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April 29, 2007
A tiny red burst of heaven
I know I have raved before about how much I love California.
But this pretty much sums up my love in one happy thought: farmstand strawberries.
This afternoon we were on our way back from a race weekend in the Central Valley. We had a fun couple of days, with Dave riding in three road races and me spectating and handing off water bottles and sneaking in hill-free runs where I could. (My cold and sinus infection are much better, thanks.) But it was also taxing, and we were feeling quite sun-baked by this afternoon. And we found out just as we headed back to San Francisco that part of the Bay Bridge had also been a bit baked, which threatened to complicate our trip home.
Because it was a beautiful day, and because we weren't in a hurry, we decided to avoid freeways and take the more scenic surface roads to get back home. And what do surface streets in the Central Valley bring? Roadside farm stands! In April!
I hope you live somewhere near a strawberry field. Because you probably know that you just can't buy strawberries like these in a store, even a really fancy one. The berries that go to stores have to be picked before they're totally ripe so they don't go bad before they get sold. And they're refrigerated, which is a shameful thing to do to a sun-ripened berry. You will never get a perfect strawberry from a place with four walls and a roof.
These strawberries were perfectly ripe and red and sweet, fragrant, picked today, still warm from the sun, and flawless in every way. We paid $9 for half a flat -- that's $1.50 per well-heaped pint. My only regret is that I didn't get a full flat to make jam.
Ohhhhh, they are delicious.
I'm afraid I may eat strawberries until I make myself sick.
April 24, 2007
The awesome homemade hat is keeping it together for me
This is my brain on amoxicillin, sudafed, tylenol, mucinex, and hydrocodone cough syrup. All I need is a margarita!
KIDDING.
My teeth hurt.
This is also my brain ODing on iTunes. Notice how all four eyeballs in the photo appear to be looking in different directions? And notice the giant CD rack silently mocking me in the background? This project is driving me batty. I have ripped 259 CDs. I think I have 350-ish to go. I am pretty sure I will run out of disk space before I get there.
Speaking of bats in the attic, I returned our new Windows laptop today, the one we bought a month ago, for repairs. It works just fine. There is nothing really wrong with it. There's just one little thing: the battery is slightly loose. It does not sit securely in its bay. When I hold it the way one always holds a laptop, or use it on my lap, as these things were designed to be used, I can feel and hear the battery jiggling around. It finally drove me crazy enough that I called the Dell help line. And the nice person on the phone had me remove the battery, re-insert it, remove, insert, etc blah blah blah no it's not broken it's just driving me insane I expected better quality than this so sue me I'm a Mac user maybe my expectations were a little high.
Deep breath. At any rate, they sent me an empty box, and I sent it back with the laptop inside. My fingers are crossed.
Hopefully I will come up with something else to talk about before the MP3 drive fills or or the Dell returns home so I can bump what may be the most unattractive photo I've ever taken of myself down the page a bit.
(Obviously I also think it's hilarious, or I wouldn't have put it up there. But still.)
April 20, 2007
Tower of song
It's a gorgeous spring day and I'm sitting inside, in front of the computer, gazing longingly at the sunny back yard. I have picked up the tail end of Dave's cold -- I skipped the usual gradual first steps of sickness and went right into the chest-full-of-thumbtacks cough. Ouch. It really hurts. Ouch.
That's why I'm not outside. So I've embarked on a very indoorsy project. I've decided to rip all of the CDs in our collection to MP3. Even though we have about 65 gigabytes of music already in iTunes, I estimate that that includes only about a third to a half of the actual physical CDs we own.
(Those 65 gigabytes already on the computer comprise nearly 14,000 tracks, or about 40 straight days of audio. That includes some audiobooks and podcasts, but it's mostly music. That's puny compared to this guy's collection. How much music do you all have on your computers?)
Once they're all ripped, I dunno, maybe we can get rid of a few or at least move the giant CD rack out of the corner of the room where it is collecting heaps of dust. The rack holds around 1,100 CDs. So I have somewhere around 500-700 CDs to rip.
The first step was to make a portable list of what's already on the computer, to make it easier for me to stand at the CD collection and pull out what needs to be ripped. I extracted a list of just artists and albums from iTunes and printed it. In two columns of 8-point text, it's 11 pages.
Now I'm inserting the CDs into the computer one by one, sucking the music off of them, and dusting and re-shelving them. I'm only on the second of 13 rows in the rack. I really hope I am back to good health before this project is finished.
April 13, 2007
I'm calling it "Crusher"
Readers, meet my new road bike. It features a brand-new anodized gray aluminum frame and a carbon fork and seatpost which make no noise when ridden. It also boasts mismatched wheels, almost-all-Ultegra components with many thousands of miles on them, and awesome handlebar tape that sent my husband into a fit of jealousy.
What, you don't like our sidewalks? Here is a closer look at the bike.
Yes, I have a triple crankset, and you would too if you lived at the top of an 18% grade. (Someday I will change that to a compact double, which is what I have on my other bike.) You can see that I'm still in my easiest gear; that's from my ride up the hill at the end of yesterday's 45-miler. The photo would be a lot sexier if I had shifted into the big ring, I know. Wish I had thought of it.
I am actually not much of a bike-namer, but the owner of my local bike shop called me "Crusher" when I went in to pick up my old, cracked frame. I liked it.
April 9, 2007
Seeing green
When I volunteered at the Nike Women's Marathon last October, I didn't expect to get paid for my efforts. But I did, sort of... I sold one of my photos from the race! About six weeks ago, someone from Gatorade's online marketing firm found the above photo on flickr and contacted me about using it in an ad.
The funny thing is that this photo should never have happened. We were only supposed to stack the cups two levels high. In our overzealousness to pour 30,000 servings before the runners reached mile 17, we built a triple tier before the aid station captain told us to simmer down and keep the cups to two stories. I do think it makes a better photo.
The agency folks tell me the ad has been trafficked, but I haven't found it yet. (I'm checking all my favorite running and cycling sites and hitting reload, reload, reload.) Let me know if you see it.
April 5, 2007
Updatus rodentus
The rat issue has been addressed. While we were in Aruba, an exterminator came and did various things, like putting out more poison, nailing bits of screen to gaps, and supposedly cleaning up droppings. He returned today and declared that since none of his poison had been eaten, the rats must all be dead or gone.
Except for the smell. And, worse, the flies. Our garage is now infested with flies. Gazillions of big, fat ones. I assume this is the result of many dead rodent carcasses providing ripe breeding grounds. Ah, there's nothing like plucking dead flies out of the washing machine before doing a load of whites. Or worse, starting the washer and then looking in and seeing a fly the size of a golf ball (almost!) struggling to escape the CLEAN laundry water.
The window sills down there are covered with dead flies and flies that have gotten too old and obese to move. They just sit there and buzz pathetically every few minutes.
God, it's gross.
Speaking of rodents, the photo above is of Dave racing last Sunday. (Team Roaring Mouse! rodents! ha! ha ha!) He's wearing a borrowed helmet since he crashed in his race the day before. Apparently a friend of ours refers to this as the vagina helmet. Makes a little more sense if you see it from the front.
April 1, 2007
Geeked out
My ride yesterday was totally fine. My rear was indeed sore and my legs were tired by the end, but it really wasn't that hard, thanks to the flat-by-San Francisco-standards route and the excellent weather. We had a beautiful day of biking.
Today I watched Dave race in a crit, then we came home and got our network dialed. Ahh, what a perfect Sunday.
Dave just got a Slingbox for work-related purposes (really!), but unfortunately, it needs to be hard-wired into both the cable box and an internet connection. So he moved our broadband modem and router into the living room, which disrupted the feng shui in the house in a couple of ways. First of all, our living room is a sacred clutter-free space (compared to the rest of the apartment) and no place for the blinking lights of the modem and router. Secondly, the move obliterated the wireless signal to my Powerbook, which must reside in the office, where it is plugged into various hard drives and other devices.
We have two Airport Expresses, which we use to play music wirelessly in the living room and kitchen via iTunes. They are like mini-routers, so I figured out how to configure them to act as wireless range extenders for our Linksys wifi router. Thus the Slingbox can be plugged right into the ethernet port of an Airport Express -- which is also plugged into the living room speakers, on which I am currently listening to Stereolab, which I am playing from one laptop but which lives on an external hard drive connected to the other laptop. Got that?
I love technology.
So we were able to move the modem/router setup back to the office where it belongs. An added bonus is that with the Airports extending our wireless signal, we now have a solid five-bar signal everywhere in the apartment, even in spots where we used to have only two bars. And the Slingbox works great, so Dave can watch and control our cable signal over the interweb. He has promised me he won't change the channel from work if I'm at home watching Magnum P.I. reruns.
Now if I could just get our Windows machine to print wirelessly to the Mac's printer, I'd be set.
This stuff has gotten me reminiscing about college. When I moved into my dorm freshman year, two-thirds of the crap I schlepped with me was a huge computer, monitor, keyboard and mouse, slow-ass modem, stereo, and giant box of CDs (which grew by orders of magnitude while I was in college, of course). Now all of those things, plus the TV/VCR combo I picked up along the way, can be replaced by a single four-pound computer the size of an anthropology textbook.
Back then, all of this stuff would have blown my mind... high-speed internet at home? wirelessly? A thousand CDs' worth of music stored on a tiny laptop computer? My college friends and I fantasized aloud about this stuff. Often. One friend looked forward to the day he could check his email from bed. Another longed for the day Apple made a laptop that was powerful enough to replace a desktop, but also affordable. (It seemed so unobtainable that we called it the Messiah computer.)
And that was only ten... uh, 14 years ago!
Of course, if I were moving in to that dorm room now, I wouldn't bring a stereo, but I'd have a bike, wetsuit, and five pairs of running shoes. I guess there is always something to fill the space.
