Feedback and Cruise Burritos

I think the world is adjusting to the ADD Nation approach that those of us who live on the Internet have developed. When I got off the bike today I checked my email and saw trains were delayed into NYC. Then 5 minutes later they were being diverted to Hoboken. On the drive to the train station the radio announced the faulty bridge was fixed and trains were 30 minutes behind. Then I got on the train on time and an email told me things were resumed as normal. Life is play by play now. Did it really matter to me if I knew all that? Not at all, though if the train had been bagged I want to know. Our need for immediate information leads us to obsess over things we can't control and don't effect us and cause us to miss things like the amazing sunrise I'm seeing out the window right now.

I will add this as well. Apparently Schiano interviewed for the Michigan job and turned it down. All of this transpired on the Internet in about 12 hours. This morning several of us were talking about it and we knew he had turned it down for 1 hour and 12 minutes before WFAN got ahold of it and reported it. Amazing that information is such a commodity on the Internet these days. And the half-life on information is like 15 minutes. Crazy.

Facts: My car let me in yesterday and started today though it's getting really sketchy now. I've chosen The Skeptical Environmentalist as my "heavy" book to pick up next. On the bike 55 minutes this morning at L3 and came in at 189 this morning. Walter ate like 10 cookies and 22 pizza bites yesterday.

So the cruise burrito story goes like this. Terren and I were walking around when the girls had the kids at one point on the trip and we're talking about all the food and whatnot and how every day they have some Mexican snack-like food at 3:00. But food was so pervasive on the trip that you simply were never hungry that time of day. So we came up with the perfect plan to enjoy it. Simple make up the biggest, fattest burrito you can make with as many bells and whistles and fixings you can muster and do it up, old-fashioned-Oprah-style. Take one bite out of it, then throw it overboard and yell:

USA!!
USA!!
USA!!

I think you had to be there. Anyway I want to catch up on some feedback.

Steve on The Oven of Doom

"good lord that was funny..."

You know we haven't had any updates from Walter about that situation so I wonder how it's all going. I hope well and in general no news is good news. You know there are really 2 nuances of that statement. The first being that the state of not having news is good. The other is that all news is bad. Same end result but slightly different roads.

Steve on The Poop Chronicles

"a few things i learned on vacation. i read somewhere that the average american makes approximately 200 food-related decisions a day (don't ask me, i'm just regurgitating facts). this popped (i almost typed pooped) into my mind as i was sitting on the plane - stopped for some gorp prior to boarding, then decided to pick up a turkey sandwich in case the airline food was bad. then had to choose which drink i wanted, followed by whether or not to take, then whether or not to eat the bad airline food, then 2 more decisions on beverages, then should i eat the peanuts. all the while wondering if i should be digging into the snack and turkey sandwich. my 4 year old son thinks poop, fart and peepee are the funniest words to roll off the tongue. everything is "poopee head", i want to go to the "pooper market", is that pee pee in your glass?, etc. Now since he finds this funny, my 2 year old daughter runs around the house saying "poopee" and we say "no poopee talk", which she promptly responds with "poopee talk" and a shit eating grin. how does this relate to my trip? imagine 2 almost middle age men driving in a eurovan from CA to UT and back with a 3 day stay in Zion. Sadly, some of the highlights of trip involved pooping, peeing and farting. i guess this stuff never grows old."

I find it funny what entertains us as we get older. Way back when, it was some hot girl at the bar who was stacked and you were trying to get with. Ironic that the primal urge which made you want that so badly is what leads to us being entertained when we can teach our children to say "poo pee pie".

Sure, life does slow down but it's all related in a stream of time. Some say that time is an illusion and everything happens all at once, which is interesting but renders useless the last 15 seconds of a close basketball game now doesn't it? Plus, how can I be eating and vomiting all at the same time?

I'm going to leave it at 2 comments today as it's time to hammer away at the Robbins book. I think Switters is about to kick it back-door style to Domino. I think at this point I'm leaning towards Jitterbug as his best. Fierce Invalids doesn't actually hold on quite so well, though it's good for second place.

Three day weekend. Jump for joy, Roy.

My Car Hates Me

Every morning I sit in my car and wait for the train. I keep the engine going a few minutes after I get there because it's frigid cold out right now and I don't want to dress up like Ralphie's brother in A Christmas Story. So I sit, maybe stare out the window or listen to the radio until the train comes. Well today, it was really cold out so I waited as long as I could to open the door. At the magic moment I pulled the car door handle and nothing happened.

I pulled again, the train about at a stop 30 feet away. Nothing. I pulled the other door handle and it opened without issue then pulled it closed. Tried my door again. Nothing. Fuck, I figure it must be frozen shut. I check the lock, not locked. I pull again and push on the door really, really hard. No I don't think it's stuck. Fuck it, escape through the passenger side door. Open, grab my bag, jump over the passenger seat, grab my cup of tea, lock the car, and I'm the last one on the train.

I shouldn't bother locking it anymore. If someone steals it that's like a blessing to me at this point. The thing hates starting on these cold mornings and it's only a matter of time before it dies for good. Now it doesn't want to let me out. Piece of crap. It will be interesting to see what happens when I get back to it this evening.

Since Walter brought coffee and hot chocolate to the time trial last week I have a stack of Dunkin Doughnuts cups which I can use to bring a cup of tea. This is wasteful of me but it just doesn't taste as good out of a travel mug. It never does. When this stack is done I may stop brining tea, or maybe I'll try a travel mug to prove it to myself, or maybe I'll try coffee in a travel mug, or maybe I'll buy a stack of disposable cups from Costco. That's highly wasteful I know. I have no response for that, other than this:

USA!
USA!
USA!

At some point I should tell the Cruise Burrito story to make more sense of that. Hi Terren.

Despite my wife getting Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream yesterday as well as my raiding her real vat of chocolate chip cookie dough while she was making cookies for her playgroup today, I dropped back into the 180s again today. I skipped right over 189 and went for 188. I'm getting back into the groove after a week and a half. It's not easy, but yesterday I had a really good eating day until I got home.

Finished Berlin Conspiracy last night which is a mere 2 days for that book. It was cheap on Amazon but still $7 for 2 days of reading is a bit steep. I think there were some connections left out with some implications that kinda turn the whole thing on its ear. And as the story went on it got a little goofy but not too bad. As I said yesterday it was predictable. And in the end (the presumable period "after the book") the bad guys win anyway, since it's a fiction about assassinating JFK in Berlin. So you know the "good guys" will win temporarily. Still I found it entertaining if not a little sketchy in consistency at times. I will likely read the author again as that was his first book I believe.

Moved on to Fierce Invalids again this morning and I picked up the 6th book in the Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe series even though they basically suck. I'm only 2 more books from being done and they're really small so I'll hammer them out in like 2 days each. I'm in a reading groove right now so I may pick up something heavy after this, maybe Bowling Alone or give One Hundred Years of Solitude another chance.

Nothing exciting going on with the bike this weekend. Chimney Rock Saturday where I'm going to meet a guy from the board who's selling me an old fork for $25. Says it's only been used maybe 20 times so it's a solid deal. Sunday and Monday I hope to get on the road bike for my race to 2000 miles. I should really compare time spent on the roadie versus the trainer but that would be a slam dunk for the roadie since my average speed on the trainer crushes the road bike. Yes, I know, exciting.

Excitement

Things are slow. Are things slow? No, things are never slow it's just that sometimes I have other things to occupy my brain on the train in the morning. For instance, these days I'm into reading again, which is nice as it makes the commute absolutely fly by. My mom got me a fantasy series for my birthday, the Belgariad series. I read the first of that and liked it. Yes I know I should be filling my brain with useful words but when you get to read 3+ hours a day you tend to occasionally pick up some fluff. And when the fluff is good you just keep eating it up. Like cheese.

As much as I wanted to just jump right into the second book I didn't want to break my rule of not reading the same author back-to-back. Actually the old rule is that I don't read the same author until I read 4 other books, but that's gone to the birds a bit lately. I've broken that with some of the Foundation books as well as the Hitchhiker Guide books. But this time I picked up something else, the Berlin Conspiracy which is a pretty good read so far. I started it yesterday and am up to page 220 or so. I should finish tomorrow. It's not breathtaking, but it's solid and it has my attention for some reason. It's fairly predictable, though a few things jump out here and there which keep you on your toes. It's not trash fiction as it does seem to be somewhat resonant with a real spy story though there are some outrageous James Bond-like moments where the main character gets more lucky seems fitting.

Anyway, my commute has been taken up by reading these days which is why I'm not blogging so much anymore, at least not right now. I'm also getting my way through Fierce Invalids which is a great read, but which is a hardcover book that's tougher to pull out of the bag when you're packed into a train seat or subway car. I also ride my bike occasionally. Or one of them. Old Trek on the trainer gets a lot of run these days. The road bike is like 60 miles short of 2000 for the year so I'd like to hit that soon. But then trainer is also about 60 short of 2000 so it's like a race. The trainer is going to win overall. But for some reason I'd like to see the road bike get to 2000 first. I also have the mountain bikes, all 3 of them, to ride. I'll get another 20 or so on the trainer Friday but then I have Sunday and Monday to try and catch up with the roadie. I'm off Monday and next Friday because I have spare vacation days. I hope to only be on the trainer this Friday and next Tuesday until the following week. That gives me 6 potential days to get road rides in. I think I would probably need 3 rides of 20-ish miles to get the 2000 over those days.

But you know, I'm off the last 10 days of the year so it's possible that I end up with more road miles after all. It could be a photo finish. Stay tuned!

Life. Is. Exciting.