strategy or ... I dunno, he started crying and my BlackBerry went off, so it was a good reason to not pay attention for a while. It ended with Colton pouting his way back to the guys' camp. Colto told Troyzan and Jonas that he has the immunity idol and...

It's the Amazing Race Season 20, and the twist this year is that all the teams will live on the same beac- oh, wait, wrong show. Sorry. The show got off to a bad start with two contestants from Big Brother, followed by two Jersey Shore types. Oh dear. But maybe the Federal Agents can take out both those teams. Teams started by pulling clues from mini hot air balloons, and then they had to fly to Santa Barbara ... which is where they started. Except there's also one in Argentina. Amazingly, a lot of the teams totally gassed out on the first task, which involved running up one hill and pulling down balloons. Misa and Maiya spent nearly TWO HOURS looking for their clue. For that, they ended up on the second flight to Argentina with four other teams. It's taken me 15 minutes to hope Bopper and Mark are quickly eliminated. In Argentina, the Married Clowns, Dave and Cherie, quickly fell behind and she started to cry. Tears of the Clown. Oh, and then she made the joke, too. The Ro...

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It's the return of Survivor! The gimmick this year is that FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER the two tribes are living on the same beach. CBS decided to go with that for the hook rather than the "No returning Survivors from previous seasons!" line because that didn't focus group test too well. (As an aside ... this show looks almost TOO good in HD. Not gritty enough.) Tarzan and Troyzan immediately had a nickname dispute and ensuring that I'm going to hate typing both names until one is eliminated. The game started with Jeff telling the tribes to take whatever they could from the truck, and the men stole a bunch of stuff from the girl's pile when they weren't looking. "Dirty cheaters" said the girls, already forgetting that they're playing a game for a million dollars. There ARE hidden immunity idols but there is NOT a Redemption Island, so no second chances (Hooray!). I just noticed the male tribe is called MANONO. Cue bad puns. The guys managed to ta...

It's albums like this that make me appreciate the great work that the folks at New Release Tuesday do to secure free streams of new releases. In a million years, I never would have taken a second glance at Worth Dying For's "Live Riot" album. I've never heard of them before, I had no idea what kind of music it was... But the free music streams give me a chance to sample new music risk-free, and boy, in this case, was it ever worth it. Worth Dying For is a rock-worship band from California, and this is nearly 90 minutes of fantastic, original, energetic and creative worship music, recorded live at a youth pastor's conference. One listen through was all I needed to make the decision to buy this album (18 tracks and a bunch of videos for only $12!). Great stuff!

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Although I'm a big Starfield fan, I didn't rush out this past Tuesday to buy the band's new independent release "The Kingdom". That was mainly due to the fact I was not a big fan of the title track , which to me was such a non-Starfield song that I reacted fairly negatively to it. My impression of the song didn't improve when I heard the band in concert last weekend at Break Forth. Curiously, that was the only song they played from the new album, which also didn't bolster my confidence that the new album was any good. Given all that, I was a bit reluctant to drop $10 on the album (even if New Release Tuesday gave it five stars and raved about the album's greatness .) Fortunately, the band put the entire album up on YouTube to listen to for free. Good thing, too, because  it is, in fact, a really fantastic album that I immediately purchased. Heck, even the title track sounds better on the album than it did in concert. (I'm still not a huge...