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

It is, sometimes, good to be the sibling with no kids and who’s the responsible one.

Case in point: At Xmas, I get cooking equipment and jewelry. He and my sister-in-law get baby stuff and food things.

Drove down to Tidewater for the annual between-the-holidays visit (easier than dealing with holiday traffic), and we exchanged presents this evening. I made out like a bandit, though I think my fave is a silver ring with a dark green tourmaline in it that fits exactly on my right ring finger, and that does not clash with my favorite steel-n-ceramic ring (which is the only ring I wear daily these days). The moose cutting board has to be a close second, though. The relatives all seemed to like my choices of gifts as well, which is always good news.

I’ve also managed not to down a single drop of water since somewhere around 10 this morning. Coffee all the way down in the car, and nothing but wine since. I still marvel that despite not really drinking a lot around us kids when we were growing up my parents have somehow turned into total wine people. Or maybe they just pretend when I come down, but in any case, most visits are tests of my liver because of the amount of wine consumed.

I’ll be drinking a good chunk of water before bed, I suspect, just to stave off a possible hangover. The blow-up mattress is ready to go, just need to dump sheets on it. The parental units have retired, and the brother, sister-in-law and nieces have retreated to their own desmesne.

The younger niece (9 months old now) is not quite a terror – she’s crawling, and standing, but not yet walking. Cuter than should be possible, and was (thankfully) not all that fussy when strange ole Uncle Moose picked her up and held her. But very, very wiggly. You had to be very careful or next thing you knew she was dangling by a single toe and straining hard to get that dislodged so she could go on to the next conquest. Wrapping paper was her favorite play toy of the evening (aside from my necklace and general person), and we had a minor crisis when the older niece popped open a tin of mints and scattered them all over the floor. Watching five adults scrounging for white mints on a slightly off-white carpet is a funny sight, but when compared with dealing with a choking toddler, we went with the mint hunt.

Shopping tomorrow. I’m looking at going to BJs to get huge amounts of necessities like adult Tang and the like, and a trip to Homo Depot to check out programmable thermostats (gotta love being a home owner). Then on to a late lunch with one of my two surviving great-Aunts, and general visit time with the ‘rents. So far so good, and glad I came down.

It feels so good to be able to stand up to pee again.

I went and got another curved barbell for my Prince Albert (PA). I’d had one before, back when I had the original 10ga in, and hadn’t seen the point in getting new ones as I upped the size of the gauges from 10 to the 4 I have in now. Just one more piece of metal to use temporarily and discard or put away when I went up again. Since I’m pretty much set at the 4 now (I can’t see going higher at this point; it’s quite large enough), it was time to get a new piece of metal.

It is true that peeing with a PA can be a bit of a challenge at times. There are tricks you learn (turning sideways, pinching, etc.), but when it comes down to it, with a captive bead ring it’s just easier to sit down than risk a mess. This is especially true at home, where I have to do the cleaning. This is the only real drawback to the PA, in my experience, and while it is minimizable with the CBR, it’s also nice to have a better solution while keeping the jewelry. As the PA Wiki entry above states, it’s not the extra hole that causes the issue, it’s the liquid rolling along the curved surface of the jewelry. Hence the curved barbell as a way to combat that, since it just creates an extension of the natural arc of the stream.

Got home, popped the sucker in after cleaning it and putting some slightly larger balls on the end (to make sure it stays in place), and took it for a test drive. As expected, was a direct shot, no spillage. Truly a glorious piss. And all while standing again.

Gradually returning to the land of the living. This cold has sucked ass. Not so much with the breathing, that’s actually been mostly okay, but this one has just left me incredibly drained of energy. I’ve been able to sleep, eschewing sudafed in the evenings in favor of sleep and depending on the humidifier, which has worked well. But that has meant that each evening around dinner time the sudafed has worn off, and without pumping another stimulant into my system I’ve not had the energy to do squat. Yay for funky dreams.

Am definitely feeling better this evening, and am hopeful that a run might be attemptable tomorrow.

Pretty much done with shopping for the immediate family, just waiting for the last bits to arrive early this upcoming week before I head down to see them next weekend. Can’t wait to see how the 2nd niece has grown (she’s 9 months old now), and to play with the older niece. But first, gotta kill off the last of this cold.

I love watching people trying to parallel park. I can see tourists doing so all day long on Independence Avenue outside my office window and it provides no end of amusement.

Speaking of amusement, day two of sudafed (yay head cold) is progressing nicely through the floaty feeling stage of the drug. Makes critical thinking oh so much fun. Did manage to avoid taking it last night before bed, so wasn’t up all night, but I did have several fun dreams as I floated in and out of consciouness (I usually don’t remember dreams unless I’m not really deeply sleeping).

The first was a scenario where I was working at a summer camp, likely a scout camp (but not the one I worked at up in Maine). I remember being really excited because I could keep up my triathlon training, though on my mountain bike, not the tri bike (dirt roads), and get in some much needed open water swimming practice. As well as getting some skin cancer sun exposure.

The second I’ve now forgotten. I don’t recall that it was terribly long.

The third and last one was teaching English to junior high school students in Taiwan, which involved me speaking a lot of Mandarin. While it was good to exercise those attrophying language muscles, it made for an odd dream (trying to explain to these kids where the term “alphabet” came from? why?).

Anyway, was good to sleep without drugs (though with a humidifier), but not the most restful night I’ve had. I’m hopeful I can avoid the almost inevitable sleepless night that comes with most of my head colds (and thus causes me to miss a day of work – because if you can’t infect your co-workers, why bother having a cold?).

I’m fighting off a head cold at the moment. Stayed over at MG’s place on Saturday and he had a fan going to keep the air circulating, and I temporarily forgot that fan blowing across Moose’s face = dry nose = head cold susceptibility. You’d think with the AC drama over the summer I’d remember that, but no. My own fault, but still annoying. Lotsa vitamin C & B being consumed (yay for Emergen-C) at the moment.

Tonight was a non-food night of shopping at the grocery store. Needed those lovely home staples of bleach, toilet paper, etc., so grabbed the requisite coupons and dragged myself up for it. Didn’t get home early enough to do whites (for which I needed the aforementioned bleach), but I can do that later this week. Did get in a swim after work, drill work this time, and felt good doing it and after. The bike ride home tends to feel a tad chilly, even after I dry off thoroughly, but it’s short enough not to be a hassle.

Oh, and I managed to lose my work badge. Which isn’t such a big deal, except that the policy of the security people is to drive you batty by punishing you for being a dork make you wait ten working days to get a new badge, even though the technology exists to print out a new one on the spot (as well as cancelling the old one). So, metal detector city for me for the next two weeks.  Thankfully that’s pretty easy when I bike in since everything but my keys (metal-wise) is already in my bag from the commute in. So once I come back from visiting my family over the weekend of the 8th I’ll be re-badged.

Did a massage exchange yesterday with a gentleman whom I’ve exchanged massages with before (for those unfamiliar, it’s simply a “you massage me, I massage you” arrangement). He could use some technique pointers, but overall is pretty good. Haven’t done one of those in ages, so was nice to get a little body work done.

And now, time to crash to help sleep off the cold.

I blame Susan Dennis, as if there were any need to blame someone, but to her goes the blame for getting me to go to the local library finally, some 7 months after I moved down to Southwest.

I’d not been to the local branch here, the Southwest Neighborhood Branch. I’d been to the Mt. Pleasant Branch many times, and I suppose I was spoiled by MtP and its Carnegie library building. Like all of Southwest, the library was reborn from the ashes of “Urban Renewal,” but unlike the cool modernist residential buildings that surround it, there is little of modernist design about it, other than the municipal cinderblock architecture (so reminiscent of my mother’s Junior High/Middle School library, where she worked for almost 30 years). Regardless of the design elements (or lack thereof), the building was in good repair, and did have a nice modern touch in the automatic doors for both entrance and exit.

The science fiction collection was rather small, two sets of bookshelves and a part of a third, but it will do me for now. I grabbed three books after renewing my card (“Your card has expired, and we have these new ones now, so which design would you like?”), updating my address and all that. They even have a keychain card, though I doubt I’ll use it since I don’t use any of the other ones I have (I consider them a nuisance at best – who wants to carry around all that extra crap in their pockets? CVS and Safeway have it right in that they allow you to just give or type in your phone number and be done with carrying more cards). I’ll have to bug the Friends group to add to the collection there. Or get creative with requests from other branches.

I also noted with some satisfaction that they have proper bike parking out front, of the reletively recent vintage that the city government is putting up here and there as they can. Glad they did so at a municipal building, and I’ll be using the bike to hop up there from here on out, I suspect.

The rain held off, barely.

Got myself up and ready and biked down to West Potomac Park to check in and get my race shirt and number (555).

The field where the tents were set up was pretty muddy from the rain the previous day and that morning. Folks were jumping around the larger puddles and trying not to step in the smaller ones by accident. Check-in was pretty painless, got my shirt and went back over to the bike to change shoes.

Just before the race started I spotted a friend from the tri club who was running with a friend of hers. Started chatting and just ran along with them for most of the race. They set a good pace (31:50 to finish, just under a 10 minute mile average), and it was fun to run with someone else and talk. I suspect I’d have run faster, but not had quite such a fun time, had I been running alone in the crowd. We did pick up the pace in the last 500 meters or so (the tri club women smoked us there – her friend and I just picked up a little and let her zip on ahead).
Simple course, an out and back. Mayor-elect Fenty was there running as well, and they got him up to say a few good words about the organization sponsoring the event, S.O.M.E.  Bonus that the race fee was a donation, so tax deductible.
Post-race I hung out enough to cheer a bit more, and grab some water before changing shoes and heading home. As I pulled up to the building I started to feel the rain coming down again – just made it in time. Was a great start to a nice holiday.

I killed Firefox 2.0 from the iBook this morning. I had already beeen annoyed that I couldn’t close all the windows by hitting control-W as I could under 1.5 and earlier (it would close the last tab, but leave the window open with a blank tab), and that I couldn’t close the tabs by hitting the little ‘x’ button in the upper right corner any more (they put the x on each individual tab, which made them moving targets), but when it wouldn’t let me hold down the trackpad button and get the little function menu, that was the last straw. Thank you for your efforts, but you’re no longer desired. Glad I saved the installation file for 1.5.0.2. Blech.

Up early this morning to go run a turkey trot 5k run. Got to bed by 9:30, and was out like a light, so did get a good eight hours of sleep (for the first time since the weekend). I suspect a nap will be in order as well, but we’ll cross that bed when we get to it. No feasting plans today; I feel no desire to attempt to overeat.

And I’m definitely not making another tofurkey (haven’t tried an unturkey yet). As I put it to a friend of mine yesterday, because they pump it full of chemicals to make it taste better, your shit stinks like tofurkey for the next day and a half or so, and I really don’t need to be reminded of the meal for that long or in that way. Besides, I’m vegan because I don’t want to eat meat, so the idea of a big ole fake meat centerpiece to a meal is, well, kind of tacky to me.

Looks like the predicted rain is holding off this morning, which is good news for those of us running the race this morning.

Okay, to the earlier list I need to add:

4. Sleep.

As in, getting enough of it. Which, of course, affects #1, Consistency. Up a tad too late this morning to go running, so doing some needed stretching instead (silly IT band). But sleep definitely needs to be on the list for focus this next year.

Was going over my goals for this next year, athletics wise, and part of the exercise was to identify what I thought my three biggest weaknesses were. After some time thinking, I identified:

1. Consistency
2. Strength
3. Diet

Consistency is probably the killer for me. Most of the time I can motivate to do what I need to do, but if/when I fall off the wagon, it’s ugly. And it kills my training. So that’s a key thing to attack this year. Strength training I’m working on. Diet, on the other hand, is not so hot.

It’s not like I don’t get enough to eat, nor a good enough variety, nor do I lack of protein (if my nail and hair growth is any gauge, I get quite enough). I do need to eat a tad less fat, and fewer calories, more often. I suspect overeating may be an issue with the stomach problems I have as well – too many calories at once for my system to handle. In any case, there needs to be fewer calories vis-a-vis energy output. I’ve managed to stay at my current weight/fat level for the past two years, and I don’t want to be here. Certainly racing and training would be easier with a tad less fat on ye olde frame, so I’m going to have to knuckle under and actually get serious about it if I want to see any progress.