Click-in, aka clipless

4th of July was slightly underwhelming. Hazy light rain made the big DC fireworks show less awesome. But the weekend wasn't all that lame. I went to REI and found real bike shoes on sale and got click-in pedals!

Then I was excited by my new toys and was playing with the pedals and shoes and ended up getting my left shoe locked to my right pedal. I couldn't get it unattached so took it to my local bike shop and they couldn't do it with their hands either, so we ended up putting the new pedals on my bike and then using the leverage of the bike to get the shoe detached. oops.

This meant that I got the teeny tiny pedals on there sooner than I wanted, but it wasn't as hard as I'd thought it would be to get the hang of clicking in and out. I didn't fall at all while practicing on a flat empty road, and then found it easy to ride in to work this morning. Then this evening, when going on a bike ride, I slowed suddenly as I realized I was missing my turn and toppled straight sideways onto my elbow and hip. oops, again. I'm fine, and it actually was a little reassuring. While I hope to not fall over too many more times, it really didn't hurt much and it was pretty much the worst surface to fall slowly onto (packed dirt path with some gravel), so now I can believe everyone who told me that it wouldn't hurt too much and would mostly just be embarrassing.

I did however learn that I need tighter helmet straps because my helmet wobbled much more than I'd like it to if my head were about to come into contact with the ground.

I've been really tempted to jump in and get a road bike, but the used bike venues aren't presenting any reasonable opportunities and it would be sort of financially dumb to buy a new one this summer. So my goal is to get a whole bunch more miles on my clunky hybrid (now all frankensteined up with clipless pedals) and then I will feel justified spending money for a new one next spring/summer.

mmmm shiny

Karmic food balance

Since the last post was so tasty looking, the world decided to karmically balance my luck with food.

Today I made a giant salad for lunch with the snap peas and broccoli.  And! I discovered after tearing up half the lettuce, I got extra protein because the lettuce had aphids!

I washed them off of the second half of the lettuce and killed the ones that crawled onto my desk, but mostly just tried to chill out about it and think of all the dirt I must've eaten as a child.

Aphids apparently are very robust because the lettuce had been in the fridge since Thursday and the ones that made it out onto my desk had been salad-dressing-ed in addition to being refrigerated.

Sadly, even without the aphids, it wasn't a very tasty salad. Maybe some dried cranberries or other sweet sort of thing would've helped.

CSA Week 4

It was a very green week for vegetables.  Lettuce, spring onions, broccoli, snap peas, a massive amount of collard greens, and some herb of some sort.

I was feeling sort of daunted by the extreeem  mass of collard greens, but luckily a friend sent me a link today to a blog that had an appealing looking recipe on it: Greens Gratin So I stopped by the store on the way home to buy some gratins :)

To start with I tore up a big pile of collard greens, and could've put in even more. The rectangular pan there is about 8x12 and the greens were a little heaping, but could have been more stacked in there. I sort of steamed the greens by putting the pan on heat with a little water sprinkled on the greens, and then loosely covering the dish with a round lid from a different pan.  Meanwhile, I chopped up two of the spring onions and started cooking them in butter. (As an aside, I've been loving my spring onions cooked in a frying pan with little or no oil, but these, swimming in oil, smelled delicious, and might've spoiled my taste buds for the basic onions)

After the steaming, the greens got bright and tasty looking.  The buttery onions had flour and milk mixed in to make a sauce. Then parmasan cheese was stirred in to make it a tasty cheese sauce.  I had to add more milk to make the sauce less thick so I could goop it over the collard greens.

Once the greens had sauce on them, I sprinkled on feta cheese and walnuts and put it in the oven to bake for about 20 minutes.

Tada!

I liked this dish much more than last years polenta based effort, but will probably make the polenta dish with the rest of the greens

Bikey dreams

I got my first CSA box of the year today and was good and ate some vegetables. I took pictures and will probably be posting weekly vegetable pictures like last year, but not today.

I cooked some spring onions and asparagus until the onions were browned and deliciously sweet. mmm. That was the good part of dinner. I also cooked up a giant handful of kale (wait until you see the pictures of how much kale I have to eat in the next few days!) and enjoyed that much less, but seasoning salt makes most things (except for my truly disgusting crab pasta adventure from a few months ago) taste better. That part of dinner was virtuous. But not really tasty.

I also got a pint of strawberries and was sad to find they were much less tasty than the strawberries I'd picked myself last weekend.  However I overcame this disappointment and ate all the strawberries because they surely wouldn't start tasting better with time :)

I will stick with kale-sausage-pasta as a relatively tasty way to get myself to eat crazy amounts of the stuff.

I also went for a bike ride on the new hand-me-down bike and am thrilled to report that I am less slow on a road bike, but I am sad to say that the hand-me-down is really too tiny and hurts my arms in weird ways and makes my knees almost hit my arms in a clown-car-like fashion. So maybe I will get a more my-sized used road bike this summer. Or maybe I will just be tough on my extremely un-sporty looking toodling bike (aka hybrid)

Also also, it is officially summer. There were thunderstorms multiple evenings this week and it is almost 80 degrees and 75% humidity at 10:30pm. Gah.

Week 2 of training

I had a busy weekend. Part of it was finishing up week 2 of official, schedule-driven mini-triathlon training, so I rode my bike most of the way to Mount Vernon and back (sounds a lot more exciting to say it that way instead of saying 10 miles) Saturday morning. Then there was a terribly exciting and quick thunderstorm and Saturday night I went out to play poker.  It was my favorite kind of poker playing -- I managed to leave with exactly what I'd bought in for, which let me not feel guilty for taking other people's money.

Sunday morning was the jogging part of triathlon-izing, and then I went out strawberry picking. This was much more successful than when I went out on the first weekend of the farm and I got like 4 pints without even trying (not counting those that I ate while in the field) and they are beautiful and tasty.

Speaking of strawberries, I'm getting my first CSA delivery this Thursday and it's supposed to have more strawberries, asparagus, kale, spring onions and basil. Yum. I still have 2 pts of strawberries from the weekend and might go out and get more this weekend, so I'm thinking of making some fruit spread of some sort.  I haven't eaten much of the peach and apricot preserves I made last year, but I don't know that that technicality should stop me from preserving more fruit.

Sun, CSA, Woolly

I got sunburned like 1.5 weeks ago and my arms are still peeling. Admittedly, they didn't start peeling until Saturday, but I'm curious to see if I can have a whole week of peeling from a relatively mild burn.

My farm has opened for the season, but I won't get my first box until June 5. In the meantime, I can go out there and pick strawberries on the weekends! Woo!

Also, I went out and saw a play last night, "Measure for Pleasure" which was deliciously British and 18th centuryish. I signed up for season tickets with some friends, so over the next year, I'll get out to see more plays.

History repeats

Friday was bike-to-work day, which I failed at. I realized Thursday that I hadn't thought about my bike for so long that I wasn't even sure if I'd last parked it at work or in the bike room at home (turned out it was at home). With that much neglect, the leaky back tire had had plenty of time to flatten abysmally. Unfortunately, it seems that the pump in the bike room is mostly dead, and I couldn't find my bike pump in my house, so my neglect meant no bike-to-work-day tshirt this year.

This morning, I resolved to be less of a biker-loser. I found my pump (under a book case behind my tall party shoes? thanks cats) and decided that the leak was still slow enough to not try to figure out innertubes today. I took the metro up to somewhere in MD to pick up stuff for a 5k I'm registered to suffer through tomorrow, treated myself to tasty lebanese lunch and rode my bike mostly downhill for about 16 miles.

Part way through the ride, I realized I'd done a very similar thing last year the day before the 5k. As I recall, it sort of made my legs feel like jello for the 5k, but it was such great weather, I just kept riding.

Finally, I got myself to a theater and saw Prince Caspian (which was ok), and rode home after recuperating for two hours.

I think there are a few take-aways from today
1. Fun today is worth suffering tomorrow. Weather like this won't be here much longer and it would've been dumb to waste it by sitting inside watching movies
2. Wear sunscreen on your arms as well as face. It's a sign of how pale I was that my sunburnt arms just look normal, until I pull up my sleeve. But they are stinging
3. I'm apparently an accidental creature of habit. I wonder if I'll go on a long bike ride the day before this 5k again next year.

Finally, finally, Jaxby is laying on my sunburnt arms. aww, oww, aww, oww. makes it hard to type too.

Progress

Last year on Feb 20th I posted about being excited for being able to jog (slowly) two miles. This jogging thing seems destined to be a never-ending trial, but I think I am a little better at it than I was a year ago.

Today I went out on the trail and jogged two miles without stopping, which is loads better than last year's effort that was two miles on the treadmill. Also I'm able to do jog/walk intervals on the treadmill for like 3 miles, which is also better than last year.

I really want to do a sprint distance tri this year, and getting the running to be less of an impossible hurdle is important for that.

Rah for winter being almost over! It was in the 40s today!

Tacos!

Another few things have come up to add to my "San Bernardino is special" file
1. That big meat recall? With the humane society and all? From San Bernardino County
2. Robbery, sure. but stealing tacos?

Robber only wants tacos

Melissa Pinion-Whitt, Staff Writer

Article Launched: 02/18/2008 10:09:40 PM PST

FONTANA - An armed robber who sneaked up on a bicyclist Sunday night didn't want the man's money, wallet or anything else of great value. He wanted tacos.
The victim, a 35-year-old Fontana man, had just bought about $20 in tacos from a stand at San Bernardino and Fontana avenues and was riding home when the bandit confronted him. "He approached him from behind, saying, `Give me your tacos,"' said police Sgt. Jeff Decker. "He grabbed the bag of tacos, punched him in the face and began to flee."
The victim demanded his tacos back when they were taken.
"The suspect then pointed what appeared to be a black handgun at the victim," Decker said.
The taco bandit, standing about five feet from the victim, threatened to kill him, then ran.
Police said the robbery was at 9:15 p.m. on Hawthorne Avenue east of Catawba Avenue.
The suspect is described as a 25- to 30-year-old man, 5 feet 10 inches tall and 190 pounds. He has brown hair and eyes and wore a black hooded sweat shirt. The man also had a long mustache.
Decker said food robberies are not uncommon when the victim is delivering pizzas, but he considered this crime to be odd.
"Doing an armed robbery for tacos, that's a little out there," he said.

Coffee. now.

We got a new coffeemaker; at work. It is trying very hard to solve all possible coffee related problems, but it's a little terrifying.

I went and read the website about it and supposedly "The new ‘funky’ look combines an almost retro feel with modern ergonomics". I think that nothing about this coffeemaker could actually be described as ergonomic.

Also it  "stimulates with a welcoming, easy and fun to use interface". Especially when I want coffee, I do not want to be stimulated with a welcoming and fun interface. I want a coffee button that gives me coffee. now.

I'm also a little freaked out by the "Creamy topping"; pod. Supposedly this enables the machine to make lattes and so on.

However, I find it very satisfying to read the nutrition information they provided and add up the mg's of caffeine I'm consuming throughout the day. zing :)