432.0; 23.4
Back to sneakers, and I must say, a lot less stressful riding. Perhaps infinitessimally slower than with the clip-ins, but that might be remedied by using "cages" like on my other bike (from which I removed the leather side-straps so I could get out more easily).
Peculiar "ending" to Lost Season 3. Seasons 4 and five pre-added into Netflix queue.
SNL's take on Palin and Clinton, w/Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, was pretty funny. But in two months, Palin will be just be the punchline to a footnote, along with McCrony. How many here remember Geraldine Ferraro? Raise your hand...
Friday, September 19, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Crunch
405.6; 23.0
I gotta start getting out earlier--the headwind is really obnoxious in the afternoon (and practically nonexistent in the morning).
Well, I took that first tumble with the cleats in the pedals. Coming up to a cross street, I saw a lady with a kid stop to wait for me, then I continued up and saw a car coming from the other way. Mixing up the signals from the brain, I hit the brake instead of twisting out, and found myself on the ground quicker than you can think it. Amazingly, I have only a skinned knee and bruised ego to show for it, and was able to get back on and ride the eight miles home from there.
I might try riding with regular shoes again, by way of comparison. I'm not sure the speed and power gain is worth the epidermal loss. Even if this only happens every now and then, I suspect it will NEVER again be as painless as today, and realize I will now need to carry some kind of first aid kit as well as the other stuff I'm packing. (And indeed, I might go for knee and elbow pads if they weren't so inconvenient.) So I might have some SPD pedals and $115 Keenes for sale soon...
I gotta start getting out earlier--the headwind is really obnoxious in the afternoon (and practically nonexistent in the morning).
Well, I took that first tumble with the cleats in the pedals. Coming up to a cross street, I saw a lady with a kid stop to wait for me, then I continued up and saw a car coming from the other way. Mixing up the signals from the brain, I hit the brake instead of twisting out, and found myself on the ground quicker than you can think it. Amazingly, I have only a skinned knee and bruised ego to show for it, and was able to get back on and ride the eight miles home from there.
I might try riding with regular shoes again, by way of comparison. I'm not sure the speed and power gain is worth the epidermal loss. Even if this only happens every now and then, I suspect it will NEVER again be as painless as today, and realize I will now need to carry some kind of first aid kit as well as the other stuff I'm packing. (And indeed, I might go for knee and elbow pads if they weren't so inconvenient.) So I might have some SPD pedals and $115 Keenes for sale soon...
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
biking
382.6; 23.9
Really had to kinda force myself to get out there, and it was later (=windier) in the day when I finally did get out. Still, went farther than what I thought of as "minimum."
Lost, Season 3. Got the last disc today. This series is just so strange... sometimes seeming almost solely for the sake of being strange... like the writers throw in all these additional plot elements and story arcs just to see how many they can throw in and how far out they can get, perhaps not even considering if, when, or how they will wrap it all up at the end. But even while I'm shaking my head in disbelief, I'm laughing and enjoying the ride--not unlike Sawyer and Charley with Hurley in the episode with the microbus. Then too there are Harold Perrineau and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, both excellent in Oz and welcome on my TV screen anytime. Season 4 to be queued up ASAP!
Really had to kinda force myself to get out there, and it was later (=windier) in the day when I finally did get out. Still, went farther than what I thought of as "minimum."
Lost, Season 3. Got the last disc today. This series is just so strange... sometimes seeming almost solely for the sake of being strange... like the writers throw in all these additional plot elements and story arcs just to see how many they can throw in and how far out they can get, perhaps not even considering if, when, or how they will wrap it all up at the end. But even while I'm shaking my head in disbelief, I'm laughing and enjoying the ride--not unlike Sawyer and Charley with Hurley in the episode with the microbus. Then too there are Harold Perrineau and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, both excellent in Oz and welcome on my TV screen anytime. Season 4 to be queued up ASAP!
Monday, September 15, 2008
Foot Bondage (not the Good Kind [If There Is a Good Kind])
Bike 2 (and they'll pretty much all be Bike 2 unless noted from now on I think): 358.7; 18.8.
Continuing with the innuendo titles here. Has anyone else commented on how the word "innuendo" is itself something of an innuendo? At least when used in reference to Italian sodomy...
Today I tried out the new Keen sandals with cleats that firmly affix my feet to the pedals. To get out, with this brand, you have to twist your heel outward. NO OTHER MOTION WILL GET YOU OUT OF THOSE PEDALS, and YOU WILL FALL OVER WITH YOUR FEET STILL FIXED TO THE PEDALS. Initially, the pedals were adjusted so tight that I had to stop, get off the bike, and step out of the shoe and wrench it off the pedal by hand--luckily tried this one foot at a time or I'd still be pedaling, afraid to stop, miles away from here or simply going in circles. Once loosened a bit, they work okay, and I think with a little more practice I'll be very happy with them, but boy it's a real test of faith to clip in and go with both feet! In other words, they require some getting used to--but also I suspect that sooner or later I WILL have an accident with them--not IF, but WHEN. I could be wrong.
On the up side, they add all of that upstroke power to your pedalling (that is, while the right foot is pushing down on the right pedal, the left foot is pulling up on the left pedal), and it did seem like I gained a mph or two, especially on uphills when "spinning" in lowish gears.
"Burn After Reading" was a great, funny, entertaining movie. I can't think of any reason not to give it all five stars. Excellent cast, brilliant story, superb dialogue, and many exquisite other superlatives. Also, this might the first movie I've ever seen without any advance knowledge of what it was about (aside from seeing a brief blurb that said it was the Coen brothers' return to comedy). I'm glad we're getting out and seeing movies sometimes.
I was proud (if that's the right word--one must use such caution!) to attend a ceremony yesterday wherein my wife received the precepts at her Zen Center. I know she worked hard all summer at the classes and the homework, and in learning a little bit about it, I find it an exceedingly admirable thing. Respect, T!
I have such a hard time with religion. Lately the dogma of fundamentalists literally makes me teeth-grindingly angry. It is just unfathomable to me how a person can let something so wispy and ethereal drive such hard-nosed beliefs and activities--and even within that, how they so misinterpret the book that holds all of their tenets! How they can let a fellow human--nothing more and perhaps a good deal less--plant a flag in their town and say, "I am God's interpreter on Earth," and then blindly follow. How they can fly in the face of all logic and reason, all out of the hope of a promised eternity in an improbable (and surely insufferable!) heaven and abject fear of an impossible Hell... These people are going to take this country back to the middle ages.
Buddhism, as I've seen it, is an entirely different thing. It all makes eminent sense, the precepts being a great example. My only problems with it, I guess, are the chanting of words I don't understand, and the bowing and rising, bowing and rising, which gives me head-rushes and threatens to make me pass out, and again, I'm not sure what or who I'm bowing to, and that makes me very uncomfortable. I do feel that I could take some time to learn more about it and I would probably be happy and comfortable with it. What I really like about it, something the preceptor said yesterday, something about committing to peace in the world, being yourself a cause of peace in the world... That is something I would like very much to do, and that is what will probably bring me back to the Zen Center. In Buddhism, too, there is virtually none of the "marketing," that need to convert others, that drives Christians et al to make their kids go door to door with pamphlets etc. It is absolutely true that, in the Christian religion(s), those who are innocent of knowledge of heaven and hell and god and jesus are supposedly not sent to hell when they die, and so these devout practitioners think it their duty to inform the innocents, so they CAN go to hell!
Anyway, wrong place perhaps to go off on a religion rant, when really I just want to mark the occasion of Terrie's moment. So here's to my love Junden, doing something very right.
Continuing with the innuendo titles here. Has anyone else commented on how the word "innuendo" is itself something of an innuendo? At least when used in reference to Italian sodomy...
Today I tried out the new Keen sandals with cleats that firmly affix my feet to the pedals. To get out, with this brand, you have to twist your heel outward. NO OTHER MOTION WILL GET YOU OUT OF THOSE PEDALS, and YOU WILL FALL OVER WITH YOUR FEET STILL FIXED TO THE PEDALS. Initially, the pedals were adjusted so tight that I had to stop, get off the bike, and step out of the shoe and wrench it off the pedal by hand--luckily tried this one foot at a time or I'd still be pedaling, afraid to stop, miles away from here or simply going in circles. Once loosened a bit, they work okay, and I think with a little more practice I'll be very happy with them, but boy it's a real test of faith to clip in and go with both feet! In other words, they require some getting used to--but also I suspect that sooner or later I WILL have an accident with them--not IF, but WHEN. I could be wrong.
On the up side, they add all of that upstroke power to your pedalling (that is, while the right foot is pushing down on the right pedal, the left foot is pulling up on the left pedal), and it did seem like I gained a mph or two, especially on uphills when "spinning" in lowish gears.
"Burn After Reading" was a great, funny, entertaining movie. I can't think of any reason not to give it all five stars. Excellent cast, brilliant story, superb dialogue, and many exquisite other superlatives. Also, this might the first movie I've ever seen without any advance knowledge of what it was about (aside from seeing a brief blurb that said it was the Coen brothers' return to comedy). I'm glad we're getting out and seeing movies sometimes.
I was proud (if that's the right word--one must use such caution!) to attend a ceremony yesterday wherein my wife received the precepts at her Zen Center. I know she worked hard all summer at the classes and the homework, and in learning a little bit about it, I find it an exceedingly admirable thing. Respect, T!
I have such a hard time with religion. Lately the dogma of fundamentalists literally makes me teeth-grindingly angry. It is just unfathomable to me how a person can let something so wispy and ethereal drive such hard-nosed beliefs and activities--and even within that, how they so misinterpret the book that holds all of their tenets! How they can let a fellow human--nothing more and perhaps a good deal less--plant a flag in their town and say, "I am God's interpreter on Earth," and then blindly follow. How they can fly in the face of all logic and reason, all out of the hope of a promised eternity in an improbable (and surely insufferable!) heaven and abject fear of an impossible Hell... These people are going to take this country back to the middle ages.
Buddhism, as I've seen it, is an entirely different thing. It all makes eminent sense, the precepts being a great example. My only problems with it, I guess, are the chanting of words I don't understand, and the bowing and rising, bowing and rising, which gives me head-rushes and threatens to make me pass out, and again, I'm not sure what or who I'm bowing to, and that makes me very uncomfortable. I do feel that I could take some time to learn more about it and I would probably be happy and comfortable with it. What I really like about it, something the preceptor said yesterday, something about committing to peace in the world, being yourself a cause of peace in the world... That is something I would like very much to do, and that is what will probably bring me back to the Zen Center. In Buddhism, too, there is virtually none of the "marketing," that need to convert others, that drives Christians et al to make their kids go door to door with pamphlets etc. It is absolutely true that, in the Christian religion(s), those who are innocent of knowledge of heaven and hell and god and jesus are supposedly not sent to hell when they die, and so these devout practitioners think it their duty to inform the innocents, so they CAN go to hell!
Anyway, wrong place perhaps to go off on a religion rant, when really I just want to mark the occasion of Terrie's moment. So here's to my love Junden, doing something very right.
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