August 2010 Archives

course ya do!!!

it's been a darn long time since i've had a rye, tonight i'm on my next glass of High West Whiskey Rendezvous. It's supoib.

It is also bottle number 532 of batch number 42.

i shit you not, dear reader, i shit you not.

tonight i wore a button-up shirt that shouldn't be worn whilst climbing. then i went climbing. i had the best night on the wall in months.

COINCIDENCE? I think... so.

in case you haven't been keeping up, i'm big into tea now. in fact, i've dropped coffee for the time being, as i sort some things out, but rather than give up caffeine or switch to chocolate, i've started drinking tea, and lots of it.

last night i figured out how to brew dragonwell tea, or at least, i figured out that i was steeping it too long in water that was much too hot, and once i lowered the water temp and steeped it a minute less, the astringency/bitterness vanished, and the buttery sweetness came through.

dragonwell is a chinese green tea that is so great, chairman mao served it to nixon when the potus visited china.

to make things better, my ingenuitea arrived today, finally. i have used it a total of once, and in concert with my discovery of how to properly brew dragonwell, i am seriously impressed. it could not be easier to use. the unfortunate part is that now that my tea is not bitter, i can taste the poor quality of our office water. still, it beats drinking uninfused water.

we went a-walking for dinner to l&l hawaiian bbq, but i couldn't bring myself to eat at a place that was so obviously a chain, and, what's more, could not hope to stand up to the quality of the hawaiian place of yesteryear, which lasted far too not long enough before closing shop and being replaced by a lame-ass 10 dollar burger place.

anyhow, i couldn't do it, so we went a-walking again, to the thai place that i've avoided for the last decade, to give it the prescribed Second Chance. sadly for the thai, on the way, we noticed our local tapas place, and could not escape its gravity well.

the meal was excellent, and the wine, though not great, went well with the food. altogether a fortuitous diversion, though quite a bit more costly than our intended dinners. heh.

i just wiped about a rice-grain's worth of orange, pasty, mold-stuff from the inner rim of my work water bottle. now, suddenly, my water tastes much better.

still, i do think this bottle is coming home for a dish wash tonight.

bleh.

oddly coincident with my sudden obsession with tea, a tea shop opened up about 10 minutes walking time from our home. we walked down last night after dinner. it's run by a pleasant but very pushy young Chinese woman. We stayed for a while talking and tasting different teas, and I began to think that she wasn't pushy so much as very nervous and poor at English (though of course, as we commented, her English is better than our Chinese). Still, she had a notion that we were tea experts coming in to try our favorite tea, when in fact, it was quite the opposite: we were there to experience new stuff.

I wanted to try a tea I'd read about ("your favorite?" she asked, and it wasn't easy to communicate that it wasn't my favorite yet since I'd never had it!) called, in english, Lapsang souchong. She had no idea what I was asking for, but fortunately, my smartphone came not only to the rescue, but to the rescue in Chinese! I googled 'lapsang souchong' and the Chinese characters came up in the results. I showed her this and she said, "oh! souchong! We have three kinds!". We tried the black tea varieties (the third was an oolong), both high mountain and low mountain. The high mountain was thinner bodied with an aroma that was more dirt than smoke, the low mountain was darker, thicker, and more smokey.

She really wanted us to try all of her teas, and we tried several more, and even though I wanted not to drink too much, there was no place to dump the tea (no spittoon as in a winery), and it seemed like it would be rude to ask her to dump it for us, so we drank it all. she claimed that black teas have almost no caffeine, only greens do, which is pretty much opposite from my understanding and experience. needless to say, we didn't sleep much last night.

a very nice place she's got, and she said that she's got over 200 teas now, with more on the way. unfortunately, in our opinions, the location is so poor that she won't last long. here's hoping we're wrong.

for a couple of weeks now i've wanted to spend a weekend in calistoga, with the express purpose of having a mud bath. for whatever reason it didn't happen 2 weekends ago. it happened this past weekend.

golden haven is the place to go for a couples mud bath, which is what i wanted. sadly, by the time i called to make the hotel res (friday afternoon, ahem) their hotel was booked. no problem, we stayed at doc wilkinson's down the road. that turned out to be a better choice (for location, at least).

we found out that doc wilkinson's AC unit is pretty lame, and we were hot all night, but the upside is that we were smack in the midst of calistoga's downtown.

now, usually when i'm in the 707, we have wine, and lots of it. but this time around we were visiting for the mud bath, and the mud bath was all i had planned. so we winged it. we walked around pleasant downtown st. helena, we checked in to our hotel, we walked in the meditation stones in the middle of the dirt lot (whilst locals stared on with disapproval from the laudromat), we enjoyed a very nice cup of tea (well, hops had some steamed milk, but when i enjoy something, i'm in a good mood, which i presume she enjoys, thus we enjoyed the tea) at the local coffee roaster. we made a reservation for dinner at jole, and decided that the staff at the adjoining hotel is so nice, we maybe ought to stay there next time, even though it looks a hell of a lot more expensive than the "hasn't changed since 1954 and that's the whole point" dr. wilkinson's.

back at the hotel we soaked in the 3 pools of different temperatures. i'm not sure if it was mineral water but it was relaxing. i learned that my cowboy hat floats when i'm trying to dunk myself, and sinks afterwards. hops claimed the water would ruin the straw, but it seems okay now. well, except that it's too tight. that may have been the water, or maybe i need a closer haircut.

dinner at jole was better than the last time. last time it was "good, maybe not great". this time it was "great, maybe not excellent". they worked around hops eating impediment, though in doing they decided to bring her all white wines, which she did not favor. i explained that over the last 2 years i have trained her to appreciate fine red wine, since i pick the wines we drink based on how well they will go with steak, with no regard for whatever tofu or salad or green bean she's having on any particular night. thus, she gets a lot of wine that pairs great with steak, and poorly with tuna, tofu, tomato, or beans.

anyhow, she had some bean stuff that went well with white wine. i kept my distance (except when she made me try a cucumber, and it spoiled my palate). the outstanding star of the entire meal was the chicken fried quail with greens and waffle. it was a smaller portion because i'd gotten a tasting menu. i've finally had chicken and waffles, yes, twice in fact: once as a fish waffle, and once at a hoity-toity restaurant in napa county. ha!

also exceptional was the calistoga zinfandel that they paired with my foie gras.

by the time dessert rolled around i was wishing i'd not gotten dessert. i am deeply ashamed to say that i left port in my dessert glass. the food was great, the staff was great, and the pairings (as long as you're not vegetarian) were great. we walked around calistoga, including the creepy part of town, and went back to the hotel with joie de vivre in our hearts.

i feel it's worth mentioning: if you're ever in calistoga, avoid the flat iron grill. we abide by this rule evermore.

the next morning we went to cafe saraforinia, on account of it looked good. well, looks can be deceiving. i got the simple breakfast of eggs, bacon, and pancakes, with coffee. the coffee was the worst i've ever had, farmer bro's (which is bad to begin with) that had undergone some sort of unspeakable torture to become a vile thing that made me glad i had decided to do one of my "quit coffee for a while" stunts. this was to be my last weening cup, and it helped tremendously that it was so awful. it helped not a bit that it cost $2.25 a cup. the bacon was lackluster at best, the pancakes lacked structural integrity, and the eggs were okay. the atmosphere reminded me of louisa's place in SLO, only without the decent coffee, good food, cool mornings, and cute waitresses.

after breakfast we walked across the street to the roaster and hops obtained a nice cup of coffee for about half the cost of the crap we'd just had.

we arrived at golden haven for the first mudbath of the day in our room. that is to say, the tub we were using had not seen a bare ass that day before we got into it. this is good, i guess, but unfortunately the water in the shower was flaky, and couldn't decide whether to be hot or cold. in our past visits to golden haven, we didn't have this problem, but we visited in the afternoon, so perhaps this is significant. anyhow, we left golden haven exceptionally relaxed, which was the entire point.

for reasons that seem dumb in retrospect, instead of heading south to have lunch at the excellent st. helena "cook", we headed north, toward geyserville, to encounter The Great Unknown, neither of us having been that way before. After a while we ended up stuck in construction traffic (on a sunday, argh). the lunching hour was bearing down upon us with quickness, and in desperation, i said, "hey i've heard of healdsburg, let's go there". so we did. the reason i'd heard of it was that some brewery i like is headquartered there, though i could not recall which one.

upon arrival, we found out: bear republic. they had a brewpub there and i decided instead of going there, since we had such a great meal the previous night at jole, why not go to Dry Creek Kitchen and have a similar, wine-centric, fancy-food meal?

well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

the staff were earnest but inexperienced and awkwardly goofy. this i can easily countenance, since it's basically like looking in a mirror.

they had this ridiculous conceit of the bread, however, which was irritating at first and became maddening later, as our meal was delayed past all reasonable delays. instead of putting bread on the table, tehy had it on a plate which a waiter would periodically bring around to teh tables. "our bread today is sourdough, whole wheat, and italian ciabatta", the waiter would say, with the breathless, exalted nuance of someone who hadn't ever been to jack in the box and had a sandwich made with those breads.

now, that would have been mildly irritating only, except, as i mentioned, our food was extraordinarily delayed, and the waiter came with bread to us exactly once and no more. so we had no bread to keep us occupied whilst waiting for our overhyped food.

the food was indeed overhyped. whereas the chicken-fried quail at jole was exceptionally good, with an incredible sauce, the "HOUSE MADE BEEF MORTADELLA 'REUBEN'" was lackluster and overly bready. not bad, per se, just not on par with the creative and delicious food i was expecting.

that, even, could be forgiven. what cannot be forgiven is that they did not bring me the wine i ordered. not only that, they put someone else's glass on our table, then, quickly realizing their mistake, removed it with an "oh sorry".

finally, the final insult: when they brought me my change of 12 bucks, they gave me a 10 and two ones. a nice 20% tip would have been around 7 or 8 bucks (it would have been more had i been charged for wine, i suppose), but apparently they believed they deserved either a $1, $2, $10, or $12 tip. normally my rule is to reward such poor change-making with a low tip. in this case, that'd be 2 bucks. but i had more change in my wallet, so they lucked out.

perhaps waiters think i'm a jerk. in general, i am much more likely to overtip than undertip, i think. but these guys seemingly went out of their way to piss us off. perhaps if we'd not had such an excellent meal the night before, we'd have felt differently.

on the way out of healdsburg we stopped at the very enticingly named hungarian trinket shop. well, it turned out to be little more than a paprika vendor, selling brands that i can get in my local grocery. bummer. i'm sure the shopkeep is a wonderful person, but we found nothing of interest there.

in short, calistoga rules, healdsburg drools.

It's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x68!

no more mohawk for a while, just an easy #1 buzz. the stylist was happy with this request.

americans supposedly believe that our current president is a muslim.

an informal and likely illegal poll of my american coworkers turned up 3 people who did not believe the president is a muslim, including myself, and 0 who did. i did not check birth certificates in the process of this informal and likely illegal poll.

on her way out the door, hops stopped by my pants, and then came over and accused: "you didn't have much money in your wallet".

me: "oh, jeez, so sorry"

hops: "i need money for lunch"

me: "huh, i guess you'll have to find a real bank"

hops: sad face

2 days ago i went to the grocery store and bought all the tuna I'd need for 3 days on the tuna and water diet. it turns out this is quite expensive, especially if you go for the Dave's tuna, but not from his website, where it's relatively cheap, but from the local gourmet grocery store, where everything is expensive but Dave's tuna causes the checkers to ask if they rang it up right because, after all, the can says "TUNA" and they've never seen anyone pay so much for a can of tuna.

anyhow, I rationalized that, even though 3 days of tuna would cost me nearly as much as a month on the V-diet, it was all for a good cause, and anyhow, whatever.

But then my imagination kicked in. I looked at the 5 cans of Dave's tuna, and visualized that as not only all I'd be eating on monday, but also, as all I'd be eating on monday. It wasn't just that it was not a lot of food. It was also: I don't really like tuna that much. So I'd be hungry and constipated on not much food that I don't like very much. Constipated? The diet calls for metamucil! But I like fruit, and beans, and those really do the job quite well.

So screw the tuna and water diet. I'll put it off for another 10 years. I'll keep my over priced line-caught santa cruz tuna packed in fairy dust, and I'll eat every last ounce of it, but over the span of a month or two, and I'll still meet my goal, but I'll get to poop beans and fruit instead of psyllium and sugar, as god intended.

i've been putting it off for nearly a month now, and after several false starts plus at least one good workout, I'm ready to verbalize and post my new goals.

it's obvious to me that I'm now too fat. I'm 235 or so, and were I at 8% body fat, perhaps I wouldn't feel crappy, but I'm certainly not 8% body fat, and I do feel crappy. Specifically, I realized/admitted yesterday that some of the indigestion/breathing related problems are simply gut-related-bad-posture-induced difficulties.

I've looked into the velocity diet and it really, really intrigues me, especially the part where Dan John says his cholesterol numbers were vastly improved, but hte idea of loading up on supplements for 28 days really deters me. I gave up the supplement-eating part of my life, though it's creeping back, I think. Still, if I don't venture far beyond fish oil, vitamins, and protein powder, I think I'm okay. It's once I start taking "fat burners" or "workout surge" stuff that I begin to worry.

anyhow, so I need to lose some weight. I've decided I'll do Draper's tuna and water diet, starting next Monday, because I've been meaning to try it for 10 years now, and because it's only 3 days so how bad could it be, and because I'm already feeling rather crummy so I won't notice much feeling more crummy, and because the whole point of it is that afterwards, you've flexed some discipline (not as much as it takes to do the V-diet, but it's cheaper, also higher in good stuff like omega 3 and mercury) and transition into a cleaner diet, which i am definitely both ready for and capable of doing.

I'm still not as strong as I'd like to be. My bench press is just starting to show some progress, my overhead press still sucks, and my deadlift, as much progress as I've made, still isn't 2x my weight.

today I did a set of 5 deadlifts at 365. it was pretty easy, as those things go. in my original set of recent goals, i wanted 5x315 to be easy. so that's nice. i've also been slowly learning new exercises, namely the overhead squat and the power snatch. i'd like to learn the olympic versions of the clean and the snatch.

anyhow, on with the goals and deadlines:

by my birthday in november:

body weight of 220lbs
deadlift 5RM of 405
bench press 5RM of 250lbs
olympic snatch 135lbs in excellent form
olympic clean 175lbs in excellent form
eating that is nice and clean but doesn't drive me nuts from boredom, isolation, or supplementation

after that I suppose i can take stock and reevaluate my goals. i used to say that 210 was an easy and comfortable weight for me to be, but i suspect 220 is similar as long as i'm lifting heavy.

i've got all kinds of things i'd like to try, like pavel's 40 day plan, more complexes, sets of 8 (heh, i've got so stuck into sets of 3 and 5 that 8 tires me out), and, someday, cycling again. but above all, i need to get the weight back down to where it's not pissing me off any more.

last night at the gym i made an astonishing breakthrough in the field of quantum physics. i expect a call from the nobel committee at any moment.

many people are familiar with the paradox of schroedinger's cat. in this famous though experiment, a cat is put inside a box with a radioactive poison pellet. after the pellet has decayed, the mathematics prove conclusively that the cat is both alive and dead until such time as the lid of the box is removed and the cat is observed.

this is confusing, counterintuitive, and hard to explain. the solution, and my breakthrough, is the more mundane and familiar experience of schroedinger's dump. this describes the situation where one clips a mighty yam, closes the toilet seat, and flushes. until such time as the toilet lid is lifted, the grogan exists in both the flushed and unflushed states.

in this way, using metaphors that are easily understandable to people who do not own cats, boxes, or radioactive poison pellets, quantum physics can be easily explained.

the 2010 toady award for most surprisingly not bad, nay, even good movie goes to... "The Brother From Another Planet." Hooray!

I was expecting schlocky, wink-and-not Shafty blaxploitation. Instead, I got a well thought out, nicely acted, often genuinely funny film. It had some awkward moments, and some lame moments. But the villains could have been really stupid, or offensive to white people, or both: but they were neither. Instead, they were creepy, villainous, and downright effective at their roles. The science in the science fiction was reasonable. I could go on, but the point is: don't let the shlocky title steer you away, this was an excellent movie.

Way better than "The Dark Crystal".

for about 6 weeks. that's something that coach john likes to say, and i believe it. incidentally, it's why most studies on "weight training" are total rubbish: even if they aren't studies of rank beginners, they usually last about 6 weeks.

it's been about 7 or 8 weeks since i began my current program, and i finally had a crappy workout. now, it's quite possible that the not-easy hike we did in rancho san antonio on saturday wasted my recovery. and thinking back, i did not indulge in over-the-top eating this weekend. these things may have more to do with today's poor workout than the "program" itself, but so may my wandering attention: i'm ready to move on.

i recently admitted to myself that i'm an optimist. this came as quite a shock to me because i consider myself more of a realist. however, i now instinctively find silver linings on clouds. for instance, i spent all of yesterday unable to walk because of a blister the size of new jersey that i obtained on my football during saturday's hike. however, i considered this a training aid: did i not say just on friday that i need to focus more on lifting through my heels? i did, and the football blister reminded me sharply when i drifted on to my toes.

so, i suppose it's true that i did say on friday i wanted to slow down and smooth out my routine. i'm going to spread the work over the weekdays like peanut butter on bread. today's workout ended after just squats and bench presses, skipping the usual monday power cleans. tomorrow i've got some nifty bodyweight things planned, including a farmer walk that i've been looking forward to, blisters permitting.

okay, prepare yourself. i don't use soap when i wash my face, i use a foaming cleanser from aveda. it's kind of expensive. it has a mechanical pump. it's totally effeminate. it's also effective: i stopped using it for a month, switched to soap, and got all kinds of pimply breakouts. there might be some other alternative, but i haven't discovered it.

now, as i said, it's got a mechanical pump to create the magical "foaming" action. i've used this stuff for a couple of years, but last year they came out with a "refill" version of this stuff, which is exactly the same as the regular version, but you don't get the pump head, you just get the bottle. it costs one dollar less. you take your old pump and put it on the new bottle. it's no more difficult than changing your bathroom soap dispenser, but you get to convince yourself that you're saving the environment or poor children in indonesia or something.

except that the pump has a lifespan of 1 refill. after that it breaks. i've had one replaced already. last week i took the broken one in to the store... where it magically worked for the clerk. when i got home, it again did not work. i gave the pump a thorough cleaning, soaking it in hot water and passing lots of hot water through it, as recommended by the aveda guy. it began working again.

then, two days ago, it stopped working. i disassembled the pump this time, cleaned it thoroughly (while showering!), reassembled it, and it worked.

until this morning.

fresh from my deadlift, brimming with testosterone, eager to get to work, i went to pump, and... nothing. the pump was again broken.

it was at this point that i reflected on the wisdom of my stance against steroid use. had i been juicing, my shower, probably my bathroom, and possibly the entire apartment would now lie in ruins. the epic roid rage that this incident would have induced would have been, uh... epic. as it was, i did my best to repair it and vowed metrosexual vengeance against aveda corp: i will now spend the extra one dollar to insure the safety of my shower door against metrorage outbreaks.

the failure, by the way, seems to be mechanical wear. there's a little ball bearing that lies over the pump input but beneath the pump spring. you push down on the pump, and, when it's broken, it doesn't come back up (so you can't dispense foaming squirt #2, which is required for my big old face). I imagine that the bearing must pop up a little from the input tube to refill the chamber with the soapy sebum dissolving substance i pay so much for, and that in the broken state, the bearing remains wedged in the input tube, maintaining the vacuum which keeps the pump depressed.

the dude in the store said the mechanism was clogged with dried soap stuff. i don't think so.

milk from the jug

at least in the toad household, that is.

there was some question in my mind last saturday as to whether i'd lifted 420 or 415 the previous day. so today, to settle the matter, i lifted a satisfactorily verified 430. just for good measure, i pulled on 450, but it was superglued to the floor.

i love deadlifting heavy above all sports, even though i'm not good at it, and this past several months have been the most fun lifting i've had since i started. unfortunately, it has now come to the point where i do actually care about how fat i've gotten. i ignored it mightily, but i'm back to the bad old times of indigestion, belts hurting when i sit down, and frequent episodes of high stress. in short, i'm fat and not relaxed. as much as i love pulling heavy, i'm done for now. my record shows that i gained a whopping 4 pounds this last week. i gained more than that on the bar, but it appears my body has no set point when i'm lifting hard and i fear that soon i will create a gravity well.

i'm re-reading dan john's most excellent book, and this morning he said to me that there's a distinction between fitness and health. in the past months, i've gained a lot of fitness in the sport of powerlifting. but my health, defined as the harmonious operation of the internal organs, has suffered. not greatly, mind you, and maybe even not on average. but the harmony of my organs is subject to bipolar swings, and though the highs are nice, the lows aren't so fun.

fortunately, i've been here before, and i know how to get better. unfortunately, it will mean losing some of my strength. well, it's not true that i've been exactly here before: the last time I felt like this i was weak. i may have weighed this much in the past, but i'm sure it wasn't muscle back then. i had no deadlift to lament, because i was getting stronger, not weaker. but i know of no way to lose fat without losing strength, at least none that will work with the level of devotion i have to give it.

my plan, i think, is to take it real easy for a week. that's going to be hard, as i've become addicted to my routine, and both anticipate and fear the 10s of deadlifting joy every friday. next friday will be a lot more boring as i try to smooth out health.

i've got a mind to finally try draper's tuna and water diet. i'm gonna see if i can get some folks to come along for that ride. note that it's the tuna and water diet, not the tuna, water, coffee, wine, whisky, and fried foods diet. that's the rub. but it's only 3 days. i can quit all those forbidden things for three days. can my friends?

after the song ended but before hte light turned green, he shouted something very NSFW to express his discontent.

this is the same homeless guy who walked into a restaurant i was eating at, up to my table, and told me and my guests that hte restaurant was going to send me a letter explaining why i had food poisoning.

anyhow, no letter, no poison, no way i'm gonna turn down my bagpipe volume.

i don't get many first-evers. the world is old enough and i'm slow enough that if there's something to be done, someone else has done it first.

however, i am proud to announce that yesterday, i got a first-ever, and a prestigious one at that: I am the first person ever to pay at Beltramo's with a discover card.

I've been trying to use my discover card there for a decade, and finally, as a joke, yesterday I asked if they take it yet. Someone ran out from the back, presumably a manager, and said that their new POS system, installed just this weekend, takes Discover.

Oddly, discover did not call me up to confirm the massive charge incurred at the peninsula's best liquor store and premier scotch destination.

It's Frobuary 2, YOMHC 0x67!

my stylist told me to tell my GM and my dad that my hair grows crooked, the crooked mohawk isn't her fault.

everyone's a critic.