Reconfigurator

Morning weigh-in: 164.5#, 8.5% BF (back to the old pig-and-python game)

 

Happy Darwin Day! Well it's not really Darwin Day, but it was 150 years ago today that Darwin's and Wallace's papers, outlining natural selection, were first presented. (This was pretty much the precursor to The Origin of Species.) In honor of all that, here's a little bit about evolution going on right now out West. I think I may celebrate tonight by taking up smoking in gas stations, or biking -- maybe I'll win an award! Meantime, here's my favorite quote (again), the last paragraph of The Origin of Species:

 

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

 

And So It... Continues: Got my rear shock bushings replaced last night (we're talking bicycles), and dropped off my rear wheel to be rebuilt, then while I was there, impulse buy, I ordered a new drivetrain... I need to get my bike and equipment ready for the Wild 100, now less than four weeks away. (I also have to get myself ready.) I hit Sals after the bike store, got there around 7:00, and rode with Dave L and a young guy named Jeremy out with his dog. We did a fast but abbreviated loop, returning to Dodson via the road just before dark.

 

Hail Hail, Some Of The Old Gang's Here: Dinner was a quick salad, then I went to do laundry, and I stopped in at Porters while it dried. A nice surprise, I ran into Stu and Cathy walking out as I walked in. They turned around, came back in and had one last beer while we caught up: Stu has been living, working and house-hunting in Florida for the past two months, while Cathy has been getting their old house ready to be put on the market. Kind of funny, we never biked together up here except one time, just before he disappeared, but apparently he's become a fairly avid biker down in Florida, and even joined a cycling club. Good for him!

 

Also saw Kateryna there, which was also nice but less of a surprise, because she now works at Porters -- last night was in fact her first night, she said. She also said there may be a Which Brew picnic coming up soon.

 

Tonight is the Tuesday night "hard ride," and tomorrow is yoga; I may also try to bike in to work tomorrow.

 

Parting shot: Well, yeah.