Olio

Some of you may have noticed that I haven't updated my web log in awhile. Here are the reasons.

Work - I'm in crunch mode at work. Basically, now that most of Adobe's products are part of a suite, I'm extra busy whenever the suites near the end of the 18-month cycle. Now is that time. After the suites ship, I'll be in cruise mode for the next year or so, and then it ramps up all over again. In the past, writers worked on several different products during the year, sharing the workload. Now, the writers work on one project, unless of course there aren't enough writers, in which case certain writers have to work on multiple products. In my case, I'm responsible for four different help systems -- InDesign, InCopy, Version Cue, and some goofy Japanese product. As compensation, I have demanded two extra phones for my desk.

Lisa - My sister has cancer -- a particularly aggressive form of lymphoma. No, it's not Hodgkins, which is highly treatable. Non-Hodgkins lymphoma is still treatable, and Lisa has a good chance of surviving. Still, Lisa's cancer made me profoundly sad. She's a single mother of a 1-year-old toddler who's now undergoing chemotherapy, which is harsher than aromatherapy by a good margin. I've been meaning to write about Lisa, but the situation was too depressing and uncertain. I thought about writing other entries, but I kept wanting -- and not wanting -- to write about Lisa, if that makes sense.

Cycling - I've gone on two (2) mountain bike rides since last I wrote. One was a six-hour ride at Tiger Mountain in which I kept doing loops around the Preston and Iverson trails. Six hours is a long time to ride a mountain bike alone. I've mentioned this before, but I would almost rather prefer riding a road bike alone. Riding a mountain bike alone is actually depressing to me.

One good thing about being alone at Tiger Mountain is that I took a particularly embarrassing fall that I'm glad no one saw. It was one of those slow-motion falls that lends itself to announcers. Here's what the announcers would have said if they had been there.

Announcer 1: And here comes Bob riding up the trail. This is unusual because most mountain bikers ride up the 5-mile dirt road and ride down the singletrack trail, while Bob is riding up. Isn't that unusual, Announcer 2?

Announcer 2: Sort of. I know people who put their bikes on ski lifts to go up to the top of the mountain.

A1: Right, it's very unusual. And here goes Bob. He's riding up over a set of roots, and IT LOOKS LIKE HE'S NOT GOING TO MAKE IT!

A2: He's tipping over. I though he could pull it out, but he tipped over.

A1: He's on a downslope right now with his hand just above a puddle.

A2: Now his hand is in the puddle. Why would he put his hand in the puddle like that?

A1: I have a better question -- Why did he slide the side of his body into the puddle like that?

A2: Where is his arm strength? Where is his agility?

A1: Look. Now he just put his foot in the puddle. It's like he doesn't care anymore about personal hygiene. What's next? Will he throw himself headlong into the puddle and make a mud angel?

A2: No, he's made it out. He's swearing. He's saying lots of swear words right now, aloud.

A1: "Chit. Ducking duck. Some in a ducking birch." That's all I could make out.

A2: He's riding again. Oh, here comes someone down the hill. They just rode by.

A1: Yes, and he's gone now. That was uneventful. Let's hope Bob comes down again. That should be fun.

I also rode Crop Circles this morning while listening to Bruce Springsteen.

Music - It's official. In any desert island scenario, the Boss would make it on my list, even if it's a list of one. I just discovered an album of his called "Born in the USA."

Television - It's also official. Deadwood is my favorite television show. I'm not saying it's the best. But for me, it's the most watchable and rewatchable. It's oddly ugly in its beauty and beautiful in its ugliness.

And now I better stop ignoring the twins.

Bob

A Graphic Is Worth a Thousand Words

This chart was created by a Frenchman named Charles Joseph Minard who wanted to show the losses suffered by Napolean's army that invaded Russia.

I love this graphic because it tells a story using several variables. The brown band depicts the size of the army as it invaded Russia with 422,000 men. As they travel eastward in the cold weather, the band thins as men die or run off. By the time they get to Moscow, there are only 100,000 men left. The black band represents their return journey. The line at the bottom of the graphic shows the falling temperatures during the return. That little tiny black band that meets up with the beginning of the brown band represents the number of men who made it home -- about 10,000.

After analyzing this graphic, I've come to the conclusion that invading Moscow was a tactical error.

Ride Report - Flying Wheels Summer Century

The official word of the Cascade Cycling Club is that if you're fit enough to do the 100-mile Flying Wheels event, then you're fit enough to do the 200-mile STP in one day. The reasoning is that the Flying Wheels has a lot of climbing -- five big climbs to be exact -- while the STP is flat. The truth is that the climbs in the Flying Wheels event aren't particularly long or steep. My personal calculations indicate that riding the 100-mile Flying Wheels is roughly twice as easy as riding the STP.

2007 STP - 200 miles, 13 hours riding time, gentle rollers
2008 Flying Wheels - 100 miles, 6 hours riding time, rollers and hills

The ride starts at Marymoor Park near the Microsoft campus in Redmond. It goes through what we writers call bucolic scenery in which we head through rolling farm lands and pass through quaint small towns like Duvall, Snohomish, and Carnation.

The ride starts at 8:00 am. I wanted to end the ride early in the afternoon because both my brother and Robert's family were coming back to town. Unfortunately, there was a huge line of cars waiting to park, so I didn't get on the bike until 8:15. I rolled along for a couple miles when it hit me -- I didn't lock the car door. In fact, I think I may have left the passenger door wide open when I was putting on my bike shoes. Here's one of the nice things about getting old -- you know who you are and how your mind works. I knew if I didn't turn back then, I'd have spent the entire ride obsessing about my ransacked car with a dead battery. So I turned around, locked the car, and started the ride all over again.

At the 15-mile mark, I reached the first rest stop. I thought about not stopping because I had ridden only 15 miles -- actually 20 miles if you include the turnaround -- but I wanted to see if I could get a map since the course wasn't marked. And what I saw was the best stocked rest stop out of any ride I've been on. It had twenty kinds of energy bars, various power gels and glu shots, bread and bagels for making PBJs, cookies in packages, pop tarts, and all kinds of sports drinks. Unable to resist the siren song of "free stuff," I loaded my pockets and took off.

I rode another 60 miles when I decided to attack. I blew by a few startled cyclists, and then rode to the finish line. At that point, I drove home. And that is the end of this account.

Leadville 2008 Training Update, Part V

I have mixed news to report. On the positive side, I have avoided all the colds and flus (and pneumonia!) that have hit the family, so I've been able to do my favorite training rides.

The 7 Lakes of Seattle. I've done a couple of 80 mile rides around Lake Washington, which I called the 7 Lakes of Seattle. Please understand that my definition of "lake" is somewhat loose in that I refer to the Pacific Ocean and the Sammamish River as lakes. It just has a better ring than "7 Bodies of Seattle Area Water." I think we can all agree on that.

The 7 Hills of West Seattle. This 25-mile ride takes about 2 hours. I loop up and down the biggest hills within ten miles of my house, pushing hard on all but the first climb. While this ride hammers my legs and lungs, it doesn't quite simulate doing the 9-mile climb up to the top of Columbine at 12,600 feet.

Bursting. Twice a week, I sprint for quarter-mile stretches or climb hard up hills. I hope this is moving me from commuter shape to racing shape, because people in Myrtle Edwards Park stare at me.

The Red Hook Ride. One of my favorite rides is to Red Hook Brewery in Woodinville. I leave early in the morning, ride 60 miles, and then Wendy and the boys meet me in the car. Once I went on a little bike ride with the boys while Wendy and Kim hit a couple of nearby wineries, but all the other times I just throw the bike on the back of the car and we eat and drink at the brewery.

On the negative side, I still weigh 180 pounds. Unless I go on a crash diet, which is highly unlikely since food is so readily available in our society, I'll be doing the ride as the Before guy in one of those diet commercials. It will be a jiggly ride.

Then again, on a positive side, Fatty has agreed to let me race on his light mountain bike. It won't be as comfortable as my full-suspension System^TM, but I need to be built for speed, not for comfort. The lighter bike will help compensate for the fatter body.

Then again, I haven't been riding my mountain bike this year. I haven't gone on a single mountain bike ride in Washington since October 2007. That's not good, because Leadville is a mountain biking race, not a road biking race. In fact, I need to pull my mountain bike off the wall in the garage and see if it still works.

Estimated Time If Leadville Were This Weekend - 13:00

Estimated Leadville Time If Training Continues As Is - 12:05

Obama Wins!

As an official Democratic caucus member, I am pleased to inform you that Barack Obama has just won the Democratic primary! Huzzah! The last time I wrote about the primaries, I was saddened by the whole Reverend Wright affair, announcing that I was pro-Hillary. In my madness, I forgot the one critical thing that I kept harping on in previous months -- he didn't authorize the Iraq war. Hillary did. As did Kerry and Edwards and a bunch of other frightened politicians.

Here's what Obama said in 2002, before the war:

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

For that reason alone, I should have been for Obama all along. I'm sorry for ever wavering. Forgive me, reader. And forgive me, Mr. Obama.

Film Review: Sex and the City

Wendy has been out of town this week and I have a big deadline coming up, so things have been a little frantic as I've juggled watching the kids and working. Last night, I decided I needed a break, so I went to the 9:20 showing of Sex and the City.

I didn't think I needed a babysitter because the boys are usually asleep by 8:30, but they stayed up late last night so I just had to jam their door shut and hurry to the theater.

Sex and the City is a laugh a minute! I say that objectively, although I must admit the Cosmopolitan I snuck into the movie house loosened me up a bit. I don't want to give away any details, but I have to!

Mr. Big is gay!

The most touching scene occurred when Carrie was at Samantha's wedding wearing an expensive pair of rented shoes. Because of an earlier dramatic scene, Carrie was sad, and she wasn't sure whether she would ever laugh again. Fortunately, Miranda soiled herself, and Carrie was able to laugh again!

Assorted Issues for the Month of May

My Web Logging Status

I recently mentioned that I'm busy at work, so I won't be updating this web log regularly through the summer. I'm thinking either two or three sloppy posts a week, or one really well-written post like this one.

Leadville Status

I got my Leadville packet in the mail. In the past, this has been a moment of great excitement. When I've seen the packet in the mail, I dropped the rest of the mail on the floor, shouted something loud and incomprehensible, and tinkled in my shorts a little bit. This time, it's different. I got the Leadville packet on Monday and still haven't opened it. It's just sitting there on the coffee table.

I don't know why I haven't opened the packet yet. Do I look like a psychologist? I'm sure one contributing factor has been the fact that I've had two nasty sicknesses this year -- bronchitis and a cold that kept me off the bike for two weeks. Another factor is my fat suit. I weigh the exact same amount that I weighed in January. I'm 182 pounds. Last year, I weighed 172 pounds for Leadville, and I missed the 12-hour mark by 25 minutes. Gulp. Yet another factor is the memory of last year's race. The whole experience was great, but the race itself was torture for the final eight hours. Do I really want to go through that again, only this time fatter, older, and slower?

AWOL Family

Wendy has an interesting job in which she gets paid half a salary year-round for working 26 weeks a year. She has some time off, so she took the boys to Indiana to visit her family. I'm swamped at work (see above), so I couldn't go. She and Kim drove the boys down to the Memphis area so the boys could spend time with their grandparents, uncles, and cousins from Wendy's side of the family. One of Wendy's brothers is a henpecked born-again christian who is married to a mean, 240-pound battle axe who allows children in her care to be scalded with hot water. The other brother is going through a nasty divorce. Here's how sad their situation is -- the extended family is working hard to get the children into a day care environment to improve the quality of their lives. It's pretty sad when a Mississippi day care facility is seen as a cure-all.

For the last two weeks, I've had the house to myself.

Nerdy Tech Talk

I'm allowed only one computer at work now, so I had to choose between a Mac and a PC. If it weren't for the fact that I need to use a Windows-only writing setup, it would have been a no-brainer -- Mac. I ordered the Mac anyway, and used a program called VMware Fusion to install a version of Windows that runs in a separate window on the Mac. I was skeptical at first, but I'm sold on it now. If you make it fill the screen, you can't tell you're using a Mac machine. My Mac has 4G of RAM, which is more than enough memory.

Here's what I love the most about this setup. When I installed everything I needed in Windows, I took a snapshot. You know how Windows machines get bloated after a year or two, and they run slower and take three times as long to start up? On the Mac, that's not going to happen. Instead of reinstalling Windows, I can just revert to my snapshot, install updates, and take another snapshot. For what I need to do, Windows works better on a Mac than on a PC. How do you like them apples?

Riding with Fatty

Elden's wife Susan has cancer. She's been getting chemo treatments on and off for the last few years, but her situation has gotten much worse recently. The cancer made its way into her brain. She has only a few months to live, if that.

Some friends and I have been trying to figure out what to do to help their family. One thing Kenny did was to set up an account where Elden's many faithful readers can donate. Elden agreed to post a button on his site. I'm glad he did this. It's difficult to accept help, and it's even more difficult to ask for help. Many of Elden's readers know how generous he has been in giving away prizes, helping other cyclists in need, and pouring effort into his beloved blog. A number of commenters begged him for a chance to pay back his kindness.

We also decided to get together and do a ride this weekend. At first glance, it seems pointless. "Hey, I hear Susan's dying of cancer. Let's all get together and go on a bike ride!" It seems desperate. Or futile.

And what's wrong with desperate acts of futility?

Especially when you can talk and ride and have a few laughs. I'm telling you, that ride we did on Saturday on the ridge between Draper and Alpine will go down as one of the most memorable rides of my life.

Elden, your buddies are with you. Susan, keep fighting.

The Twins' First T-Ball Game

I don't think 4-year-olds should be playing organized sports. Wendy does, which is why Luke and Max played in their first game on Saturday. I thought about staying home in protest, but the allure of watching pre-schoolers try to figure out which hand to put their mitts on was just too tempting.

I was actually surprised by the quality of play.

As batters, most of the kids ran the proper way around the bases after the expected amount of delay. As fielders, most of the kids managed to trap or chase down a hit ball and -- after the expected amount of delay -- throw it in the general direction of first base.

Yes, there was crying in T-Ball.

I found it interesting that all the crying was done by boys. The girls remained stout and steadfast during play, their casual spitting and crotch-grabbing a sign that the emasculation of our culture extends its reach into our very pre-schools.

One boy on our team (the Buttercups) was crying so hard that he wasn't able to bat. His mother pulled him from the lineup. So I hit for him. Now one thing I'll say is that the bats used are ridiculously small, making it difficult to get leverage. Although a few parents and coaches scowled, I reckoned that driving the ball hard into centerfield would turn their disapproval into envy.

When I swung, I hit both the plastic tee and the bottom of the ball. As I mentioned, the bat was ridiculously small, so the ball traveled only a few feet. I wanted the umpire to declare it a foul ball since the tee itself flew nearly as far as the ball, but he signaled it was in play.

Well, you can imagine the argument that followed. I slammed down my helmet and kicked dirt all over home plate, and then I kicked dirt all over the umpire's shoes. While I was trying to dig out the home plate so I could hurl it towards the pitcher's mound, I was secretly hoping that our coach would step in and take over the argument to keep me from getting ejected, but let's just say he didn't have my back.

After that, it got a little out of control. Fortunately, I managed to stay out of the legal system, and we all managed to come out of our first T-Ball game unscathed.

I Changed My Mind

I want Hillary to win the Democratic nomination.

I know you have questions. First, why aren't I writing as much? I'm busy at work, so whatever internet web log entry I slap together is going to be quick and dirty. Second, you're probably wondering why I changed my mind after so eloquently expressing my desire for Obama to win.

Well, this may come as a shock to you, but I don't have to defend myself. I'm like Juror #7 (Jack Walden) in 12 Angry Men. I'm sick of all the talking. That's right, you heard me. I've had enough.

You're probably all, "Who tells you that you have the right to play like this with a man's life? Don't you care? Don't you have the guts to do what you think is right?"

No, I don't care. I just want it to end. And right now, I'd rather hear about Whitewater than Jeremiah Wright.

I remember sitting in the Democratic caucus a few months ago and hearing several people say, "We have two great candidates..." No, we don't. We have two deeply flawed candidates, at least in terms of being electable. What kind of "great" candidates would be dead even with a garden gnome who's basically running for George W. Bush's third term?

Here's an analogy. Imagine your favorite book is being made into a movie, you're in charge of casting, and you have a limited number of choices:

The Catcher in the Rye - Holden Caulfield
- Keanu Reeves (Hillary)
- Ashton Kutcher (Obama)
- Corey Feldman (McCain)

Pride and Prejudice - Elizabeth Bennet
- Sarah Jessica Parker (Hillary)
- Jennifer Love Hewitt (Obama)
- Madonna (McCain)

The Hobbit - Bilbo Baggins
- Freddie Prinze Jr. (Hillary)
- Rob Schneider (Obama)
- Steven Segal (McCain)

Do you pick? Or do you just walk away?