Dork Dork (Bike) Dork

Did I mention that I bought a cheap cycling computer for dork-dork-dork purposes? You know, add another element (if a very unimportant one) to make all this riding even more entertaining.

These are my stats for Monday-Friday this week (don't forget these things are supposed to be super inaccurate, so this might be way off):

total distance: 181 km
total time riding: 7 hrs and 20 min
max speed: 60 km/hr (!)

It's really too bad that this doesn't give you any indication of the HILLS. A lot of it was flat (most of my ride to work and back), but the rides to practice and the long rides both have some pretty big hills. If you don't believe me, please refer to the max speed. If I hadn't had a speedometer, I would have simply reported that I was cruising. So fuckin' fun. :)

ps. if you are thinking the time is too fast for a me on a giant mountain bike but too slow for a road bike or cyclecross, you are right. This is on my hardtail moutain bike with slicks.

Reefer Madness and the 100-Mile Diet

Reefer:

I actually bought this book a couple of years ago, after reading and loving Eric Schlosser's other book, Fast Food Nation. It sat on my shelf for a long time. I forgot about it for a while, and it also got bumped down the line a few times for borrowed books (friends and the library) that need to find their way back sooner. I started the 100-Mile Diet before leaving for Italy, but I didn't want to bring it with because a) it's a friend's book b) it's hard cover c) it's autographed. It seemed like an all around poor choice of a book to bring traveling. So Reefer Madneness got it’s moment, on vacation. (watch me get sent for "random" drug testing again. ;) ).

The book is actually three essays, linked by the topic of the American black market. The first one is on the craziness that are marijana laws in the States. This is actually what I thought the whole book was on, but in hindsight, the big black American dollar bill on the cover maybe should have tipped me off. I really enjoyed all three essays in the end. The second essay is about strawberry production in California, and specifically the cheap, often exploited, ofter illegal immegrant labour involved in harvesting the berries. This essay has links to the 100-Mile Diet, and I suppose Fast Food Nation also. Not only do I recommend it, I own it, so if you want to read it, just let me know.

Diet:

I expected to like the 100-Mile Diet, but I liked it for even more reasons than I expected too. I enjoy books/lectures etc. on this sort of topic, but I wouldn't have guessed how much reading the 100-Mile Diet made me appreciate food. It's not a doom-and-gloom book and instead sents a positive message about improving the way we eat, and connecting to your food source. It's also very well written and quite funny. It's written by two young people living in Vancouver, and I found myself wrapped up the story of their lives. There are recipes at the start of every chaper, and a couple of fun quotes. My favorite, mostly because it makes me think of my league team, is this:

"If you wish to make an apple pie truely from scratch, you must first invent the universe".
- Carl E. Sagan.


Unfortunatley, the best I can do is recommend this book. I borrowed it far too long ago, and I need to give it back.

My current read is A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, so far is sweet.

Birthday Party

Friday night was awesome, because friends held a birthday party for me. I was out of town when I turned 30, and then kind of stupidly busy. A big THANKS to Lindsay and Jeff who decided to take up the cause and throw me a party. How sweet is that? Further thanks need to go to those who made/brought food, which was all delicious goodness. Even further thanks to everyone who came to celebrate, I had an absolute blast. Along with goaltimate and a BBQ, people also chipped in for a donation for cancer research, a cause rather close to my heart (I had thyroid cancer when I was younger, and my mom had/has a form of blood cancer). This was one of my original ideas for what to do about turning 30....okay, for turning 30. ;) Unfortunately I got too wrapped up in my own busy life - the Europe trip, and moving 6 days after getting home, to be able to follow through with it. But my awesome and generous friends made this happen too, and by the end of the party there was a $250 donation for cancer research. Thanks everyone, what an amazing birthday present. :)

A Picture of My Tattoo....

...that doesn't make it look like a have a giant white flabby bicep.  It gives a much better idea of the size of my tattoo also.  I'm not sure why it's so hard (for me, at least) to take a picture of your own left arm, but it is.  Thanks to Toby and Bridget for the picture.

Elevator Incident Number 4

Today, I got stuck in an elevator. AGAIN. This is the fourth time. I'm terrible luck. If I'm with you, take the effing stairs.

I usually do take the stairs, if it's a humane number of flights. I work on the 30th floor. The only time I take the stairs is when I run them at lunch time, or during fire drills. That's a lot of stairs.

This time, I was on there for 25-or-so minutes, and there was a big difference to my other experiences. I was the only one stuck on there. I've heard lots of people speculate as to which there would prefer; other people (sacrificing personal space) vs. alone (generally things are more scary when you are alone). Well, now that I have so very many stuck-on-elevator experiences to drawn from, I can decisively say, in my opinion, it is much nicer to have personal space. I could move around a bit, which was seriously great.

A couple of funny/strange moments from the elevator, with a little back story. The elevator never actually moved, and I could see that it was still flush on 30. I could see this because the inner doors were open half and inch, and the outdoors a quarter inch. When someone (security or an elevator tech?) asked me where the elevator was and the door status. I told him what I just described to you. He suggested, super helpfully, "have you tried stepping out the doors?". Crash weight loss diet, here I come. The other moment that made me laugh was when security (I'm sure this time) suggested that I try the open door button. I suppose they probably had to ask, but, uh, yeah, I gave that a try.

Now, for those of you who follow my stuck-in-elevator moments, you may be wondering about Elevator Incident Number 3. Let's see, there was the one at work were we all really had to pee (20 minutes, 12 people), there was the one during the bomb scare (45 minutes, 16 people), number 4 was today....#3 was Paganello. I'll explain in my next post.

Go Ride a Bike

I love commuting by bike.  It's sweet to be able to arrive somewhere and knowing that I didn't just burn a bunch of fossil fuels.  Walking place is pretty awesome too, but biking throws in the fun factor and the workout factor.  I've been doing a lot of this of late, and really enjoying it.  Right now my morning ride takes somewhere in the 35-minute ballpark, and back takes more like 45 minutes, all the way to an hour if it's windy/nasty out.  This is on a hardtail mountain bike with slicks on it, I'm sure it would be much faster on a road bike or cycle-cross, but I don't own either one of those.  The other day it only took me 40 minutes back, because there was no wind at all.  Glorious.  It's funny, I was trying to figure out why the way home is always so much slower.  I think there are three factors that add up to drop my time by 15+ minutes:  1) It's slightly uphill at the end.  It's pretty flat, in a car you would never notice, but it is slightly uphill, and that makes a big difference.  2) The giant killer wind.  The same one that is at my back on the way to work.  3) Left turns.  The way there has lots of right turns (I, like, totally paused), but on the way home I have to yield to traffic a lot of the time, holding my left arm out like a *)*#)$*#.  (I'll stop f-bombing and saying r&#($&(#o).

I'm hoping to go to MEC tomorrow and grab a cheap cycling computer, so I can dork out even more.  Wait, "grab" makes it sound like I'm going to shoplift it.  Don't worry, I'm planning to pay.  I'd go for something more valuable if I was going to risk shoplifting. ;)

A couple of things from my recent rides:

• squirrels are ricardo.  I almost hit one the other day.  I was heading downhill, and I slowed right down because it was running out into the street.  It stopped, and when I went to roll by it, barely moving, it made it's break for my front tire.  I didn't hit it, but it was close enough the I said "fucking squirrels!", which means it was close.
• Most drivers share the road and are pretty courteous.  A lot of the idiots are big idiots.  I had a guy in a big truck (of course), try to pass me between two stop signs that were about 60 ft apart.  He couldn't quite make it, so instead he basically turned his truck horizontally in front of me, so that I had to stop and wait.  He then had to wait at the stop sign for a gap in traffic.  I'm pretty sure he didn't think that was going to happen, because he looked guiltily back in his rearview mirror at me, and I sympathetically and clearly mouthed "you bastard" at him.  Okay, so not so sympathetically. 
• Brookfield Properties claims to be a green company, but really they are smog-coloured.  More on this later, but I'm going to make it a separate blog.

Anyway, these are just semi-memorable things that happened.  I don't really look at them negatively, they were just strange and therefore worth mentioning.  I think I am finally my legs used to this much extra riding.  It's been an adjustment for sure.  And I love it.  :)

Re-Living the Trip Part 3 - Florence and Sienna

We hung out in Florence for a day and did city things. The city is much smaller than I would have guessed, both in terms of population (400 000, according to Rick Steves.) and urban sprawl (or lack thereof). Florence was a great city just to wander around in on foot.

A couple of highlights were our little Italian landlady (ask Kristin about you, you will laugh your ass off), some of the best gelato we had all trip (which says something), and a market where we bought roasted veggies, fresh cheese and bread for lunch (damn!) and some fruit.


We decided to rent bikes to ride outside the city of the second day. We had planned to do this before, but the "plan" was much more in the ideas stage. ;) We lucked out though, because as it turned out, there was a sweet bike store (that did rentals) about a block from out hotel. We found it by walking home from dinner the night before we planned to leave. Perfect!

Biking to Sienna on Euro-cruisers was definitely a trip highlight. It was so much fun, and a good workout day at the same time. It was about 85 km, and SERIOUSLY HILLY. We had a great day, and we were pretty stoked to get there, as I'm sure you can see in the picture. Of course when I say "there", I really mean about 2 km straight downhill from Sienna (as in we had to ride up again), but I didn't know that at the time of the picture. ;)

Sienna itself was very cool. The highlight for me was the Duomo (church). When we arrived, they had unfortunately just shut it (to tourists) as mass was about to stay. Kristin managed to convince them IN ITALIAN that we wanted to see the mass. A few minutes of convincing later (skills), we were in.


ps. had I had more internet time in Italy, I wanted to crop this picture, and stick in on the blog with "OMG the pope!" or something along those lines.

pps. This dude was going to mass with white socks and sandals. BUSTED.

Random Cat

I found this random sketch that I did like 5 years ago. It caught my attention when I realized...it's Tartan. I drew him one time, ages ago, back when I used to swing by and feed him. Ahh, Tartikins. :)