Playing A New Game

A game that's new to me anyway, and they call it the Friday Random Ten: you shuffle your player and post the first ten that come up. I now have (almost) enough music to make it a meaningfully random sample, so I thought I'd play...

Here's Mine:
1. Gary Numan - "Cars"
2. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - "Relax"
3. Beat Happening - "Crashing Through"
4. Modest Mouse - "Dirty Fingernails"
5. Bad Brains - "Sailin' On"
6. The Yardbirds - "Choker"
7. The Cramps - "Faster Pussycat"
8. Green Day - "Life During War"
9. Bauhaus - "Bela Lugosi's Dead"
10. Will Carroll - "Some Lunch"

...and a bonus cut for street cred:
11. Johnny Cash - "Cry! Cry! Cry!"

Busy day tomorrow, many errands (starting with an 8:00 AM oil change) before heading down to Englishtown for Dad's birthday, so I thought I'd stay in tonight. I planned ahead; this was at least partly the motivation for going out last night. Got home from work, cleaned the bike so it's presentable when it gets the new fork, and have been playing with the computer ever since, mostly downloading music. No idea what the list above reveals about my relation to cool, nothing good I'm sure...

Six Days And Counting

Morning weigh-in: 178.5#, 11% BF

After yesterday's photo data-dump, I went out to Which Brew for dinner. I was a little surprised, the place was crowded and I almost couldn't get a seat. I ended up sitting between Carl (who has been a little scarce since he gave up drinking -- we had matching glasses of ginger ale) and some glibertarian traveling-software-salesman type. Perry was there, also Michele, Katrina, and Jeff & Tracy, distributed here & there along the bar, but I took the last empty seat and immediately started chowing down so I didn't really get to say hello to those further away. Carl was cool, interesting as always, but the other guy, while interesting in some ways, was a bit of an annoyance...

Dinner was a "mini-me" salad (fresh mozzarella, tomatoes & roasted peppers over mesclin-type greens, w/ balsamic vinaigrette), and a bowl of chili. I've been ravenous lately, but I've only had an appetite for cereal -- Kashi Cinnamon Harvest is the new crack, bowl after bowl with blueberries -- so it was good to get out and eat some real food.

Deja vu, I'm counting down the days until I can ride again. I should be PICC-free by Thursday night, thus back on the bike next Friday unless I decide to do a night ride... I just bought a new fork, Marzocchi Marathon XC, super-sweet and I got a good deal; I'm having Bike King install it this weekend.

More Updates

Went to the infectious disease doctor today, got the word that the PICC line is coming out next Thursday. Meantime, the fasting blood sugar levels were OK (high 60's last week, low 80's this week, normal is around 100), so I'll breathe a little easier about pre-diabetes, though I should still lose weight. I am now on a third antibiotic, yes up to three a day, which will drop back down to two when the PICC line stops. One bummer: He wasn't happy with how slow the incision is healing. Well, I see the surgeon on Tuesday, he'll probably have a pronouncement of some kind...

Meantime, I just posted 28 more photos into flickr.

Not Even A Drop In The Bucket

I just uploaded a dozen photos on flickr, miscellaneous shots taken in mid May. I still have about 120 photos to go through, choose the keepers & post them, but that's not happening tonight.

Colonized! No More Bread For Me

Morning weigh-in: 178#, 11% BF

Not much to say here today, dum de dum, let's see:

Nurse came yesterday for PICC line maintenance, she looked at the rash on my arm (armpit, really) and pronounced it a yeast infection, no doubt caused by antibiotic-induced imbalances in my skin's microbe ecology. I see the infectious disease guy tomorrow, and he should be able to give me a cream to clear it up. Sounds disgusting ("mmmmm... rich yeasty armpit goodness...") but I was still glad it wasn't what I suspected: last week's PICC line cleaning had been pretty aggressive, and I thought that maybe the internal part of the line, getting yanked and bounced around in its vein, managed to irritate or damage something. Good thing it's only another set of alien microbes eating me...

Walked yesterday at Merrill Creek. Did what has pretty much become my typical hike: clockwise from the lot, out to the middle of the second dam, stand on the rickety stairway, then turn around and come back. There were more cars than usual in the lot, and I saw a few people out on the walk, plus a few rabbits & deer.

AJAX: Excelsior! I signed up yesterday for the beta test of Google's new web-based spreadsheet, which, like their gmail and calendar services, is based on AJAX -- the wave of the future? We'll see... I gave it a try today; it seems pretty good so far, though there was definitely a touch of latency involved.

Too Close To Home

Tonight is the first Mug Club Night of the year -- the Mug Club year cycles around the anniversary of Which Brew's opening in late May. Mug Club night was originally on Mondays (when WB is usually closed) , because the local police union, or PBA or whatever, had been meeting there, first Monday of the month, for years and the deal was that they could continue to do so when the place changed hands. I'm not sure what triggered it -- I can guess, but I'm not saying -- but about a year ago Mug Club Night was moved to Wednesdays.

Now it's back to Monday, and it's interesting that I read this today, in light of various recent events...

Anyway, The Weekend

Morning weigh-in: 177.5#, 11.5% BF

Boy, this weekend was like being shot out of a cannon...

Friday night I went to bed early, like 9:00, because I was getting up Saturday at 2:30 AM, to be on the road by 3:30 AM for a 4:30 arrival at Deer Park, where I would be helping my friends run the 12 O'Muchy 12-hour race. Which is exactly what I did, except I also had to get up at midnignt for my scheduled IV infusion.

I got to the Deer Park just about 4:45, and things started to really happen about 5:30. Long, long day... Brian raced (solo, kicked butt); Rich, Doug & Lori, and I helped the W2 people (ie Bob & Karen and Kris & Karin) with check-in and scoring; and it poured for a good portion of the day -- the race went from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, but many racers, especially solos, stopped early due to mechanical failures, and I left around 4:00 because I was worried about my ankle.

Got home, IV infusion, went to bed, got up at midnight for another infusion, then slept through until morning.

Sunday morning was internet playtime, plus a few errands. I ate breakfast at Coffee Works, but that odd guy Charley was working so I didn't really linger. In the afternoon I helped Eric & Kris with some PPRAC fundraising at Wal-Mart. Brian was also there, so I congratulated him on his awesome race.

Got home, did more computer play, plus laundry, Taco Hell dinner in between more errands, back to the 'puter, last infusion, bedtime. I was whooped, even though it seemed that the majority of my weekend time was spent sleeping.

One of the things I was playing with was gcc's FORTRAN compiler. I wrote a small program, which seemed to compile & link OK but generated a whole bunch of arcane runtime errors -- which was fine by me, I'd forgotten how much of a dog FORTRAN is, and that just gave me the incentive to walk away without getting any fleas...