Biking Purgatory

The bike ride to work was pretty rough this morning. Usually it's my lungs which are the limiting factor in my ride, as my endurance - especially lung-wise (whatever that means) - has never been very good. But today it was my legs which were saying, "I dunno, boss, I don't think we're gonna make it." I pushed on and did get to work okay, but they were really straining toward the end. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong; I think I was just tired and haven't been getting quite enough sleep to compensate for all the activity I've been engaging in.

Thank goodness for weekends!

Also on my morning ride, I decided to take the route to work that I used last year, rather than the one I've been using (with certain variations) this year. Part of it is substantially easier, and part of it is a whopping pain in the ass. I find that I much prefer going up short, steep hills over long, gradual hills. Again, I think it's an endurance thing; I can put on huge bursts of energy for short periods of time, but over a long period I wear down rapidly. (I think my leg muscles are actually pretty powerful right about now, but they have to move 230 pounds of me around, so relatively speaking it's still quite a bit of work.)

But I think I like the new route better. But a little variation once in a while is a good thing.

I'm watching Tracy's cats this weekend while she's on vacation. She lives about half a mile on the other side of Epic from me, so I biked out there after work, tackling a couple of decent-sized hills in the process (although neither of them were real killers). After playing with the cats for a little while I geared up to bike home -- and discovered it to be raining out! I'd heard there was a chance of thunderstorms this afternoon, but hadn't quite believed it.

So I hung out for another half-hour or so until the worst had passed, and then set out. It continued to rain lightly-but-steadily for the whole ride home, which was pretty damned annoying. My sneakers got soaked (somehow), and my bag got a little damp (although for the most part it did a good job of staying water-resistant). And then I discovered a little something perhaps best highlighted by the following exchange I had last summer:

MHR: So what's the difference between all these different bicycle helmets?

Sales Clerk: Well, they're all designed to meet certain minimum safety standards.

MHR: So the difference between a 40-dollar helmet and a 100-dollar helmet is...?

Sales Clark: The expensive helmets are engineered to provide better ventilation.

But all-in-all it wasn't a terrible ride home, and the rain let up later on so I could walk downtown to do some reading. It rained again while I was in the coffee shop, but looks to have pretty much stopped as I write this.

Ah, adventures in bicycling.

I placed an order with Amazon.com earlier this week, and had a very pleasant experience with their customer service staff. I realized that I'd wanted to add one more CD to my order, and they let me simply place a second order with the new CD, and then merged the two orders together to save on shipping. Both reps I communicated with (via e-mail) were very helpful and courteous; I was impressed.

In the process, I discovered that even Amazon.com's software has some "workarounds". While I was placing my second order, the rep put my first order "on hold". How did he do this? He simply changed the payment type from "credit card" to "check" - clearly just a tricky way to put something on hold without having an actual "hold" flag. As a programmer who has come up with his fair share of workaround in his day, I was rather pleased to have noticed this (and I think they were a little surprised when I pointed it out).

Yes, the order has a bunch more jazz albums on it. Yes, I also took out another eight or so CDs from the library earlier this week. Yes, I've bought some other albums in the meantime. Yes, I'll probably do another Big Jazz Entry here in the next week or so. Don't you feel special?

Michael Rawdon (Contact)