The Talk, It Turned To Tater Tots

Morning weigh-in: 182#, 11.5% BF

Hit the gym last night, then went to WB for dinner. Plenty of talk there, as well as at work lately, about food -- a common theme being stuff like mac & cheese, tater tots and hamburger helper.

Tonight is a towpath/Sals ride, not sure what'll happen after that, but I know it'll involve food.

You Down With HDR? Yeah In My Car

Oak Tree Sun
Originally uploaded by worldwidewandering.

Morning weigh-in: 179.5#, 14.5% BF

I remember Laurie Anderson saying something in a seminar once about the function or purpose of art. Her example was someone who made paintings of diners, for instance. You go to the show and see the paintings, and for a while you see and notice diners everywhere you look. The art helps open your eyes, and helps you become more aware of things in the world around you.

Anyway, I've been getting into photos I find on Flickr lately, which use a relatively new technique called HDR photography. It seems to be the vogue right now, especially among Europeans (I sure don't know how to do it). The gist is, you take several pictures at different exposure levels, and combine them digitally to allow for greater lighting ranges than you can get ordinarily. That's the idea anyway; maybe it's an aftereffect but the photos also seem to have an almost hallucinatory clarity. Either way, many of my current favorites are now HDR photos.

Coming home last night, I happened to be driving into the sunset, and I realized that the lighting was similar to a lot of those HDR shots, and the light-and-dark-drenched view was closer to HDR than to ordinary photo views, which seemed to be how I saw the world until that point. Just sayin'...

You down with ADD? Yeah, you know -- oh look! A baby wolf! SWERVE! CRASH!

UPDATE: Edited for spelling & clarity.

Oh Well, Time To Eat The Donuts

Morning weigh-in: 182#, 13% BF (That's more like it.)

Yoga last night. Didn't feel quite as good as other times, in fact I felt a little -- pissy, not sure what was going on. Maybe I just have to get back into the loop.

Went out afterward, laundry & dinner at Which Brew (duh): bowl of chili and a plate of garlic-chipotle hot wings, washed down with some Troeggs Oatmeal Stout. Came in to work this morning, got my $2.00 donut -- Monday Night Football pool winner buys donuts for all the losers. Keeping my weight up isn't so hard...

Tonight is a towpath ride, maybe on the singlespeed, followed by food shopping.

Great minds think alike: Witness Billmon, Amanda and Roy. What they said.

Drowning In Blood

Morning weigh-in: 177.5#, 14% BF

Wow, what a drop in weight. Rode last night, pretty quick towpath ride, then went to bed without eating dinner. I like those numbers (and I'm supposed to be training for All-A-Muchy anyway) so I think I'll watch what I eat for the next few -- days? weeks? hours? All I have to do, apparently, is never eat again. Sigh.

I never got around to it, but the title of yesterday's post is from Peter Gabriel's "Red Rain." I was feeling depressed about torture, habeus corpus and the possibility of a US first strike (maybe even a tactical nuclear first strike, nothing's off the table) on Iran, and was going to talk about that. Oh well, the moment is lost, but I still can't get my head around how the monstrous has become normal, and how we became the monsters. (Strangely enough, I've been having many dreams involving monsters lately.)

Anyway, rode last night like I said, and Sunday was a nice social ride at Jacobsburg with Doug & Lori, Joe & Cindy, Brian, some kid Mike and that Dirt Devil dude Marc. Brian and Joe were both on 29" singlespeeds, shout-out to the trend watchers...

Tonight is yoga, then maybe I'll do the Drinking Liberally thing at Which Brew. Or maybe not (see above). I don't mind stealing bread... but I'm going hungry.

At The Water's Edge, In My Dream

I worked a little late Friday, dealing with a small emergency on one of the other jobs, a little overtime special. Home, a quick bite (leftovers) then I sat and digested as my lights charged; I went out riding around 9:00. I only did about 16-17 miles, turning around at the bridge at Freemansburg, but it took me an hour and a half, I was totally sucking wind (literally: lungs were wheezy & full of fluid) and I got a calf cramp. Hey, I got in my ride though. Dinner was a bowl of chili at Which Brew, followed by a trip to see Post Junction at Porters -- it was a late night.

Saturday was the gym, where Dawn told me her dad had a mini-stroke. Just what I need to hear... Very active guy too, he was lucky it wasn't worse, though Dawn said he was crabbing about missing archery season.

Still kind of tired & sick, I went home after the gym and took it easy (ie, did laundry & napped) for a good portion of the rest of the day, until Doug called and mentioned how much he'd like, on a Saturday afternoon like that, to sit in a bar and eat wings. We didn't actually follow through on it right away -- I went back to sleep -- but later, after picking up my drycleaning, the seed came to fruition and I went to Which Brew, probably the earliest I've ever been there. I called Doug back, told him where I was, what was on tap and what was on the menu, and they came on down. After an early dinner, we left and met up with Eric & Janna, Judy, and Kris at Celtic Fest. Never been there, not sure I'll go back, it really was just so-so. Despite all the things going on, it was an early night.