September 2007 Archives
To celebrate Labor Day weekend, Brad and I decided to go on another long bike ride. We were going to go between Red Wing and Cannon Falls in Southeastern Minnesota. A good 50-mile bike ride with some rolling hills to help us get ready for the Purple Ride coming up in two weeks.
Unfortunately, it ended in a bit of a disaster, with Brad hitting a rut and pitching over his handlebars at 20mph (we were going downhill), us hitching a ride from a passing pick-up truck to the nearest hospital, and a broken clavicle. And Brad's shoulder, arm and back are all chewed up from the gravel he landed in.
Thankful that a) he was wearing a helmet; b) it wasn't any worse; c) I didn't have to see it happen (I was riding in front); d) he didn't fly into me, and e) that we were able to get a lot of help from strangers and from my parents (who drove the hour down to Cannon Falls to collect us and take us back to my car 30 miles away in Red Wing).
A good start to his career as a human cannonball, but next time I would prefer him to have a softer landing place.
My mom went down to the recently re-opened 10th Avenue bridge, which is the closest bridge to the collapsed 35W bridge, took some pictures and stitched them together into a panorama.
Even when he's doped up on Vicodin, Brad can still kick my ass at Trivial Pursuit. Rather than feeling like I'm a giant moron, I choose to believe he's just really smart.
SEE THIS AND YOU'LL FEEL LIKE IT'S HOME.LOTS OF ORIG ARCHITECTISSAL CHARACTER.FRENCH DRS,BUILT-IN BUFFET,WOOD FLOOR.MAINT-FREE SIDING & 2-YR OLD ROOF.NEWER DECK AND LARGE DBL GARAGE.ENJOY BACK YARD WITH NICE LANDSCAPING AND HAMMOCK!
I browse house listings a lot. It's sort of a guilty pleasure. I also get a kick out of the abbreviations and misspellings. I'm not quite sure how one would arrive at "architectissal".
What's with group blog writers using the first person plural all the time? Take this example from Apartment Therapy Home Tech:
We don't have children yet but all of our friends that do keep telling us how many batteries they go through for their kids toys. Currently, we use rechargable batteries for our gadgets, but what about wind powered toys? For $30, a wind powered RC car kit from Japan can run for 3 and a half minutes after sitting in a 5 mph wind for 5 minutes. Cool concept, but we suspect all that waiting around for wind charging will become very old very fast for a young child. If only the run time was longer than the charge time.
The only way this really makes sense is if the author is talking about his household - for example, he and his wife. But everyone on this website writes this way all the time. In the end, I think this just sounds pretentious. Blog writing is full of editorializing. You don't see newspaper editorials filled with "we"s and "our"s despite the fact that a newspaper is a collaborative publication.
If opinions and personal experience are going to be given, why try to force it to sound impersonal, like it's coming from the blog as a whole and not from an individual person? The impression I get is that these blogs are trying to be friendly and conversational in only the most superficial way, without allowing any of their writers' personalities to peek through. It strikes me as very disingenuous. Yes, it's a group blog, but the posts are written by individuals. And if their individuality is intended to be completely effaced, then they should do away with personal anecdotes or opinions entirely, thus doing away with the pronoun pickle permanently.
(Note: We actually are big fans of the content in Apartment Therapy's many websites — and many other group blogs on which this phenomenon can be observed &mdash but this royal "we" just grates on our last nerve.)
I don't usually get too teary over famous people dying because I don't really know them as people and I guess I'm just callous and unfeeling.
But my heart dropped when I saw just now that that Madeline L'Engle has died. A Wrinkle in Time and the other books in that collection are among my most cherished childhood reading memories.
The book used concepts that Ms. L'Engle said she had plucked from Einstein's theory of relativity and Planck's quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children's literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.
Ms. L'Engle is one of those writers that makes me fantasize, once in a while, about writing books for children. Maybe someday I will.
I've been told on more than one occasion (so often, in fact, that I do feel justified in tooting my own horn about it) that I make exceptionally good chocolate chip cookies. And I've been making chocolate chip cookies regularly since I was about 14 years old, so I've had a long time to hone them. I do bake other types of cookies once in a while, but chocolate chip cookies are my first and enduring love when it comes to baking. So simple and so good. All those years of baking cookies have resulted in cookies that turn out puffy, yet not too cakey - soft in the middle, and crisp on the edges.
Since I simply use the recipe on the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip package, the secret seems to be in my methods. If you're interested in learning more about my cookie voodoo, read on. Otherwise, just enjoy gazing at some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.
Continue reading "Chocolate chip cookie voodoo" »
Recently I finished reading Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, and this book, among other things, has launched me head-first into an existential funk.
Einstein was clearly a person who lived life to the fullest. He was brilliant, passionate, and vibrant. He wasn't without flaws, though; he was often described as cold to his closest friends and family. Those people who seemed to tie him down with obligation and responsibility were pushed away, yet he formed all sorts of close relationships with all sorts of interesting people. He was described as a loner, but a loner who (based on this book) seemed to have a whole lot more friends than me. And even on his deathbed, Einstein was thinking about political activism and theories of the universe.
I'm almost 30 years old and I've been expecting all these years to at some point have a clue about why I'm here and what small thing I could possibly contribute to the world. It's not for lack of trying. I've tried a lot of methods to figure this out over the years. And it's not happening. And I'm not sure it ever will. Instead, I just get out of bed and get through another day and breathe some oxygen and burn some gasoline and put some more stuff into a landfill. I think all my life I've simply tried to walk softly and not squish any bugs. I've tried to be a nice person and do as little damage in this life as I could, but that's starting to not feel like enough.
7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable - I think there's a lot of truth to this.
Also, we're having lots of interesting clouds today:
Also, my coworker finally had her baby yesterday, a girl. I've never been spent so much time around a pregnant woman before and watched someone go through an entire pregnancy like that. Her desk is right next to mine, so it's pretty much been 40 hours a week. I know it's the most basic human biological process, but I still find it amazing, fascinating, and a bit creepy.
On Saturday I rode in Purple Ride, a bike ride to benefit pancreatic cancer research and outreach. (Related: why I am riding in PurpleRide).
There were 8, 24 or 50 mile routes to choose from. Last year, the highest mileage was 24 and that's what we did. We barely made it, but we did it. This year, we decided to go for it and do the entire 50 miles. Of course, Brad couldn't go because of his injury, but I didn't want all that work to be for nothing, so I went alone.
The first ten miles and the last ten miles were the worst. Warming up was extra hard to do because it was cold - it had frozen overnight and was still glove-and-jacket weather by 9:15 when I started the ride. The last ten miles were simply a test of willpower and endurance, as I'd come pretty close to my limit at that point. Let's just say that when I saw the sign for the finish line, tears actually came to my eyes because I was so thankful I was done. But those middle 30 miles were worth everything I went through. Those middle 30 miles are the reason why people bother to get in shape. Being out there in the beautiful fallish weather, zooming along the endorphin rush, feeling the wind on my face and the pleasant feeling of healthy muscles working hard. I'm telling you, as a completely unathletic person all my life, I've been converted.
When I was done, I thought I was pretty nuts for having attempted such a thing, but feeling good about myself for having done it. All day long, I was tired and stiff. I went to bed at 8:30, unable to stay up any longer. The next day, though, my muscles felt better, I was more awake and I realized I totally want to be crazy enough to do this again. Next year, I'm going to bike a full century.
In a dream last night, I was at some kind of Willy Wonka-esque candy store where I was allowed to eat as much as I wanted. It was a tough decision because I knew I only had so much room in my belly and I didn't want to squander it. The Willy Wonka-esque candy proprietor asked me if I like chocolate and I said yes. "Then you need to eat this first," he said, and handed me a truffle with a little indentation in it that, on further inspection, looked sort of like a mouth that was opening and closing. I was horrified. "This creature has the ability to taste chocolate much more intensely than you ever could," the candy man told me. "If you eat this before you eat some chocolate, then you will be able to experience the most intense chocolate flavor you've never imagined."
I really need to learn to consciously tap into the part of my brain that can think of things like this.
I'm feeling a destructive urge today. Not out of any sort of mental imbalance, at least I don't think. I mean, I'm not feeling self-destructive or depressed or anything. What I'm talking about is a primal sort of destructive urge. The kind that compels children to build elaborate, precarious towers of blocks and then gleefully knock them down. If I were to clean my house today, I'd purge years of stuff I've pack-ratted away. If I were to get a haircut today I'd chop it all off. It's actually kind of a good feeling. But I predict I won't do anything with it other than overdo it at spinning class tonight.
I've been having a mysterious, sporadic problem with my right eye lately. And no, it's not pinkeye. Some mornings I will wake up with a hideously red eye, but not uniformly so. The redness is confined just to the part of the eye that would be exposed to the elements if my eye were open a normal amount (i.e., not all bug-eyed). I go to bed with happy eye, wake up with angry eye.
Look at this picture of my eye from last night right before bed. Notice the white of my right eye looks, well, white.
But I woke up this morning with an eye that could scare small children. I can just see people trying not to wince visibly when they're talking to me and looking me in the eye. I think I've induced eye-watering incidents in more than one person today.
I can only conclude that I must be sometimes sleeping with one eye open. Why else would just this one stripe of red when I wake up? Clearly, I don't trust either my husband or my cats and I'm on guard even while I sleep.
If you like photography, you should drop whatever you're doing (reading this, apparently) and go right now to the newly opened virtual doors of JGeorge Photography. Reasonably-priced, stunning photos, beautifully printed. Your life will be better if you have at least one of these photos in your home.
(And now I return to my regularly scheduled hibernation.)
