tuesday on the failwhale

windoze is crap.
crap.crap.crap.crap.crap.
and Stinky Tuna Man i have no great love for you either.


BRING ME MORSELS. i require them.


ohfuckme.
is an internet connection too much to ask?

hope, hype and lat pulldowns

the phrase "president obama" hasn't lost its luster. hearing it is like someone dropping a warm blanket over me when i didn't realise 'til then that i was cold. don't get me wrong -- i didn't drink the koolaid and i'd be happy with "president hufflepuff" or "president whickyclickclickwhirratweet"... anything that's not "president bush." but how lovely to have a president who can speak, who doesn't elevate the lowest common denominator. watching tuesday's inauguration speech was like reading dickens again after 8years of jonathan kellerman.

teho quipped "morale, it matters," and he's spot on. if obama's administration could accomplish 2 things i'd call it a Win:
1. give us a reason to think we don't suck for being american
2. stop thinking the rest of the world is like us, and just dying to be a democracy.

if all 3 snorgoyles could kick off in the next 4 years that'd be awesome too, but icing on the cake, my man.

'tis friday; bitch session w/E on the calendar. i am anxious to see if he thinks i've gotten any huge-r since we last rode.
- i've been lifting! - i proclaimed as we toiled up a long landenberg hill. can you tell?
he surveyed me doubtfully.
- ummm keep at it - he answered.
black tights minimise, you know.

but i had to go and open my big yapper to F too, and he probed my shoulders & biceps while i flexed valiantly.
- you're shaking - he chuckled.
- i just lifted this morning! - i protested.
- it's okay - he said soothingly. girls aren't supposed to have muscles.

not in afghanistan maybe, but i'm american bitch. and that might MEAN something now.

aside: Fresh Air on tuesday aired terry gross' interview with iconographer & street artist shepard fairey, remarkably well-spoken for a dude who's been arrested 14 times. give it a listen.

Poetry for Short Days and Sub-Zero Temps

one more day on the trainer
and i may go insaner.

can you find the 44th president??

loucypher wondered if his 11-year old daughter appreciated the historic importance of this day.
- do you know what today is, annie? why it's so important for our country?
- cos a man from delaware will be in the white house?
das what i'm sayin'.

cokie roberts mused on Morning Edition how this peacefully staged transfer of power, literally from the hands of the outgoing POTUS into the new, is unique to this country. john adams was one of the few outgoing leaders who bailed on on the inauguration -- he slunk out of town the night before his rival thomas jefferson assumed power.

in situations like these, the whackjobs will inevitably surface. this weekend i waited for 15min in a checkout line at EMS as the woman in front of me racked up over $1200 in freeze-dried food and a 2-person tent. making small talk while scanning the 50th bag of Mountain House beef stroganoff, the cashier asked the woman where she was camping. in her backyard, turns out. why?? because she's convinced bush will not cede the presidency and instead will declare a state of emergency and put us all under military rule while he crushes the obama insurgency. our lady of perpetual stroganoff plans to hunker down in that tent with her 10yo german shepherd and stendhal's The Red and the Black which she's always wanted to read.

i'm all for a long sit with a good read but let's hope our lady's off her weetabix and in 3hrs we begin to wipe away the shit of the last 8 years. and the bees come back.

when the things that should be infinite, aren't

one of my favorite professors died on tuesday. as a poet, De had a powerful vocal presence, and he taught an enormously popular class in reading poetry out loud. i remember reading 'the wild swans at coole' in class and after 15min of De's coaching, my final reading ended with a long silence, then audible sniffles from all over the classroom. when De took a sabbatical i lived in his house for a year and took care of his dog buford, a frothing mastiff who'd suffer small children poking fingers in his eyes but was petrified of the porch steps.

buford was warm-up for having my own dog. but they too are finite, as dr dog informed us earlier this week when we took the j-dog in for a checkup. oh he's 8? sure it's normal for him to be slowing down, but this breed lives until 10 or 12.

10 or 12, like that's a good thing? is it useful, this melloncollie? perhaps not, but this loo seat that lets you calculate the weight of your poo surely is.

first "race" of the year

returned to the running racing circuit this weekend. legs are quite certain of this, my iliotibial bands and calves plangently so. i feel like i ran a marathon though it was only 10miles. the highlight of my warmup was being chased by a yappy and tantalisingly puntable yorkie, leash trailing behind it. i gave its owner a WTF look as i ran by; he just chuckled tolerantly. o funny dog, the things you do!

anyway, the point of the run, to moi anyway, was not to race but rather do a nice tempo effort with 370 of my closest friends. the cannon fired (yes we get started by a cannon because we are DELAWARE and what we lack in size we make up for in sheer noyz) and king dave, with whom i'd done a killer 4000yd workout in the pool the day before, pulled up to me and inquired about my target pace. tempo, i said, and you? sticking in the low 7s, said he, and then getting down to 6:45s at the half. serendipity! - i thought, for that was exactly what i wanted to do and now i had company, but by the time i wrapped up that compound thought king dave was out of sight and i didn't clap eyes on him again until the gatorade table at the finish.

the first mile went by and i was way off my intended pace; second mile passed the same; but it felt right so i didn't push. we climbed up to rockford park and i started to pass a stream of people petering on the hill. as we approached the halfway turn-around i was surprised to see there were only a dozen or so women ahead of me. oh whatever i'm running my own pace, right? i passed a couple more on the way down from rockford and then with 2 miles to go there were 4 women in striking distance.

do you see where this is going?
do you understand why i whimper when i walk down steps?

i let one woman pull me closer to the others. a quarter mile from the finish there's a 200m climb that goes straight up, and i thought that if i got close enough before the hill i could knock some of them off there because if i'm catching you at the end of a 10mile race you're probably not going to be able to counter on a hill.

i passed one, then two, three, and the fourth as we crested the hill and hit a headwind that almost blew me backwards. i was not a happy kid but i knew i'd be even less happy if the woman behind me had something left for the straightaway dash to the line so i pegged it for about 30sec and then did something only cowards do – looked back – but i'd enough of a gap to cruise in without popping a lung onto pennsylvania ave.

turns out i was 5th overall; 6-9th finished within 20 sec. so much for my tempo run.

it is good to be back.

the way to our hearts

- yo guys - F addressed the ether - does anyone have a working login for Getty Images? i need to buy a photo, like NOW.

i shook my head; loucypher and quasar were clamped under headphones, inaccessible.
- you can use my login - the mayor (my boss) volunteered - it's 'largewealthypenis.'

- i wish i could make a girl laugh like that - F said to the mayor as they walked out to lunch.

see teho, not a Company. hey while you have some free time, can you get on this?

it is a TOW-MAY-TOE

socked in again by work, the only notable interruptions a flurry of IMs triggered by riley's invite to 'check out this tat i got last night' and Loucypher's Daily Lament. the subject of today's Lament was how the parents of his daughter's best friend seem to think chez loucypher is a daycare service where they can drop their child off and leave her for days, trusting she'll be fed and washed and groomed.
- they're losers - loucypher ruled - you know what they named this poor girl?
- placenta?
- worse. they spell her name 'L hypen A'. how would you pronounce that?
- um... LA?
- yeah that's what you'd think, right? but no, you're sposed to say "ladasha." ladasha! and they get upset because people don't know how to pronounce it! i guess it depends what dialect you're using.
- my name means "vagina" in farsi.
- oh go back to work.

dr. cherry's work, at 3 months

it's been nearly three months since dr. ken cherry of UVA installed Pipes 2.0 via a patch of my left external iliac artery & an inguinal release. rode 60miles sunday, ran 10 hilly ones yesterday and flirted with low 6's pace his morning: nary a squeak of claudication. i can run sub-7 pace comfortably now when before surgery my left side from hip flexor to calf would shut down at 7:40 from lack of blood.

now i don't wanna jump to any Rash conclusions, but my studies would indicate that i was broke, cherry fixed me, and that his counterpart at christiana care who saw no stenoses or vascular irregularities in my arteriogram and concluded "maybe at the age of 40 your vessels don't dilate like they used to" was full of shit. but i could be wrong.

regardless, it is good to be moving again, and moving w/o having to mitigate constantly migrating pain. no objectives or focus for the upcoming season -- have yet to consult the Oracle -- but there's short-course du nats in april (eep), in may a national-caliber tri (my favorite race) and in june a half-ironman that's also a qualifier for Kona. maybe that's focus after all.

for now it's just base base base, with perhaps some lifting injected here & there if i can talk EZ into spotting me on squats over & over & over again. oh seemple simon and eez pieman...

reason #2009 why i love mac

don't think because it's a new year it's a new me. fat chance, esp when the idiocracy's still running full steam. today's scenario: i'm working in visio, via windoze XP running in virtual mode on the Lapple, when visio throws an alert telling me this particular operayshun requires a plug-in i'm missing and would i like to download it. sure, say i clickity-click, and am delivered to this page on the internets (click to embiggen):

it's an invitation to run a Validation Tool to "determine whether your Windows installation is genuine." how thoughtful! because that's exactly what i as a user on deadline wish to do right now. is there a git-around? can i obtain the visio plug-in without validating my OS?** do my socks match? no, no and no.

why do i love mac? cos it doesn't do this shit. fuck you microsoft.

oh and happy new year. i hope you didn't make any rash resolutions.


**validation code "fuck you" doesn't work, in case you were wondering.