Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

Sunrise through the cherry blossoms this morning on my first weekday morning ride of the year. Absolutely gorgeous.

Also pretty darned cold. My little balcony thingey says 46, though the official temperature at the airport across the river says 38. Either way, chilly when you’re cycling. I’m glad I changed my mind at the last minute and put on the fleece tights. As I sit here in the apartment my arms and toes are still a little chilled, but the shower will solve that. This was supposed to be the coldest morning this week, so I’m hopeful it won’t be this bad again this season.

Not my fastest ride ever, but the point was just to get out there and do it, not necessarily to be a speed demon on the roads. Didn’t see anyone else from the club out there (and it’s hard to miss me, between the club jersey, wind vest and arm warmers – I look like superman in the club’s blue with all the red and white on it), but that should pick up as it warms up. I thought I’d see one or two of our die hards, but perhaps they’re avoiding the Point until the blossoms are done and the tourists are gone (and yes, there were tourists out, even at that hour, catching pictures of the sun just hitting the blossoms as it came over the Washington Channel).

I’ve been cutting back on my caffeine intake again, with a goal of eliminating it from my diet during the week. I’m tired of being dependent on it to get going in the mornings, and would prefer to be able to use it more strategically and not as a “must have” drug. So far so good, though yesterday was dragging. All part of getting back to training and getting my body back into shape. I wrote off yesterday for exercise, but I want to get back to the schedule I was on last spring before the injury – MWF Run in the morning, swim in the evening (with Wed as the weekly long run), TuThSa bike, Su completely off. That worked well as I recall, and kept me on track with a single weekend day to be a complete bum (and one night to be able to go out without worrying about the next morning’s workout). I’m still on the fence about the Columbia triathlon (Olympic distance) in May, but if I can stick to that I think I can do it, even if I’ll be slow on the run.

Holy shit, it’s Tuesday evening. As in “it’s already Tuesday evening,” and also “is it only Tuesday?” all in one. The time change threw my already precarious balance with sleep and the morning meetings completely off. Add to that a host of “too much work-itis” and you have a mix that’s just been more than a bit nuts. Oh, and social and cult/co-op obligations most of the week as well.

I fully expect my candle to be completely burnt out by Saturday evening.

I will cut my participation in the cult thing short tomorrow if I still find myself in need of sleep. Won’t be able to keep functioning otherwise, and frankly I despise those things and would like as little to do with the process as possible. The folks who are most vocal at these things are batshit-crazy and best avoided under normal circumstances. And then they wonder why they can’t get more participation. Despite the advantages of desk service and on-call maintenance, it is enough to drive one away from communal living arrangements.

The boy bingo has been interesting. Did confirm something based on a friend’s post from day or so ago – I have no tolerance for the folks who lie about their age online. I’m not talking about “oops, had a birthday a month ago and forgot to update,” but rather the deliberate attempt to blur one’s identity by moving up or (more likely) down in age in some vain attempt to make one look more attractive. The last few times I’ve run across that it hasn’t been a pleasant thing, and it engenders a sense of distrust in the person and who they ultimately are under their public persona.

Insulating yourself from the world is so much easier. If you have no contact, there are no boys to have to meet, and be interested in, and turn down, or say yes to, or decide among. And that’s comforting, not having to decide. “But how can you know what you want, ‘Til you get what you want, and you see if you like it?” Meh. Boys are so difficult.

That said, I ran into Doug on the way to dinner. Was good to chat in person, even for only two Metro stops. I do miss being as social as I was. But I’m going to get busy soon with my new triathletes as they gear up to their July race, and work is absolutely freakin’ insane now (I was out at the bar tonight and got email indicating that OMB disagreed with the position we’d taken, taking the position I’d originally taken inside the agency on a particular issue before I was overruled – schaden-correct-view-of-the-law-what?? Friday will be interesting.).

And then there’s, of course, a boy who’s flirting from tonight. As well as boys from previous nights. And boys I’d like to get to know, and boys I’d like to avoid encouraging (despite trying to be polite). Boys are, well, odd. And they force decisions. The gentleman whom I had the date with last weekend is out; he snored, and smoked, both pretty annoying on their own, but deadly in combination. There was another man I was sort of interested in from previous contacts online and in person, but he wasn’t there tonight when I was at the bar, so another gent who was more insistent seems to have gotten my attention for the immediate moment. Despite my warning him off, he’s still interested, so we’ll see how this goes. Dating is difficult, but I’m not trying to race to one definite goal, so we’ll see where the various wanderings take me

Following the stress of this past week, I ended up going out on Thursday to meet the regular crew at JR’s, then on Friday, in a convoluted fashion, I ended up at the new Ziegfield’s/Secrets. Two late nights, and even without drinking terribly much, it was more of that sort of stress than I’m used to. It was fun, but I don’t see how some guys do that week after week.

Tonight’s plan is a dinner date, sober, with one of the regular crew from Thursday. Don’t know if it’ll go very far past this as I hadn’t realized he smoked when I agreed to the date, but hey, we’ll see how it goes. Can’t really do much past dinner because I’d like to bike or run tomorrow, and I need more normal sleep pattern back before the upcoming work week and the new stresses that will entail.

On a side note, I wonder if anyone has studied whether people buy less cologne/perfume in jurisdictions where they don’t allow smoking in the bars.

It was interesting to see that Z/S is within walking distance, as long as you feel safe walking through/around the public housing between there and the cult co-op. The experience was a bit crowded; I don’t think they have a very good layout for the bars – too crowded and too few bartenders. Getting ignored by one bartender as he worked the back bar didn’t help my impression of the service. No dancing upstairs, either, despite a large dance floor and lots of dance music playing for the dancers.

As far as habits and coping mechanisms, knitting seems to be a healthier alternative to drinking. So far.

Long, long, long day. We have agreement on the stimulus bill, but no text yet to see what’s changed and what they still left there and fucked up. And there was some truly fucked up stuff in there, like mandated competition for grants, all grants, even the ones which are just supposed to be spread among the states evenly by some sort of formula (because it’s smart to have, say, Delaware competing against New Jersey for grant money). Not brilliant, but typical of rushed legislation with good intentions.

Got several more rows done on the hat, the decreases and slips in the rounds have started. It’d look better if my stitches in the cables were more even, but I’m still pleased with how it’s coming out, and I think K will like it. There’s a bit of an increased urgency now, as she started chemo on Monday, and radiation this week as well (1 day of chemo, 5 of radiation each week – yowch). So I want to get it done and off to her this weekend so she’ll have it if she needs it. Plus I need to know if I’ll need any more of the yarn, since my one supply is waaaaay out in Vienna. It’s supposed to knit up from one skein, but that can vary, and I’ve heard other folks say they’ve needed a smidge more than a skein to finish these.

So, yeah, instead of going out to drink, or staying home to drink, I popped in more bad movies and got a bunch of knitting done. And now it’s crash time so I can hopefully get what I need to get done tomorrow done and get out of there to my PT appointment.

In many, many ways this past year stunk on ice (the break up and my foot injury being the most notable). As many others are, I’m hoping that 2009 will be a better one for me and for those I know and love.

I’m working on an Uberlist now for 2009. I didn’t do one the past two years, after doing them the 2 or so years prior to that, and I think I miss the structure it imposed upon me, to think about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. Having something written just helps, so I’m at it again. Hopefully it’ll be complete by the weekend and I’ll get it up once it’s done.

Until then, have a safe and happy new year.

With two or three more exceptions, I believe I’ve made it through my obligations for the holiday party season. This past week was a constant stream of events, and while I loved each of them in turn, in the aggregate it was a bit overwhelming. Several days I had 2 events in a day, and while tried to pace myself for eating, it wasn’t easy. Add to that the fact that so much of the food at this time of the year has dairy in it and I end up eating far too much that either has dairy in it, or far too much “sometimes” food because I know it doesn’t have dairy in it. Either way isn’t the best way to nosh.

But, back to the grind tomorrow, including time in the pool after work before heading out to dinner with a friend to celebrate the end of his semester. Two of the events this week were with the club, and they and one of the parties which seemed to be all skinny little 20-somethings served as due notice that, being able to run or not, I have to get back to regular training now. In the first place, I have signed up for races, and it would be good to be prepped for at least two of the sports (and, hey, if all else fails, maybe I can do a “aquavelo” IM – where you do the swim and bike but not the run portions of an iron-distance race). And I’m trying to plan out a weight routine, using Strength Training for Triathletes, which I’m finding to be pretty informative and useful.

The piercing is better than it was with the old jewelry, but still a trifle sore at times. Nothing like waking up at 2 am and wondering if you’d feel better at that immediate moment if you were more of a masochist.

Upgraded WordPress this evening, finally. I think I was 3-4 versions behind the most current. They’ve managed to make upgrading the plug-ins pretty darned painless, and it’s a shame they can’t do the same with the site files themselves. In comparison, even though it really doesn’t take that long, it seems to take an eternity. They’re a victim of their own success there. Cross-posting seems to be working just fine, which is a relief (other versions have broken it). All in all I’m impressed with the latest interface, it’s much nicer than previous ones, but not overly complicated.

And with that, it’s time to crash here.

The cupcakes went over well last night. ‘Twas a fun evening, and I enjoyed getting to see the various folks who were there.

Waiting for coffee to finish steeping here in the french press this morning, then I’m getting cleaned up and heading out to brunch at Asylum with Stephen and Kevin. I’ve found ’tis better to get to Asylum right at 11 when they open because they’ll actually have the daily specials available (and they’re generally worth it), and you can find seating with a minimum of fuss. 2 pm? Good luck. Haven’t been in a couple of months, so am looking forward to the good food. And time on the Metro to knit, of course. Then I’m going to be stuck reviewing a document for work for a bit, and hoping I don’t get the same reaction I got last year when I pointed out typos in it (“Wait, you can’t change the text now!” Then why have me review it, you wankers? Honestly).

Have my annual physical tomorrow, as well as a dermatologist visit to get checked out. Don’t expect anything earth shattering will be found, but given the family history it’s better to check than not. The worst part is the fasting for the blood tests. No, wait, I take that back, the worst part is the prostate exam, but the fasting comes in a close second. But we do what we must.

Picking JT up from the airport this evening on his way back from London and grabbing dinner with him. Sunday dinners with him seems to be becoming a regular habit, and it’s one I’m glad we’re getting into. He’s one of my longest known friends in the area, and I enjoy the extra time with him now.

Let me preface my remarks here by saying that I use gay.com (and other chat programs) a lot to keep up with friends online. I’m on regularly 4-6 nights a week, and I happily pay gay.com for full access to their site. But I am incredibly displeased with this new implementation they’ve brought up this week. Unhappy enough to consider dumping the subscription if they don’t get it fixed.

I think I spent a grand total of 40 minutes on “the new gay.com” this evening in two different installments, after it seemed like I spent about the same amount of time trying to convince the web site that no, really, I didn’t have a pop-up blocker stopping their wretched pop-ups from popping up. Verdict: It sucks elephant butt.

Let’s catalog the deficiencies:

• It runs too slow (to be expected with a new system).
• There’s no way to ignore bots in the chat room now.
• There’s no way to turn off the entrance and exit alerts, so you frequently end up with a screen full of “so-and-so entered,” “so and so left” crap that you don’t need.
• You can’t zip through the list to find folks easily by hitting the first letter of their screen name – you’re forced to scroll through the entire thing.
• It takes forever to bring up a screen name when you want to click on their profile or view their photos.
• No clicking through to links in chat, you’re forced to cut & paste.
• Because it’s run through the browser, if someone sends you a link in another program (AIM/Yahoo/MSN/etc.), chat ends up getting shut down if you click on the link in the other program because the new page opens in your chat browser window (or whatever window you have open).
• There’s too much wasted space in the windows – they take up too much screen real estate.
• Even after full disabling the pop-up blocker and getting their pop-ups to work, Every Single Window that popped up continued to display the “you need to turn your pop-up blocker off” message, blocking the screen that I was trying to see until I could hunt down the tiny little “X” that would turn the message off.

In other words, the thing sucks elephant butt.

I’ve left feedback with them, and will continue to do so. The stand-alone chat program worked so, so much better than any browser based crap they could throw up there. I can understand that perhaps they wanted more ad revenue by bringing users back onto their site, but there are ways to do that (force users to go to the profile page on their site to see pictures – more ad revenue/hits right there, without breaking up the other features that made the program work so much better) and still make the experience user-friendly. I realize the company is (probably still) losing money like mad, but driving away core, long-time users by making the site unusable is not the way to fix that.

Started training again this morning, after a two week mostly-break. Was hot as all get-out, but got through it. My next race is in 4 weeks, in Luray Virginia (pronounced “LOO-ray,” not “luh-ray” as you might think), another olympic race, so I have to get prepped for that. Remind me not to take an exercise break after my next breakup, it’s not worth it, even if I am feeling blue.

In other news regarding the breakup, I seem to have gotten some of my tolerance back. Not that this is necessarily a good thing, but it is nice not being completely worthless after having drinks.

I’ve finally managed to break out of some of the isolation I’ve had especially in this two week period, but also to a degree since having moved down to southwest. I’m trying to be more active about getting myself out of the apartment and around folks, and spent a good part of the weekend doing just that. And that’s been fun. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to work in training for all three sports in the tri, but I’ll muddle through somehow. In the meantime, I’m enjoying getting out of the house more, and look forward to more of this.