Wednesday Potpourri

Over on Pickled Beef, Tink asked for a little help in restoring her faith in humanity. I don't get out much and so didn't see any continuum-altering opportunities for good deeds, but I did what I could.

About half a mile from our house is a nice recreational park. It's mostly an open field used for kids' soccer practices and the occasional Sunday morning cricket match (seriously.), with a splash park and a couple picnic shelters plonked down in the middle.

The park also has a 1.55 mile long walking/jogging/biking path that runs all the way around its perimeter. At several points along the path, the city of Allen has provided permanent stations for dispensing doggie poo mitts and receptacles for the disposal of any such collected during one's walk around the path. Neat idea, huh? I think so, but the local pet owners apparently don't agree. Maybe it's in our nature to rebel against doing what someone else wants us to do (pick up after your pony-sized mastiff, in this case), or maybe it's just too much to ask people to hang up their cell phones so they'll have a free hand for a doggie poo mitt.

Either way, when Turtle and I went out for a ride this past weekend, I was dismayed to find a couple large piles of poo on the path. Not next to the path, in the grass. On the path. Instead of spending the rest of my ride fuming, I thought of Tink's post, rode to the nearest poo station, and grabbed a couple poo mitts.

“I'm going for another lap,” I called to Turtle. I held up my poo mitts and waved them. “I got doody duty!”

I discovered a few things over the course of that lap:

• The poo mitt is really simple to use. Just put it over your hand, pick up the poo, and (!important) turn the mitt inside out so that your hand is outside the mitt and the poo is inside.
• I intensely dislike [the behaviors of] lazy, self-centered people.
• Riding around with a couple bags of dog crap in the pockets of my cycling jersey makes me giggle. I even made up a song, to the tune of The Pretenders' “Brass In Pocket”. (I leave the lyrics to the reader as an exercise.)

It was easy and fun (almost). From now on, when we do the park loop, I think I'll grab a couple poo mitts and police the area as we go. No charge.

Other recent randomness:

• Turtle wouldn't let me buy her anything for her birthday or for our anniversary. Instead, she's had me testing my somewhat limited home improvement abilities. First, we rolled the dice on some decorative painting technique. Not a big deal, on the face of it; I'm proficient with both brush and roller. The risky bit was where I had to use a brown glaze and a rag to attempt an antiqued effect. The result was… acceptable. Then came the energy-saving window film. I've done two windows so far, with not too many bubbles but no small amount of cat hairs embedded like flies in amber. The jury is still out regarding the film's effectiveness at blocking heat.
• Last month, Turtle's hairdresser friend from St. Louis was in town and we got to meet them for dinner. During the course of their conversation, the two of them concluded that I needed a new haircut. Turtle's friend gave me clear instructions, which I passed on to my barber yesterday. After I'd signed the waiver, he went to work on me with the clippers and #2, #3, and #4 guides. The results? Well, it's comfortable; it will save some money on gel and electricity I would have used to run the hair dryer; it shows quite clearly where I'm going to go bald first; and it makes Turtle look really young.
• I had a really nice ride Sunday afternoon with the Recumbent Bicycle Enthusiasts of North Texas (RBENT). We met out near the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport and did a loop around the perimeter of the airport for a total of about 23.5 miles. It was a really good turnout, and it was great fun seeing such a large variety of recumbent bikes and trikes rolling down the road and turning heads. Oh, and the dinner at Hard Eight BBQ (Coppell, TX) afterward was really yummy, too.
  

The home stretch

With about four weeks to go until the Frisco-to-Ft. Worth MS 150, things are finally beginning to fall into place. On the hells heels of a two-week period when I worked over 140 hours, my manager assures me that we're out of panic mode. That means I should have a few full weekends when I actually get to try to put some miles under my wheels instead of sitting inside, pecking away on my laptop.

Yesterday, I got out for a beautiful 40-mile group ride on a route with plenty of rolling hills. My legs felt good all day, so if I can manage to get in a metric century at next weekend's Lancaster pay ride and then 50+ miles at the next weekend's sanctioned MS 150 training ride, I should be good for the distance. I'll just have to rein in my need for speed and avoid hammering along at 20+ mph like I did last year. If I do that, I may not have two 75-mile days in me.

I ran over something during yesterday's ride and put a half-inch cut all the way through the tire. When you've got a hole so big that you have to line the inside of the tire with a folded energy bar wrapper to keep the replacement tube from herniating out and flatting again, the tire's a goner. So I have a new set of Hutchinson Fusion 2s on the way, and I need to restock on C02 for my inflater. Strange... I seem to have gone through a lot of those this past year.

Meanwhile, today's the big day for the MS 1.5 kids' ride, here in Allen. Since the one in Flower Mound last month, Turtle, Leggy Peggy, and Squirrel Bait (who now prefers to be known as “Squirrelly Girl”) have been working really hard to put together this second event to raise funds for our MS 150 team. Prayers and other good thoughts are appreciated because, even though the ladies have planned their butts off, this is still going to be a lot of work.

Since my work load has been such a thorn in my tire for this year's MS 150 effort, keeping me off the road and away from blogging, I felt it only fair that I plaster fundraising flyers in every break room and restroom in the office.* I used one of those crappy glue sticks – the kind that don't stick very well – to stick little strips of paper across the bottom with my online donation link printed on them, so people could pull them off and not have to remember the URL as they dash to their computers to shower the MS Society with filthy lucre. That's my plan, and the plan is working to the extent that I can tell my coworkers are taking the URL strips; but I guess they're waiting until next pay day for the showering part.

I've even been contacted by the woman who does the company newsletter, who wants me to be sure to let her know how many employees contributed toward my MS 150 efforts and how much, after the ride. If I'd known, I might have been able to convince her that getting the word out before the ride might have gotten more donations from more employees so that she'd have even more to put in the newsletter, where the company likes to list all the ways in which it helps the community.

So I'm off to drink a cup of coffee or two before diving into the preparations for today's MS 1.5. Wish us luck!


* You may be wondering how my flyers got posted in the women's restrooms. Let's just say I get in to work much earlier than most of my coworkers.

No blog for the weary. Or wicked. Whatever.

Hi gang! Remember me? I'm the guy who used to post here with annoying regularity* in those halcyon days before my employer got bought out, I got assigned to a different development group, and I was issued a laptop computer as a perk** of my new position.

It's not that I don't think of you guys. I do. Weird and snark-worthy things are happening to me on a regular basis, but by the time I get to a computer out of sight of the surveillance cameras I'm either too tired to post or the memory cells that held the anecdote have been trod beneath the hobnailed boots of some XML transformation or the eleventy-seventh fruitless e-mail exchange between yours truly and a QA tester to whom I'm unable to convey even the simplest of technical concepts. It's not the first time I've wished I had taken Hindi in high school – or kept a better polish on my Spanish, at least.

Turtle and I are doing okay. She's still looking for a job and trying to keep me de-stressed. I'm trying to take advantage of the occasionally unseasonably warm day to sneak out for a training ride on my bike. The trips to the cardiologist were a bit discouraging, but he's not prepared to crack me open just yet. I'm to continue doing what I've been doing, though it has been suggested that I do what I've been doing at a somewhat reduced level of intensity. Riding for a couple hours at 90% of my maximum heart rate is not a great idea, apparently.

Things at work are pretty good, too. Sure, the hours are longer, the cubicles smaller and completely exposed, and the folks holding the purse strings are so tight that I have to make a show of sneezing all over my stuff to keep it from disappearing; but the work I'm doing now is interesting and even kind of fun. My new teammates are good guys and we have some laughs. One of the guys looks like Kevin James' XL (as opposed to XXXL) brother and has a phone with a Banana Phone ring tone. When he gets a call, we all jump up and dance around. Okay... I get up and dance around while the other guys look at me like I've forgotten my meds. Sometimes, I fire up the Banana Phone video*** through my laptop speakers and watch while Kevin James XL scrambles to figure out where he's left his phone. It's a hoot.

Last week, I had a weird dream that was going to share with you guys, but I didn't get to it in time. Now all I can remember about it was that someone I knew (I don't know who, only that I knew her) showed up at my work wearing a Hilary Clinton mask and wanting to discuss her “sweater puppies”. Probably just as well that it's slipped my mind. I've had about all I can stomach of The Hilmeister and all the rest of those gasbags vying for the office of Commander in Chief.



* But that's another topic entirely. Frankly, I'd rather discuss politics. Or have a root canal.
** Read, “Now that you can take your development environment with you, we'd like you to soldier on after you've completed your 9½-12 hours at the office. Yeaah... that'd be great.”
*** A retooled knock-off of the most excellent Badger Song.

Wherefore art thou, muse?

I remember now: I have this blog thingy where I used to post my internal dialogue for the... well, entertainment might be too charitable a word. Amusement, perhaps.

Around 3:30 this morning, I finally gave in to concerns about lawn care that had been milling around in my head and keeping me awake. I crept out of bed and went to my office to look up some information about thatch control and core aeration, but I ended up playing around on Flickr. It's fortunate that web sites don't literally collect dust, but I could tell that it had been a while since I'd been on that site. As if it weren't bad enough that I haven't really uploaded much of anything since Turtle's and my Caribbean cruise last year, I also had a couple buddy requests (or something like that) in my in box.

I didn't even know I had an in box on Flickr.

Anyway, I discovered a new "blog this" feature that allows you to, with the click of a button, add many of the photos on Flickr as a blog posting. Even more exciting, this actually does work with the new and super handy (here's a tissue, in case any of that sarcasm dripped on your shoes) Blogger Beta. I promptly blogged a couple photos I found particularly interesting so that you could enjoy them too.

That lasted about as long as it took for me to get to work, have a cup of coffee, and pause to wonder about the copyright implications of my actions. Sure enough, "The Jimmer's" photos were marked "All rights reserved", so despite the fact that he (or she) hadn't disabled my ability to use the "blog this" button, I felt my only correct options were to either take down the images from my blog, or go through the whole process of contacting the photographer to ask his permission to display his (or her) work.

Frankly, that's just too much effort to go through just for an image of a dilapidated shack with a TV with the screen shot out in the front yard. Even if my alternate title was going to be "The Presley Homestead".

Meanwhile

I've been trying to take Tink's recent challenge to heart and return to noticing all the strange little things going on in the world around me.

• The beefy, early-middle-aged guy in the booth across from us at Chili's. The tribal armband tattoo was kind of cool. The spider web encircling the point of his elbow wasn't something I would have chosen—but then, part of the reason I don't have one is that I could never think of a design that represented something integral enough to Who I Am that I'd want to wear it for the rest of my life.
  
  Which brings me to the four-inch high "KISS" plastered across his bicep. Now, I can almost understand someone getting a tattoo of the Grateful Dead's iconic skull. For their fans, it's not just a band; it's a way of life. But KISS? Sure, I have a couple of their earlier albums (one within arm's reach), from before they got old and fat and couldn't carry off the whole rock-gods-in-makeup thing any more. But come on. Bands come and go.
  
  I bet the poor guy sees that tattoo in the mirror and wonders what he was thinking. Or worse, maybe he doesn't.
  
  
• Speaking of rocking out, I actually got on my desktop computer at home the other day and rediscovered the pile of MP3s I have on it. It occurred to me that it might be nice to put together some driving music to listen to during my commutes, now that I have a CD player in the car. The result? Commuter Sampler - Vol. 1.
  
  You'd think that I'd use lots of soothing ambient music and drowsy Rachmaninov... stuff. Nope. It's all high octane stuff. Counterintuitively, it helps my mood during my commutes, perhaps because I'm so busy howling along with Queens of the Stone Age's "No One Knows" or Dwight Yoakum's "Fast As You" that I can't be bothered to get pissed off when the dozenth butthead cuts me off without signaling. Or maybe there just aren't that many people willing to cut off the insane guy while he's yelling at his windshield.