Where angels fear to tread.

Well, not fear precisely. More like "expect no good to come from the treading"—but in the end, It Is Done.

Here's what I've learned from my Blogger-to-Beta-Test-Blogger migration experience:

1. The actual migration process went smoothly. It took several minutes, but when I logged on to my new [low growl] Google account and checked out the results, I was relieved to find that my modified "classic" template had made the trip. Even better, my blog still displayed. The only obvious difference was the appearance of Blogger's navigation bar ("Click 'Next' to visit a porn site, or enter a search term to not find a term you know appears multiple times in your blog!").
2. In my sidebar, I've included a Blogger image linked to the Blogger dashboard for my convenience. I only had to update the URL to point to the beta test Blogger site and viola! Sorted.
3. As I type this post, I see the new "Labels for this post" field just begging to have some descriptive categories entered. Someone more organised, like Eric could probably explain why this sort of thing is useful, but my "classic" template doesn't support labels, and I'm unlikely to go to the bother of converting it to use the new JSP tags that beta test Blogger touts as being the second coming of Bill Gates. Putting aside the additional overhead of having to download a Gordian knot of JavaScript poo with every page, how random would I be if I started slapping categories on everything I post? (Hint: methinks "not very")
4. Google is considerate in not requiring your life and credit histories or even a blood sample in exchange for the required Google account. That's good news. It's not even that big a deal creating a new e-mail address for each profile I need prefer to create in order to keep my more-or-less anonymous blogs separate from the ones on which my Secret Identity is obvious. What gets up my neck is that it's reasonably obvious from Blogger's FAQ that the whole point is to force us into Google's system. There, they hope to entice us to use the various Me Too services they've added to compete with Yahoo! Going public and having a board of directors can't be a lot of fun.
5. Ah well... it's still FREE.

Foo and Turtle conversation #1

Foo: Ow! Why are you pulling my arm hairs?
Turtle: I didn't think it was attached.
Foo: It's an arm hair. Why wouldn't you think it was attached?
Turtle: It's white. I thought it was one of Bitsy's.
Foo: I suppose you think this one's Bitsy's too. [plucks at white hair on arm] Oh.
Turtle: See, old man?
Foo: Silence, impudent strumpet.

Foo and Turtle conversation #2

Foo: I'm kind of weirded out today.
Turtle: Weirded out? Why?
Foo: I don't know if it's because this temporary crown was killing me or what, but I was having some really bad dreams last night.
Turtle: Like what?
Foo: Well, in one you started levitating... floating about five feet off the floor. I told you to stop, and for once you listened right away. You fell on the floor, caught your leg funny, and broke your ankle so badly that some of the small bones fell out through a tear in the skin. I was freaking out, running around trying to find a zip-loc baggie to put the bones in before rushing you to the hospital.
Turtle: My leg's fine. See?
Foo: Yeah, well... no levitating, okay?
Turtle: I'll try to restrain myself.

A palm tree, DVDs, and thee

I wasn't going to do this. I really wasn't. I'm far too indecisive about such things, which is really my way of saying that I have a hard time thinking of what movies I've actually seen. On the other hand, that should make things easier since the ones I do remember must've made an impression.

Here's my list of the movies I'd choose to take along if I knew I were going to be exiled stranded on a desert island:

• Western - Tombstone
• Horror - Saving Private Ryan (hey... I was horrified)
  
• Sci-Fi - Serenity
• Musical - Rocky Horror Picture Show (I loathe musicals, generally)
• Comedy - Monty Python's Holy Grail
  
• War - Red Dawn
• Action - Hellboy
• Foreign - The Triplets of Bellville
• Classic (before 1960) - The Magnificent Seven
• Documentary - Ride With The Devil (not technically a documentary, but praised as being historically accurate)
• Bonus Pick (any genre) - Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

Lost in translation

Some of your comments regarding my awkward years reminded me of an anecdote that ties together my 6th grade year and our parallel discussion about dialects:

It was the start of the first school year after we had moved to Kentucky, which meant that on the first day of 6th grade I had had only about a month to get used to the Southern twang. As I sat at my desk with my purse-sized pencil case, filling out the usual first-day-of-school forms (did any of us really know our dad's work phone number or that of our family doctor?), the little girl at the next desk spoke.

"Could ah borry a pin?" she politely asked.

"I'm sorry," I said. "A what?"

"A pin," she repeated, as though to a piece of wood. "Kin ah borry a pin?"

"A pin?"

"Yeah, a pin."

We traveled a couple thousand miles around the earth's axis* while my brain feverishly tried to make some sense of what this cute little blonde girl was asking me. Ultimately, it failed.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't have any pins."

"Yes you do," she said, now infuriated. "You've got a whole bunch of 'em, ah reckon."

"What... pins? Why would I have pins in my pencil case? All I have are pencils and pe--"

I blushed.

"Oh. You mean a pen, right?"

"Yeah," she muttered, certain I was mocking her. "An aynk pin, so ah kin fill out this here paper."

I sheepishly handed her a brand new Bic ballpoint. What in God's name kind of place had I landed in, where Es were Is and Is were As? Most perturbatory.

I did terribly on my spelling tests, that first year.


* In fact, it was probably more like 2 or 3 miles, but sometimes applying science to something just sucks all the fun right out of it. Or pops it with a pen.

Whur y'all fruhm?

Gwynne got me again with her posting of a quiz about American English dialects. My result:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop." [Not any more. I compromised on "soda". -Foo]
The Northeast
The Midland
Philadelphia
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Long weekend wrap-up

Which is long? The weekend, or the wrap-up? The weekend, definitely; the posting, probably.

Apart from the cruise that Turtle and I took back in May, I went into October not having used as much of my vacation time as I thought I had. As a consequence, I found myself needing to burn (or lose) 13 days by the end of the year. I've elected to take a handful of Mondays and Fridays off, which makes for some nice long weekends, and never mind that my days off are mostly booked with last-minute medical and dental appointments. Gotta use up that flex spending account, you know.

Friday

Sat at my computer until 10am or so, and then went out for a bike ride. It was windy, I'd been fighting some kind of bug, and I hadn't been on the bike for a couple weeks. After 11 miles, I decided I wasn't feeling it and threw in the towel.

After lunch, I headed down to Plano, where I had an appointment to have an echocardiogram. This, because of something my internist's PA thought she heard during my routine physical. There we were, talking about cycling and whether or not it was strictly necessary for me to have a prostate exam this year, and she dropped the bomb:

"So... what are we doing about this murmur?"

I chuckled. "Go on, pull the other one."

"No, really," she said. "You have a heart murmur."

"I've never had one before, and I didn't have one when I came in earlier this year," I said. "And that was to make sure some tightness in my chest wasn't heart-related."

"Well, you have one now," she said, apologetically.

So I had the echocardiogram, courtesy of Pam, the pleasant young technician who turned the monitor so that I could watch the valves of my heart flapping open and shut. I was struck by how much an echocardiogram resembled a sonogram.

"So, can you tell whether it's a boy, or a girl?" I asked innocently.

Pam blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You know, can you tell its gender from the picture?"

She searched my eyes for a long moment and correctly concluded that I was full of crap.

"Behave or I'll take away your pillow," she said.

"Yes'm."

Saturday/Sunday (core weekend)

Lots of the usual. Goofing off in my PJ bottoms, unraveling the mysteries of CSS-oriented design. Watching The Libertine on DVD (an unexpectedly grim experience). Going to church. Eating too much pizza (both days). Re-watching X-men III: The Last Stand and catching some interesting details I'd missed the first time around. Reconciling several months' worth of bank statements.

Scintillating, no?

Monday

Got up, showered, and headed to the dentist's office for a crown replacement. There was nothing really wrong with the existing one, aside from the fact that my previous dentist did a botch job on it. After more than five years, I still couldn't chew anything more resistant than a banana on that side, and the blasted thing was oversized enough that I frequently found myself masticating my own tongue. Why do it now, after so long? Gotta use up that flex money.

Got on the bike again, felt good, and managed to finish up before the construction workers awoke from their siestas to mess with me. When I returned from riding, there was a message from my internist's office on the voicemail, the gist of which is that my heart is perfectly normal. Either it's perfectly normal to have a certain amount of murmur, or the murmur has mysteriously disappeared.

The human body is so weird (and so is mine).

Awkward years

Over at Hubbadoo, Anne has thrown down the gauntlet with her Awkward Days post, in which she challenges those most likely to wear a pocket protector to publicly out themselves. The prize? The dubious honor of the King Dork crown.

Okay, I threw in that last bit on my own—primarily because, putting aside the fact that mine were awkward decades, I'm about the closest thing you'll ever see to a shoo in.

In her picture, Anne was in 5th grade. I was in 6th grade at the time this was taken and looked two years younger. Contrary to any impression you might have based on the highwaters, I would not hit my underachieving growth spurt for another three years.

And when I did, I was still a dork. At least the girl I had a crush on tipped me off to the fact that the mere existence of a top button didn't mandate its use. I can still remember her mocking laughter, but the lesson was helpful never the less.

C'est la vie. We can't all be tall or cool or pretty, and yet... there are still surprises.

Many years too late for it to have helped my self esteem, I gained an interesting insight during a phone conversation with my next-youngest sibling. She still lives in the town where I suffered through adolescence, and she works with some of the people with whom I attended high school. She'd been talking with Vince (not his real name), a football letterman who was a class or two ahead of me, and he said to pass along his regards.

"That Foo... he was pretty cool," Vince told her. "I remember he always seemed like he really had it all together."

I couldn't recall ever having had a single conversation with the guy. He was tall, athletic, had a blinding smile, and usually had a couple cheerleaders swooning along beside him. If anyone had asked, I would been positive this was a guy who had no idea we walked the same halls every day. And I would have been wrong.

We're all Losers; we're all Cool. You just have to ask the right person.

I passed!

I'm sure I will, at least. After more years with my employer than I care to remember, I finally had to take my very first drug screening test. Thanks, Messrs. Graham, Leach, and Bliley.

This morning was when The Examiners came around and, heaven help them, I was prepared. You might ask how one prepares for such a test. Or not... but I'll tell you anyway.

• Onions
• Asparagus
• Lots of strong, black coffee

There's nothing in my body that wasn't prescribed by a doctor or purchased at a fast food drive-through, so I'm confident I'll pass with flying colors. However, it may not be a perfect score.

I expect there could be deductions for going outside the lines.

Cool tool

I stumbled across a very handy Firefox extension this morning and wanted to share. Those of you who don't poke around in the innards of your blog templates and wouldn't know a <div> if it crawled up your leg and nipped you on the bum will not be interested.

When deconstructing an existing page layout on the way to putting it all back together using CSS, the biggest challenge often is figuring out how the existing document is organized. Sure, you can run the code through Tidy and hope the indents are right so that you can match closing tags with their mates, but it's an imperfect solution, especially for pages with a lot of content and multiple sub-sections.

That's where the View Source Chart extension for Firefox comes in. After downloading and installing this extension (written by Jennifer Madden), you'll be able to right click on a page and have View Source Chart display a hierarchical view of the entire document, complete with handy little boxes that give you visual cues as to what goes where. Even better, you can click on individual sections to collapse them and get them out of the way to make finding the higher level sections easier.

And, oh yes... it's free.

Zoom zoom

After a week of working at it, I've finally got a new car. The process was relatively painless, the one fly in the ointment being that the first salesman who ran out the door and grabbed on to my leg when I paid my first visit to the dealership was green as a tomato worm. He had only been selling cars for a few weeks, didn't really have a lot of answers to my lengthy list of questions, and ultimately cost me a couple wasted trips to the dealership. Things went more smoothly once The Hoary Veteran (a very pleasant fellow whose real name was Bruce) took me in tow when I visited during one of The New Guy's days off. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My New World

Part of the challenge, as it was explained to me, is that Mazda has decreased the dealers' allocations of 5-doors (or compact wagon, as I've also seen it) for the 2007 model year. There I was, standing in the showroom with my checkbook in tow (I even brought my own pen!), and the sales staff were having trouble coming up with more than one to show me.

"Well, we have this black one," The New Guy told me. "It's pretty sharp, huh?"

"It's good enough for a test drive, and it does look sharp," I agreed. "But the only black car I've ever owned as a Texas resident is the one I owned when I moved here from out of state. Never again."

The New Guy gave me a look utterly devoid of comprehension.

"You know, because black is so hot," I said, attempting to bring him along.

"Definitely," he said, nodding and flashing a grin that went just beyond conspiratorial but didn't quite reach lascivious. "Black is very hot."

I suspected we weren't on the same wavelength, so I cut to the chase.

"I will not be buying a black car."

With that settled, we set about checking inventory to see what was available, only to discover that all the other Mazda 3 hatchbacks had manual transmissions. After 10 years of daily commutes in the beep-and-creepy Dallas traffic, one of my primary reasons for buying a new car was to get my left foot off the clutch. Those lovely creatures with their 5-speed manual transmissions and sporting a variety of lovely paint schemes were dead to me.

To shorten the story a bit, I ended up working with Bruce and Eric The Acquirer to find me a car. They were expecting delivery of a gray one (along with Phantom Blue and Aurora Blue, one of my three preferred colors) in a couple weeks but would also do a search to see if they could get one sooner from another dealer. The next day, I got a phone call from Turtle saying that The New Guy had called to say that they'd found one, that it would be driven in the next day, and what time would I like to come in to take delivery. I called back and asked if 10am would be good, and he said it would be just great.

At 10am yesterday, I showed up at the dealership to find that not only would the car not arrive for another three hours, but it was The New Guy's day off. Bruce and Eric were as mystified as they were apologetic. Since I was already there, I sat down with Bruce and worked out a few details regarding my trade in before heading home to wait and fall asleep in front of some really lame horror movie starring the post-car accident Mark Hamill.

Cutting further to the chase, at 6pm I drove off the lot. Still fumbling to figure out where all the light switches were and how to work them, I pulled on to the highway and immediately found myself in the midst of a traffic jam.

Ahhh, I thought. The blessed relief of an automatic transmission.

It figures that the day after I buy a new car, Texas can't spare me a little sunshine for pictures. But it's gray, after all, so call it a theme.

Meeped: Day 3

The bad news:

I can only send e-mail from my Road Runner e-mail accounts using SMTP from my home computers. When I'm at work (which is about 80% of my computer time), I'll have to either use RR's webmail, or another account—like, say, from one of my personal domains. Someone representing himself as a tier two support person for Road Runner posted on the forum at dslreports.com and confirmed the way their SMTP authentication works:

our smtp server authentication is IP driven no other authentication is supported... so if you are on a foreign connection its not going to work which is a pain i know !!!!!!!

Not a huge hardship, now that I've migrated my domains from Yahoo! Domains to GoDaddy so that my e-mail forwards actually work dependably. However, there are places where I'd like to provide an e-mail address that I can POP (that lets out my standby Yahoo! e-mail) and that isn't associated with my unique and very recognizable domain names (see my previous comments about online paranoia).

The good news:

It looks like the dust is starting to settle a bit, and speeds at the Foo household are comparable to what we had with Comcast. According to Speakeasy's speed test:



I can't remember what we're supposed to be getting, but it's a point of reference. Certainly, it's better than what I get at work:



In fairness, I should point out that the connection at work has to deal with a whole office of bandwidth hogs like the guy who sits for hours and watches old episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on his computer.

Another bit of good news is that I did some checking into Grande Communications, which may or may not be the one cable alternative to Time-Warner/Road Runner in our neighborhood. I'll be looking at their pricing for comparable speeds, of course, but I did some initial research into their phone/internet/cable TV bundles, and it looks like going with Grande would be about $60 cheaper for comparable features. Of course, there are still all the tariffs and taxes to factor in, but I would argue that a savings of $20/month and ditching Time-Warner could still be considered improvement.

Meanwhile...

I'm having a vacation day so that I can go get my annual physical out of the way and then mosey—'cause that's how I do things when I'm on vacation—up to the Mazda dealership to see if I can make a deal for a new car. I even ran the old one through the car wash last night, and then came home and vacuumed up all the mulch and breakfast biscuit crumbs that had taken up residence in the carpet and upholstery over the past [mumble] years.

October searches

• gravity pulls in allen,texas Allen does not suck.
  
• misfire peristalsis Yeah, well... you make me puke too, so it evens out.
• meaning of bad penny You ain't from around here, are ya?
• list of abbreations I see you've started without me.
• sweeturtle I couldn't agree more!

Deep thought

Parents of conjoined twins: if you have girls, please don't name them Sybil and Phyllis. Kids are cruel. [I shouldn't have to explain this one to you, but I will if I have to. -Foo]

Meeped: Day 2

After receiving absolutely no response to my questions about procedures for doing the migration manually, without installing RR's ActiveX poo, I finally succumbed to social engineering and did exactly what I was expected to do. I gave in and just ran their bloody wizard.

I now have a stupid, grinning roadrunner cartoon permanently embedded in my Outlook Express e-mail client, an ActiveX program I can't find to remove, and a mostly-working internet connection. Browsing doesn't seem to be appreciably slower, as long as I'm viewing a page that's already in cache, and I'm able to receive e-mails from the POP3 server.

Unfortunately, attempting to send an e-mail to an address in some other domain besides Road Runner gets me something like this:

An unknown error has occurred. Account: 'FooRider @ RR', Server: 'smtp-server.tx.rr.com', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '421 Service not available', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 421, Error Number: 0x800CCC67

or this

The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was 'xxxxx@yahoo.com'. Subject 'Re: grrrrrrrrrrr', Account: 'FooRider @ RR', Server: 'smtp-server.tx.rr.com', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '550 relaying mail to yahoo.com is not allowed', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 550, Error Number: 0x800CCC79

The first is no surprise, given what I've read on forums regarding Comcast-to-Road Runner migrations suffered out on the left coast. But does Road Runner honestly expect me to give up being able to send e-mails from my work machine by SMTP?

That's exactly the question I asked in my second missive to Road Runner's tech support. I don't actually expect to hear back from them this time either, but those folks are not without a sense of humor. From their tech support page:

Road Runner is proud to offer industry leading tech support through a variety of channels. All of our online tech support channels are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Outlined below are your technical support channels:

Technical E-mail Support

Try our Technical E-mail Support where you can get answers in hours not days.

"Hours not days"? Good one, guys. I just can't stop chuckling.

Meeped: It begins

For months, the Foo household has been receiving from Time-Warner Cable a mind-numbing barrage of propaganda regarding their impending ownership of our business. There are the postcards, the pamphlets, the e-mails, and the extremely annoying TV ads that gleefully remind us twice at every commercial break how they're "fine tuning" our cable service.

If throwing a spanner in the works can be considered fine tuning, I suppose that's a true statement. Turtle called this morning to tell me she'd received an e-mail instructing her to convert her Comcast e-mail account(s) over to the new, exciting Road Runner accounts. I hadn't received any such notifications, so I asked her to hold up and forward a copy of the e-mail to me.

According to the e-mail, "all you have to do" is run their handy wizard, which downloads and installs some sort of ActiveX control and modifies your Internet Explorer browser with neato Road Runner stuff. This malware activates your Road Runner service, "optimizes" your computer to run with it, and then goes through every e-mail client it can find on your system and modifies your e-mail configurations. "Never mind the details," it seems to say. "I know what I'm doing."

In other words, it's time to make a full system backup and dust off the OS reinstallation disks.

Meanwhile, I noticed this morning that I haven't received any e-mail to one of the public comcast.net addresses I use for mailing lists and other correspondence that might attract spam. It's a forwarding address that I've set up to pass everything along to my primary comcast.net mailbox, but it turns out that Time-Warner went ahead and switched it to forward to some new tx.rr.com address that doesn't exist because I haven't created it yet!

They're fine-tuning my internet experience, you know.

It gets better. I visited the Time-Warner web page that provides migration information for the North Dallas victims. Yes, Road Runner will still be providing free anti-virus and firewall software, as Comcast did, but instead of McAfee, we get some half-arsed junk put out by Computer Associates. I've used Computer Associates' stuff before, and it was crap; but I thought maybe things had improved, so I went a-Googling for reviews. Words like "ineffective" and "system crash" kept cropping up in the user reviews. PC Magazine's review was more diplomatic but said essentially the same thing. Looks like I'll be shelling out some bucks for ZoneAlarm's security suite.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Timeless

As I was working on the image, I was reminded of a comment one of our friends made at dinner the other evening.

"Hey, you're the big clock expert," she began somewhat ominously. "How come clocks with Roman numerals always use 'IIII' instead of 'IV'?"

I prefaced my answer by saying that I'd never really given it any thought and then admitted that I didn't know the answer—though I suspected it had to do with aesthetics and balance. One look at my little collage above should be enough to convince anyone that my grasp of compositional balance is tenuous at best, but there you have it.

Since then, I took 15 seconds out of my busy schedule to Google for the answer and was surprised that this is a topic of some lukewarm debate. If you're interested in how that all shakes out, Cecil Adams, in his typically entertaining fashion, covers it pretty well in this article.

Now playing: Inspiral Carpets, Revenge Of The Goldfish

Pedaling hard

It is as the title suggests, but only in a figurative sense of being very busy (without, some might argue, getting anywhere fast). In fact, I haven't been on the bike for over a week.

While the blogging and biking world passes me by, I've been feverishing picking up the slack left at work since four of my fellow cube dwellers recently got sacked. At home, I've been almost as feverishly ("Hmm. You're a little warm...") working on putting together a reasonably bulletproof Dreamweaver template for Turtle's side business. As a consequence of the latter, I've finally spent the time to really understand the CSS box model and—more to the point—the mis-implementation of it by various versions of Internet Explorer.

I took the time to attend an 80^th birthday party with Turtle this past weekend (when I usually would have been riding my bike), but aside from that I've been a very non-social holed-up-in-my-office little W3C nerd.

Jesus, His arms wide

Turtle and I were in the car—she driving and me doing my part by looking around and howling along with the radio. As we passed a semi with a 2/3-scale portrait of Christ painted on the side of the cab, my first thought was There's something you don't see every day.

Even Jesus' posture seemed to say, "Hey... it beats the heck out of me. It's not my truck."

My second thought was Jesus, His arms wide—a reference to the metaphorical language central to the "Darmok" episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn't realize it until I went to hunt down a Wikipedia link for this post, but in the Tamarians' language "arms wide" meant "gift" or "to give".

And suddenly it all made sense to me.

Slacker with a capital slack

Yes, that's right. I have nothing to report about Saturday's PBA Fall Century ride. It's not that I'm too lazy to type it up, as believable as that might be. It's because I didn't go.

As of Friday afternoon, I was still waffling. With my confidence shaken by a couple sub-par (in my opinion) performances in the preceding weeks, and considering my general malaise, I came up with a short list of reasons why giving it a miss would be the smart and responsible thing to do:

1. I had missed church the previous two weekends, first because Turtle and I were in San Antonio, and then last weekend because the Bonham ride and trip home took me longer than I had estimated. And then on Sunday evening, when I had intended to go, I fell into my usual Sunday routine and forgot. If I did the century, I wouldn't make it home in time to go again this week—and would be too exhausted to go, in any case.
2. Time. At a 15 mph pace, I estimated that it would take in excess of 9 hours to complete the ride. Figure about 6½ hours of actual riding and at least another 2 or 3 hours for a lunch break and other stops.
3. Turtle had been patiently waiting for a block of my time so that we could put together the initial design template for her business web site. If I did the century, I'd be gone all day Saturday (see #2) and most likely wiped out for a lot of Sunday.
4. The weather forecast called for 20% chance of thunderstorms starting Saturday afternoon. The prospect of riding the latter portion of a 100-mile ride in the rain and having to dodge lightning bolts didn't thrill me.
5. Finally, if it turned out that I'm just not strong enough to go the distance, Turtle would already be a good hour and a half away (at church) when I discovered it. There'd be no one to come and retrieve my capital-L-on-the-forehead-wearing butt.

So I wimped out, instead choosing to do one of my usual 40-mile Saturday morning rides (which was lovely, thanks for asking). I also got churched up, Saturday evening. That must've been the right thing to do, because we were blessed with a slow, steady, all-day rain on Sunday. Perfect weather for putting together a reasonably presentable web site template for Turtle (though the font on the header graphic still looks dodgy to me (sorry, Dear)), only taking short breaks to eat and watch an episode of Carnivale: Season Two.

If you want to know how the Fall Century went, you'll have to wait and see if rcarlino (who probably didn't wimp out) posts a comment about it.

Ride Report: Autumn In Bonham (Bonham, TX)

I didn't do the Autumn in Bonham ride last year, because of some sort of schedule conflict. This year, I wasn't planning on it just because I felt I'd maxed out my 2006 entry fee budget. However, word on the street is that it's a really nice ride, and I felt an obligation to take a crack at the Leonard Leviathans—three very large (for Texas) hills—after missing them during the Cotton Patch Classic, so I signed up anyway.

The drive up ended up taking less time than I expected, so I parked up close, picked up my ride number and t-shirt (my second favorite design of this season, by the way), and set about unloading and assembling my bike. The guy parked next to me turned out to be Blanca from over on BikeJournal.com, so we chatted with each other for a while and then with various other acquaintances as they arrived.

It continues to amaze me that I go to these rallies with hundreds of other riders and always seem to run into at least a dozen people I know (including Lance, Lance's son, Allez, and Allez's husband). I think that's kind of neat.

Shortly before 9 am, everyone lined up and we got under way. I started off riding with John, local legend and webmaster of the popular bicycle-stuff.com, but we got separated early, at an intersection where a police officer had his SUV parked right in the middle of the intersection and gave confusing instructions about which groups were supposed to go which way. I went left; John went straight, never to be seen (by me) again.

Almost immediately, we came to a long climb. And then another. And another. Cool, I thought. We're getting this all out of the way early, while our legs are still fresh.

But they kept coming... and coming... and by my first stop at the second rest stop, my quads were already grousing at me. I'd maintained a 16.3 mph average to that point, but I knew that I was going to have to back off my assaults on the climbs if I was going to survive the rest of the 64-mile route (which, in typical bike rally fashion, was actually .1 mile short of 67 miles).

While I was eating a banana and chatting up one of the grandmotherly volunteers, a couple of those acquaintances I mentioned before rolled up at the rest stop: Steve (who rides a fire engine red Bacchetta Café recumbent) and Peggy (who looks and sounds enough like our blog buddy, Allez, that they could be sisters) from Frisco. Knowing that I ride a more sane pace when socializing, I joined up with them and their friend for the rest of the hilly, energy-sucking-chip-seal-plagued, beautiful-scenery-having ride.

This was one of those routes that really made me wish that my digital camera weren't quite so bulky. There were surreal fields of some sort of golden-flowered weed clumps. There were barns and cows. There were interesting little near-ghost towns that just begged to have their weathered facades and peeling columns photographed. Everywhere we went, people smiled, yelled, and waved from porches and front yards.

I was impressed, overall, with how the drivers in the area didn't feel compelled to threaten us with their vehicles. In fact, the only close calls I had all day were near Leonard. In one case, I had come to a full stop at a four way intersection and awaited my turn to go. As I did, the elderly woman in the PT Cruiser decided she wanted to go. So I stopped. She waved for me to go, and as I did, she started to pull out again. So I stopped. She waved me on. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The other was a police officer, who came within a foot of clipping me with his passenger side mirror as I balanced precariously on the white line along one of the few stretches of road that didn't have a nice, wide shoulder to retreat to. At the next rest stop, I mentioned this to one of the volunteers. When I described the guy to her, she told me that this was "the Leonard cop", that he was a jerk, and that he'd been buzzing the rally participants all day.

Way to serve and protect, Barney.

Finally, we came to the Leviathans, and I remembered what I'd been told by others who had ridden them. The first two were steep but made manageable by the fact that they were prefaced by nice descents. When I saw the big hills ahead, I shifted to the biggest gear I had and gave gravity a hand. I reminded myself not to overdo it on the way down because I'd need my quads and hamstrings for the climb, but I needn't have bothered. At 37 mph, I spun out (i.e., ran out of top end gears) and had to coast until I reached the point of resistance on the climb.

Two down, no problem.

But the third hill... that one was every bit as nasty as I'd heard. It wasn't preceded by as much of a downhill, leeched away all your momentum, and then got steeper as it turned. And all on that momentum-robbing chip seal. When I was already into my small ring by the halfway point, I knew I was in trouble, but I kept churning away. Two thirds of the way up, I'd run out of gears on the low end. With my mucles wrung out by all the day's previous climbs, I could no longer spin and was reduced to mashing on the pedals. Twenty yards from the top, I was down to about 5 mph and nearing my stall speed—you can't really track stand a recumbent—but my guts were telling my brain to tell my legs that we were almost there and to stop being such wussies.

That's when my right quad flew all of us the bird and threw a cramp.

Rather than risk the embarrassment of falling over or the embarrassment of tearing something and having to ride the SAG wagon (although, now that I think of it, I can't recall seeing one all day), I put my feet down and walked the short distance to the top. Meanwhile, Steve veered around me and cleared the top. I could attribute his success to slightly lower gearing or to slightly wider tires that roll better on the chip seal. I may have used up too much of my legs earlier in the ride, or it may go back to the hammerfest I did with a couple friends after work, two days earlier. The bottom line is that I didn't beat the hill, and that's a bitter pill for me to swallow.

The rest of the ride was no sweat. Once it had made its point, my right quad behaved itself. We had an enjoyable, uneventful ride back to the starting point, where we discovered that most of the cars were gone and the organizers had pretty much folded up their tent. We must have dawdled at a couple rest stops longer than I'd realized, because even with all the climbing I still ended the day with a 16 mph rolling average.

Bonham was certainly one of the most challenging rides I've done this season, but I enjoyed the route, the scenery, and the company. I'm just thinking maybe I need to find a leg press to work out on before I consider going back for seconds.

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www.lipsum.com

Those of you who know what to do with this sort of thing will find this sort of thing sort of useful.

He so horny

This is a short week for me (praise the Lord!) because I took a vacation day Monday. Originally, the thought was that Turtle and I might spend an extra day bumming around the New Braunfels area after attending a family gathering over the weekend, but events didn't play out that way. Instead, I had the luxury of a whole day during which I could whittle away at my endless list of Things That Need Done during the middle of the day—that magical time when crowds are thin and I haven't just spent an hour battling every Tomas, Rick, and Herold intent on fraying my last good nerve.

One of these tasks was the dreaded (by me, at least) trip to Costco for the next two months' supply of beer and wine, toilet paper, frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts and ground beef patties, fresh pineapple, and a half dozen bagels¹. Turtle, ever the compassionate one, offered to go with, but I turned her down. This was going to be a surgical strike. I planned to be in and out within half an hour, and I already had my path through the store mapped out in my head.

Into the parking lot, dodge the departing shoppers with their walkers and oxygen tanks, grab a cart (one with four round wheels, this time), flash the membership card. Hard left, down the aisle at a lope, weaving around the vacant-eyed, slack-jawed woman in curlers, executing a perfect bump and roll around the Korean national jabbering on a cell phone. Grab the beer and wine, and heave the cart toward the fruits and veggies. Grab a package of pineapple on the fly, swing right toward the freezer section.

Blast. What size bag of chicken breasts? Quick phone call to the missus.

Grab my breasts and my meat (Stop. It.). Hard right at the end of the aisle, and I had the skids of soft drinks in my si—ABORT! ABORT! Hauling hard on my cart, I screeched to a cartoon halt to narrowly avoid colliding with a cart that had appeared from a side aisle, followed closely by an elderly man.

Crisis averted. The old duffer shuffled his way slowly down the aisle in front of me and, with time on my hands, I found myself wondering... what the hell is he wearing on his head?

I dismissed my conclusion twice before accepting what my eyes told me, but perched on this adult's head was a child's toy viking helmet, complete with eight-inch horns.

I worked my way past him, ostensibly to get to the Diet Coke. In reality, I just wanted to get a better look at this guy. I expected to see him smirking, like he was just goofing. Or scowling like he'd lost a bet. Maybe drooling a bit. What I saw was a neatly-dressed man of about 70 years, with his spectacles perched on his nose and their case clipped in his breast pocket. His expression was neutral and—notwithstanding his unsignaled merge into my lane—alert. Wearing a viking helmet cocked at a jaunty angle.

As far as I could see, his cart was conspicuously bereft of SPAM.

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¹ This didn't quite work out according to my plan. Turtle and I don't eat a lot of bagels at home, so I only needed a half dozen. Unfortunately, when I went to pay for all my stuff, the cashier informed me that they were "a dozen for [some amount of legal tender]" and didn't I want a full dozen? I told him no, thinking that I'd get my half dozen for half the price of a full dozen. Instead, he tossed my bagels to an assistant, who whisked them away somewhere. I asked what he was doing and only then did he bother to explain that it was a dozen or nothing. Not that I actually would have left my cart and all the people lined up behind me to go to the back of the store and grab six more bagels, but the whole business kind of left a bad, bagel-less taste in my mouth.

Now playing: Queensrÿche, Operation Mindcrime

Catty chat

Turtle sent me a link to this from another site, but it cracked me up so much that I went and hunted down a copy on Youtube.com to save here for posterity.

Watch it, but not with a mouth full of coffee or yogurt.