Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who have helped me raise $2,195 (so far) for Food & Friends. I’ve now managed to exceed my fundraising goal thanks to these generous contributors:
Thom
Jerry
Joe
Greg
Richard
Roger
Lea
Kevin
BC
John
Daniel
Doug
Jon
Frank
Mom & Dad
Dave B
Michael
Thank you very much!!!
Practice swim with my newbies this morning and two local coaches. Headed out to Sandy Point early to get in the swim before it got too hot. We swam, off and on, for about an hour, practicing swimming in the swells and going around the buoys set out to mark off the swimming area. It was very helpful to get out there, and I’m glad we do this.
This was the first time I’d hauled out the wet suit since last year. I was a bit worried
about getting into it, since it had been a little over a year since I’d used it. It fit just fine, no worries there. Whew. It was warm out – the wet suit wasn’t strictly necessary (borderline water temps for using it), but I wanted the practice in it. In the water it was fine, it was standing around listening to the coach that was warm.
Got the drink bracket installed on the bike this afternoon. That definitely makes it a lot easier to mount the water bottle on the bike (much, much easier than the rubber bands – well worth the $10). I’m hopeful this’ll encourage me to drink more water while out riding.
Mostly recovered from the work week as ‘acting supervisor.’ It was relatively quiet, and I’m glad nothing big was needed. I think it cemented quite firmly that I’m not quite ready to be a supervisor. I’m a specialist, I do my job relatively well, and I’m not ready to start herding other cats. At least, though, we know I can do it if needed when my team leader needs to go out of town.
Off to a party with BC this afternoon, then another long ride tomorrow to try out the water bottle before next week. I should run at some point, too, but I suspect that’ll be on hold until after the Food & Friends ride.
Stretching, a shower, lots of food, a lie-down (not really a nap), more food, and I’m starting to feel human again. Four hours and about 20 minutes after I started I got home from today’s bike ride out the W&OD trail, about 62 miles. Went out to mile marker 24, which is somewhere in Loudon county near Sterling. Stopped briefly, stretched some, then turned around to head back.
The ride out was great. The trails were well marked, and I had no problems switching from the Mt. Vernon Trail to the Custis Trail to the W&OD. The way back, on the other hand, I never saw a marker to get back on the Custis, so I ended up riding the W&OD all the way down to Shirlington, getting a little lost as there are NO signs worth crap down there, then finally finding my way to the Four Mile Run trail and back to the Mt. Vernon and home.
Wore a sleeveless jersey to try and even out some of the sun on my shoulders. So far, so good.
Overall I liked the W&OD. There were a tad too many stops when you ran though areas like Vienna and Herndon, but there were also some good stretches where I was able to get down onto the aerobars and relieve pressure on my neck. Not too many kids out, though I had one heart-attack inducing moment when I thought one little girl was going to turn out into the trail right as I came up beside her. Thankfully her mother, running behind her, intervened. I suspect that’s where my max heart rate reading came from for the ride.
Have to get the center water bottle set up for this upcoming weekend’s ride – I didn’t have quite enough water with me, which was really annoying when I was lost in Shirlington and couldn’t find my way out. Basically this just involves trimming the straw down to a height where it won’t annoy the hell out of me, but I’ve not needed it to date, so haven’t hooked it up.
Probably do a repeat of this ride, only a bit further out. Pretty much ready for the Food & Friends ride next week, just doing some last minute testing.
The natives are restless tonight. It’s the usual pre-July 4th firecracker week here in DC and they’ve been going off sporadically all night. My favorite was just a few minutes ago, an explosion so loud that I lost hearing for a couple of seconds, even here inside my apartment (with the windows open). I can only imagine what it did to the kids who set it off.
BC’s birthday was Friday, and some space he had tried to get for a blackjack night to celebrate on Saturday fell through so I hosted it here. I’m happy to report that the table easily seats eight. ‘Twas a fun time, and a good way to celebrate the birthday in a nice, low-key manner.
Needless to say, though, we didn’t get up until sometime around noon today.
Once we finally got going it was time for some shopping at the Macy’s sale downtown. ‘Twas fun to shop with him, he’s got good taste. Unfortunately I wasn’t looking for much in the way of fun stuff, more like socks and dress pants and the like. Regardless, the target items were found, and we wandered around a bit more downtown before heading back here for a bad movie and some cuddle time.
Should be an interesting week ahead. I’m acting team leader for my team this week, which seems (from the report from this past week’s acting team leader) to be a lot of getting tons of emails from our boss and forwarding them on for assignment. I know there are other things, but that seemed to be the most onerous part. Thankfully one of our main ethics attorneys will be there to consult (my team leader’s main experience is in ethics work), since I know little to nothing about advising folks on the federal ethics statutes and regs.
Finally cooling off in here now that the thunderstorms are rolling through. I can’t really hear them over the dishwasher, though. It was a ‘clean the apartment and do laundry night’ for me, hence the dishwasher running. The dining table looks nicer without so much crap on it, as does my desk. Amazing what actually filing the stuff in the ‘to file’ pile will do for the place.
Now if I could just make a dent in the ‘to read’ pile.
Good bike ride this morning. I’m hoping the weather will be relatively nice so I can run in the morning. While I’ve been biking a lot more, and finally getting back to swimming, I’ve neglected my running over the past week, which is probably a contributor to the foul mood from yesterday (which was gone after a good night’s sleep and the ride this morning).
Popped by the bike shop to pick up supplies. Sadly their choices of Shot Bloks was very, very limited, so I only picked up a couple. I’ll have to pop back out somewhere else to pick up more. Still haven’t been able to try the margarita flavored ones, but I wasn’t too keen on the pina colada ones. They were okay, nowhere near as gross as vanilla clif shots were, but not a favorite. I prefer the black cherry or cran-razz flavors so far. Oh, and the bike shop was able to take my old bike tubes to recycle them. Yay! Better than dumping them in a landfill, for sure. Glad I remember to take them with me to work this morning in anticipation of the shopping trip.
Swim tomorrow, then maybe dinner in town with BC and some friends. Have to behave as I have a long ride on Saturday, around 4 hours or so.
Clearly feeling more than a little bit of volunteer burnout today. I know it’ll pass, but at the moment I could take the three organizations I’m currently doing work for and happily pitch them all directly into the Potomac. I think this always happens the days I have meetings at the cult co-op. Those can be so incredibly contentious, over the smallest things, that they’re frequently quite unpleasant to sit through. Makes me wish I had already picked up how to knit, as at least that could occupy my hands while I listened to them drone on.
Got to see BC last night for dinner and a horror flick. Whoever set up the arms at the theater so they could be pulled up between the seats and out of the way is a genius, as that made cuddling during the movie all the better.
And to whoever decided to start the as-yet-unreleased new Nicole Kidman flick with images of a space shuttle breaking up on reentry, may you die a horrible, painful death. Like any of us needed to see that happening again. Watching the first shuttle accident live on TV in Junior High was bad enough, having to help with post-cleanup efforts from the second one in the early 2000s was worse. Seeing it on the screen was not pleasant. So, yeah, thanks for the memories, asshat.
Oh, and the smell of pot and incense is back. I’ve placed a call with the local police lieutenant to see if they can do anything about it if I report the smell when it’s back. Not entirely hopeful, but wanted to know my options there. I’ve had it with these folks, and with this smell.
To date I have avoided doing charity sporting events, but this year I have committed to ride in the 2007 TEAM Food & Friends cycling weekend, July 12-15th. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do the century (100 mile) ride as part of the weekend; I’ve certainly been riding enough this year for it!
Food & Friends is a nonprofit organization that prepares, packages and delivers more than 3,000 meals a day, free of charge, to clients throughout the DC metropolitan area. One of the main reasons I signed up for this was that while Food & Friends began as a service to deliver meals to people with HIV/AIDS, and that’s still a central part of their mission, over the years they’ve been able to expand that service to include men, women and children who face a variety of illnesses such as breast and prostate cancer, and other life-challenging illnesses. That mission is critical to support providing three meals a day to more than 1,300 people, six days a week.
Please support my efforts to raise $1900 by making a tax-deductible donation today. Every penny raised goes directly to help the clients of Food & Friends.
So far I’ve raised $545 thanks to these generous contributors:
Thank you very much!!!
I hope you will also contribute. If you do donate, please let me know, since I won’t necessarily know the real names of folks who read this.
Want to see something gross? Take apart, for the first time ever, a mouse (trackball, actually) that you’ve been using for well over a decade, in order to clean it.
Yuck.
A vignette from the weekend, completely out of context:
Me: This is really fun.
BC: I’ve got no complaints.
Me: Good, ’cause if you did I’ve got a ball gag over there that would stop that right quick.
*pause, look at each other*
*both of us dissolve into giggles*
Words just can’t do justice to the mash-up video posted over here at UltraSparky. Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon meet Unk. I love it.