Virtual Thanks

This year I am most grateful for all the friends I have met through the internet. As unlikely a method as it is, I love that there are so many interesting people I would never have the chance to become friends with if we were restricted to mere spatial proximity. It's a large, large world and anything which can connect people in so many ways is something worth cherishing.

Most surprising to me is the wide of variety of people I have met. Rather than just finding shodows om my own interests and tastes, I have met people with an infinite variety of backgrounds and perspectives. I want to thank each and every one of you for enriching my life and broadening my horizon.

Vampire Weekend

The price for growing up in Florida and having a family that went waterskiing (and one of the verbal quirks that distinguishes me from a native Northener is that I call it snowskiing as if it were an equally likely alternative activity) every weekend. My dad would want to hit the lake about 8 a.m. so that he could get in an hour of skiing while the water was still 'like glass' - the super smooth mirrory texture of calm water. As soon as all the rubes in their speed boats showed up, the water just got too choppy.

We would head home after a picnic lunch and put the boat back in the garage. Meanwhile I would have fried to a deep lobster red crisp. For the next week, if I was bored following my mother around the commissary, I had some built in entertainment. I would play games with my peeling sunburn. The best one was to see how big a piece of skin I could pull off all at once. Sometimes I could do the entire length of my arm.

So for me the risk of developing skin cancer is a 'when', not an 'if'. After years of doing Male Habitual Doctor Avoidance, my wife booked me an appointment with a dermatologist, which is no mean feat. I've gotten a table at Babbo easier than a time slot with a skin doctor.

The appointment included a Full Body Scan, which is far less sophisticated than I thought it would be. The doctor looks over my whole body while a nurse writes down the rapid fire jargon-filled observations. The only thing slowing the doc down from her voluminous tracking of conditions was her stopping to zap scaly areas with her liquid nitrogen gun. A quick peak at my pale white ass confirmed for her that all the skin damage is sun related. Thank goodness I never became a nudist.

All the dry flaky spots on my skin which I thought were just a lack of moisturizing were actually pre-cancerous actinic keratosis conditions. While the cold gun burns off the surface cells, the doctor told be to come back for the Blue Light Treatment, or it's more technical name, Photodynamic Therapy (PDT).

PDT involves applying a chemical that takes away the natural UV resistance of the skin. To get the chemical absorbed into the skin, they wrapped my forearms with cheap Target brand saranwrap and then had me sit in the waiting room for 90 minutes with my arms looking like they were being marinaded, which I guess they were.



After being thoroughly basted, they then stick my arms into an open ended EasyBake oven of lights that put off a preternaturally blue light. During this time the skin gets warm and some spots begin to tingle.



But the most disruptive aspect of this treatment is that you then have to stay out of sunlight for 48 hours afterwards. Like indoors away from windows. My tech even cautioned me against standing in the kitchen with the blinds closed. So that began what I am calling my Vampire Weekend. Normally my house is kept dark enough to meet London Blitz darkout conditions anyways, but I took extra precautions.

Rather than use my desktop computer I set up a laptop in the dining room which is equidistant from the rather sunlit kitchen and the living room which has perfectly opaque vertical blinds. I even turned the overhead lights down on the dimmer.

Normally, having to stay indoors all day on a weekend is not a problem. But when you are told not to do something, it's all you can think off. All day yesterday, I was itching for the sun to go down. Finally, as twilight began to glimmer I begged my wife to go to the movies with me just to keep me from going stir crazy.

Today, as my 48 hours are to expire, the skies are rainy and overcast, but I am going to wear a thick long sleeve shirt just to stay on the safe side. I was given some topical creams just in case my skin gets irritated, but so far all I feel is the warmth of a mild sunburn, which just brings back the memories of those summer days of my youth blissfully ripping the blistered skin from my arms. Now I leave that to the doctors.

And just in case you feel misled by my post title and were expecting some tweeny pop band, here is a link to make up for it.

Doraville!

For about six months after I got married (and the three months before, shhh, don't tell my parents), my wife and I lived in the delightful Atlanta suburb of Doraville which was immortalized in song by the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Truer words have never been spoken than "New York's fine, but it ain't Doraville."

In Tom Wolfe's overwrought sprawling 1998 novel A Man In Full the Stoic (literally, he reads Epictetus) hero finds himself working as a dishwasher in a Vietnamese restaurant in Doraville. Wolfe goes into his trademarked level of detail about this Asian-American enclave. This came as a great shock to me since when I lived in Atlanta the only Vietnamese restaurant was a lonely outpost in Midtown. During the interim a thriving multi-ethnic corridor had erupted along Buford Highway.

Also, when I lived in Atlanta, the MARTA rail system had two lines, the East-West line and the North-South line which then ended at Brookhaven. Since then the North-South Line has been expanded and split to include a line north along the Georgia 400 corridor to Sandy Springs causing the original North Line ending in Doraville to be renamed the Northeast Branch. With there being another spur on the East-West Line, MARTA decided to ease the confusion with the compass point names and go with color coded lines similar to those used by Washington DC's Metro system or the Bay Area's BART.



Only when they picked the colors, they called the route ending in Doraville the Yellow Line, causing Asian-American advocacy groups to howl in umbrage. It seems the Powers That Be Were tone-deaf to the racial implications of the color. Other places haven't had this problem. For example D.C.'s vestigial and shrinking Chinatown is served by the Yellow, Red, and Green lines. But under a hail of bad publicity, the City Too Busy Too Hate has renamed it the Gold Line.

It's just funny to find my former little sleepy burb engulfed in such controversy. All I know is that when I am trudging down I-85 towards the Tom Moreland Interchange, aka Spaghetti Junction, I just can't keep myself from humming:

Doraville, touch of country in the city
Doraville, it ain't much, but it's home

Snowpocalypse

I survived the 2010 Blizzard but it was a lot of work. My yard already had a base on it of nearly a foot. The snow started about noon but nothing stuck until I got home from work shortly after 4 p.m.

I decided to take a photo out my front door every hour, or as close as I could get to it. The snow started slowly but built steadily. Just before midnight I decided to go out and give the drive a quick shovel so there would be less to do the next day. As soon as I got in the gale force winds kicked in. At about 3 a.m. I turned in for a few hours sleep.

When I awoke the next morning, it was as if I had never shoveled at all. The snow had drifted and blown to create a perfectly level surface across my entire yard. So I changed strategies. I decided to wait out the storm. About 3 p.m. things were tapering down so I give it my first try. I dug a path to the curb and cut some markers side to side so I could find the edges of the driveway.



Sunday morning the shoveling went faster than I expected and I had the driveway clear to the curb within about an hour. Some neighbors were digging a walking path to the garage door of our local elderly lady, so I helped out there. The single mom next door to us threw in the towel and got a guy to come over with a snowblower.

Next up was digging my SUV out of the parking lot. It was nearly completely buried. Once I got in unburied, it was time for a nap. My strategy all weekend was to not shovel anything in the street in hopes that a snowplow would come through and clear the ice dam at the bottom of the drive. At 3 p.m. I gave up and cleared enough of the slushy goop to get my car into the driveway.

Within a half hour of finishing that, a snowplow did come by and iced me in. I guess I have to pick up the shovel again tomorrow.

So here is a bonus video of a Bobcat clearing snow from my street.

More Snow Pix

The snow has stopped. This morning before shoveling I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. Part of the fun was finding all the things buried in the snow.



And once the snow stops, the sky and the snow are just so beautiful.





My dog used to love the snow. He would leap through it with a look of joy. So when I saw dogs being walked this morning, it brought back all those memories.





But it was time to shovel snow and my neighbors, including the newlyweds two doors down were already hard at work.



Snow is so beautiful, but so much work.

Live Blogging the Blizzard

For once a snowstorm prediction is proving accurate. we returned from a holiday party last night just as the first flakes were beginning to fall. This morning there was between 8 and 12 inches of snow across my yard and driveway.

The front door at about 9 am this morning.



The front steps and yard were completely buried.



The problem with my yard is that I have a twenty foot wide townhouse and half the front yard is the driveway. Another third is the front steps and the sidewalk. And then there is a tree in the middle of the rest. Any snowfall over six inches because a civil engineering problem. I have to grade the snow around the yard, calculating the angle of repose and doing strategic cut and fill work to allow more snow to be shoveled later. Here is the Buzz Flag before and after the first shovel. Update: After the second shovel, the post for the flag is nearly buried.



And here is the driveway finished for the first pass:



Update (2:30 p.m.):

The bobcat that was plowing our cu-de-sac conked out and had to be towed away. It quit right around 11 and a tow truck came out about 2. It took them about an hour to get it on the truck bed. At one point they were using a pickup truck with a plow blade to push it.



Update 2 (11:45 p.m.): The whole family came out for the final shovel of the night. You can see my son and I in this video clip finishing off the drive and the steps.



One final look at the close to being buried Buzz Flag:



But when the sun sets and the Christmas lights come on, there is a glow and peacefulness to the neighborhood that make the hassle and backbreaking work of the snow worth it.



More to come?

A Catonsville Fourth

The quaint little town of Catonsville, just over the river from Ellicott City, has an old-fashioned Fourth of July parade every year. What distinguishes it from other small town parades all over the country is the lengths people go to in order to secure prime seats for the show. Days ahead, people start lining the street with lawn chairs and blankets and benches. They use cord or cable or rope to secure their site and will often leave their family name taped to the lawn furniture.

This morning I rode my bike up the trolley trail to take in this display of possessive patriotism. The parade doesn't start until 3 p.m. but all these pictures were taken between ten and eleven this morning.


Folding chairs, beach chairs, camping chairs, it doesn't matter.


Some groups of chairs are more organized than others.


If you don't have enough chairs for the space you need to save, use police tape to reserve the extra space.


These were two of the nicest chairs on the route. People are mighty trusting with their stuff on the Fourth.


There is a brand new ice cream shop in Catonsville called You Scream. They marked off their section of the sidewalk for their customers. I had some delicious cherry italian ice because it looked so patriotic.


Nothing says patriotism like paying your taxes.


And some people take the color scheme to the extreme.


The Knight of Columbus want to wish you a happy Independence Day, hon.

So whatever you do today, celebrate the freedom and spirit that makes America great.

Hella Father's Day

We have two Father's Day traditions. I pick some place to go out to eat and my son and I go on a father-son bike ride. Usually the dinner place is a burger joint or barbecue. Definitely not anything upscale or fancy. This started several years ago when I wanted to do some biking on the Mount Vernon Trail and had heard of some obscure burger place in Alexandria called Five Guys. They only served burgers and hot dogs and fries. Now Five Guys are everywhere. The other day Barack Obama went to the Five Guys in south DC and made the news.

But a few weeks before that he went to another burger joint called Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington. He caused quite a kerfuffle among those willing to hate him for any reason whatsoever by asking for 'spicy mustard' aka Dijon. Right wingers took this as further evidence of Obama's inherent foreign-ness.

Hell Burger is not owned by Ray. There is no Ray. It is owned by Michael Landrum, a DC restaurateur known for his persnickity rules. His original steak place is called Ray's The Steaks, a bad pun it took even me a while to figure out (make better steaks, raise the stakes, get it?). Then he opened Ray's The Classics in Silver Springs which is about the best steaks in all of DC.

So when Obama went to Hell Burger, I knew I had no other choice since it intersected my two food eating obsessions, good burgers and eating where Obama eats (those places are for another day). The lines at Ray's restaurants are legendary and I knew it would take some planning to go there. I called the restaurant and got the voicemail machine which said they opened at noon Tuesday thru Sunday. We got there at 12:03 and we glided right into the small strip mall parking lot and miraculously found a space right out front but found the placed packed. It seems that according to the sign out front he really opens at 11:30.

There are actually two Hell Burgers. The one Obama went to is at 1713 Wilson Blvd and is a take-out line. The other is four doors down at 1725 where you can get a table and have your burger brought to you. This one seems to be the original Rays The Steaks and looks way too small to have ever been the toughest seat in DC.

I mentioned persnickity rules. The big one at Hell Burger is no claiming a table until you have placed your order. We saw this honored more in the breach as vultures stalked people leaving. It's one thing to have rules, it's another to enforce them. We placed our order and still got a great table out front.

And the burgers. Truly one of the greatest burgers ever. Ten ounces of prime beef cooked to order with dozens of toppings. Yeah, you can go crazy and get the $17.50 one with bone marrow and truffle oil, but you don't need to. Burgers start at $6.95 and most toppings are free. Fancier items like cheese range from a buck to four dollars for the Amish cave-aged cheddar. I went with the Vermont white cheddar it was the best cheese I have ever had on a burger. My wife had applewood bacon and it was what bacon was meant to be. And right on the table was ketchup, yellow mustard, and brown spicy mustard. This is America, you top your burger with what you want.

And these burgers were big. Two hands to hold and don't drip all over your ten dollar Chinese counterfeit Tommy Bahama shirt like I did. Good food is worth hunting down. And Hell Burger lives up to its name. It's one helluva burger.

Thousand Mile Ride

I rode a bicycle over a thousand miles this year. Not all at once and not all in the same place or even on the same bicycle, but it all adds up to over a thousand miles. I went on the ride that put me over the top yesterday afternoon. The winds were blustery and the roads still damp, but the weather was warm and I had been waiting a month for the right day to roll the odometer before 2008 was history.

Now a thousand miles probably counts as a slow week or two for Lance Armstrong (and speaking of Lance, he managed to knock-up his 26-year old girlfriend despite his much publicized testicular cancer. Even his swimmers are aggressively athletic), but it is quite a feat for me. While that averages out to less than twenty miles a week, it actually requires me to ride three or four times a week when the weather is nice.

I have been keeping meticulously anally-retentive (is that hyphenated?) records of my rides for four years now. Actually, they went back further than that, but I lost the first year’s records in a tragic hard-drive crash just before I rode the Seagull Century in 2004. I log the date, route description, total distance, total time, and time it took me to ride the first 2.5 miles. Two and a half miles is an odd little building block of my riding habits. If I keep a 15 mile per hour pace, it takes exactly ten minutes to ride 2.5 miles, which also equates to one mile ever four minutes. So if I’m bored with the scenery, I’ll try to calculate in my head how fast I have to ride for the next mile or two to get back on the target pace. I know, I am such a geek.

A thousand miles is more than I had ridden in the previous three years combined. I credit two factors: I managed to stay injury and accident free for twelve consecutive months. Since 2004 I have had a broken ankle, a torn ACL, and one smashed bicycle helmet. I also no longer have a dog to walk every morning which gives me a lot more free time for going on a quick spin on sunny summer mornings before work. I’d trade half those miles for having my dog back, but I try not to think that much about him because it still hurts.

I have standard routes that I ride around Howard County that take me through or past either Patapsco State Park, Dorsey Hall, downtown Ellicott City (my favorite) or Clarksville. Those names probably don’t mean anything to anyone not familiar with Hoco, but that’s how I roll, literally.

I also achieved a milestone that had eluded me the past few years, which is riding up Ilchester Hill. Going up from the Patapsco River, Ilchester Road climbs four hundred feet in less than a mile. A sign going the other way warns of an 18% grade. While I know of much better cyclists than myself that can loop that a couple of times, just getting up it once without keeling over is accomplishment enough for me. It took my second attempt this year to conquer it, but what a feeling of satisfaction mixed with exhaustion it is to make it all the way up.

But what I really enjoy are rides in new and unfamiliar places. This year I’ve taken bike rides in the San Jose valley, up and down Cape Cod, and across the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a lot of fun and a great way to see places up close and personal.

I don’t know what is in store for next year, but I’d like to ride another thousand miles. The forecast for Thursday is cold but sunny. It’s never too early to get a good start on the year.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Where should I go cycling in the coming year?

My New Driveway

Way back when I bought my townhouse, I vaguely noticed that the driveway slab closest to my garage door was slightly off kilter and formed a slight valley where it met the lower section of the driveway and the steps coming down from the front door. Over the years, this minor flaw has been a major hassle. When it rains the bottom step becomes a puddle that has to be jumped over to get to my car. In the winter it freezes solid and becomes the world's smallest ice rink. But now I think my troubles are over.

Loyal readers will recall me kvetching about a power outage back in October that resulted in a crew from Big Giant Utility (BGU) jackhammering a 2 foot by 2 foot hole in my driveway at two in the morning. They quick patched it with asphalt and said another crew would come by in about two weeks and saw cut and repour a band of the driveway. That sounded like it would look like crap, but who was I to argue.

Three weeks came and went and the uncompacted asphalt patch became a black sinkhole threatening to enrich a car suspension repair franchise. A call to BGU revealed that they had no record of the repair ever having been made probably due to lost paperwork from whichever subcontractor did the actual late night electrical repair. A team was dispatched to top off the original hole with asphalt and repairs were again promised in a week or two.

Three more weeks and another two or three phone calls to find the guy that fielded our first effort revealed that the paperwork still hadn't been properly filed which led to more promises. In the meantime some cracks had started to spiderweb out from the original hole. Then on Monday, which would be two months and five days after the original repair, I came home to the sight of half my driveway ringed with warning tape. The entire lower section of my driveway had been jacked out and replaced. And the pitch of the new slab matches that of the other section.

The drainage characteristics of the new driveway have been well-tested since then because it has rained nearly every day since with no ponding or pooling. I thank BGU for performing a long needed improvement at no cost to me.

However, they didn't bother to leave me any instruction on curing time. After two days of parking on the street, I tore down the warning tape and let my wife back in the garage while I made sure that my car is on the upper slab each night. Still in the ground are six three-foot tall metal spikes holding in the slab framing. I have no use for them and I have no idea if BGU is going to come back for them and take out the framing.

In the meantime I am just dreading the day one of us cuts the turn out of the driveway too sharp and scrapes the side of the vehicle with this semi-permanent lawn ornament. I think I'll call BGU and ask what I should do. In about three weeks.

When Worlds Collide

or Apologies To Amber

I was in the new area of Baltimore called Inner Harbor East doing some post-movie browsing in a chi-chi store when a woman approached me and asked me if I was yellojkt. Since I was wearing a Georgia Tech jacket I thought maybe she had asked if I was a yellow jacket. I looked back puzzled. She said “I’m Josh’s wife.” I thought back searching my memory banks for fellow alumni named Josh.

My wife jabbed me in the ribs and said “Your blog dummy.” And then it all clicked into place. This was Amber, the very lovely wife of internet celebrity Josh Fruhlinger. The Amber I had met just a few months earlier at Josh’s Jeopardy party. A person whose picture is on my blog.

I felt so embarrassed. We exchanged pleasantries and I told her to say “Hi” to Josh for me. I just want her to know that it’s me not her. I have a mind like a sieve that gets very disoriented when I run across people in unfamiliar contexts. I have a couple of equally embarrassing stories like that that I tend to pull out.

The classic one happened in college. My fiancé (now wife) had brought up her brother to Atlanta for week one summer. We decided to take him downtown to see the sights. We took the subway downtown and were coming out of the station when a large black woman started waving at me. My fiancé looked at me and I looked at this lady until she said “You don’t recognize me. You’re the turkey club.” And then it clicked. Every day for lunch I went to the cafeteria and had the same thing. A turkey club sandwich on a hoagie roll with mayo, lettuce and tomato. And this woman was the cafeteria worker that made it for me. Every day.

The really brutal moment was Monday at lunch when I had to go in for lunch. When I got up to the front of the line, she yelled to the whole line “Hey, I saw this guy downtown Saturday and he didn’t recognize me.” The whole line game me the raised eyebrow stare. I just grinned foolishly and took my turkey club.

The other time was right after I graduated from college and moved back to my hometown for a job. I hadn’t been to a dentist the entire time I was in college which is a ridiculously long time. My wife suggested I use the dentist she had used as a kid, so I made an appointment.

So I’m in the chair and the hygienist started the cleaning. Then she goes “Hey yello! How have you been? I haven’t seen you since your graduation party.” I just stared blankly. She sees my bafflement and introduces herself. Still no click. Then she says “I was dating Bob back then.” And at least I remembered Bob. Bob was the salutatorian of our graduating class. The guy that at our five year reunion got drunk and accused me of ruining his life. But I still couldn’t place her which is very embarrassing when the person with her fingers in your mouth know you but you don’t know them.

There you have it. If you run across me in real life and even if I have met you before, feel no shame in saying “I read your blog, dummy.” I need those kind of anvil-heavy contextual clues because I truly am that clueless.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do you have trouble recognizing people you should know?

Power Play

Andrew Sullivan in his Daily Dish blog used to run a feature called “The View Out Your Window” where he would run photos from all over the world that readers had taken out their window. Some of them were quite beautiful. Some weren’t. This picture was taken out my window at 2:15 am Thursday night/Friday morning.

Thursday I had come home and my wife announced that we only had power in half the house. I went around and checked the lights and examined the electrical panel. Sure enough, one whole side of the panel was off. My wife had checked with a few neighbors and they were only on partial power as well.

We called Big Giant Electric Company (BGE) and reported the problem before heading out to dinner. Since the master bedroom was part of the affected problem, I used that as an excuse to stay up until midnight catching up on my DVR inventory. After finally feeling my way into bed, my wife woke me up at 1:45 to say there was a knock on the door.

There in the road was a BGE truck with spotlights blazing and a safety vested crew racing around the neighborhood furiously spray painting the sidewalks. The foreman told me that the problem had been isolated to a short underneath my driveway and they would have to dig it up to fix it. They could do it now or they could have another crew come back in the morning. Here is where my sleep addled thought process went:

• I want my power back on.
• My neighbors probably want their power back on too.
• If I let the truck leave, there is no telling when they would come back.
• Nobody else seems to have noticed the blindingly bright road crew in their front yard.
• My nearest neighbors are a nurse and her daughter, an Air Force officer and his wife, and an elderly widow.
• I'm already awake.
  

I told the foreman to go ahead and break out the jackhammers but to stop if anybody came out to complain. I got some indication that maybe he wanted to go home for the night when he said, “Your neighbors are going to love you, man.”

It took about twenty minutes to jack up a three foot square hole in my driveway. You can see the chunks in the upper left of the photo. I have the back bedroom in my unit and I could hear the noise all the way back there through the closed third floor window. The neighbors on either side have the master bedroom in the front. And the Air Force guy had his window open. But nobody seemed to notice.

I was just starting to doze back off when at 3 am the lights all through the house blazed back on. I went outside to admire the still steaming patch of asphalt where I had used to have a concrete drive. The foreman said that another crew would be back within two weeks to sawcut and repour the concrete. We'll see.

I thanked his crew for their hard work and they said that they were now off for the night. And not one neighbor has said a word to me about the late night construction crew.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:What would you have done? Wait for morning, or get it done then?

Weighty Issues

It’s no secret to me that I have been putting on a few pounds. It’s been pretty apparent in the mirror for a few years. About four years ago, my wife joined FamousWeightLossProgram (FWLP) and I followed along and lost nearly thirty pounds. Since then I have put back on forty. Not a good trend.

I’ve been avoiding my doctor because he is a runner and very fit and a bit of a nag. Nonetheless, since I have a history of prostate cancer in my family, I’m supposed to get my innards tickled every couple of years.

Sure enough, I nearly tipped the scale at two bills. My doctor gave me the eat less/exercise more lecture and said he would send on the cholesterol report from my blood test, but he wasn’t expecting good news since those numbers track weight.

In reality, despite my ballooning weight, I have never felt more fit. I recently added jogging to my exercise mix of bicycling and walking. I can now jog at least three-quarters of the one mile lap around the local pool. On the weekends I will often bicycle twenty miles (or more if the route includes a bagel shop).

And as best I can tell, the numbers from my blood test, while not great, were far from cataclysmic. My blood pressure is 116 over 72. Even when I was about as active as a sofa cushion my blood pressure has always made doctors think I was a triathlete. My cholesterol was a respectable 167. The only category I was out of tolerance on was the LDL/HDL ratio which was 4.5, just a smidgen lower than the 5.0 ratio recommended. I guess I need more fiber or something, but I’m not about to go on prescription meds over that.

It seems everybody I know is on Lipitor or some other statin-type medicine. I’m very suspicious of Big Pharma and the continued trend of defining risk down to the point that nobody is healthy. When diabetes meant a lifetime of precisely timed insulin injections, it was a diagnosis doctors made reluctantly. Now that there are oral medications available, everybody goes on the meds at the drop of a blood sugar hat.

This is not to take lightly the people out there with serious health issues or risks. In fact, it is the opposite. When everybody is at risk, it's easy for the people that really need help to get swept aside.

Nonetheless, I could drop a few pounds and be even healthier. Several of our friends joined FWLP and my wife bowed to peer pressure and went along with them. Now I’m back to being the walking SillyPoints™ calculator since I reverse engineered the formula a few years back. While the SillyPoints™ algorithm is some patented trade secret all I’m going to say is calories divided by fifty plus fat grams divided by twelve. You’re on your own for figuring out the fiber grams bonus.

I make it a point of pride to not pay somebody to put me on a scale, I did go out and buy a FWLP endorsed scale that measures down to the tenth of a point. It costs about the same as five weigh-ins at FWLP, so I have to hold out from joining for another two months to recoup my investment. My last scale only did one pound increments and was rather prone to going out of calibration. This new scale claims to be able measure body fat, body mass index, blood alcohol level, and IQ score. So far I’ve just watched my weight bounce around a couple of pounds based on time of day and proximity to my morning constitutional.

One of the features that makes FWLP the market leader in weight management is its focus on accountability and public humiliation when you pack the pounds back on. But that is what the internet is for. More details to come.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is anybody ever happy with their body?

Sidewalk Sex Party

When I walk in my neighborhood, I notice lots of things strewn on the grass or in the street. Usually it's normal stuff like broken bottles or empty fast food bags. My dog used to be particularly good at finding out if there were any chicken bones or rolls left over.

Now I live in a nice suburban development. One time there was a dead deer in the road. Another time I found a crack pipe. I assume it belonged to the moving crew that was working that day and not one of the neighbors. Another time, while riding my bike past a local cemetery, there was a bra in the road.

But Sunday morning, I found a pile of things that just baffled me. It just didn't seem like the stuff people would leave between the sidewalk and the curb.



You can click on the picture for a bigger version, but here is the list of what I saw:

A roll of clothesline
The wrapper for a garden hose (hose missing)
Several latex gloves
A roll of clear wrapping tape
Bottle of rubbing alcohol
Length of black nylon strap
DSW Shoe bag (not pictured)
Wooden paint stirrer
Tube of Astroglide
Buttplug (or dog chew toy, but hopefully not both)
Two unopened condoms

I am just at a loss to put these items in any sort of narrative that makes sense to my not-so-sheltered mind. I mean, I know what you can do with these things, but why were they where they were. It had rained the day before and nothing looked weather-soaked. I stumbled past this about 8 am, well into the morning jogging/dog-walking hours, so plenty of other people had already walked right past it. And for the record, none of those items were mine. And they were all gone when I went by later that evening.

Help me out and tell me what I stumbled across. A BDSM lawn party? A roadside gay orgy? A disrupted fraternity hazing? A post-Republican National Convention celebration? What? All suggestions, bizarre or innocuous, are welcome.

The Next Yellow Jacket

My son goes off to college today. We put him on a plane to Atlanta so he could go to freshman orientation over the weekend. He has to go early because he is joining the marching band and their band camp starts in a week. In between he will be staying with my brother who lives in Atlanta.

Next Friday my wife and I will load up his belongings into our SUV and make the twelve hour drive to Atlanta so that we can move him into the dorm on the following Monday. Then we turn around and leave him on his own and head back to our empty nest.

If you have been following my intermittent posts about college hunting, you would know that my alma mater, Georgia Tech, home of the Yellow Jackets, was on his short list. He called it his safety school, and sadly it was. He applied to three more competitive schools but the roulette wheel that is the admissions process for ultra-selective schools came up double zeroes.

And while I could be accused of some sour grapes, I think he is just as well off. While he is very talented in math and science, we haven’t seen any evidence of the drive needed to succeed at schools as rigorous as some he applied to. Not that Georgia Tech is a basket-weaving summer camp. I have no doubt he will be challenged more than he expects to be. The hubris of youth is nearly unlimited.

The question I get asked most often is if I’m happy that he is going to my old stomping grounds. I am, but not for the reasons people assume. While I wear my school pride on my sleeve (and my internet alias), I was more interesting in getting him into a school that would be good for him.

The time to get a kid thinking about colleges is long before the post-PSAT mail blizzard starts filling your mailbox (and nowadays, your kid’s e-mail inbox). As you can tell by the picture, my subliminal soft-sell of GT over the years has been subtle and low key. But it has never been exclusively aimed at Tech.

From the age that he could walk, we have visited college campuses Over the years we have strolled the grounds and browsed the bookstores of places like Wake Forest, Duke, Chapel Hill, Stanford, Berkeley, Oklahoma State, Virginia and MIT among others. So when it was time to select colleges, we had lots of reference points. For awhile there I was worried that he wanted to be a Blue Devil. All he knew about Duke was that they had a good reputation and were big rivals of his dad's school. Fortunately, that phase passed.

Finding the right college is a game of matching the student with the school. And like personal relationships, there may not be One True Match, but there are fits that work better than others. My son wanted a strong engineering school in a metropolitan environment. And Georgia Tech fits that bill very well for him. For a different kid under different circumstances, I would feel very differently about shilling my school.

Parents want the best for their kids. Sending a kid off to college is the culmination of eighteen years of parenting and coaching and school trip chaperoning. After nearly two decades of daily involvement, it’s hard to let go. As we have been helping him pack, there have been a lot of tears, mostly my wife’s, but some of my own.

My son has been chomping at the bit to go off to college for at least a year now. He is embarking on a grand growth experience and has nothing but exciting times ahead. I hope he does well and has fun. And he will because he is not the one that has to head back to an empty house full of memories.

Tour Dem Parks

Yesterday, despite the heat, I went on the Tour Dem Parks charity bicycle ride. I like these little events sponsored by local charities where you pay a fee, do a ride, and get a tee shirt. While I admire people like HRH Courtney that can go out and raise a ton of money for a super-charity, that is not my style or level of dedication. This event was in support of Baltimore City Parks and the route went through as many as possible. Since the focus is on parks, many of which I had never even heard of, here are my impressions.

CARROLL PARK – The ride started and stopped here. I had never been to this park, the centerpiece of which is the Carroll Mansion which is one of those minor tourist attractions I have never been to. All over were signs to not park on the grass which would have been tempting had I not been so severely warned. Since I got there an hour early, I got real close parking and helped myself to some bananas for breakfast.

MIDDLE BRANCH PARK – From Carroll Park, the Gwynns Falls Trail runs through some of Baltimore’s finest industrial wasteland including the incinerator that welcomes visitors to Charm City. Once through there it becomes the part of Middle River Park, a nice sleepy park (and I say sleepy because a few people were sleeping on the park benches) along the Middle River that is part swamp and part open sewer. Right near the end of the park was a gorgeous boat house where some folks were washing something.

SOLO GIBBS PARK – Rejoining the main route took us around Ravens Stadium and then through Solo Gibbs Parks which as we navigated bollards and skinny paths seemed more residential playground than full-fledged park, but it was busy and went by fast.

FEDERAL HILL PARK - The route through Federal Hill was some of the most tedious with lots of cross streets and traffic, but the view from Federal Hill was worth it. Overlooking the entire Inner Harbor, this little park is one of the most charming places in Baltimore. Lots of riders were taking breaks for pictures and sightseeing. I had never actually been to the park before and it was smaller but prettier than I had imagined. Down below we could see a throng of runners on a charity run.



HARBORPLACE - While not technically a park, the Inner Harbor is definitely park-like and as we swooped through the plaza, we joined the route of the charity run (it might have been Susan Komen or Race For The Cure, I never quite got the name) all the way out to Canton. The race volunteers and traffic police kept yelling at the bicyclists to stay away from the runners and sometimes gave contradictory directions on which side of the street to stay on. Still, it was nice to have Boston Street closed to traffic.

O’DONNELL SQUARE – Canton is one of my favorite Baltimore neighborhoods, but we just zipped through once we were free of the runners.

PATTERSON PARK- Patterson Park is the largest park in Baltimore and should be a Central Park or Boston Meadows style centerpiece, but it isn’t. While well landscaped, it was a little shabby. The trail wandered through the hill and a large tree downed by recent storms nearly totally blocked one part of the path. Right at the southwest corner we went by a gorgeous mega-playground built like a fort that was completely kid free at 9 am on a Sunday morning. The first rest area was right in front of the Patterson Pagoda, a regional landmark. It was cool to see it up close.

CLIFTON PARK – The ride to Clifton Park was through some of the worst war-zone abandoned rowhouse areas of Baltimore. On the left just north of Johns Hopkins Hospital, there was a huge four block area that had been bulldozed clear. A big sign noting what is was for went by to fast to read. All the bicyclists waved at the ladies coming out of church in their Sunday finery and big hats. At Clifton Park, the bicylclists started getting confused about the route. It went up a large steep hill past the clubhouse of the infamous Clifton Golf Course and back down the other side.

HERRING RUN PARK – Right at this park I saw a Taco Truck setting up on the side of the road with a lot of guys in soccer jerseys setting up a field. Then it was around Lake Montebello on a very nice biking/jogging path. Past this point the route wandered through some very nice neighborhoods including the elderly housing apartments that stand where Memorial Stadium used to be. While not marked on the cue sheet, one park was surrounded by mansions and completely landscaped with flowers all in bloom.

WYMAN PARK – This shaded meandering park went by too fast to enjoy as we headed downhill to the next rest area across the street from the Stieff Silver Building. Here the heat was beginning to build and plenty of people were using the hose to cool off.

DRUID HILL PARK – Truly the crown jewel of Baltimore City, this park was busy with all sorts of activity. The route took us along the lake, past the conservatory and zoo and to a beautiful path behind the park that led down a steep switchback to the Jones Falls Trail. This trail kept appearing and disappearing as it led back into the central area of Baltimore.

MOUNT ROYAL - At this point I was getting confused and just following groups of riders and we wandered through the Mount Royal area. At one point in the median of a bigger road, a group of more serious cyclists were waiting at the route split for a lost buddy. The long route went from there west to the trailhead of the Gwynns Falls Trail. That was the trail/park I was really looking forward to but I checked my watch and odometer. I had gone over twenty-five miles already, it was after eleven and over ninety degrees. I headed back to the start.

CARROLL PARK – The route back went along MLK Boulevard past UMB and through some newer housing developments including one advertising townhomes in the low 300s. Back at the park, all the ballfields were busy and the announcers were booming over the speakers in Spanish. Back at the Carriage House, all bikers were crowding around the Gatorade. I had a hockey puck burger and a Chipotle pork taco before heading home.



It’s been several years since I did an organized ride in Baltimore and I loved the route of this one. You really saw all aspects of the city, good and bad. And there are some real hidden gem parks along the way. And if somewhere in your travels, you pass a wheezing, puffing guy in a loud gold GT biking jersey, that was me.