Sunday Night Wrap-Up

So here I am, relaxing after an awesome Sals ride, and listening to the song that made me a Democrat: Temple of the Dog's "Hunger Strike." (Well, that and a book: Carlyle's History of the French Revolution. And the '92 election.)

I'm also blogging this while using a new (to me) browser: Chrome, the one marketed as Google's browser. I'd been getting more and more frustrated with Firefox crashing all the time -- it seems to have a lot of trouble with video, though strangely not with YouTube -- and Googling the problem seems to show a lot of people asking the same questions, and getting what I consider a runaround, like: "are you using the latest version? have you tried using safe mode?" and other bullshit like that. (The questions run the gamut of technical sophistication too, from "my Firefox crashed" to "the culprit seems to be X_ShmPutImage," which is what I'm getting when I look at the crash report.)

It got so I could reliably crash Firefox by going to certain websites, mostly news sites where a video might be playing when you get there, and I finally had enough. Chrome was pathetically simple to install, and it loads my favorite sites quickly and seems to display them correctly; I'm not sure I like the bare-bones look of the browser itself but I figure I'll get used to it. Maybe there are extensions, add-ons or other eye candy that I can use to gussy up the place.

Anyway, the rest of my weekend:

Friday morning found us going over in Easton, where I picked up my car -- finally! -- and we went out to breakfast. The place we ate was a bit of an experiment, and it was decidedly meh so we're probably not going back but I'm not going to name it here... Anne took off for work, and I, after some errands, took off to go skiing at Blue Mountain. This was the first time I'd gone skiing in years, and it didn't come back immediately but it did mostly come back -- I stuck to the easier slopes, and left after about an hour and a half, when the after-school crowd started coming in.

Yesterday we were in Jim Thorpe, a family get-together at Anne's mom's house. We started with White Russians and a viewing of "The Big Lebowsky" and finished with pinochle, Anne and me vs her brother Joe and his wife.

This morning we got up, not particularly early but we went for a run before breakfast, 2.68 miles in 28 minutes, for a 10:34 average pace. For some reason I was hurting, it was a tougher run than usual for me. Some breakfast and some at-home BS (Anne had to go into the office), and I rallied in time for my ride at Sals.

Which, as I might have mentioned, was awesome. There was packed snow on the trails, but traction was surprisingly good -- which was good because I found myself really depending on good traction, just about the same time I would realize I was on an icy rock, more than once today. I wasn't riding particularly well today, the weeks of slacking have taken their toll, but the riding did not feel too difficult, and the trails, and just being in the woods, were extremely pleasant. I ran into Joe G, on foot with his dogs, talking with Rob L who was riding some fully rigid singlespeed. They were the only people I saw, though there were tracks everywhere, even relatively unused trails were covered -- I tried to take a nonstandard route, but nothing looked very out-of-the-way today.