* The Prestige
* Children of Men
* The Fountain
* Renaissance
* The Science of Sleep

So, made the ride home in about 35 minutes. Took a slightly longer, but flatter route home, and it was pretty quick. Given that I’m currently absolute crap on the hills, this was probably actually a faster route overall. Yeah, the last uphill to the house is murder on me right now, but at least I made it to the top.

I think maybe the saddle I’ve got is ok, the problem right now is that it’s pushed too far forward, and because the wider part of it is hitting the insides of my thighs, it’s quite uncomfortable. I think this is easily fixed by just pulling it back a bit. Right now, the riding position is *so* far forward that a lot of my weight is sitting on my hands. The other problem is that for some idiot reason, I’ve got GripShift-length handlebar padding, which puts the transition from padding to no padding right in the middle of my hand, coincidentally exactly where the DS’s corners hit my palms, and makes my hands go numb. Which is good, I suppose, since I’m putting a lot of my body weight on ’em. Whee.

So, definitely got some adjusting to do, but it’s actually really nice to be able to ride to work. I’m hoping that I can make this a MWF thing, though I’d suspect that if I can do MW then that’s as much as I can currently hope for. T/TH are currently YMCA evenings, so that would get me up to 4 workouts a week again (we fell of the boat after the honeymoon, and have currently only been going 2-3 times a week).

Honestly, if I can force myself to cycle to work even marginally regularly, this’ll go a huge way towards getting me back in shape.

I wish I could muster up that sort of positive feeling about work, but it’s just not there right now. It doesn’t feel like a challenge. Hopefully that’ll change soon, but damn…

Biked in to work today. That’s the first time in about six years I’ve actually ridden my bike, which is incredibly pathetic. It’s an old Cannondale Super-V, which I got while I was in college, after my Slingshot got stolen. It’s a neat bike – turned out to be one of the better implementations of early dual suspension, but has been surpassed in about every way between say, ’97 and now.

Still, it’s a surprisingly good-looking bike, and with a couple tweaks, I think it’ll be fine as a commuter ride. It *definitely* needs a new seat. It’s got a Selle Italia Flite Ti, and holy crap, it’s hard. Not one of the newer style saddles that takes pressure off the sensitive bits, either. Not really all that comfortable. I even have a hard time imagining it was *ever* comfortable… but I suppose there was a time when I was used to it.

The ride to work’s not bad – about 4 miles, mostly flat, with one hill near the start. On the way home, it’ll be a slight uphill incline with a nasty hill right at the end. But hey, whatever. Should be fun.

If the makers of Forza 2 for the 360 have any sense, they’ll include Top Gear’s test track as one of the courses in the game.

I’m pretty sure I first heard of this at Chuck’s blog, but Sci-Fi has the pilot of The Amazing Screw-on Head on their website. It’s quite interesting. I wouldn’t have thought Mike Mignola’s visual style would translate at all to animation, but there’s something about it that just looks … right. It’s appropriately weird, the voice acting’s really good, and the whole manner of storytelling works really well. There’s a “video phone,” for instance, that’s entirely mechanical, and the effect is surprisingly good.

http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/

I just got a rejection letter … from the place I was hired at a month ago.

Now, that’s maybe the weirdest thing that’s happened all week.

Picked up three books from Amazon recently, two of which arrived today.

* The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie
* What Einstein Told His Cook 2, by Robert Wolcke

the one that hasn’t arrived yet:

* The World According to Clarkson, by Jeremy Clarkson

I’d read WETHC1, and so getting WETHC2 was sort of a no-brainer. I’ve been watching Mr. Laurie in House, so that was sort of a no-brainer, and I’d just finished I Know You Got Soul, by Jeremy Clarkson and loved it, so that was also a no-brainer.

I had time to read the books today, to boot, due to a bit of a cold I picked up sometime last night. Whee.

The Gun Seller reminds me strangely of Kerowack’s book, in some respects – lots of wordplay, and just overall sort of an odd situation. Not really similar settings or content in any respect, but there’s a definite similarity to the overall style, I think.

WETHC2 is good, so far – basically a collection of food columns written by a witty chemist. Good stuff, both educational, and entertaining.

Bleah. Back to bed for me. Gotta get better by tomorrow, I don’t have any PTO accrued. Alas!

So, the last couple nights, I’ve made sort of random dinners out of leftovers. Sunday night, it was chicken katsu sandwiches. Basically, we had some leftover chicken thighs, which I breaded in panko, and pan-fried. Mixed up some ketchup and worcestershire (sp?) sauce to make a tonkatsu sauce, and had it on a split Acme herb slab (bread). Good stuff. Went with a salad Joe was making. Ate, and watched Battlestar.

Tonight, I remembered we had some left over frozen shrimp, and had a hankering for a po’boy. Now, I’ve never made a po’boy before – hell I’ve only had ’em a fistful of times. But I figured, what the heck. Looked up a Food Network recipe, and was off to the races. 20 minutes later, the other half of the herb slab was the foundation for an awesome shrimp sandwich. Mmmmm. Good stuff. That + more Battlestar = good times.

Made me wonder, though, what can I cook?

That is, what can I cook without looking at a recipe?

Not much, honestly.

* Chicken Teriyaki (with a sauce made from scratch)
* Jambalaya
* Risotto
* Ravioli (dough from scratch)
* Harb-stuffed roast chicken
* Roasted Salmon w/ Cranberry/lemon relish
* ?

Not much else is coming to mind. I think for the most part, I don’t tend to make the same things over and over – we tend not to cycle recipes much, even if there’s stuff we like. But I think that might change, because we’ve found a stable of stuff that’s relatively quick, and tasty, and gotten to the point where we cook enough things that even if we cycle them in a regular rotation, there’s enough variety that it’d take a good long while before we got bored. Now, if only I’d made enough of the shrimp sandwich filling for leftovers. Damn!

Fixed the water valve in the washer this morning. Pretty straightforward – remove three hoses, and unscrew the unit from the washer body, but getting everything off took a while, ’cause it was on pretty tight. Getting it on took even longer, because the new valve didn’t have its screw holes threaded. So, I had to forcibly use one of the old screws to thread the holes. Gah. The other thing, and pay attention, because this will *undoubtedly* be useful to everyone who reads this blog one day:

KEEP YOUR TOOLBOXES NEAR THE FRONT OF YOUR GARAGE

Because when your garage gets full of weird knicknacks and odds and ends, they’ll all pile up at the front, making reaching the back nigh-impossible. Still, I cleared out a pathway, and made it to the back. Hooray for me. Got the vise grips, the plumber’s wrench, and some screwdrivers, and the whole process took about an hour, and a $26 dollar part. If only I’d had a washer overflow thing, the floor damage would be fine. Definitely have to look into getting one of those.

On a slightly different note, been playing Battle for Middle Earth 2 on the x360, and though the controls aren’t perfect, they’re reasonably good. Better than I’d expected, to be sure. If anyone out there’s got it on the 360, I’d love to get some multiplayer going. Also watched the first three episodes of Battlestar Galactica tonight, which were pretty darned good. Not say, Firefly-good, but they’re setting up much longer plot arcs, I think, and are taking their time in telling them. Where Firefly clearly was trying to “hook” viewers, Galactica seems to be more assured there will be a future, and so the stories are unfolding at a more deliberate pace. It also feels like there are a lot more characters, and they’ve all got disparate goals. Instead of having say, 10ish people focused on a single goal, there’s maybe 10ish people, all with different agendas, purposes, and histories. I’m definitely excited to see more.

Oh, and on another fun note:

The water valve in our clothes washer developed a leak, and ended up leaking all over our floor, seeping through the bamboo flooring, and travelling through the subfloor. So, now for about a four-foot span in front of the dryer closet, the seams of the bamboo flooring are stained. Whee. It’s not a complete discoloration, it’s just now the seams between the boards have gotten a touch darker, like, say, they were water damaged. Stupid washer. We found the leak, turned the water off, pointed a Vornado at the floor to dry it out. Sucker’s been blowing non-stop for a day, now, and it feels like it’s almost dry. It’ll stay on for another day, just to be sure. Fortunately, the replacement part was only $26, but the damn thing was leaking for the better part of at least a day. Tomorrow, I’ll pull the old part out, and replace it. Hopefully, that’ll do the trick.

Stupid water. Seems to really be the bane of my existance, in regards to this house.