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They’ve moved me and the rest of my team to new digs, which so far has been totally sweet. The new office (which is actually an old office, but they got rid of a bunch of people (there’s a big mound out back that I assume contains the bodies) and so we were moved so they could consolidate and possibly get rid of the lease on my old building) is closer to my house and doesn’t require me to cross I-95 to get here. It’s farther from the data center, but I only have to go to NDC about once every couple weeks.

It goes without saying that I’ll have to go twice this week. Oh well.

This building is a vast improvement over the last one; for example, it has an actual cafeteria, instead of an eating area with some snack machines. Even better, the bathroom on the main floor has showers in it, and lockers, so as of today I’m riding my bike to work, as long as it’s not icy, which isn’t usually a problem in August. It’s a little under 5 miles, so it takes me about 20 minutes, which with traffic is about as long as it would take me to drive. And now I can burn roughly 500 extra calories a day, which is a pound of fat a week! If I can keep myself from compensating by eating entire freezers-full of ice cream, I should be Totally RippedTM by Christmas.

And while we’re on the exercise subject, my sister, Liz, and I have decided we are going to run a 5K in October. So that I might get a jump on training (and also because all my bike shorts were in the wash at the time), I went out Monday afternoon for a good jog. I was able to go a lot further than I had predicted; I ran for a solid 18 minutes (for me, about a mile and a half; I’m fat and slow) before the agonizing chest pains caused me to slow to a walk. In all, I calculate I went about 2.9 miles in 34:30, which definitely wouldn’t qualify me for the Boston Marathon. Hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to spend more time running and possibly cut a few minutes off that time; I’d like to do a complete 5K in under 30 minutes. Wishful thinking, perhaps. If wishes were horses, beggars would probably eat the horses.

You gotta have a dream. (Hopefully you all don’t have any of my dream, with the homeless people eating livestock in a visceral manner. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.)

Worth noting:

• The News Journal was kind enough to finally print a review of My Fair Lady. Good job, what with us having just 2 shows left, one of which is sold out! Nothing like timeliness. On the other hand, they did say I have operatic flair. Unfortunately, they made no mention of my sweet booty.
• The heat has broken, apparently! It’s only supposed to hit 90 today, as opposed to the near-three-digit temperatures we’ve been rocking all week long. Woooooo.
• Happy birthday to my pops, who is 347 years old.
• I was afforded little sleep last night, as I got home from the show at 1:30, and my wife awoke me to attend to Charles at 5. So forgive me for what I’m about to say: Mel Gibson is responsible for all the wars in the world. Good night, sugar tits.

All right all you Jack Samsonites put on your face eyes and listen with your hair ears because I have a QUESTION and I know at least one of my readers has an IQ above 40 and MIGHT be able to answer it so HERE. IT. GOES.

Well, actually, there’s some background first.

I’m trying to get into good shape. I tire of the low-carb diet because

1. I like carbs, and
2. If you go off the low-carb diet for a day, you’re totally screwed and basically have to start over.

So boo to that. Right now I’m just trying not to overdo my daily caloric intake, and ALSO I’m biking between 50 and 100 miles a week. My reasonably conservative calculations would indicate that I burn about 45 calories for each mile that I bike, so hopefully my total caloric output is lower than my intake and I’m burning off my ass in small amounts every day.

This would be diesel.

My digital scale at home seems to indicate I weigh about 235, which is fine, although at the doctor’s this morning (I went for an allergy checkup: I have allergies, they are fine) they weighed me, in my heavy clothes, at 234. So who knows. I might want to invest in a scale that wasn’t made in an 8th world country. So I have some ways to go.

In addition to my bike-riding, I’d like to do some kind of calisthenic workout every day that would help with flexibility and strength without bulking me up. It might be out of reach, really, but I wouldn’t mind being mad ripped without getting large; I’m already massive and scary enough without being massively muscular, so I’m not much interested in lifting weights. Also: weightlifting hurts, and I hate it. I’ve done a little poking around online, and the only thing that I really found that approximates an actual “program” is this thing by Matt Furey, who by most accounts is a con artist.

My question that I pose is this: if I were to develop a calisthenic program for flexibility and basic strength, what exercises should it include? I’m assuming I’ll need the basics, like pushups, crunches, maybe some chair dips, lunges, etc. I’d prefer not to duplicate efforts, and I’d prefer not to use weights (so I’d rather do, say, pullups, than bicep curls with dumbbells). TELL ME, PEOPLE, WHAT YOU THINK.

Okay, here’s the word:

• I’m not dead, although I did fight off a nasty case of food poisoning this weekend that laid me heck of low. I’m still kinda feverish, I think, with the sweating and chills and JUICINESS IN MY PUPPISS. (Glavin.)
• The show is going outstandingly (note: not a real word), aside from a major miscue on my part on opening night in which I failed to enter and missed an entire scene. Reason: I am an idiot. Luckily my role in that scene was to wander on, mutter some things to Eliza, and then lead her off the stage, so she noted my absence, said something to cover it, and just walked off. This assuages my guilt not at all.
• Charles is awesome. He celebrated his 2nd-month-day (or whatever) on Sunday, and tomorrow will be 9 weeks old. He weighs 16 pounds. According to the CDC growth charts, this is well beyond the 97th percentile, and is also very hard on my arms. I usually put more pictures of him up on his website every week, but didn’t get a chance last week; expect to see some shortly, however.
• It’s hot. Temperatures are expected to reach 100 degrees tomorrow. I am DIS. PLEASED. Mainly because I have a brush-up rehearsal for My Fair Lady at an unair-conditioned location.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Normally, I post all the Charles pics over at his website (which if you haven’t been checking out, you are a tool), but I just did a freshy post last night, and this is too cute not to be online somewhere immediately:

In case you’re curious, I’m working another of my patented all night shifts, during which I intend to hallucinate about Kate Beckinsale.

Hearnwife is very fond of reality TV, particularly the “Find Some Exploitable Talent”-style shows like “American Idol,” “So You Think You Can Dance,” and “The Next Great Fluffer.” I don’t find them all that interesting, usually, but I always get sucked into the first few episodes of any given season, when they have the laughable idiots on to embarrass themselves.

The “Idol” contestants are particularly hilarious; some of the hopefuls have all the singing talent of a recent tracheotomy patient. And yet every one of them firmly believes that they are the best thing to hit the world since the discovery of bacon. How can this be, I wonder? How do they not realize how painfully bad they are? I have discovered the answer: blind spots.

Everybody has blind spots. Jacqueline Kennedy simply looked the other way while John F. dipped his wick into every bombshell that wiggled into the Oval Office. My wife ignores the fact that I have no child-rearing skills (seriously, it’s a wonder I don’t diaper Charles’ face more often than I already do). My friends ignore my mild alcoholism. It’s endemic to society. Most of the people who get in line to audition for American Idol just manage to ignore all the evidence saying that they are painful and embarrassing (all the good crystal shatters when she reaches for that high note; he was once asked to leave a Rolling Stones concert because when he sang along it threw Mick off; etc.), and embrace all the evidence indicating that they have talent (which usually turns out to be idiot friends and parents who couldn’t carry a tune if you installed a handle on it). And the results are hilarity for the viewers, and utter humiliation for the singer.

Or would be, if the singers were capable of being humiliated; most of them are simply unshakeable when it comes to confidence in their abilities.

I bring this up because I have realized my blind spot. (Or at least, the first blind spot I’ve found to which I’m willing to admit.) I have a hard time grasping that I am a HORRIBLE athlete. I have the hand-eye coordination of someone who is blind and handless, and also uncoordinated. And yet periodically I think to myself, hey, I’m not in such bad shape, I oughta do something athletic. I’d probably do better than I think!

This is how I happened to find myself riding in a mountain bike race for the 2nd straight year. You might remember last year’s event, in which my left-hand crank came off the bicycle after a few miles. Well, I had gotten the bike repaired, and even added a few upgrades (trigger shifters, bar-ends, new cassette), so I figured I would have no problem getting through 16 miles of hilly terrain.

After last year’s experience, I learned four important facts. Let’s revisit them:

1. Get plenty of sleep the night before.
2. Carry plenty of water.
3. Use quality equipment.
4. Snort a lot of crystal meth before setting out.

Did I learn? Let’s see:

1. I got about 7 hours. It couldn’t be helped; I had rehearsal the night before, and was required by law to go out for beer afterwards. (Seriously, it’s like a Chester County regulation or something, you could look it up.)
2. I remembered to pack my Camelbak^TM-like water backpack. I’ll explain how well that worked shortly.
3. I used the same crappy bike, but repaired all the faults and added the aforementioned upgrades.
4. I couldn’t get my hands on any meth, but I did have two delicious beers on Saturday night.

How did I do, you ask? Well, let me tell you, everything went great. Until I started pedaling. Then things went downhill, literally and figuratively.

My strategy was to let everybody surge on ahead, so that I didn’t have to worry about a bunch of people passing me and screwing up my mojo, but unfortunately I forgot they do a staged start. My group was going off first, followed by the kids, the women, and then the old people, by which I mean people over 45, who in any normal situation would barely be middle-aged, but when surrounded by hundreds of lithe 23-year-olds look positively decrepit. Even if most of the ancients were in FAR better shape than I’ll ever be.

The race started with about a mile over flat dirt path, so I let everybody in my group ride off while I took a nice turtle approach (slow and steady, baby) and chugged along at medium speed. The ground was hard and easy to ride on, and I had plenty of water, so I was comfortable. I got to a small hill, and muscled my way up it, then a nice fast downhill.

Then I hit the mud, and my average speed went from 10mph to about 2mph in a heartbeat. I could get through the mud okay on flat ground; it wasn’t fun, but it was doable. Downhill, however, I was terrified to go at any high speed, for fear of sliding off into a tree and leaving my family without my important influence. I basically gripped the front brake and carefully slid down. Pedalling uphill was out of the question; the back wheel just spun, so I had to walk the bike up most of the slopes. It was treacherous and tiring, and I started to develop a blister on my heel because bike shoes are NOT designed for walking. But I soldiered on, because I am the BOMB.

I assumed there would be a water stop at the 5 mile mark, like last year, but after I’d been riding for roughly 45 minutes, I began to be concerned. When it got to be an hour, I said “I still haven’t gone 5 miles yet? And this race is 16 miles? I’m going to be out here for 4 hours!” The seeds of doubt had been set, and I’m pretty sure my eyes welled with what my wife likes to call The Tears of Unfathomable Sadness. As it turned out, there was no 5-mile water stop, and of course I had drained my water supply around mile 2. For the second straight year, I was going to risk dehydration and heat stroke! Simply splendid.

The course had been set up to be pretty damnably technical (which means “difficult, dangerous, and ball-bruisingly bouncy” in trail-speak). Apparently there weren’t enough roots and bumps for the organizers’ tastes, so they’d added more. At a normal mountain biking speed, between 10 and 15 miles per hour, I could have simply stood up off the seat and bounced over the bumps with great glee. My speed through the mud, though, was about 4 mph on flat ground, so when my front tire hit a significant bump it would just stop, slamming my yambag and its tender contents onto the seat, the bar, or the handlebars.

At one point, I came to a bridge that consisted of a nearly 40 degree climb, a flat portion over a roadway, and then a 40 degree drop. The bridge was, I kid you not, completely paved in cobblestones. I actually considered following the road back to the starting line, finding a race organizer, and just punching him in the balls.

When I bought my road bike back in April, it came with what are described as “clipless pedals.” This is a bit difficult to understand, because what they do is basically clip your feet to the pedals so that they are always in the right position and you can get a more efficient transfer of power from your legs to the drivetrain. They’re called “clipless” to differentiate them from “clip” pedals, which you’ve probably seen around; they consist of a big bracket thing that you stick the toe of your shoe into so you can’t pull your foot off the pedal easily. The clipless models use small cleats installed in the bottom of bike shoes that “click” into the pedals. They hold your feet in exactly the right place, and are easier to get out of than the clip pedals.

Unfortunately, when they are caked with mud, they are pretty much useless. Difficult to get out of (and if you can’t get your foot loose, you can’t put that same foot down when you stop, meaning you just topple over to one side), and basically impossible to click into. By about mile 4, the mud had completely encapsulated my shoes and pedals. Every time I had to stop to push the bike up a hill or carry it over some 6″ tree root, I would clamber back on and try to click back in, and I couldn’t, so I spent most of the ride trying to pedal as my feet slid around on the pedals and periodically slipped off. This is how I found myself flying over the handlebars into a pricker bush at around mile 6.

I was actually fairly lucky; the only damage I did was a series of scrapes and bruises to my shins, and my front shifter twisted around on the handlebars. I just had to twist it back, and bite my lip to hold back a womanish scream of agony.

Of course, everybody else in the race knew what they were doing and were in phenomenal shape, so I was constantly having to get out of the way so people could fly by. This didn’t bother me until I realized that the men passing me were my father’s age, AND had started 15 minutes after I did.

Around mile 7, sweat was dripping into my right eye, so I wiped it off with the only thing I had available: the front of my shirt. Which was caked in dirt. Suddenly finding myself monocular, I had to stop and walk the bike for what was probably 45 minutes, which made the blister on my foot even bigger, and also caused me to curse all that is holy.

At around mile 9, I came upon a collection of bicycles resting against trees, with no riders nearby. Usually this means that someone has been injured, and unfortunately it was no exception. A few hundred yards further, I discovered the missing bikes, who were helping bundle a poor young woman onto a stretcher to carry her to a truck that would take her to a hospital. I didn’t find out what happened, but the injured rider didn’t appear to be conscious. My first thought was, “Wow, I hope she’s okay.” My second thought was, “I’m not doing any more mountain bike racing.”

At mile 9 (or so), a Race Marshal caught up to me. His job was to make sure that no stragglers (like me) were left behind. Basically it meant that I was so far behind that they had sent out a rider to make sure I wasn’t dead. That fixed it for me; I got to the water station at mile 10 (they hadn’t had one at mile 5, which pissed me off no end), loaded myself up with moisture, and packed it in. I got directions back towards the parking area, and started off. Then I came upon a big hill, and I realized that I simply had no energy left. It was 2pm on one of the hottest days in recent memory, I’d been exercising as hard as I had ever done for the better part of three hours, and just had nothing left. So I got off, and started walking up the hill. I got to the summit, climbed back on, and pedaled on flat ground for a little ways. I turned a corner around some trees, and discovered yet another enormous hill. I sighed, and started pushing the bike up the next hill. Then, my blister popped, so I sat down in the dirt and had myself a good cry. I wish I was kidding.

I considered my options. I could carry the bike to the road, and try to ride back to my car. I could leave the bike, and just walk towards the road in my socks (wearing the shoes rubbed my blister, which was now completely open), hoping that I made it back to my car before I passed out from heat stroke. I could sit by the side of the path and rest, and then when the temperature had cooled, ride back to the car. I could call 911 and mutter “Fair Hill Mountain Bike Race…heat stroke…track the GPS in my phone…I’ll be the guy crying in the woods in the yellow shirt.” Or I could just lie in the full sun and hope that the angels would take me to meet Jesus.

Just then, Fate, and/or Jesus, smiled upon me: the people who had been packing up the water station came by in their SUV. They threw my bike atop it, and drove me back to the starting point.

I was supposed to inform the authorities that I’d been picked up, so nobody at the finish line would worry about me. I went inside the building they were using to administer the race. Inside, it was chaos; people milling around, vendors selling food, a woman with a microphone announcing winners, and not one person who looked like they gave a rat turd if I’d finished the race or not. “Screw this,” I said, and left.

I hopped back on my bike (as best I could; hopping was not my strongest suit at the time) and rode back to my car. I loaded the bike on the rack, got in, turned the A/C on to “Arctic” mode, and left. There was a Shell station on the way home, so I stopped in for a fill-up and bought:

• A double-size Twix bar
• A cinnamon roll
• A gallon of water
• Peanuts

I ate and drank all of it before even getting out of Maryland.

Thanks to my old friend Noel, I have been alerted to the interestingness that is the Johari Window. It’s a personality tool that compares what I consider my dominating positive personality traits to be to what others consider them to be. Check out mines here, yo, and tell me if you think I’m basically retarded. You can also set up your ownz, doggle.

The inverse of this is called the Nohari Window; I set up one of those, too. Tell me if you think I’m unethical!

Having a baby really does change everything, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. For example: Charles routinely wakes us at about 6am. I do enjoy being up at that hour, but unfortunately my body doesn’t usually permit it. On the downside, due to lack of sleep, my brain is getting faulty; I realized a moment ago that I left the house wearing a forest green shirt and blue argyle socks. If my wife had caught me she would have punched me in the face. As it is, I’m going to have to work doubly hard to make sure I don’t run into Carson Kressley, as his “tut tut” would cut me very deeply.

Our house looks very white trash today. Even more so than normally, I mean. I decided it would be a good time to get rid of a few things, so we’ve got some old picnic benches out by the trash can, along with a treadmill that I broke by being fat and an exercise bike that was pretty much broken when I bought it. Definitely the classiest look on the block. If only my pit in the backyard was visible from the street!

Speaking of the pit, progress continues, slow as ever. It’s been so hot that I can’t bear to do anything when I get home from work but take off all my clothing and lay naked on the couch. (Which one? Why, the one you’re sitting on! Ha ha!) The good news is that I got a good bit of digging done over the weekend during cooler mornings, and I discovered that the little bolt cutters I purchased go through the rebar mesh holding all the concrete in place like it’s made of Jello. Very strong, dry, metallic, sharp Jello. I’m able to get my shovel under the concrete in most places, so hopefully if I can expose more chunks of rebar I’ll be able to break it all up a bit. That’s my plan, anyway.

You may be wondering if I’m doing the Brandywiners show this summer, and the answer of course is Heck Yes. You may also be wondering why I haven’t really mentioned it, and the reason is, I do not know. Normally my ego is such that I mention these things all summer long, particularly if I have a major role, but for some reason this year I’m feeling more humble. Anyway, the show is My Fair Lady; my role is Freddy Einsford-Hill; I get the best song in the show and get to be beaten up by a girl. OUTSTANDING times.

So many topics! I’ve saved nothing for tomorrow! Oh well.

I had to get the Mazda fixed yesterday. It’s needed a new timing belt since approximately 60,000 miles, and it’s at 101K right now, so every acceleration was coming with a little prayer. Bad times, that. I’d read that usually when they do the timing belt, that’s the time to get the water pump replaced, since doing either of those involves basically disassembling the engine down to the subatomic level and it’s cheaper to only have to do that once.

I also had them look at the transmission, which has been shifting very stiffly, and gave me a scare last week when I couldn’t start it because it hadn’t gone all the way into park, which I fixed by slamming it up and down through the gears (it’s an automatic, sadly) a couple times.

In the end, they had to do the timing belt and water pump, and also recommended a new battery, a full tuneup, and a brake job. I said no to the brake job (I can do that myself) and yes to everything else, which brought the total cost to $989.75, for which I’m pretty sure I could simply have purchased another car. Sigh, says I, with much melodrama.

Charles laughed at me last night. (Or rather, he laughed at something in a dream while I happened to be holding him, but I’m going to pretend he was laughing at me.) Mark the date, people, 7/10/2006: the day my son realized either

1. His father is a hilarious comedian, or
2. His father is amusingly stupid, like all those folks on COPS.

It could go either way, really. Still, it was a pretty cool moment, and then he improved upon it by sleeping for 7 hours straight, and then screaming for no reason for 10 minutes.

Congratulations to Ryan Howard for winning last night’s Home Run Derby, which is about as boring as I had remembered it. Home runs are fun to watch to a point, and I reach that point about 8 swings into the first competitor’s at-bat. Still, Ryan (a Phillie favorite) kept hitting dingers, so I watched all the way through. Thanks to David Wright, Ryan’s opponent in the finals, for tiring himself out in the first round.

This morning I watched the “Legends and Celebrities” softball game, which I had DVR’d, and which was infinitely more amusing than the Home Run Derby. A few highlights:

• John Kruk, Gary Carter, and Dave Winfield all hit home runs, which was doubly amusing because I’m pretty sure the fence was about 150 feet from home plate. The announcers (I don’t remember who they were) kept talking about how such and such really hit one well, which made me giggle. C’mon, guys, I can THROW a softball 150 feet over a 5 foot fence. I’m pretty sure I’d have a reasonable shot at knocking a wiffleball over that.
• People kept sliding into second. I kept waiting for the Pirates’ groundskeeper to come out and kill someone with a lawnmower blade for tearing up his grass 48 hours before the biggest game that PNC Park will see all year.
• A rivalry between comedienne Sarah Silverman and her boyfriend, late night host Jimmy Kimmel, who were playing on opposite teams, and which culminated in her swinging a bat backwards in an effort to drive a ball into his groin.

The National League team ended up winning, and Gary Carter won the MVP. I found this game far more riveting than any playoff hockey game. I guess that shouldn’t be terribly surprising.

I watched a Space Shuttle launch last week, the first one I’d seen in a long time. I don’t avoid them, but I don’t go out of my way to see them; this probably indicates that I’m deeply scarred from having watched the Challenger asplode on live TV 20 years ago, or something. I dunno. Anyway, it was very interesting, and it indicated to me a very important point, when it comes to the future of the human race:

We are deeply, deeply screwed.

Not because coverage of the launch was handled by a collection of reporters who weren’t good enough to handle the city desk for East Frimrip, Alberta. And not because the shuttle itself had any problems. But I realized: the population of the earth is expected to more than double within the next century or so, as it tends to do every century, and the earth itself isn’t expanding. We have limited resources, and the earth is filled with people who still believe that their job is to reproduce as much as possible. For someone that likes privacy and inexpensive real estate, this strikes me as A Problem.

There are a number of solutions, of course. We could force families to limit their baby-making ways, which is technically probably a violation of their civil rights. We could all just learn to live with less, although this would be a difficult feat for Americans who are used to eating 3 meals a day that would feed an Ethiopian family for 2 weeks. And we could try and find more space.

I’m a fan of this last idea, although it does mean that humans will continue to spread like a virus, but through the universe instead of just throughout the Earth, so it is a short term solution, if by short term you mean “several billion years.” And in that time Sol will have long winked out, so we’re gonna wanna try and get off this rock before then anyway.

I am therefore greatly concerned about the fact that we can’t get a human into space without delaying the launch for two days so visibility can improve, and every time we do so, pieces of the spacecraft fall off. And it costs something like 200 million bucks to get it off the ground and safely back home. And the possibility of maybe putting a man on Mars to eyeball the place is a twenty year project.

We’ve been working on this space travel thing for over 50 years now, and we’re still practicing orbiting Earth? C’mon, man, we should’ve had colonies on the Moon 10 bloody years ago! I should be able to vacation on one of Jupiter’s moons! I SHOULD BE GETTING HORRIBLY DRUNK WITH THREE-BREASTED ALIEN HOOKERS, DAMMIT.

Uh…forget that last bit.

Yuri Gagarin flew into outer space and said “omg d00d teh stars are so clear up here!!!!1!1! lol oops i peed in my spacesuit wtf” in April 1961. So we’ve had over 45 years of practice with manned spaceflight. The Wright Brothers flew their little canvas toy on December 17th, 1903. By 1948, 45 years later, we were using planes to bomb cities, had rudimentary passenger air services taking Indiana Jones to beat up Nazis and steal priceless trinkets, and had even broken the sound barrier. It seems to me like we’re a little bit behind, here.

I think I blame the government. Most of the early advances in flight were made by individuals or well-funded corporations, and yet until the last 10 years or so, every spaceflight effort was run by a government. Because governments are swayed by public opinion (sort of), safety has always been paramount, which means that the cost of a space mission is basically quintupled because of all the redundancy and high quality components. During the birth of flight, planes were built by mechanics who had a spare engine laying around and started nailing wood and canvas together. Sure, people died, but that’s the price of progress. And it’s not like the government is doing a particularly great job of keeping our astronauts safe; unless I’m mistaken, NASA has lost 16 or 17 astronauts during spaceflight or training operations, which is something like 5% of everyone who ever went into space aboard an American spacecraft. (These numbers courtesy some article I think I read once.) I think if private entrepreneurs had been in charge of the space program from the beginning, we might have made some progress, and we’d have more dead rich people, which is always good, from an estate tax perspective.

I was going somewhere with this, but as is my wont, I forgot what it was. Oh well.

We had a good weekend; lots of sun, so I was able to get some digging done, put new pedals on my mountain bike and test them out, and we had the Brandywiners Picnic on Saturday at which I demonstrated my volleyball and softball prowess. Oh, and drank beer. We love us some beer.