Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

All in all a very good Thanksgiving day. Was nice and quiet for most of it. The store this morning was uncrowded and uncharacteristically quick to get out of. The cooking went well, and I took the better of the two batches of cupcakes with me (made 2 dozen). Unfortunately I’ve broken a ring on my icing piper, so it was slathered on by spreader rather than piped nicely, but they did fine.

Side note: I really, really want to make the margarita cupcakes I found in the cookbook while flipping back to the buttercreme frosting recipe.

The dinner itself was fantastic. I took a zucchini risotto as well as the cupcakes (the mushroom selection stunk, so zucchini it was). The bird came out perfect, which the host was rightly proud of. He also thoughtfully saved me a batch of potatoes sans butter/milk, which was much appreciated. The other selections were equally tasty, with lots of good vegetables.

Some Wii was played, and I set Jon’s Wii up (he hadn’t played with it since he’d moved – in June). Next thing you know he’s going to be getting messages via the Wii from a certain someone who will have him registered here shortly. Bwhahahaha. We did warn him what the blinky blue light on the front means now, too.

Got the kitchen cleaned up just now after getting home, so no mess in the morning. Off work early tomorrow, and will plan to stop by the gym after that, swim, and hand in my receipt for the new shoes & lock. Wonder how they’ll do the credit.

Got the news that early registration for the Nation’s Tri opened for DC Tri Club folks, so signed up for that tonight. Hopefully with the stretching I’ve started doing on my feet will keep the PF under control, and keep it from recurring, and I’ll be able to do the race this time around.

Picked up replacement shoes (shower and gym), as well as a new lock this evening. Both pair were on sale, which is always good even when someone else is paying. Still, the replacement costs is going to be almost as much as they make from me for a year’s worth of locker rental fees.

Quiet night. There are happenings around town, but I got home from the shopping, laid down for a quick nap and woke up an hour later feeling pretty cold (for no apparent reason), so I stayed in and behaved myself. Earlyish morning tomorrow to pick up some last minute food needs for tomorrow night’s dinner, then it’s some cooking and some time spent in Crobuzon (aka my town in Animal Crossing: City Folk) before I zip down to Alexandria.

Friday in the office should be nice and quiet (I hope!). I’d like to get filing done and clear a ton of shit off my desk.

This past weekend sucked. I finally got productive around Sunday afternoon when I had a cleaning/laundry fit, but prior to that it was a lot of sitting around feeling sorry for myself, avoiding walking, and playing on the Wii. My usual “leave me alone until I feel better” attitude gets compounded when it’s semi-painful to walk as well; doesn’t encourage me to leave the house for a lot when it can potentially hurt to do so.

Did get out Sunday morning to use a gift certificate my newbies had given me at the end of their tri program, picked up some cross-training implements to help with that process. Was a good excuse to get out of the house, but even the walk to and from Metro ended up making my heel sore.

Then, today, not a ton of pain. Wandering around the office was fine, no real pain. The bike ride there and back was fine, of course (biking hasn’t irritated it at all, thankfully). So bizarre, pain the one day at minor stuff, none the next at a more normal course. Wish it would just heal up already, this is long past the point where it got old.

Got completely and utterly soaked on this afternoon’s ride. It had been threatening rain on and off all day, and I’d been a zombie most of the day, so I finally got going around 4 or so. Was great for the first 2 long loops, then a little over halfway into the third the bottom dropped out. Not much to do but keep riding at that point, and it’s not like I’ve never raced in the rain (Mooseman, Richmond Powersprint, anyone?). Did an additional short loop – was considering going for the long loop again as it started lightening up, but then the bottom dropped out, again, on the backside of the short loop, so I headed in after that one.

Yesterday was all about being a slug. Got up late, knitted (per the previous post) & caught up on TV. Played Bioshock. Made pancakes. Was fantastic, especially after the chaos of the previous weekend, and the mess of the work week.

Limited email today. My inbox at work hasn’t looked that good since, oh, early February 2004 (i.e., right after I started there)? Evidently we had a “catastrophic cascading hardware failure” in our network stuff which killed off all email access. Whee! Still feel sorry for the CIO types. Explaining this all to management will not be fun. Especially since as of now we still have no crackberry service.

The peanut thing in the slow-cooker worked pretty well. I added water, thinking there wasn’t enough liquid, but it seems there actually was, after the veggies sweat out and shrunk down. So it was “stewier” than expected, but still good. It’s definitely been worth it to have dinner waiting for me when I get home. Now I have a bunch in the freezer for later, again, easier than trying to come up with fresh food every evening, and better than processed stuff as well.

Otherwise more splicer killing in Bioshock, and now it’s zombie movie time, before I crash.

I will say this about the economic news: at least it’s stopped people from commenting on the other inanities which the two campaigns keep spitting out. Though I’d not wish this nonsense on us any day of the week. Re-regulate the markets, tax the hell out of the salaries these fuckers made while screwing the rest of us over and bringing ‘value’ to their companies (which are now defaulting on everything they did), and to the extent necessary, let the market ‘correct’ their actions without bailing their asses out. They so love the market, then live by its rules and don’t expect the rest of us to bail out your poor choices.

I feel very, very sorry for our IT folks today. Our network connections (email, internal drives) went down sometime right after lunch, and stayed down all day (and, from the lack of email on my work crackberry tonight, looks to still be down). Not fun, and I’m sure they were sweating buckets trying to get it all back up.

In the meantime, with no access to pretty much anything I need to actually write things, I worked for a brief while on a presentation I have to give next Friday (before that program seized up and refused to play nice, thankfully after I’d saved my work to the desktop), and then I ended up leaving early along with most of my coworkers since there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do. I played a lot of Bioshock once I got home (needed to just kill time & monters), and enjoyed the fruits of the slow-cooker’s labor all day, a garlicky chicken stew, which needed a touch more salt and a lot more garlic; eight cloves was not enough to make something ‘garlicky’ in my book.

Cleaned up the slow-cooker and prepped veggies for another batch of stew tomorrow, this time a peanut sauce, after I’d bagged up today’s stew for the freezer. Saved one serving for tomorrow’s lunch.

Finally updated WordPress this evening, both on the main CountFour home page and on the /legalmoose site. Got tired of the constant “a new version is out, update today!” warnings that have been there for a while now. Also popped in some more plug-ins, to make viewing the site friendlier for mobile browsers (thank you for that example, Brian), and to be truly obnoxious and make Twitter go off when I post new things here as well (thank you Brian and Fredo). Put in a new cross-poster for LJ which seems to work better than it had before (since my preferred one stopped working a couple of iterations of WP ago), even if the text box is a bit much. I suspect that’s editable, but I’m not going to worry about it tonight.

And with that, I’m off to bed.

Tried to go shopping today, post-pride. Wanting to not waste petrol, and since I was already warm from walking around at the pride festival, I biked over to Barracks Row to hit the local bike shop and the local yarn shop. Someone, however, had other ideas for me.

• Strike One: Local Bike Shop no longer carries nutrition products, the sole thing I needed.
• Strike Two: Local Yarn Shop doesn’t have any of the notions I wanted to pick up.
• Strike Three: Picked up my mail from yesterday on the way back into the building, and the every-two-years-like-clockwork jury duty summons was in there.

I get the picture, I’m staying in the rest of the day.

Earlier I did go down to the Pride festival for DC. Was nice, nothing particularly smashing, but I enjoyed it. Saw several folks I don’t see much of these days, picked up a bracelet (bike chain pattern), got some sun (no burn though – yay SPF 30). I didn’t go out to the parade last night – I didn’t want to go drinking after or during after yesterday morning’s race, and honestly I prefer the festival for people watching and talking. Instead I finished up Half-Life 2: Episode One on the Xbox (didn’t take long, actually), finished a knitting sampler I was working on (increases and decreases, various methods), and started the next project – BC’s hat, to match the scarf. The hat, after the initial cast on and row, is coming along quite nicely, especially in comparison to the scarf. We’ll see how it goes when I have to start decreasing and slip it over to the double pointed needles.

Question for my knitting friends: Do they not make aluminium or metal needles these days? Mom has a ton (which I will filch from her in due time), and I like the feel of them, but almost everything I see other than Addi Turbos are wood of some sort (or bamboo). What gives?

Hauled the shuffle out, got it all charged, then promptly left it at home this morning. Whoops. Watching the other guys working out proved to be a bit more entertaining today, anyway. While there were two guys in the weight room on Tuesday (one of whom was the other’s trainer), today had half a dozen other folks, making it fairly crowded, but not so bad that I couldn’t find space for lunges and push ups. Upped the weight and reps slightly today, as Tuesday was purposefully light. Still not too difficult, which is the point of this stage.

I had forgotten how often one ends up having to wash a load of cold wash clothes once real training begins (not to mention biking to work again, which I started back with last week). Doing that tonight, then some reading, then bed. Was up far too late last night with Halo 3 (addicting, even when I die, over and over and over and over and over), so I need rest before the next run in the morning. Skipped biking this morning because of the storm last night (didn’t want to risk all the limbs I knew would be down on the road this morning).

We actually lost a chunk of our fence here at the cult co-op when two big limbs came off one of our larger trees. Thankfully no one’s house or car was hit, just the brick wall.

IM training started this week. It’s been okay so far, but then again, at two days in I should hope it would be okay. Did light weights tonight for the first time in forever and a day. I’m sure I’ll feel it tomorrow, though I didn’t do terribly much, in keeping with the long hiatus. It’s the whole trying to fit in 3 workouts per sport plus weights, plus have time to cook food, work, sleep, and perhaps even have a small social life. When push came to shove, weights went out the window. Going to try and not succumb to that in this cycle.

This past weekend meant two days headed over to the local festival in BC’s home community, which meant two days of festival food. Mmm, grease. The art and what not was fun, though, as was wandering through with his parents, and assorted friends we ran into.

On the gaming front I picked up Halo 3 when I was at home, because I found it on sale for 1/3 off. So far it’s kicking my ass on “normal” mode. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it eventually, but for the nonce I’m dying a lot. Still haven’t beaten Overlord, though I’m getting toward the end. I started getting a bit better at SSBB while home, and still stink at Mario Kart. That’s about the extent of it, I think – everything else is in abeyance.

I think I’m going to take the red cross CPR/First Aid classes this winter, after the IM. I need the refresher for the first aid portion, and if I ever did learn CPR it’s long forgotten now. Useful skills to have, and requirements for some other things I’m contemplating, but don’t want to discuss quite yet.

Had a really nice Memorial Day weekend. I zipped down to see my parents and my brother and his family. The drives both ways were relatively relaxed, and I was able to keep the mini on cruise control at a reasonable speed for most of them (which very much helped my gas mileage – not quite 38 mpg each way). I’ve started going down to Petersburg and cutting over on 460 to 64 rather than taking 64 down the Peninsula, and I find it a much more pleasant drive. The Peninsula always drives me nuts with it’s constant construction (I’m not kidding – they’ve been widening or fixing or doing something on that damned highway since before I learned how to drive; I hate driving there). Picked up the eldest niece on the way in and had fun scandalizing her with bad singing to Madonna. Fun times.

The parents are doing well, as is my brother (aside from meds-related weight gain, that is). Took the brother to get his belated birthday gift – running shoes. Poor guy has my feet (which is to say, flatter than the proverbial pancake), so got the exact same shoes I wear. They were on sale (yay!) at the local running store, so he got a top and socks, too. He’ll have to find his own shorts. Now I just have to find a 5k for us to do down there this November to get him going.

Past the shoe shopping trip, it was an utterly unscripted weekend. We had no need to be anywhere, no race to do, etc., so we did projects around the yard (or, rather, they did projects and I watched and/or entertained my nieces). And that had to be the best part of it – just hanging out with my family and getting a chance to just be together, without the need to be running hither and yon on someone else’s schedule.

Went through Mom’s knitting stuff. Didn’t steal any of her needles (though she has all these nice old aluminium ones which were tempting), but did take a lovely 1941 “Knit for Defense” booklet with some relatively easy patterns in it (sweaters, gloves, socks – stuff “for the troops”). Copied a couple other easy patterns on their copier/fax/scanner/printer/coffee maker/nail gun/etc. machine. Might try the baby hat pattern before I do BC’s hat, just to get in some practice. Part of the just hanging out included a ton of knitting on the scarf, with the result that I have a couple more hours and it should be done finally. It’s looking pretty good, now that I have a better idea what I’m doing.

Not a lot went on past that. Some gaming on the eldest niece’s Wii with her and my brother. A couple of movies and other bad television. Planting flowers and putting up the blueberry bushes’ bird netting. All in all the perfect little vacation, and exactly what I needed.