two people, totally independently, today told me that my hairstyle made me look like a samurai.
earlier this weekend i thought the same about myself, and i am pretty sure hops commented on it, too.
there are worse things to look like than a samurai. i told my coworkers: arigato!
okay, i didn't say that. but i should have.
it's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x36!
i am the mohawk your haircut, who brought you out of boredom to be your haircut. you shall have no other haircuts besides me, for i am the MOHAWK.
in addition to the haircut, i re-styled my Hootie goatee. it was to be a transitionary step to the Real Facial Hair Plan that I had for xmas, but 1) it is clear i'm several months off from achieving my plan, and 2) i kinda like the transitionary form.
i have to face the facts: i look good in facial hair. the sillier the better.
which brought me to another realization. as i've pointed out before, and as all men know, the real purpose of facial hair, particularly a beard, is to distract women from the fact that the man in question has multiple chins. a good beard flows over all the chins and creates the illusion of a single, unified chin structure. a bad beard reveals the chinplex.
but it has come to my attention that for me (though probably not for someone like K-fed) the beard is a toy, a source of endless amusement, a joke-on-my-face which brings a smile in the midst of my mustache/beard complex whenever i get a glimpse in the mirror.
this one is particularly amusing. har de har! it's a twofer.
tired of having not ridden since last thursday, i went for a ride yesterday morning. first mistake: i left my booties at home. second mistake: i went for a ride.
the roads were slick, which always freaks me out. but much worse than that, it was 40 degrees out, according to my thermometer.
i got to the fountain at sawyer camp trail, and turned around. my toes were freezing, i had almost no feeling in my thumbs, and my nose was chilled.
i'd taken off my sunglasses early on because they'd fogged up so much i couldn't see. facing the return ride, the sun reflected brutally off the wet pavement, literally blinding me. it quickly became apparent that i had to choose between the poor detail perception of my fogged up sunglasses, and the total blindness of going without. i put them on and rode even slower, since i couldn't see potholes or even people. unfortunately, slower wasn't better because then i cooled down too much.
somehow, i managed to make it home. i've never gone so slowly down crystal springs, but i feared slippage on the wet road, and going too fast gave too much wind chill.
when i got home and off my bike, i had a loss of balance, nausea, and more irritability than usual -- all signs of mild hypothermia. my toes thawed out in the hot shower, quite painfully. i was reminded of alien 3 (which we'd watched the other night) where they heat up the alien, then dump cold water on him, and he blows up. my toes felt just like that.
all in all, it sucked. and i only got in 14 miles. but it was still better than a ride on the trainer.
This morning in an email I joked that I'm a bangle, since was monday (admittedly, not especially manic) and i was wishing it was sunday, because, after all, that's my fun day.
Enough of that.
Anyhow, Sunday was a fun day. It rained and was generally ugly, so instead of cycling, i put on my running shoes and gathered up as much warm running clothing as I could. I went for what ended up being 10.4 miles.
At one point, as I was running up crystal springs, face first into near-freezing wind and rain, i realized: man, i enjoy running. in fact, i enjoyed the entire run, something i often do not do on this route.
as usual when i run about 10.5 miles, i figured that i was in the middle of a personal-record-breaking distance run, and that i'd surely run at least 13 miles, maybe even 15. i don't carry a gps or pedometer so i really don't know. i modified one of my known routes, adding extra distance to it, and figured i'd added at least 3 miles to a 10 mile run. whelp, i added .8 miles to a 9.5 mile run. go figure. it wasn't steeper, either, though i thought it had more hills. so it goes!
after a lot of lounging about, we headed on down for some fish waffles. the fish waffle batter was getting a bit old, so the fish wafflers wanted us to take some home. we had a near-empty water bottle, so we shook it out and got it filled up. this morning we made fish waffle batter pancakes -- in this case, it was gingerbread flavored. they burned a bit but were still quite tasty!
dinner was chimichurri marinated tri-tip. it was a huge blunder. i set the burner dials to what i thought was "medium"-ish. no, not what i'd used for "medium" in the past, but i figured it was cold out, so maybe some more heat would be nice. by the time i'd looked up the internal temperature of "medium rare" tri-tip and found my thermometer, the meat had passed well done. argh.
it was still quite edible with enough sauce.
also: i'm rockin my new shoes. today in a meeting, everyone looked under the table to get a gander. heh.
starting tuesday this week i began suffering from horrible ass pain.
i couldn't sit comfortably. sneezing, laughing, coughing -- all caused big pain spasms in the arse area. i thought maybe i had a bruised tailbone or a hemorrhoid that escaped and migrated north. i didn't even realize how much i walked around with a clenched buttocks until i tried to relax them to take a pee -- ow!
well, you can all breathe easy now, and so can i. it was just a big, bad-ass case of DOMS -- delayed onset muscle soreness -- resulting from last week's return to deadlifting after a many-months departure from my favorite lift.
i'd cut out the weight lifting to allow me more slack to grow into cycling. much as i love the deadlifting, i think (for now, at least) i'm a cyclist, not a weightlifter. but as i sit on the couch playing video games all day, i can't help but notice my dusty, rusty (really, it's rusted. argh!) weightroom over there, beckoning and whining like a lonely puppy.
so i'm back on the iron, two days a week, and speaking of weak: man, am i. that's fine, it'll all come back.
and speaking of coming back, the DOMS in my arse faded away yesterday, just in time for today's deadlifting session! I look forward to the next ass-crippling attack of soreness. it's what i live for.
i was going to try to break the blog silence by posting some boring stuff about my visit home or today's return to deadlifting or something, but instead, the internet produced this for me:
police tasering distraught son whose father was swept away at sea.
EDIT: next time officer friendly is pointing the taser at you, don't forget:
