Mickey Mouse

So this is what life has evolved to:



Yes that is Mickey's head sitting in the bucket of a John Deere tractor. I feel it is not only my obligation to buy presents for my daughter which offset the girlie-girlie theme my mother seems to follow, but also to sever the heads off various gender neutral toys and put them together as seen in the image above. Actually the head fell off on it's own. I just used the tractor to cart it away.

As we were smashing some of the block houses that we built last night with Julia's Mr. Kennedy action figure (that I bought her Saturday), Nat asked me if I wasn't sure I didn't want a boy after all. No, I told her. If I had a boy I would buy him pink purses and shit and that might not go over so well once he got to high school. Figure worst case Julia can beat up most of the girls by that age and bust out the John Deere tractor for the rest.



I forgot to mention that we found the Vitalon tea which I was addicted to in Taiwan this past weekend at the Kam Man market in Edison on route 1. We were both pretty stoked. We got 4 big bottles, each of which equates to 2.5 of the smaller sized ones I was drinking on vacation. The cost was $2 a bottle which comes out to 80 cents each. In Taiwan they were 20 NT which equates to 67 cents each. That comes out to 13 cents a bottle to ship them here. Pretty damn reasonable if you ask me. In addition, we were reminded that the Kam Man in Edison is much better than the one in Parsippany. We also picked up some fresh soymilk, a few sticky rice things*, and a few buns which were still warm.

Quick spin on the bike this morning but not much. I'm working from home tomorrow so I should be able to get outside for an hour and change. I'll also likely be dragging Julia up and over the hill to the playground a lot since the weather has warmed up today. Finally it looks like winter is giving up the ghost and conceding defeat for another half-year or so. It will be time to mow the lawn before you know it. I'm almost done raking last year's leaves.

* no idea what to call them in English and I'm sure you don't care.

Gotham

I took this picture on the way home Friday, via phone camera. I love when the city looks like Gotham. I had to play the role of Idiot Tourist and stop on the sidewalk and snap this:



Yesterday I spent all of yesterday playing with Julia and her new cadre of toys she got over the weekend for her birthday. When I say "all" I mean like 6 hours of playing, literally. At the end of the day as we were laying down to go to bed, I asked her, "Who did you play with all day?"

She furrows her brow, as if I'm asking what the density of a black hole is. Eventually she announces the answer, "GRANDMA! GRANDPA!"

Apparently the idea of her parents playing with her just doesn't register. We're some sort of Borg-like creatures in her world that exist to serve her food and get her things. To be clear, Grandma and Grandpa weren't at the house yesterday. So no confusion there. Just Julia, mommy, and daddy. She did remember who took a bath with her yesterday though. At least we register somewhere on the radar.

All kidding aside, she's been a little Daddy's Girl since they got back, which I'm pretty happy with. When she sees me first thing in the morning she runs to me with a big smile on her face and wants me to pick her up. That's good stuff. To be honest it makes me not really care that I've lost some steam with the biking and racing stuff, as I'll talk about in a minute. She's growing up and when I take off for half-day forays to go biking it means I miss about 1/4 of my weekend time to hang out with her. It's fine now and again but doing it every weekend it gets old.

Bike I finally got on the bike for a pre-work bike ride this morning. This is the first pre-work ride since before vacation. We're (read: I'm) at a point where I need to do this for the simple sake of exercise. Ideas of racing in less than 3 weeks are downright funny at this point. I've moved on to trying not to hit 200 pounds as a reason to get on the bike before work. It felt good, but it was hard to get up at 5:00 am. Hopefully this helps get things back into some sort of order, but the fact is I'm just not stoked to race right now. I chose to work in the yard yesterday while Julia napped instead of going for a bike ride. The drop in temps drained me of motivation. It's getting to the point where I'm not really having a whole lot of fun with this forced march to race season so I'm going to just do whatever keeps me interested in riding. Another 35 degree morning today. So while winter seems gone, it's not far gone. I still hate this cold.

Wang Video: Here's a commercial with Chien-Ming Wang in it. Check out the very end where he dances. At the risk of sounding un-PC, I think the lack of ability to dance might be called Yellow Man's Disease if you use this as a sample of how Asians dance.

Sick Wrestling Moves: I don't care if you're a wrestling fan or not, you have to appreciate this guy's ability to simply fly. The video is at the bottom of the post. It's really worth the watch.