Not just a ride today

I just got back from a nearly 30 mile ride. I didn't just ride around though. My first stop was about 7 miles in at the Taco Derp. I grabbed a pair of soft tacos slathered in volcano sauce. I also topped off my water bottle twice. Once to drink with the tacos and again for the next leg of the ride.

From the Derp I continues on the bike path for another few miles till I reached the dam. I did several jumps off of the dam into water that was MUCH warmer than it was a week ago. No nut freezing at all this time. It was rather nice. I think I did maybe two or three dives and the rest were back flips. I like doing back flips the best because they're freakin' cake and people seem to be impressed with them.

After the dam stop I headed up the hills a bit to my sister's house. I actually had to get off of my bike because the hill was too steep. I was more than 3/4 of the way up it before I did so, but I still feel like a bit of a failure for doing so. I chilled at my sister's place for the better part of an hour then headed home. The last leg went fast because I was coming down all those hills I went up and it seemed like even the flat parts were sloped down a bit because I rarely took it off of the big gear up front.

All in all though I guess I'm happy with my performance. I think that if I'd encountered that one hill by the 5th or so mile, rather than at the 16th I'd have been able to make it all the way up it. I did after all make the climb up 141 just a couple of days ago and that hill is literally a mile long. This one was maybe half that, but much steeper. Not that 141 is a cake walk either, it's still an 8% grade, but this one was just enough more that it kicked my ass. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be able to make this same ride much quicker and go right up that hill without stopping.

Corporate shill time once again

Preface: No really,  no one is paying me to say this shit:


I've been trying to lose some weight for a while now and I really don't know how it's going. The first five pounds was easy, but the next 50, that's being a problem. I'll never meet my goal however if I keep going to D'angelo's for grinders. (For those of you not in western New England I'm taking about subs, hoagies, heroes and other large sandwiches.) Just looking over the website tells me that quite a few of their sandwiches fulfill one's daily requirement of several different things at once. And one of their sandwiches, I can't recall which one, gives you more than 200% of your daily intake of sodium.Yowza!

Now you'd think that just reading that would make a person run the other direction, but here's the thing. They've got this one sandwich called the Thanksgiving Toasted. It is exactly what you expect it to be. Open the fridge the day after thanksgiving, reach in and slap a bunch of the shit you find onto a toasted grinder roll (I choose wheat, how health conscious of me) then add two little cups full of warm gravy and devour.

Check out this tasty mofo!

Does this not look like an awesome sandwich? It's got everything you need in a sandwich. Mayo, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and a side of gravy. Now the picture here shows the gravy already on the sandwich, but that's just a suggestion and if you ask me it's the wrong one. Don't dump your gravy willy nilly. What you've got to do is open the container and just dip the sandwich in as you go.The gravy stays warmer longer and every bite you take is freshly prepared with its gravy. By the time you get to the end of the sandwich you won't be left with soggy gravy bread. Not that this particular point matters all the much. Trust me, the sandwich won't last long enough for it to even think about getting soggy.

And this is why I will never lose all the weight I intend to lose. Why does everything that's good have to be fattening. And why does everything that's good for me have to taste like cardboard by comparison?

Unsurprising

The Avengers was an awesome movie.

That will be all.

Stuff what crossed my eyes this week

Here is a short and certainly incomplete list of stuff I've seen this week while biking, and possibly while doing other things:

-About 7000 chipmunks
-An amount of squirrels roughly half the total of chipmunks
-Four really fat squirrels
-A goddamned bear cub
-A curious lack of mother bears
-A Phillips head screw driver (small)
-Many pieces of the driver side front window motor assembly from a Nissan Sentra SE-R SPEC-V
-A properly functioning driver side front window motor assembly from a Nissan Sentra SE-R SPEC-V
-A Nissan Sentra SE-R SPEC-V driver side front window, in both up and down positions
-A really damned bright bicycle headlight
-The relocation to another bike of a less bright bicycle headlight
-Far too many road constructions
-Far FAR too many police (mostly at these road constructions)
-One REALLY stupid new road construction that achieves nothing but wasting about five or six feet of perfectly usable road width
-Many shapely asses, mostly clad in short shorts (I love spring time)
-A 1942 penny, sporting wheat grains on the tails side
-An as yet unused shower head
-Teflon thread tape for the above
-A box of Rice Krispies Treats cereal (mostly empty)

And this has been the week my eyes have had. Not a bad week, if you ask me.

Mother Nature is a giant gaping cunt

I felt like seeing The Avengers today. I also felt like getting in a ride. The theater is only a touch over 11 miles from home so the plan was to kill two birds with one stone by riding to the movies. I checked three different weather sites to see how it was going to be. Two of the three said it was going to start raining well into the movie, so if I felt the need I could just take the bus home from the movie while the third said it was already raining despite the fact that it obviously wasn't. Encouraged by this I went ahead and hopped on my bike.

By the time I was out of the driveway it was already sprinkling. Whatever I won't let a little mist stop me. I continued on and get to the bike path in under five minutes. The rain had started properly by this point, but it still wasn't a bad sort of rain. Fuck it, I can ride through this I thought and went ahead with the plan. Not five minutes later it had started to downpour properly and I also realized I forgot my keys, so I wouldn't be able to lock my bike up when I got there. Fuck it, plan derailed. I'll just hit the store for some dinner foods. On the way to the store the rain continued to get harder and I was glad when I finally went through the front door.

Inside I stalked the aisles, dripping rain everywhere I went. I checked the soups. Nothing interested me. The prepared foods were almost gone and non were my thing anyhow so I grabbed a prepackaged meatload dinner with a side of garlic mashed. Along the way I hit the frozen food section for another couple of nights worth of dinner. Adding a loaf of bread I figured that was enough and checked out.

I headed to the door and dropped my receipt into the little thing they have there that contributes 5 cents to the cause of your choice for every receipt put into the box. Unsurprisingly my cause of choice is the rail trail box because yay, biking. When I got outside the rain had gotten even harder than it was when I arrived, so I gave it a few minutes to lighten up. Not a chance of that, if anything it got worse, so my impatient side said "fuck it" and I took off. All over again I got soaked through and miserable, but wouldn't you know it... right when I turned onto the side street that would ultimately lead me home (this being less than a half mile from home) the rain halted. That was 20 minutes ago and the rain has yet to return.

So fuck off, Mother Nature. You're a cunt of the highest order.;

The bikes have returned

Hooray the bikes are done. I picked them up from Joe's Garage yesterday morning and gave my nephew's bike back to him. He can't ride it yet because of his broken collar bone, but he'll be on it soon I'm sure. Mine is sitting downstairs and that's alright with me. I'll be taking it out in just a moment. I was quite happy with the prices of the tune ups considering all they did to them. Both bikes got all new cabling for brakes and shifters, his bike got new tires front and back and mine got new brakes for the back. I could swear mine got something else too, but I can't remember what. All that went along with the usual stuff like adjusting the shifting, lubing stuff, truing the wheels and all around making the bike good for the coming season. I think I'll be going back there, but of course I'm going to test ride the bike first and find out just how good a job they did.

And with that, I'm off like a prom dress.

The occasional whining post

The only thing worse than having to work an extra two hours unexpectedly is knowing you're not going to earn overtime for it.

More suck: I have to fix my damned car and it's raining. I guess the car fixing will have to wait. Maybe I can use that time to pick up my new shoes. Oh wait, no I can't because they aren't open yet.

I swear I'll have more and better stuff to write about next time.

I want my bike back!

So the bike is at the shop.

And I want to ride. NOW!

On further reflection I should have taken the bikes to the shop one at a time. I could be riding mine or my nephew's bike right now, but instead I'm sitting at the computer typing this up. I did do something exercise related earlier though. I did 20 sit ups and 40 push ups while listening to the metal/rock related music choice channels. I did them in sets. 10 sit ups at a whack and 20 push ups at a whack. Being a fat guy with relatively strong arms I can do a decent amount of push ups, but just plain suck at sit ups. I don't like them either. I do this thing I accidentally discovered as well. I lay flat on my back and raise my upper body a little bit with my abs then try to hold myself there. If I do it just right my abs begin to twitch. I remember doing it at work last year when waiting for the press to wash up before taking the plates off. There I can lay down on the platforms in such a way as to stretch my back out. I do that occasionally when my back is bothering me. While doing that I think "hey, may as well do that weird plyometric thing with my abs" I remember that after a week or two of doing it at work my abs were noticeably more firm. I'm pretty sure I was skinnier back then though. And now we do other stuff while the machine is washing up, so I don't have as much chance to get it in while waiting for the press to wash up like I used to.

Aside: For a fat guy I sure do make a lot of posts about exercise. Maybe next time I'll make one about Everybody Edits or some other game I play.

Later, blogland.

Keeping it going

I took another ride today. It was actually the same ride as yesterday, but in reverse. I think the route is better this way. Yesterday I only rode the flats for a little bit before it started going all up and down. Today the first half of the ride was by and large very flat and the ups and downs got thrown in towards the end when I was already warmed up with the final mile and a half being nice and flat for a good cool down. I actually ended up going about half a mile farther today because there was traffic in the way making me miss my road. I just hooked the next left and went around the block and home.

In a little bit I'm going to be taking off, in the car this time, to steal my nephew's bike. Then I'll be taking his and mine to the bike shop to get them tuned up. He won't be using his for a bit due to his broken collar bone, so it's really the best time to do it.

Well, time to bolt once again. The shower awaits.

Exercise is good

I've been attempting to lose the extra weight I gathered over the winter, mostly by biking. I'll be taking off on a nine mile ride of mostly flat roads as soon as I'm done posting this. Yesterday I took a shorter ride, but a decent portion of that was on a dirt road traveling up the easier side of the mountain. I think I may enjoy today's ride better though because I always like taking the bike paths and have planned a portion of the ride to go over a bit of the bike path I'm 99.99% sure is all finished and opened, but the gmap-pedometer is still convinced isn't passable. Then again, it still thinks that the new bridge that was finished last year isn't a bike/running route either. So I guess I should bump my assumption up to 100%, but hey, I haven't been there yet this year. For all I know a crater could have formed like it did on that other chunk of bike path a year or two ago.

So that's the plan, and I'm going to bring this here blog entry to a close so I can go through with it. I also want to make sure I leave early enough that I get home in time for that pony show because Suited for Success is on at 8 this morning and Art of the Dress is the best damned song that FiM has put out yet.

Later, blog world.

Edit: Yup, the path goes that far. It's where the path begins/ends.

Quick update

Despite my efforts to educate the masses on moshing I've failed in a way. I went and accidentally broke my nephew while we were in the pit. We used to weigh about the same as few as 6-9 months ago with both of us hovering around 250. I was always a little more, maybe 5-10 pounds. The winter was not kind to me and I rocketed up to 285ish due to poor diet and depression. Meanwhile he dropped a bunch of weight and is about 190. So when we lined up and charged at each other as we usually do at least once a show, instead of us just bouncing off of each other and having a laugh about it I kinda sorta broke his collar bone. It must've just been the perfect hit because he never even fell down or anything, but the bone snapped in half. Nevertheless if he hadn't lost so much weight I'm sure he would have still had enough muscle and fat in the shoulder region to deflect the force of the blow and we never would have had to leave the show.

This incident, coupled with one from last summer has convinced me that I should no longer do this sort of thing. At least not to people I know personally. Unless of course we're both of about the same build.

There have been other developments, but I'm going to leave them for another time.