Just a few little life updates and anecdotes as I recover from a 7-mile ride on a warm, pleasant and sunny Sunday evening.
We spent the day at the beach yesterday; I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon known as “tides.” In Pennsylvania, our equivalent of a “beach” was a few tons of ultra-coarse sandy substance dumped at the edge of a man-made lake, and the most water movement we got was if somebody with an amped-up trolling motor on their jon boat got a little close to the swimming-area buoys while searching for bass. No complaints; we had a good time, and it made sense to avoid serious sun exposure without the benefit of modern conveniences like SPF-50 sunscreen (the kids at the pool called me “Whitey,” which, in a racially-challenged area of Central PA, meant that my skin had to be pretty much glow-in-the-dark. That’s like your snail friends calling you “slowpoke” or something).
But, it’s incredible to me that several football fields of land appear and disappear on a regular schedule. I mean, I’ll snorkel out through the waves for a couple of minutes to get to where some of the interesting stuff is, but if I waited a few hours, I could just walk over and check it out, sans-breathing apparatus.
Speaking of snorkeling, sadly, not much interesting stuff to be seen. The weather was great above water, but the storms off the coast stirred up a lot of seaweed and other junk. It felt like my experience getting my scuba cert in the mud and silt of Lake Skaneateles. I had half a mind to go back and get my underwater light–not that it would have helped.
We grabbed some nice seafood for dinner with Kara’s mum, and we split a California roll as an app…I had a hankering for sushi, which I should have indulged for my main course. It’s worth pointing out: a lot of what we consider “sushi” doesn’t actually have any raw fish in it; California roll is vegetables and cooked crab. It’s still absolutely delicious, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Honestly, even stuff like tuna sashimi, while raw, is just slightly less-cooked than the way you ought to be eating tuna anyway. But, I can understand that folks with texture issues might not want to do raw tuna, much less something like raw quail egg (even I don’t care for that, although I did try it once), so, next time you have a chance to try sushi, don’t be afraid of grabbing one of the “safer” options, just to try it out.
Today was a pretty productive Sunday. I ran some errands; I convinced Kara to get her old mountain bike out of storage at her mum’s, just to see if she wanted to occasionally try to come riding with me. So, I hit International Bicycle Center–Newton location, this time, which is larger than their Allston store, where I bought my Trek FX 7.1 (yes, that’s my review up there…they left out the carriage returns, so it reads like WALL OF TEXT; I’ll post it up here with original formatting intact sometime when I have a slow news day). She is now the proud owner of a silver Trek Vapor helmet, nicely contrasting with my white one, as well as a bell. No streamers or little basket, but maybe on a future trip.
I also picked up a couple new tubes; I had the misfortune of discovering on Friday that riding with higher tire pressures than my old mountain bike + fully-loaded rear rack with groceries + badly-executed bunny-hop + granite curb = flat rear tire. And I’ve been going back and forth on the whole “bar ends” thing, but I finally broke down and bought a pair, which I installed after fixing my tire. I don’t use them so much for hill-climbing leverage, as I did when I was riding a mountain bike, so much as to give me a comfortable additional hand position. I find that riding with my hands turned up, as if I’m gripping a baseball bat or a sword or something, is more comfortable than riding with them sideways, like pushing a grocery cart.
So, the bike is now essentially complete, with the only other planned upgrades being a pair of bike shorts–the mountain-bike casual type, that are baggy on the outside. I shudder to think of myself in spandex.
Well, maybe a light, eventually…we’ll see how wintertime riding goes.
Wow…a dude just zoomed past the balcony on a Segway. It’s the weekend when the college kids come back to Boston, so I’ve seen a number of weird things, just in the last hour, but that’s really unusual.
Anyway, in other upgrade news, the Jetta has a new driver’s side mirror and a mirror adjustment switch. I was initially going to install it myself, then I thought I’d wait to have it done as I thought I might have to take part of the door off. As it turns out, I only had to remove 3 total screws to get enough access behind the door panel to remove the mirror, and one of those 3 was the bolt holding the mirror on. So that’s done, and I can go back to the luxury of not having to turn my head all the way around to see if there’s a car to my left–of course, I will still always do head checks of my blind spots, but it’ll be nice to have some additional coverage.
With a little luck, the Jetta will pass inspection and be road-worthy for another year. I’d love a new car, but I don’t want to deal with a payment, and considering that I only really have to drive once or twice a week, it just doesn’t make sense…I put more miles on the bicycle. I just hope it doesn’t rain between now and the inspection. Rain always seems to make the “Check Engine” light turn on, which is a surefire inspection fail.
We’re loving the Sodastream; I stopped into a local cooking supply store on the way home from the bike shop today for a CO2 refill tank and some more soda mix syrup, and a woman at the checkout asked me how I liked it. I told her how MJP got us interested in the idea for the sake of saving a couple bucks, but that I prefer it because I now let the Brighton Water Department deliver the heaviest part of the soda to our condo, rather than lugging it up 2 flights of stairs.
A little meta-writing, here: I think I’ll intermix blog entries of this type with my usual business and strategy stuff. These types of entries remind me of a show that I played with my old musical side project, January River, doing a set of three original songs (if I had to categorize the style, I’d say it was “emo-folk coffeeshop acoustic”) in the middle of a show with my “main” band, DMD. Interest was, well, limited, but between songs, I plinked out the opening riff to “Sweet Home Alabama,” which ended up getting people interested–until I stopped playing it and went into another original. Sometimes, you’re better off just being a cover band.
The point being, based on current known readership, the tendency of blogs to focus on personal life topics, and the popularity of reality-based entertainment, I wouldn’t be surprised if this entry garnered a lot more comments than, say, an essay on maximizing ROI when doing offshore vendor selection. And that’s fine: two different blog posts for two different audiences; while I hope that people enjoy the business stuff, that’s totally cool if it makes your eyes glaze over. The same people who might enjoy those topics would, I’d expect, be bored reading about bicycle upgrades. January River probably should have played a few cover songs, then done an original, but you live and you learn.
So, I’ll keep on adding variety to the topics here. As we say when playing certain drinking-related card games, for the people!
I remember going to see your band once and hearing the intro to sweet home and thinking that very same thing about how you should have kept playing it.
Yeah…pretty sure Dad was the one who mentioned that everybody started coming in from their smoke breaks when they heard the first few notes. DMD could have been a lot more popular, too, if we’d just played a few more covers and a few less of my Candlebox ripoffs.