The Riding of a Bicycle

Becca had spent the night with a good friend Sunday night, and had taken our car with her. Instead of doubling our drive times too and from and just making a mess of schedules, I decided to ride my (our) bike to work Monday. I checked it out before she left on Sunday, just to make sure everything was working, and got things tightened up. So I ride in the 4.5 miles to work sucking down car fumes while pedaling madly uphill for a big part of the ride. When I got to work I felt like I might throw up, but by the end of the day I decided that I had actually enjoyed the ride quite a bit and felt like I could do it again on the way home, and probably for several days each week.

Unfortunately about halfway home last night the pedal on the bike just started wobbling and eventually fell out. The pedal had stripped right out of the arm on my gear wheel thing. The really annoying part is that this bike is relatively new, sure it’s at least 3 years old but it’s been ridden probably less than 2 dozen times, and it’s a Gary Fisher mountain bike. People speak of that brand like it’s awesome, but I guess there’s no guarantee that crappy parts might not be attached to an otherwise nice bike.

Anyways, it will be a couple days before I get it fixed, which might totally sink the motivation I otherwise felt for this endeavor. We’ll see if I can ever stick with the biking to work idea. It seems like a great idea, less gas money, better health, less juggling of our one car.

NOOooooooo!!!!!!! Not the Snack Packs!

Jell-O snack packs splatter over highway in Florida

The Best Mac and Cheese

This is what I had for lunch yesterday when I went home. It’s based on twisted mac and cheese that you can get at several restaurants. Yesterday, though, I discovered that the best base pasta to start with is actually the generic Shells and Cheese - which comes with the packet of liquid/gel velveeta style cheese, not the powder. Make up a batch of that type of Mac and Cheese, you wont be sorry. On the side sauté some diced red peppers, diced garlic, and some scallions. I’ve found that you get a better result if you Sauté with some real butter in the pan! Once those are a light brown on the edges. I throw them in the pan with the shells and cheese. Add a few hits of crushed red pepper, and some black pepper. Mix well. Dish it up. Top with some italian bread crumbs (which you can buy in a big cardboard tube) and some fresh grated parmesan cheese. Simple and fantastic! Becca made that for me yesterday for lunch, and I’m not sure I can go back to just sandwiches.

Gathering All my Online Activity Into One Place

It’s called FriendFeed. And it lets you track and publish all of the information about what I’ve been up to on the various social enabled web service I’m a member of. Most of what you’ll see on here is links to things I’ve rated on StumbleUpon, bookmarked on del.cio.us, and song’s I’ve “loved” on last.fm. But occasionally there will be new photos from Picasa(google) web albums, or books on goodreads or movies added to our Flickr queue. You never know what might be there. It’s kind of like this running social log of what I’ve been reading and what I’m interested in. It doesn’t really sound that interesting to me. But I could see some sort of interesting infovis document being created from this. Perhaps something along the lines of a personal “annual report” ala Feltron. I hope no-one really cares that much about the details of what I do online, but it’s interesting to see it all in one place.

Also, yes since I mentioned photos, there is a new album of photos from our trip to Bishop’s Castle up. It’s absolutely astounding that one man could build all of this.