Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Donating blood and riding

Yesterday I went up to church over my lunch hour and donated blood.  I'm not a big fan of the experience, although it is the only time I get to eat Nutter Butters all year.  My donation went pretty well, although the tech did almost lance me all the way through my vein so my flow as encumbered a bit until they pulled it out a touch.  Eventually, I filled up my bag, and got my Nutter Butters in with some apple pie, apple juice, and water.  I was a little nervous because I only had a plum for breakfast, so I wasn't sure if I was going to crash and burn after donating.  Fortunately, I felt fine, and all my vitals were pretty good for not being anywhere near race shape.

I left church, and went through the Whole Foods pizza bar where these soccer guys in front me of ate the rest of the BBQ chicken pizza.  I ended up with some greek pizza and a grilled veg pizza.  It was alright, and I got some smoked mozzarella pasta salad (delicious to the Nth) and some orza or something like that.

I went and finished up my day, and then went home and got ready to ride at Taco Tuesday.  TT is a fun group ride that leaves the Sandtrap bar and grill at around 133rd and Holmes.  We then ride Blue River Parkway (BuRP) and generally have a great time.  I decided to ride from home to the group ride, as I can ride trails almost the whole way there.  The trails I ride are in a fairly degraded shape, and at one point I couldn't even see the trail so I just started riding through the woods.

I met up with Travis from Bike Source at the official trail head and we got to B.S. for a bit while we waited for the main group to arrive.  He's a nice guy, and used to work at the Trek Store not too long ago and we talked about a mutual friend we have that has been going through some cancer stuff.  Neither one of us had talked to him in awhile, but the general feeling was that he was doing pretty good.

Anyway, the main group finally left the parking lot and we caught them coming on to the trail.  It took about 5 minutes before they were out of sight and I was sucking wind like a new Dyson.  I had 0 top end, and my legs felt like a 6-year old girls legs.  Albeit a bit hairier.  HA!  Yea, that was lame and wrong.  I was having a rough time, because mountain biking is both more fun and easier the faster you go.  Now, let me be the first to say I have no illusions of actually being fast.  But I can keep a decent pace from time to time and have grown accustomed to that.  It was like having a Corvette as a daily driver, then having to drive a Miata.  Sure, the Miata is still fun, but it's no 'vette.

I pulled my strava charts when I got home, and my average pulse was 176bpm.  That's pretty dang steep.  My last road ride avg was 142bpm.  No wonder MTB'ing is so fun.  I guess I just couldn't push enough O2 to my muscles with my diminished blood supply.  Speaking of muscles...

Old Spice Muscle Music from Terry Crews on Vimeo.

Monday, August 20, 2012

One of those weekends

I dove headfirst into some homeowner duties this weekend, and I'm still tired.  Saturday I got up at 5:30am and rode almost 40 miles.  I had no legs at all, I just plodded along.  Which is an awful way to ride, but riding is better than most everything else.  Kind of like death by tickling.  Something like that, anyway.

As soon as I got home, I changed and decided to dethatch, aerate, overseed, and fertilize my lawn.  My lawn, like most peoples, had a rough summer, so I'm trying to make it look nice for this fall.  I think we are pretty cheap with our lawn (at least in our neck of the woods), but it's pretty silly how much money between watering and fall maintenance everything costs.  I saved big bucks aerating myself, but I promptly forgot about any savings once I counted the blisters on my delicate desk jockey hands.  It is probably good for me on some level to do some physical labor every now and then.

Sunday was a day of folly.  Myself and a neighbor mounted some flat panels and we wanted to minimize any dangling cords (or rope swings, in Kieran's case) so that involved getting to spend some time in the attic.  My neighbor's attic was super balmy, even at 10:30am, and I was dripping sweat all over his pretty white insulation.  We got his house done though, and my house was next.

With some other responsibilities and church, I didn't get started until 7:30pm.  My attic time wasn't even close to successful, as I had to back out, and then fish everything through the walls.  What a pain.  That took me almost three hours to move an outlet 7 feet.  Sure it looks nice, but I'm still pretty sore (mentally and physically) after that exercise in near futility.

So enough about that, AB started 2nd grade, and he really likes his teacher.  She seems really young, but she's quick to point out she's been teaching for 7 years.  I would guess she gets raised eyebrows when parents find out she is the teacher, and not a TA.  I don't particularly care about her age.  It's not like she's teaching neurovascular surgery.

That's it for now.  Time to go get the little man from school.


Monday, August 13, 2012

Not exactly a regular sighting

I'm not quite as rare as a mountain lion in Shawnee Mission Park, but me updating my blog is a close second.

Work is super busy, for more reasons than I care to talk about or put out for all eternity on the internet.

Our house is trying to cut the cord (AT&T).  I'm tired of forking out $160 a month to watch Real Housewives and Diego.  We got a new bedroom TV since Penny's high school TV/VCR combo finally bit it.  The new TV has Hulu Plus, Vudu, Netflix, and a bevy of our content providers.  Plus I hooked up a $25 antenna and now get HD over the air (OTA).  The quality of OTA is way better than cable, since it is virtually uncompressed.  The picture quality for the Olympic Closing ceremony was unbelievable (even if NBC screwed up Olympic coverage almost as much as humanly possible).

I've been listening to some good music courtesy of Brandi Carlile.  Fans of Grey's Anatomy may remember one of our songs "The Story" being sung during that musical episode last season.  Here is the music video.  The video is pretty lame, in my opinion, because of the gratuitous amount of lens flare that would make Michael Bay blush.  The song is excellent though, and Brandi sings with an amazing amount of emotion.  She has a few songs I really like, including "Raise Hell", "Keep Your Heart Young", and "That Wasn't Me".



I've been trying to learn one of her songs, and I just started work on Dave Matthew's "Gravedigger".  I've always loved that song.  The lyrics are well written, and aren't inspired by glaucoma medicine.  I had to throw that in because it would seem a lot of DMB songs are.


Cyrus Jones 1810 to 1913
Made his great granchildren believe
You could live to a hundred and three
A hundred and three is forever when you're just a little kid
So Cyrus Jones lived forever

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain
Gravedigger

Muriel Stonewall
1903 to 1954
She lost both of her babies in the second great war
Now you should never have to watch
Your only children lowered in the ground
I mean you should never have to bury your own babies

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain
Gravedigger

Ring around the rosey
Pocket full of posey
Ashes to ashes
We all fall down

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain
Gravedigger

Little Mikey Carson 67 to 75
He rode his
Bike like the devil until the day he died
When he grows up he wants to be Mr. Vertigo on the flying trapeze
Ohhh, 1940 to 1992

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain
Feel the rain
I can feel the rain
Gravedigger

Gravedigger


Friday, August 3, 2012

Playing guitars

That's all I've been consistently doing these days.  I'm getting better, and I can occasionally play for 10-15 seconds at a time when it actually sounds musical.  It's a great source of enjoyment for me, and it is awfully relaxing and is great exercise for that side of my brain.  Not much room for music between the 1's and 0's.

I'm looking at getting an acoustic now, I have an electric that I'm quite fond of, but it does what it does well, and playing acoustically isn't one of them.  Penny will wonder why I didn't get one to begin with, I'm sure.  She's right, most of the time.  Hopefully she won't read this and find out I was saying she was right about something.

The boys are doing well, getting large that's for sure.  Kieran is growing up quick, but holding on to some little kid behaviors that we'll have to beat out of him.  Of course I wouldn't beat him, because when he's 6'4" 230# of muscle, I'll need him on my side to protect me from AB.  I can't believe how strong AB is getting.  He can nearly hold me down on the floor when we're wrestling.  That's crazy, when he's only 7.  Kid is like an ox.

No other revelations for me, other than we are entering the birthday season with Penny, my bigger little sister, and her husband all within a couple of weeks of each other.  Might as well drink and eat cake, because I'm not getting any faster on the bike!