What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last?

Daughter has started to fear things. She'll grab my hand and hold it in front of her face if any scary parts come up on one of her dvds. Now, the 'scary' is relative of course, so I'm often shielding her from something like an ogre doll in Little Einsteins.

It makes me wonder how she processes fear at this age. She hasn't exactly had anything happen to be scared of, so it's strange how she can associate these things with fear. I know she has nightmares, but I really wonder what happens in them.

Saint Mikey the Slightly Dented

I've been busier than usual lately. Standard workload for the normal job, and I've got a pretty full load of contracts on the side. I've managed to mostly keep up with training, though swimming is way behind.

Christmas is coming fast, and, thankfully, Thanksgiving is behind us (see what I did there?). I don't like the holidays very much at all, but with Daughter and Son around I'm trying to do a good job of hiding that. They'll probably see through the act when they're older, but by then it won't be as big of a deal for them.

It's kind of hard for me to put together something cohesive right now with how fragmented my focus is. So, hopefully throwing out this grab-bag crap of a post will help clear out the pipes.

In Which I Express Surprising Hatred for Common Things

The alphabet pisses me off.

I realize that this statement might need a little more explanation than most of my random declarations, so first, some background.

I have kind of an arms-length relationship with reality. The world that exists in my head is a nifty place, full of well-formed theories and concepts that aren’t sullied by all that nastiness that floats around the real world. Try sending me grocery shopping for a good example of this. You want me to get eggs and milk. Those are what I consider ‘implementation details’. In my head I’m going to the store to get ‘food’. So when I come back with a sandwich no one should be surprised. That’s if I even manage to make it to the store without forgetting where I’m going and autopiloting to work.

Concepts are obviously a big deal to me, so things get a little sticky when certain concepts are implemented poorly in reality. For example, the horror that is the English alphabet. See, an alphabet is supposed to be a way to break down phonetic components of language to allow for transcription. The English alphabet technically does this, but that’s like saying that a drunk guy pissing on your lawn is fulfilling the responsibilities of a sprinkler system.

The letter C is a great example. It makes a sound like K or sometimes, for no appreciable reason, it sounds like S.

So why in the name of all that’s holy do we have the letter C at all? USE K OR S DAMNIT!

I get angry thinking about vowel ambiguity and the ‘silent e’ pisses me off to no fucking end. I remember very little of my childhood, but I know I learned to read pretty early, so I think that might have spared my kindergarten teacher being yelled at by a swearing five year old about conceptual clarity. Since then, I never really gave it much thought except when I’d typo an ill-constructed word and the rage would briefly flare back up. But now that we have two kids I’ve had to teach Daughter this abomination and I’ll be taking Son through it soon. When I was teaching Daughter phonics, I’d have to stop and explain that C says Kuh or Ess because somewhere along the line an idiot was put in charge of something that they shouldn’t have been.

I use that as an important life-lesson for her.

She’ll have fun with her teachers.

So will I.

I Can Do a Thousand Now

In case you haven't noticed, and no one really has, I've generally focused my melancholy, laser like, onto punishing my body through constant exercise.

So this leads to some delicious irony when I say that I'm in the best shape of my life.


Side note, you might notice a large gap between this and the prior post. Well I was in another country with a slightly authoritative bent, and blogspot access is a no-no. On the plus side, I did start Daughter in on minor harassment of the local authorities.

Accomplishment For Its Own Sake

I did another race a while ago. It was a very short one because there were some guys from work doing it for the first time. I did better overall and actually got second in my age group, but I'd blame that more on the less competitive crowd at these shorter races.

So that pretty much ends my season. I've got maybe one more in mid-October that I might do, but other than that I'm aiming for next year's ice-breakers.

Since everyone is just salivating over the thought of my training plan, here we go:

For running I'm putting in miles and doing a 5k training plan. I'm at < 20 miles a week right now and won't peak much higher than 25. Depending on how I'm doing with this I'll probably go to a 10k plan early in 08. I won't do anything other than distance for at least a month. I just need miles now to get my legs ready. I'm going to start the running portion of the coaching in a month, so hopefully that will help.

For biking, miles miles miles. I've upped to 90minute rides, and I'll probably peak at 2 hours. Then I'll work in hills and speed.

I've started seeing a swim-coach, and that's working out well. Swimming is absolutely about technique. They guys working the hardest are usually going slowest. From what the coach says, I wasn't 'horrible' but I've improved a hell of a lot, so I think that translates to me actually being something close to horrible.

For next year I want to drop 15 minutes off my sprint time, which would put me competitive in my age group.

Oh Sweet Merciful Christ SHUT IT OFF!

I'm not a terribly domestic person. Like most statements, a lot of the actual meaning behind a statement like that depends on the precise definition applied to a single word. So 'domestic'; We've got kids, so we spend a lot of time at home, but I don't pay a lot of attention to the environment itself. Some people pride themselves on having a spotless kitchen, which is fine as long as they stay this side of OCD. I don't even really notice that I have a kitchen unless I'm hungry or it's caught fire in some small way. That's the way I'm using domestic.

Now given that I pay as much attention to household appliances as my cat does to drywall texture it might be a little surprising to hear how excited I am about a blender. Blenders are the cock-teases of the kitchen appliance world. A bold and moderately frightening statement, I know. They promise so much. They've got 30 different settings to pulverize food most of which have names that sound like sound-effects in a second rate comic book. So you buy one, or more likely get one as a wedding gift from an aunt that you forgot existed, and your happy little head is filled with visions of low-cost frappuccinos and smoothies and, if you swing that way, margaritas. Seven months later your wife has figured out that condoms aren't normally needed for most business meetings and you've been given 12 hours to clear your stuff out from the house. You find the forgotten box behind the also unused punch bowl, and you decide to give the thing, no pun intended, a whirl.

This is a spur of the moment thing, so you don't actually have all the ingredients for a smoothy, but hell, you're bored and hungry, so good judgment be damned, the apple sauce is going in there. You throw in whatever fruit you've got and ice that's been in the freezer trays for nine years. Since you really only want a drink for yourself you end up using about a 17th of the capacity of the damn thing, but hey, you're still craving the fruity goodness of a smoothy so you bravely continue on. You fire up the beast, put it on frappe or fricassee or whatever the hell the middle option is and watch the ice cubes bounce around for a few minutes while the rest of the mixture turns a color you wouldn't think possible from fruit.

Now you're thinking, well that's the hard part right? Wrong. Trying to pour that lumpy sludge into your cup is one of the most surprisingly frustrating things you've ever tried to accomplish. Only about a quarter of the stuff actually pours into the cup easily. You manage to scrape out another quarter before learning one of the fundamental truths about blenders, you can't get a god damn thing out of a fucking blender. Half of your already small portion has chemically bonded with your blender. Remember those commercials where they superglued a hard hat to a beam and then hung some dumb son of a bitch over certain death. That's what your smoothy is doing in the blender, only it's not kicking and wetting itself like the dumbass in the commercials, no, your smoothy is making rude comments and using surprisingly inventive hand gestures to communicate unflattering facts about your genitalia.

Wisely, you give up and try to drink the portion that you've gotten out. I say 'try' because that's precisely what you're doing. The ice is still in chunks that are the perfect size to block the straw and you keep running into chunks of half-frozen bananas, which is odd, because you didn't actually have bananas in the blender. So, now you're still hungry, you've eaten some chunks of unknown things, and you've got an hour less to move the contents of your life to your mother's basement.

...oh but now you've got the clean up the blender. You poor bastard.

How in the holy hell are you supposed to clean out something that's a funnel shaped container with blades at the bottom. Cleaning a blender is like trying to give a suppository to a cat. Neither of you really want to do the task, someone's going to get scratched up, and the job's going to be half done at best.

Obviously I have issues with blenders that, are, frankly, a little surprising even to me. So when a friend recommended a thing called a 'magic bullet' to me I was resistant. Well, first I kind of thought it was a sex-toy and I was a little confused about his motives. Flattered, but confused.

He explained that a magic bullet was, in fact, a blender. It's a fundamentally redesigned one though. Really, they took all the evil and hateful problems right out of a blender. It's like they took Satan, and got rid of the all the goat killing and fire and stuff, and just left a guy who really throws kick ass parties.

Just go buy one.

Now a word of warning to consumers on both sides of the perversion aisle. The 'magic bullet', as you might expect, really is the name of a sex-toy too. So I just want you to be sure which one you're ordering. The little sex-toy wouldn't make a good smoothy, and while the blender could probably be converted to a sex-toy somehow I really wouldn't recommend that unless you consulted with a certified and bonded electrician and follow proper safety guidelines.... and pick an easily remembered and pronounced safe word.

and I will tell you what you are

This is bound to piss people off, but I may as well come out with it.

I have to eat constantly and I'm getting sick of it.

I started out skinny, and I've dropped almost 10 pounds in the last 5 months. I've upped my intake a hell of a lot and I'm trying to load up on the heavy calorie foods, but I've really only managed to hold steady. On top of that, I'm looking to up my run distance over the winter, so I'm going to have go up even more calories a day just to hold even.

Now if I wanted to eat crap-food this wouldn't be a problem. Hell, two poorly chosen meals at just about any fast food place would take me over my quota. But no, I get to try and eat relatively healthy which means I'm eating all the god damn time, which gets old.

Here's a tasty after dinner snack.
Brown half a pound (I use ~.6 lbs) of extra-lean ground turkey
Put in a big bowl with a full can of vegetarian refried beans
Add enough cheese to make tasty, but not enough to clog the arteries
Microwave until the cheese melts, add some salsa and you're good to go.

That's a little less than 1000 cals.

I just finished one of those babies, and I'm probably going to have a bowl of cereal in a while. The whole evening I've also been snacking on raisins. This is another good reason why I shouldn't go beyond Olympic distance, aside from the fact that my joints would basically secede from the union of my body if I tried Ironman distance I'd literally never be able to stop eating if I wanted to stay above skeleton body weight.