tonight was the last night of sailing class (i passed and am now officially a novice sailor). after class, i unlocked my bike and then in the process of locking the chain around my waist, proceeded to break the key off in the lock. yay! so now i have a rather thick chain wrapped pretty snugly around my fairly thin waist and was feeling like maybe the dumbest person in the universe.

i asked the instructors if they had a set of bolt cutters. they didn’t, but through alternating chuckles and sighs, they said that they had a dremmel tool that would work. not wanting to stand there watching one dude cut into my waist while three other dudes stood there watching the spectacle for 20 minutes, i asked if they had alternate suggestions, which is when the main dude came up with, ‘dude, you should to to the firehouse. firemen always have bolt cutters.’ (i will remember this forever.)

so i rode home, took a picture or two, and went to the firehouse, conveniently located two blocks from my house. i knew the firemen would be awesome when i saw that one of them had a road bike parked next to the firetruck. and they were awesome (and jaded — firemen have seen everything and are totally unphased by small shit); they were able to get the key to turn in the lock and didn’t have to resort to the bolt cutters. they also didn’t make me feel super-stupid, which was nice of them, since i was already feeling normal-stupid.

mia got lasik done today and i got to watch/comfort/drop my jaw in amazement at modern science. the good news is that she can now see without glasses — one minute(!) after some oddly clockwork orange/chien andalou (both nsfw!) eye-opening/eye-slicing surgery (which was pretty awesome and pretty insane to watch from my ringside seat), she had 20/30 vision. the bad news is that it hurt when the valium wore off, so she’s now in a deep vicodin-induced sleep. i think that the wake-up-in-pain-request-a-vicodin cycle is going to persist until tomorrow morning’s follow-up appointment. and of course, lots of different eyedrops.

to summarize: cool to watch, cool that she can see, cool that she came out of it ok (touch wood), but megabummer that there’s so much pain.

also, in rereading this post, it seems that it was maybe written by an in-love-with-quirky-punctuation(and parentheticals) 12-year-old. bleh.

pardon my pigpile but this is really the biggest news story of the day?

what i love about this whole brouhaha is that it brought itself to life inside a vacuum of its own creating. tell me that’s not heavy. right-leaning news outlets are all about the muslim, kill whitey, unpatriotic, terrorist fist-bumping rhetoric. no one outside of people who are 100% plugged into left-leaning news commentary actually know that any of this back-and-forth is going on (i took an independent poll). then the obviously left-leaning and obama-loving new yorker puts image to the left-leaning news commentary about right-leaning rhetoric and everyone (obama included) lambastes them and it’s all over every news outlet in the country and everyone is running to make sense of what’s happening. and unless my math is incorrect, i’m pretty sure that this story is going to collapse under its own weight right about… now.

i guess we can have his gun now.

r.i.p.

apparently the spam filters at work are asleep at the switch because this gem got through to a design list this morning.

and the thing is, for one second, i thought this was an email from a design consultancy with a pretty awesome and edgy sense of humor, alerting us to their presence at the Reno SCI Convention and Design Summit. turns out it was just dead cats in my inbox at 8:30am.

also, you are now looking at the proud owner of bigbiglions.com. because bigbigloins.com was taken. just kidding. i think.

the tiny cottage where i spent a few days last week is about a block from the narragansett bay, which i remember from my youth as being incredibly polluted and sort of foul, though i never cared enough not to swim. i’m happy to report that it seems cleaner every year.

after each day’s 10-17 mile run, i’d go for a swim to help my legs recover (this really helps and was much nicer than the freezing cold baths i take after my long runs in seattle). over the course of two days, i saw giant conch shells, a starfish, and the biggest school of fish i had ever seen. i stood in waist-deep water with the sun on my back for 5-10 minutes waiting for the continuous stream of fish to peter out so that my swimming wouldn’t break them apart. about 50m out, a big fish jumped out of the water, grappling with a smaller one. it was a magic moment where i felt like i was of an ecosystem, in more than just an abstract way.

when the school of fish thinned, i went for a short swim and then came back onto shore to dry off in the sun. it was then that i heard trickling water running down the street and into the bay. i went to check it out when i was assaulted by the smell of chlorine. yes, someone was closing their pool for the season and letting all the incredibly toxic chlorine dump into the bay. i felt like that indian guy on that 70s please-don’t-litter psa. only i’m not indian. though neither was he. the indian was sicilian, the half-greek is half-italian.

bummer.

or something is rotten in the state of denmark. word up.

the chicken (above, in mid-flight) has flown the coop. ©afp

how many dudes wearing the yellow jersey get fired five days before they ride down the champs elysees being cheered on by enormous crowds? you’d think it impossible but you’d be wrong. today danish mountain goat michael rasmussen got sacked.

from velonews:
“He broke team rules,” explained Rabobank spokesman Jacob Bergsma, who said team officials believed Rasmussen had lied to them regarding his whereabouts in June of this year, when UCI and Danish Cycling Federation officials had been unable to locate the rider for out-of-competition [drug] testing.

Bergsma said the team officials learned that when Rasmussen had said he was in Mexico - where his wife lives - he had actually been in Italy, working with an as-of-yet-unnamed doctor.

Late last week, Danish federation officials announced that Rasmussen had been ejected from that country’s national squad and would not be representing Denmark at the world championships or at next year’s Olympic Games.

To add insult to injury, Rasmussen was also forced to fend off charges that he had attempted to trick a friend into transporting a cutting-edge hemoglobin replacement from the U.S. to Italy in 2002.

from jay:
asshole.

from velonews:
“Double stage Alexandre Vinokourov (Astana) learned Tuesday that he had tested positive for homologous blood doping following his victory in Saturday’s individual time trial.

Vinokourov and his Astana team have reportedly withdrawn from the Tour.”

asshole.