Back on the horse, a little.

This past weekend I did 2 good bike rides in a row.   That's a first in over a year.  Saturday I hung on for the entirety of the ever-crazy, ever-dumb, Saturday Morning World Championships called Vino-Velo .  The basic idea is that you and about 20 of the fastest people who aren't actually racing bikes, but who think they are, get together and ride a set course through the suburbs of Philadelphia.  There are sprints, traffic lights, stop signs, hills etc.  I have avoided it primarily because it's a great example of why drivers hate bike riders here, but it is awfully fun to go fast with other people on bikes.  My knee/hip/leg pain was manageable for the whole ride but I was pretty sore later in the day.  I imagine that's the expected effect of not riding hard for 14 months.

Sunday Jennifer and I went out for a  nice ride through the hills to the northwest of the city on Sunday.  Happily, I wasn't suffering too bad from the ride on Saturday and Jennifer took it easy on me.  She does love to attack up the short hills though.  I'm sure that if it weren't for the whole fear of crashing thing, she'd make a good bike racer.  Now, hopefully the trend keeps up since spring is here.

So, I guess we are a bit wussy in the cold now.

Jennifer decided that she needed her hat in the shower.

A video from when men were men and bicycles were made of STEEL!

Nice sunset

For some reason I really love winter sunsets. This was out near Haverford on a ride yesterday afternoon. For the first time in a long time it felt like my knee was working well. Not anywhere close to 100 percent, but moving in a good direction and that made the sunset all the nicer.

Beaten

Yesterday was my third treatment by a new doctor who has an "alternative" form of treatment for my knee pain problems that have plagued me for the past year.  He does a treatment called IASTM (Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization) which is a classy acronym for pummeling the shit out of my legs and butt.  For decency sake, i'm not going to post the gruesome pictures of my ass bruise, but basically Dr. Wenneker takes something like one of these:

And then does some of this to my leg--

The process is a lot like squeegeing out all of the scar tissue from the muscles and tendons.  Let me tell you, it hurts.  It hurts a lot.  He is also big on something called 'dry needling' which basically sort of surprises your muscle into relaxing and becoming more flexible.  The process involves taking an accupuncture needle and inserting it into the skin over a knot in the muscle, then you stab it in and out at various angles to trick the muscle into relaxing.  That sounds a lot worse than it feels.  Really almost no pain on that one until I watched them doing it and it was basically like watching a sewing machine needle disapear into my flesh.  Weird.

At the end of the day, I really don't care how much the process hurts, as long as the results are there.  So far, so good.  I definitely feel improvement in my mobility, and the tightness and pain around my hip have diminished a lot (except where I got jabbed with the corisone shot yesterday) and I'm hopeful that with some extra strengthening and stretching, I'll actually be able to keep the gains and start riding more.  Fingers crossed.

Go big or go home

That's right folks, Jennifer just received 5 pounds of gummies. Should last  a week or two.

Looks like this guy made a little trip to the hammer store...

I have no idea what was up with the 10 oz claw hammer slung into the chain around this guy's seatpost, but I'm just glad he checked it at the door of my building.

Stoked for snow!

So, while Philly 'endures' these terrible chills into the 30s, Iowa is going to have snow for Christmas!! Here's the forecast for Ames tonight!

Snow with areas of blowing snow. The snow could be heavy at times. Low around 22. Windy, with a east northeast wind 14 to 19 mph becoming north 24 to 29 mph after midnight. Winds could gust as high as 39 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 7 to 11 inches possible.

Bad day at work cured by good sake at home

This bottle was made about 100 kilometers south if our place in Nagano. We got it on the trip to Vancouver last April. It was my little birthday gift to myself.
Totally hitting the spot now after a trying day at work.

Little shout out to Lara-chan and my onsen buddy Shane. Hope you are doing well wherever you are

Physics

Last Friday my coworkers had a small sendoff party for my boss who's going to be away for the next month on an Eisenhower Fellowship.  Lucky guy.  Well, smart guy really.  Anyway, in honor of Halloween as well, they got a cooler full of dry ice for making party tricks and spooky drinks etc.  By the time the sendoff wound down at about 12, there was still 3/4 of a cooler full of solid CO2 left, and I decided that I might need to take some home with me.  I filled a Tupperware with the stuff and then headed back home.  When I got back, I thought, "Won't this stuff stay frozen a lot better if I put it in a thermos?" 

Check out the dented metal cap.  Probably where it destroyed the light fixture.

Getting out my trusty stainless thermos and dropped in the dry ice cubes.  I sealed the cap nice and tight to make sure that the air didn't get in to warm up the cubes and then Jennifer and I headed off to bed.

Glass Shards EVERYWHERE

At about 1:30 in the morning we were awoken by a giant exploding thud followed by some broken glass shattering down stairs.  "What the hell was that?"   We headed down and found exactly what anyone who has half a brain and understands physics just a little bit would have known.  The plastic cap from the thermos had failed (thankfully) and blasted the top of the thermos off, up through the light fixture and through the drywall into the ceiling.  We never found much of it, just a ton of glass and plastic shards as well as the metal cup/cap thing.

3 inch hole in the ceiling.

Soooo, I spent my evening picking glass shards out of the ceiling and did a full kitchen sweep.  Not like I should have been surprised by this, since I spent much of my teen years thinking of ways to make things explode, I should have known better, or at least put the thermos in someone else's house.

My favorite sport is run by cock smokers

I must say that I've really been enjoying the combined cycling media communitiy's coverage of the UCI defamation suit against Floyd Landis.  It seems that pretty much every story includes the laundry list of things that Floyd Landis can't say about Hein Verbruggen, Pat McQuaid or the UCI.  

For example, this from Velonews

"Piguet’s ruling forbids Landis from “stating that the UCI, McQuaid and/or Verbruggen have concealed cases of doping, received money for doing so, have accepted money from Lance Armstrong to conceal a doping case, have protected certain racing cyclists, concealed cases of doping, have engaged in manipulation, particularly of tests and races, have hesitated and delayed publishing the results of a positive test on Alberto Contador, have accepted bribes, are corrupt, are terrorists, have no regard for the rules, load the dice, are fools, do not have a genuine desire to restore discipline to cycling, are full of shit, are clowns, their words are worthless, are liars, are no different to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, or to make any similar other allegations of that kind.”

Similar stories can be found all over the media sphere, which kind of makes me wonder, isn't the reporting of this case merely magnifying and repeating all the allegations that Landis has made against these dudes?  Well, if so, good.

It reminds me of a story from Alf, my old roommate:  It was a new school year and the principal of Alf's high school called an all school assembly to address what he considered to be a plague of swearing that was sweeping through the student body.  The principal took the podium and after describing how it was disrespectful to use vulgar language,and how stiff penalties would be levied against anyone using swears in the halls or classrooms of the school.  he then proceeded to enumerate all of the words which would not be allowed.

"Students of Shorewood High school will not be allowed to say the following:  fuck, bitch, shit, fag, pussy, whore, cock smoker...."

And all the kids were like, "Cock smoker?  Nobody says cock smoker?"  Guess what the most popular swear was for the following year.  That's right.  

Maybe the UCI is run by a bunch of cock smokers after all.

 Glaciers are cool, literally.  Holding this little chunk was a lifelong dream.  My own pet glacier.

 Truly one of the finest hikes we've ever done was the Kasugi Ridge hike in Denali State Park which parallels the Alaska Range.  The weather treated us very well, and we got good looks at Denali pretty much every day.  It's a big goddamn mountain.

Exit Glacier

 Harding ice field and the top of Exit Glacier

 Glaciers, they're awesome, and we were there.  This is a picture of two fools hanging out at the edge of the Harding Ice Field.  Some day, probably not all that long from now, this will be a melty puddle.  For now, it's an incredible sight.

Seward Alaska, just hanging out next to the campsite, enjoying the scenery.   

My lunch was better than his

 

Family time

After one night with my mom and sister in town.

Innovations in office wear

Just the thing I needed for a long and dangerous conference call.