I used to have really vivid dreams, I've been a lucid dream practitioner, and I've generally enjoyed my sleeping life. However, the last year in staff has wreaked havoc with my natural sleep cycle. I have a hard time remembering my dreams now.

I'd like to get back to normal, so I've been concentrating the last few nights on dream recall. This morning, I finally remembered one, so I thought I'd write it down.

( There's a boring dream behind the cut. )

I haven't regularly kept up with journaling in... well, let's be honest, ever. There have been times when I've sworn I would do it, but things tend to get in the way.

I have a nice off-line LJ editor installed now, and I'm going to give it another go. If long, boring, tortured, mostly-for-my-own-consumption life updates aren't your thing, then just move along to the next link on your "friends" page, m'kay?

( Click here if you really want to continue. )

Hey, I haven't posted a real entry in forever and I have a lot rolling around in my head. So naturally I'll procrastinate and post this instead, because it helps feed my deep-seated need for snooty one-upmanship.

Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged "unread" on LibraryThing.

The rules:
bold = what you've read,
italics = books you started but couldn't finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you've read more than once
underline = books you own but haven't read yourself


1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke - currently in progress

2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
25. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
28. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
46. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
51. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
56. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
57. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
61. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
62. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen
66. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
69. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
70. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
72. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
73. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
75. Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse by Jared Diamond
80. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
82. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole?
84. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
85. Watership Down by Richard Adams*
86. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
87. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
88. Beowulf by Anonymous
89. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
93. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
94. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
96. Possession by A.S. Byatt
97. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
98. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
103. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Does anybody actually read these things?

You are The Chariot

Triumph, Victory, Overcoming Obstacles.

The chariot is one of the most complex cards to define. On its most basic level, it implies war, a struggle, and an eventual, hard-won victory. Either over enemies, obstacles, nature, the beasts inside you, or to just get what you want. But there is a great deal more to it. The charioteer wears emblems of the sun, yet the sign behind this card is the moon. The chariot is all about motion, and yet it is often shown as stationary. It is a union of opposites, like the black and white steeds. They pull in different directions, but must be (and can be!) made to go together in one direction. Control is required over opposing emotions, wants, needs, people, circumstances; bring them together and give them a single direction, your direction. Confidence is also needed and, most especially, motivation. The card can, in fact, indicate new motivation or inspiration, which gets a stagnant situation moving again.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Snow can wait
I forgot my mittens
Wipe my nose
Get my new boots on
I get a little warm in my heart
When I think of winter
I put my hand in my father's glove
I run off
Where the drifts get deeper
Sleeping beauty trips me with a frown
I hear a voice
"Your must learn to stand up for yourself
Cause I can't always be around"
He says
When you gonna make up your mind
When you gonna love you as much as I do
When you gonna make up your mind
Cause things are gonna change so fast
All the white horses are still in bed
I tell you that I'll always want you near
You say that things change my dear

Boys get discovered as winter melts
Flowers competing for the sun
Years go by and I'm here still waiting
Withering where some snowman was
Mirror mirror where's the crystal palace
But I only can see the myself
Skating around the truth who I am
But I know, dad, the ice is getting thin

When you gonna make up your mind
When you gonna love you as much as I do
When you gonna make up your mind
Cause things are gonna change so fast
All the white horses are still in bed
I tell you that I'll always want you near
You say that things change my dear

Hair is grey
And the fires are burning
So many dreams
On the shelf
You say I wanted you to be proud of me
I always wanted that myself

He says
When you gonna make up your mind
When you gonna love you as much as I do
When you gonna make up your mind
Cause things are gonna change so fast
All the white horses have gone ahead
I tell you that I'll always want you near
You say that things change
My dear

Never change

All the white horses

After years of resistance, my journey towards the dark side is complete.

We walked into the Apple Store last Sunday and walked out with an iMac. And about 5 minutes ago, I ordered two MacBook Pros, one for myself and one for bigangel. I already love the iMac.

Really, Bill Gates has no one to blame for my switch but himself. I had heard the horror stories about Vista but assumed that, like most things in the format wars, they were overblown. Our desktop died a while back, and I bought a pretty well-equipped HP last fall. It should have been great. It had a really pretty monitor, and I spec-ed the whole thing specifically for video editing. With the amount of raw computing power available for so little money these days, I figured it would be no problem.

Boy, was I wrong.

Even using the dinky little "edit your home movies" program that IS A PART OF THE VISTA OS was a nightmare. Every time I tried to edit anything, the machine would crash. It rendered better to the internal hard drive than to the external firewire drive (and if you know anything about editing, you know what a head-scratcher that is). It was, in short, unusable. Our previous desktop machine, purchased about 6 years ago (and NOT anywhere NEAR top-of-the-line at the time) was much better behaved when it came to editing.

The straw that finally broke the camel's back, though, was when I tried to sync my WINDOWS mobile device, using WINDOWS software (and I mean Outlook... not exactly a "beta" product) to my WINDOWS desktop. It took, literally, 5 FREAKING HOURS.

Between that and the lipstick-on-a-pig half-assedness that seened to permeate the OS overall, I was finally, after countless years as a Windows user, done. I sold the beast to a co-worker last week and as soon as Steve Jobs gets around to shipping our new laptops, I can rule the universe together with him as father and son.

Or something like that.

I've done well in my last few races.

A few weeks ago, I decided I'd try a new tactic. In the last lap, there's usually there's a lot of looking around, holding back, and strategizing for the final straightaway sprint. The majority of that final lap is often kind of slow as everybody saves themselves for the end. I decided I'd try to exploit that.

In the final lap, I sat in around 3rd wheel for the first half and then, just as we approached the 180 degree turn in the middle of the course, I attacked hard. There's always a bit of a slowdown for the sharp turn, but my bike handling is getting better and I knew I could take it pretty fast. I went a little wide and had to hit my brakes coming out of the turn, allowing another rider who reacted fast to get past me. He wasn't slowing down, so I jumped on to his wheel and we blazed through the rest of the lap to the final sprint. In the end, there were just 2 other riders who could match our speed. In the final sprint, I came around and beat the guy I was drafting, and the other two came around and beat me. Luckily for me they were in a higher category, so I won my first race!

Two weeks ago, I used a similar strategy with exactly the same result, although I was doing all the leading out that time. 2 wins in 2 weeks!

Last week, I wanted to try to win the whole damn thing, not just my category, so I hung back a little more in the pack with the intention of pulling around several riders in the sprint. Not a good decision. I got caught out behind a couple of slower sprinters as the lead riders got a slight gap in the final straightaway. In the end, I placed 3rd in my category. Still a podium finish!

This Thursday is the final week of the crit series. I have a last-lap plan in mind. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully I can finish out the season with a decisive win.

If you feel like it, come out and watch (or participate in) the action! There will be a grill set up (bring some meat), music, free Sweet Leaf tea, tables, chairs, shade, and a lot of company. And WOMEN RACE FREE this week, though you'll need to buy a 1 day USCF license ($10) if you don't have one. They had the same deal last week and there was a very large female turnout; enough so that the ladies got their own race. If you've been contemplating giving road racing a shot, this is a great time to do it (yes, I'm looking directly at you, sophiedbarker)!

My bicycle racing over the last few months has dramatically improved. My fitness level is getting higher and the technical aspects of a criterium are coming along nicely after a lot of practice, most of the work focusing on accelerations at speed and cornering.

I've been racing regularly in the Thursday night crits at the Driveway race track. Last week, I took a flyer off the front... WAAAAY too early. I was feeling good, and the pace seemed really low, so away I went. Unfortunately, I didn't bring it back in as quickly as I should have, and I blew up. The group caught me and spit me out the back, forcing me to finish the race in a long grinding time trial. Oh well, lesson learned.

This week, I decided to play it a lot smarter. The pace seemed low again. I was in no difficulty whatsoever. I took a few pulls at the front. I kept my eye on the "laps to go" sign. I got myself in position for the inevitable accelerations near the end of the race. So far, so good.

The bell rang for the last lap, and things ramped up. We were cooking along, but I was still feeling really, really good. The group strung out in a long line and gaps started appearing in the field as the weaker riders faded off the back. I was positioned in 5th, glued to the wheel in front of me.

In the second half of the track at the Driveway, there's a sharp left-hand turn, a left-right-left s-turn that starts mild on the left-right and then finishes out in a sharper left-hand turn. After that, there's maybe 200 feet of straightaway to the finish line. We screamed around the first left-hand turn and it was a full-on sprint as we powered through to the s-turn. I felt great; there was a lot of gas left in the tank. I was certain I could use at least the guy in front of me as my lead out man and maybe even jump one more place up for a top 3 finish.

As we hit the last left-hand turn at somewhere above 30 miles an hour, I could clearly see where to aim my bike, where there would be holes opening up. A real field sprint is awesome, exhilarating, like a roller coaster ride with your heart rate pegged somewhere in the 190s. It happens in a split-second and in slow-motion all at once.

The first two riders took the turn a little wide, and rider number three dove a little inside. It was a good line, and rider four and myself followed, sure that decision would allow us to snake right past rider one and two. But then, as we were right in the middle of the turn...

Catastrophe!

Rider number three went down! There being more friction in his body than his bike, he slid right down the middle of the pavement while his bike skated right! Rider number four sat up a hair, trying hard to take a line to the right of the sliding bike, with me right behind him. For a brief second, I thought we were going to make it, that we would stay upright and on the track. Then the sliding bike caught on something and spun right into our path! For another brief second I thought we were going to go right over the downed bike, a mass of sharp metal, spinning tires, and soft, yielding flesh. We pushed it a little farther right, though, and suddenly rider four was rolling, separated from his bike as the pavement ended! I was still upright as I hit the grass, riding my bike straight up rider four's back. I fell over as I stopped, landing softly on my knee in the grass.

Game over. No top three finish, but no broken bones, either. No broken bike parts. Not even any road rash. Just disappointment mixed with dissipating adrenaline and a big shot of gratitude.





Just wait until next week.

I've never been to Asia. But I have a question for those of you who have. Is it socially acceptable in some Asian countries (I have no idea where they're from) TO EAT WITH YOUR MOUTH WIDE OPEN while INCESSANTLY SMACKING YOUR LIPS, as the table full of people next to me are doing?!?!?!

I seriously wish I had my mp3 recorder with me. I would be laughing out loud right now if I weren't shuddering in revulsion. It's seriously AMAZINGLY loud! And there are 3 of them doing it!

I've been racing my bike in criteriums on Thursday nights out at the "Driveway," a really nice racetrack off of 183 designed for car and cart racing (making it fast and smooth). It has been a lot of fun, and this last week I can officially say I hung with the fast kids. Well, the fast kids in my category, anyway.

I didn't contest the sprint at the end or anything, but I finished with the lead group and was never in any real difficulty. I've been practicing my accelerations and cornering a lot since I started racing, and that has no doubt helped tremendously. A few more weeks, and I'll be ready to take a flier off the front just to see what happens.

Vino did not look good today. He sat near the back of the peleton, even during the final sprint. That's not race leader behavior. You may be recovering, but you shouldn't look vulnerable doing it.

Kloden, his main mountain lieutenant, has serious problems, riding with a hairline-fractured coccyx. He had to be towed back into the field a few times today by his teammates. I doubt he'll finish the tour.

And Mark Biver, the Astana team manager, seemed pessimistic after the stage.

Which all leads up to this weekend. The next two days are crucial. The conventional wisdom is that Vino must just limit his losses and tread water until he has some time to recover. To wait for the Pyrenees. I wonder, though. If anyone might launch an insane attack when it's least expected, it's Vino.

Others will be testing him, however. The man on the right in the picture is the Australian Cadel Evans. He's been one of those "might-be" riders up to this point in his career. He's shown promise, he seems to have the ability, but the desire, the fire, the desperate need to win at all costs, have not really revealed themselves in his character. If he looks deep down inside this weekend and finds those things, there might just be a new leader by Monday, and a powerful new force driving the peleton.

Don't count Vino out just yet, though. One of the things Biver did say today was this: "[Alexander] will die on the bike if he has to. He'll do everything to stay in the Tour."

But will it be enough? Or will the cracks appear on the grueling alpine hell that will be unleashed on these men over the next two days?

Only time will tell.

The Tour de France started last Saturday.

I seem to have a penchant for supporting doomed riders. I was a Jan Ullrich fan for years. He played second fiddle to that giant walking sphincter who goes by the initials Lance Armstrong.

For the last few years, I've admired the rise of Alexander Vinokourov. He embodies what I love about cycling. He fully embraces the inhuman suffering of the sport. I really don't think there's another sport on the planet that asks so much of its participants day after day after day. And when things look the bleakest, Vino rises to the occasion. He fights and fights, even when, as in the 2005 Tour, he has to fight even his teammates.

Yesterday, Vino fell. Hard. It happened at a really inopportune moment, and it was interesting to watch the reaction of the rest of the peleton. In the past, when a contender was delayed by mechanical problems or falls, the other leaders would ease up a bit and wait for them to rejoin. Maybe it's because the riders feel there's no clear favorite this year, or maybe the sport is just changing, but CSC clearly pressed the attack as Vino assembled his team and tried to chase.

It was, in my estimation, a shitty thing to do. It was also, in my estimation, a big mistake. Because although the cycling press is having a field day playing up the import of the 1 minute 20 seconds Vino lost yesterday and making predictions that his injuries and pain portend the "end" of Vino's tour, I remember 2005. I remember a man who was shelled, off the back, dropped, in the mountains. And I remember a man who, when that happened, seemed to find something deep within himself that many other riders lack. I remember a man who would not stop fighting back. When physically over-matched, he somehow pulled himself back up to the leaders time and again. A man who even attacked on the Champs Elysees and won the last stage; a stage that no one but a sprinter can win.

It doesn't pay to piss a man like that off. And there's a whole lot of bicycle racing left in this tour. A whole lot of opportunities for a whole lot of pretenders to the throne to have problems of their own. Don't expect Vino to show any mercy.

N+1 = Ideal # of bicycles
N = Current number of bicycles

I, like most bicycle owners who actually use their bikes, live by the above equation. Currently, I'm coveting a full carbon racing machine.

And...

I have always loved Dutch-style city bikes. Until recently, they've been really hard to find in the States. You could find the occasional import, but they were astronomically priced. Also, the imports you could find tended to be the newer-styled machines. Functional, but kind of plain, looking too much like a modded mountain bike or a hybrid.

That's not what I've wanted. I've always wanted an "Opa:" black, skirt guard, full chain case, classic. A Raleigh 3 Speed would fit the bill, but the cost of refurbishing one always seemed too high.

And then something happened this year in the U.S. bicycle industry. I don't know what the impetus was, maybe it's related to gas prices. In any case, this spring, just about every manufacturer started offering a real live city bike! These are the kind of bikes the U.S. industry abandoned 30 years ago to focus on "race-inspired" machines. These are bikes that AVERAGE, NORMAL people can ACTUALLY USE for TRANSPORTATION!

Some of them are the same models that they've sold overseas for years (see the Specialized Globe), but Electra... oh, Electra. Electra went all Old Skool with THE AMSTERDAM. It's perfect. 3 speed internal hub, tire-dynamo headlight, full chain case, rack, bell, the works! It's the quintessential "Opa."

Since moving back into town, I've realized that, outside of work, we rarely drive more than 4 or 5 miles. That's biking distance, friends. I have a perfect cycling artery right outside our door that takes me to directly to 38th street, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Hell, I can get to Auditorium Shores in 7 miles, without ever riding on a major street.

Compound the "covet" factor with the "this-is-dumb-why-are-we-driving-2-miles" factor, and the pull of the Amsterdam was too much to resist.

So I bought one.

And, since I have a family, C. had to have a suitable cruiser too. So she's the proud owner of a very pink Electra Townie, complete with a wicker basket. A sweet ride. And although she'll be using a trail-a-bike or a trailer for longer trips, M. has been hard at work learning to ride her genuine vintage Schwinn Pixie (that literally weighs more than my road bike!). So it's been all bikes all the time at Heidel Central.

If you know us personally, you'll be seeing a lot of our cruisers. Tooling around on them is effortless. Most local trips take about the same amount of time on them compared to driving, when you factor in parking. And most importantly, you get a really happy, hard-to-describe feeling when you're on a bike that puts you in the same riding position as that banana-seat Schwinn with the ape hangers you had in fifth grade.

I've pored over Google Earth. Our routes to all major attractions are memorized. All systems are go.

I feel like Pee Wee!

I raced in my first criterium this weekend. If you care nothing for bike racing, this will be a pretty boring post and I suggest you move on. But if the intarweb tubes weren't made for pointless naval-gazing, I don't know what they were made for.

I have a data plan on my mobile. That's the only reason you're reading this (IF anyone is actually reading it). The power's gone. Right now, there's no mobile service either, but I've set this entry to auto-post when (if) the cell towers are back on-line. That could be hours, days, weeks. Who knows.

What a way to spend my birthday. What a birthday to have. If anyone's ever able to pick up the broken pieces of civilization, I'm sure there will be memorials, moments of silence, the whole shooting match. On my birthday, June 13th. Great.

So...

Nanowrimo actually got me to get off my dead ass and write a book. Not a very good one, but a book nonetheless.

And...

I'm way, way overdue with a screenplay I was supposed to finish last summer. Somebody's waiting on it.

Therefore...

It stands to reason that Scriptfrenzy will work for me. The same people who put together Nanowrimo have designated June as the "write-a-script-in-a-month-with-a-bunch-of-people-participating-to-encourage-camaraderie-and-actually-finishing" month.

So here goes. The clock starts ticking on Friday.

So... we've just finished up 6 months of a program called Body-for-LIFE. We've taken pictures throughout, and we had our "after" pictures done by a pro.

Some of the results have been pretty dramatic. You can click on this link to see a slideshow with some before and after pictures.

I bring a new baby home tonight.






I'm very excited.

I'll write a trip report soon. In the meantime, photos are up on Flickr.