Today’s ride: 15.1 Miles in 1:20.45, average speed 11.2 MPH. Top speed 21.2 MPH.
First day with the Trek 4500 – awesome ride.
Afternoon ride – twice around development, down 140 to Taunton Green, around Green / Courthouse, down to High Street to broken bridge, back to High’s intersection with 140 – down to 3rd/4th street – past the old Silver plants – past Public Works building to Weir Corner – down Weir to gas pipeline, back home via Elementary School, Williams Street, High School.
For the last three weeks, as a part of a major change in my lifestyle, I’ve begun to seriously exercise for the first time in many years. My goal is to reach 170 pounds in a year or so.
I’ve found that running on the treadmill is exceptionally boring – and the treadmill here at the house is not a great one. Running outdoors is good and easy to do in this neighborhood, but my shins aren’t so sure about that. So a few weeks ago, I started riding my bike.
Now, I’ve had this bike since 1992 when I was preparing to goto college. I paid $80 for it at Target and it shows. It has not worn well over the years. So after discovering some local trails and talking with some friends that had nicer bikes, I decided that a new mountain bike would make a nice Christmas gift this year. So Christmas came early for me.. it came this morning!
After researching several bikes, I ended up purchasing a 2004 Trek 4500, along with some accessories (below) from Silver City Bicycles, just down the road in Raynham, Massachusetts.
Here’s a view of the Trek 4500:
In addition, I wanted to be able to monitor distance, speed, time, and some other factors, so I picked up a Cycle Computer from Vetta – the Vetta RT-88. This little baby is wireless and measures a ton of factors. Take a look:
Of course, you have to have a cool helmet. Unfortuantely, I couldn’t find a Trek helmet that fit my head – so I went with the Specialized 2005 Air Force. It was a pain in the ass to adjust, but I suppose it’s worth it to keep my brain intact.
Of course, I have a wish list of items. Here it is:
I expect this list to grow in the coming weeks!
If you don’t read Dooce, well, you’re just missing out on the finer things in your life:
Hello, Internet. My name is Heather and my website is the number one search result for “poop in my ass.” Life doesn’t get much better than that.
And then there’s this fine entry:
I guess C. was at work the day after traveling for a few days, and he found himself IN THE COMPANY BATHROOM (I can hardly type these words without my whole bowel system clinching up), and The Big Bad Motherfucking Poop hit him. He was going to have to pass The Big Bad Motherfucking Poop at work because it was coming and nothing could stop it. For those of you who have been really constipated you know which poop I’m talking about. It’s the one that you can’t physically pass because it’s so hard and large and GRANITE-LIKE IN TEXTURE that the law of physics says, “This is too big to fit out your butt.” But The Big Bad Motherfucking Poop disregards the laws of nature. It defies nature, and it must be passed because it says so.
So C. is sitting on the toilet, his pants around his ankles, and The Big Bad Motherfucking Poop is making it’s way out his butt even though Object A is too big to fit through Object B. And he is in pain, a lot of pain, the pain of a woman feeling the head of her baby crowning through the birth canal. The pain is almost indescribable, and as he is telling me this story I want to hold his hand and assure him that everything is going to be okay because I HAVE FELT THAT PAIN. Pain, oh pain. The world is going to end PAIN.
Go read Dooce now – you won’t regret it.
This is a monumentally stupid thing to say, as reported today in the Boston Globe:
Vice presidential candidate John Edwards promised a West Virginia mother on Wednesday that if the Democratic ticket is elected in November the military draft would not be revived.
During a question-and-answer session, the mother of a 23-year-old who recently graduated from West Virginia University asked Edwards whether the draft would be reinstated.
”There will be no draft when John Kerry is president,” Edwards said, a statement that drew a standing ovation.
It’s a stupid thing to say because no one can predict the future.
What if we’re attacked and have to goto war against another country – say Iran, or North Korea, or Jordan, or Syria, or the Sudan – who knows? What if our current military structure and force levels isn’t enough?
What if?
What if?
No one thought something like 9/11 would ever happen to us either – but it did – and it’s changed our worldview.
What’s he thinking? Everything will be hunky-dory if Kerry and he are elected?
This ranks right up there with “Read my Lips”….
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Zell Miller has a few words for his critics:
But for David Gergen and this newspaper’s Al Hunt, among others, to call me a racist was especially hurtful. For they know better. They know I worked for three governors in a row, not just one: Carl Sanders, Lester Maddox and Jimmy Carter. They knew I was the first governor to try to remove the Confederate emblem from the Georgia flag. And by the way, when I called each of Georgia’s former governors to tell them what I was about to attempt, Jimmy Carter’s first question to me was, “What are you doing that for?” Mr. Gergen and Mr. Hunt also know I appointed the only African-American attorney general in the country in the 1990s and more African Americans to the state judiciary than all the other governors of Georgia combined, including that one from Plains.
So, they can call me names and ridicule my angry demeanor all day long. But facts are facts. And the fact is, John Kerry has a long record of proposals to weaken our national security in a time of war. And I would never put my family’s safety in those hands.
Until 9/11, I voted based primarily on one issue: gun control.
So, based on that statement alone, in most years, I would not support Kerry simply because of comments like this:
Kerry said renewing the assault weapons ban would not interfere with the Second Amendment rights of gun owners.
Idiot.
Please have him go back and read the Second Amendment again.
The fabled “assault weapons” ban expired this morning, reports CNN:
Ten years after it was born out of the carnage of three California mass shootings, the federal assault weapons ban is fading out of existence Monday.
This is a horrible law – born out of emotion and reactionary thought rather than any criminological theory.
I am glad to see that it’s gone.
Now, on to more important things…