April 2006 Archives

upon returining to my apartment from my morning run, i found it filled with vapors reminiscent of turpentine, crazy glue, or rubber cement. the workers redoing my patio must have been gluing some crap to the concrete.

i turned on the kitchen and bathroom fans but that didn't seem to help much. i opened the bedroom window but right outside of it was a worker taking a cigarette break. i closed the window.

i took a quick shower and put on some boxers and pants and went outside my front door into the hallway.

there i proceeded to floss, brush my teeth, take my allergy pills, and get dressed. i missed my morning espresso and web browsing, and presently feel a bit dizzy (though that may just be hunger or psychosomatics).

you'd think that if the workers were going to fill my apartment with toxic fumes they'd let me know beforehand. i really don't have any spare brain cells to donate to the cause of redoing my patio (for which i did not actually ask). urgkh.

dick dale, while quite possibly not jewish, has bestowed upon us, the world, the jewish and gentile population of the planet, if not the definititive rendition, then at least the definitive surf guitar rendition of hava nagila.

it will leaven your matzah.

the whole album will noodle your kugel, as will his other.

yesterday on the radio i heard some beeb reporter blathering on about the latest details from the saddam trial.

"saddam this and saddam that and saddam blah blah blah"

it struck me : everyone in the whole world is on a first name basis with the former dictator of iraq.

you never hear "earlier this morning, george vetoed a bill passed by congress" or "later that week, tony gave george a nice backrub" or even "the results came back negative for colin's colonoscopy".

why is it that everyone calls saddam "saddam" instead of "mister hussein?" even chuck and jean-b get the formality of a last-name identification. is the whole world really on a first-name basis with saddam?

guess so.

well, i finally got around to shaving with my grand-dad's straight razor. a couple weeks back i had it "reconditioned", which really amounted to "sharpened" and "excuses made for why the rust couldn't be removed".

the place where i had it sharpened was supposed to be "the best" but they didn't put a razor's edge on it. they put a kitchen knife's edge at best, and even then it required pretty thorough stropping to realign the visibly misaligned edge.

the thing is a lot heavier than my other blades. the modern blades feel like steel feathers and this feels like an iron brick. shaves like one, too. did i mention they put a pretty crappy edge on it? i managed one pass north-to-south and tried a little south-to-north before i decided the SN wasn't doing any good.

i didn't cut myself but i also didn't get a great shave. if i want to use the shaver, it's going to need some honing. fortunately, i have a brand new whetstone, just waiting to be used. we'll see if i can turn this family heirloom (as of me) into a living artifact.

the handle, though somewhat degraded, is really cool. it's "whale's tooth", i.e. baleen. i wouldn't buy a shaver today made from animal parts (tortoise shell, ox horn, etc) because it's rather pretentious and needless, but i have no moral problems posessing a 80 year old family "treasure". and this thing surely is 80 years old if it's a day. probably older than that.

last night i resigned myself to a dinner of boiled canned vegetables and pan-fried sausages. i had obtained the sausages the evening before from my local gourmet supermarket. they were prepackaged and of a variety that i had recently previously enjoyed.

the "eat by" date on the package was within 2006, but the month was smeared. that was a warning but i've eaten things before which were "expired" to no ill effect.

so i cut open the package and grabbed the first sausage. it was a little slick and slimy. no problem, that's normal to have a little bacteria on a meat product. i've cooked and eaten slimier chicken breasts, i figured the cooking process would do what it was designed to do and kill the thin layer of bacteria.

then i tried to pull the sausage out of the package.

i've never seen anything like what i saw when i tried to pull the sausage from the package. i've never felt anything like that. it was attached to the other sausages by a thick mucous slime. it was horrific. it was a sci-fi special effect. it was thick, sticky, stretchy. it would not break it would just attenuate. it was like mostly-dried rubber cement. it was no bacterial infection. i don't know what the hell it was. it presented serious opposition to the removal of the sausage. it had surprising tensile strength.

it was gross.

but i was hungry and fearless. i rinsed it off under cold water. it took more than a minute of serious scrubbing and rinsing to remove the unknown goo from a single sausage. i tossed the sausage into hot butter and went to work on another sausage. my plan was to scrub all the sasauges, transfer them to a new package, and save the other three for later.

by the third scrubbing i came to my senses. the goo was simply too repulsive. the fact that it had come in contact with my sausages -- at any time in the past -- precluded me from eating the scrubbed sausages, no matter how thoroughly i had removed the slime. no matter how effective the sizzling butter would be at denaturing any germs living on the surface of the sausage, i'd still be eating something that had been in contact with an unknown substance of a disgusting nature. my inner seinfeld overpowered my inner costanza and i threw the lot of the sausages into the trash.

the goo itself had had no odor. i could smell the sausage through the goo. it was not a fungus or a bacterial infection, as far as i could tell, since these things would tend to have an odor. the identity of the substance remains a mystery.

but i was still hungry. by this time the pot full of canned vegetables was ready to eat but i needed protein. so i made myself a hobo casserole: heated canned veges + can of tuna + "laughing cow" cheese round. heat on medium for 5 minutes.

the hobo casserole smelled awful. really bad. so, emerilly, i added a crapload of dried flaked garlic. now the hobo casserole smelled like garlic, which was still bad, but better than before.

the HC turned out to be delicious and i didn't get food poisoning and i didn't have an alien burst out of my chest.

another successful home-cooked meal.

guess i'm ready to slice my arteries now.

i still haven't had a real major cut with either the safety or non-safety razor. since then i've upgraded the badger brush and it really is as soft as i could imagine. with the straight razor i still get uneven shaves, but it's fookin close. by the end of the day i still am smooth in any direction that can be rubbed, at least in the places where i did a good job.

progress. mark it.

it's been over a year since i began the tradition of weekendly hikes, although at the time i didn't know it would be a weekly thing.

there have been gaps but there have also been weeks where i hiked multiple days and thus the average remains about once a week for more than a year now.

that's pretty cool.

i've upgraded my gear and my stamina and now an 8 miler is easy without lots of elevation gain and a fat pack on my back. i no longer have the chance to blog about the hikes afterwards. i seem to be busier overall than i was back then, and really, a 16 mile hike leaves less time in the day to blog than does an 8 mile hike.

i dont take a camera these days, though that may change. there really is a lot of cool stuff out there to shoot, but sometimes it requires a quick draw.

anyhow. i've been a weekend warrior for a year now. so noted.

many significant and totally uninteresting things happened to me over the easter weekend.

i will blog about some of them and keep others to myself.

prepare yourselves.

last night i brewed up batch #4 of beer. this one is special because it's the first time i made up my own recipe. the ingredients arrived a week later than i'd hoped so i didnt get to brew as soon as i'd have liked.

i've got the thing down mostly now, to the point where i'm considering all-grain because extract is too simple (and restrictive).

but first, my worry: i thought i'd killed my beer. i thought i'd made DOA beer. i screwed two things up:

1 - i didn't "thaw" the yeast long enough. the vial says 3 to 6 hours out of the fridge before pitching. i let it stand 2 hours at the most.

2 - i pitched at 90F. supposed to pitch at 70F.

the beer didn't show any sign of fermentation after 12 hours. after 22 hours it had a little scum on the top and maybe a bubble in the airlock. after 25 hours it's barley burping but it's not dead.

huzzah!

i'm aiming this time for a belgian stout. black as night, fruity as a frenchman. sweet, not too carbonated, not too hoppy, not too familiar. that's the plan, at least, and since it doesn't appear to be dead, maybe it will come to fruition.

one thing i had suspected and hoped but dared not until now to utter:

yeasties are tough motherfuckers.

i shouldn't have been worried, but i didn't follow all of papazian's advice (my first fully sober brewing experience, i'd say) so of course I worried. balls!

It's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0xf.

this time i took a picture and said "make me look like that". the picture was folded so the stylist (whom i've used before) wouldn't see the kilt.

he done did a nice jorb, i look as good as it gets.

i bought some canned corn yesterday.

the label says "fiesta corn".

they throw in some bits of red bell pepper and some onion powder and now it's time for a fuckin cinco de mayo party.

whatever.

another weighted hike in the spirit of the previous:

i started and ended in exactly the same parking lot as last weekend's hike, but traversed an entirely different portion of the park. no swinging from trees this time but toward the end i managed to get a little lost and ended up hiking 100 yards through an ankle-deep swamp. this week i'd decided to wear my non-waterproof dunhams, so my feet got swampy. ick. the shoes aren't dry today (next morning) so they may have to be... serviced.

part of the hike traversed the difficult part of the infamous black mountain hike. i weighed my pack before i left in the morning and it totaled 32 pounds including consumables.

hiking a nasty trail with extra weight after a 7 mile warmup is an exercise composed 80% of physical endurance and 90% mental endurance. but the swell thing is that i know with a couple months of regular training, a 14 miler like this will be easy street with 50lbs.

the gps didn't really save the time info but i remember the odometer said my "average moving speed" was 2.8 or 2.9mph. that's not bad since my unweighted-flatland moving speed is usually 3.3mph. the whole 14 miles took me 6 hours, yielding a 2.3mph average for the whole hike.

W mentioned something about scenery. i also met a guy on the trail who was impressed with the scenery. it's quite the scenic hike, but i'm kind of used to that by now.

animals seen on this hike:
- bees
- dead mouse
- many deer
- goats
- goatherds
- dead racoon

in fact, you could even say "hyper" active.

har.

har har har.

overslept this morning, doubtless on account of the fucking farmers. hard to say if this had anything to do with my poor deadlift performance, but poor indeed it was. i managed just three of my target five reps, and having videotaped them, i was able to see that the form was awful (as if the pain in my erector wasn't enough to clue me in).

Now, I've made it past 5x315 and set some DL PRs, so I can't complain too much about the end of my DL progress. But I've managed to lose the pysical component (though not the mental component) of my reorientation. gung-ho attitude seems to be enough to push me through sticking points in my still-increasing bench press, but that sort of attitude with deads is likely to land me in the hospital.

a question arose this morning: was my awful form a result of the PR-pushing weight, or was it just that i always have poor DL form?

I think it makes no difference. i reckon i'll change my weightroom focus:
- time to lose (or "loose" for you internet spellers) some weight. i'm getting chubsy
- more endurance focus: longer runs, hikes, and KB workouts. ties in nicely with the above
- continue milking the BP gains as long as possible
- switch from DLs to squats plus thick-bar SLDLs to get some use of my thick-bar

i'm sure you all care. i reckon i'll make the switches next week.

over the weekend i picked up a copy of Gradius for the PS2. I was pretty sure that it was this game with which I spent countless hours of post-Sunday School fun at my friend GH's house. I don't recall ever being any good at it, since those countless hours weren't countless or frequent enough for me to gain the requisite skills, but I do recall that I was very much addicted to the soundtrack, if not the gameplay.

Well, the PS2 version pretty accurately reproduces the gameplay, as far as I can remember, and I suck even more now than when I was 11. The soundtrack on the PS2 version -- whether it matches that of the original (snes?) version -- is not at all addictive, and in fact, not memorable.

I have trouble playing video games now, especially ones like Gradius where -- even on the easiest setting -- I die without getting far and lose all my gear. Each time I must choose to continue the game I feel like I ought to be doing something more productive, like reading or drinking Scotch (it turns out that a glass of whiskey does not improve my Gradius skills).

Anyhow, Gradius is a two player game, and I suppose this weekend I might be able to hook up with a gamer that would play it with me. We'll see.

here's my hike from this weekend:

in the past my hiking emphasis was on fast and light. take the minimal pack with lots of water to prolong things.

this time i took plenty of water, an extra clif bar, some towels, plenty of clothes, and a 10lb weight plate. still i managed 12 miles with a pretty nasty uphill bit at the end and a harrowing but extra-fun stream crossing where i had to swing from a tree.

didn't see any rattlesnakes this time but i did see some deer and park rangers. my calves were still sore this morning when it came time to deadlift (tired from the stupid DST) but i managed.

attitude adjusted, evidently.

my pops sent me this link, a straight razor shaving tutorial written by vegans, which i had read previously but mostly ignored because, well... you know. vegans.

i read it fully last night and followed the links and learned a couple things. this morning i applied these things with mixed results.

1 - pull the skin really really tight. i'm still not pulling tight enough i found out. better luck next time.
2 - here's the scary part: do a second pass against the grain, no lather. supposedly, if i'm not doing this, i'm not shaving, i'm just scraping.

well, #2 was just as scary initially as shaving with a cutthroat was in the beginning. the first stroke was hard to get around to, but once done it was done. in the spots where i did a good job there is no hair at all in any direction -- perfectly smooth skin. that's new.

in the spots where i did a poor job there's minor irritation -- still not as bad as the NORMAL irritation from an electric. practice will make perfect, unless i accidentally kill myself.

and their fucking daylight fucking savings time.

argh!!!

bleeeeaaaaggghhh