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Here’s the secret to surviving a 45-mile charity bicycle ride: get a flat tire 3 miles from the start. I got one, and was in the process of repairing it myself, when a “SAG” (“Support And Gear” or “Support Aid Group,” depending upon whom you ask) van rolled up with a professional who did it for me while I watched and enjoyed the cool morning air.

I should backtrack.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know I was participating in the Livestrong Challenge, a charity bike ride to support cancer research. There are a number of distances: a 10 mile, 45, 70, and 100. My boy Zak rode the 100, but because I value my life/knees/testicles, I was not planning to go that far. My homeskillet Sarah B, who happens to be Zak’s girlfriend, and her brother Kyle agreed to ride the 45. The original plan was that we’d stick together, but that proved very optimistic.

The Livestrong folks emailed out updates to the schedule, which revealed that we had to pick up a “race packet” with our bib number and some other things, and the only times that this could be done were on Saturday the 23rd, or Sunday the 24th between 6am and 7am, at Montgomery County Community College, which is 1) where the ride kicks off and 2) over an hour from my house.

In short, I had to be up at 4:30am Sunday in order to get up there, get my packet, meet with my peeps, and be ready and warm for the ride.

The drive up was pretty tame, since nobody was on the road, but was complicated by the fact that I had replaced all four of my car’s brakes the previous day and had not had time to drive the car the 100-200 miles needed to properly break them in. So if anyone had cut me off, there was a good chance everyone was going to die a fiery, screaming death, because I probably would not be able to stop in time. Nevertheless, I made it without incident, arriving around 5:35. I had time to kill, so I started scarfing down egg salad, and wandered over to the information tent to get in line for my packet. Bonus: nobody was there except for the people handing out packets, so I got mine right away. Bogus: now I had roughly 105 minutes to kill before the race kicked off, and I had no idea where my homies were.

Luckily, I had made plenty of beef jerky, so I was all set if I had to wait a long time.

A few text messages later it was determined the aforementioned homies were still at the hotel, so I read a cycling magazine I’d been given and tried to fill up on eggs (probably not the best move), eventually getting my bike loaded up and finally meeting Zak and Sarah and Kyle over by Sarah’s dad’s car. We made our way over to the starting point, making sure to be there by 7:30.

At 8am, they finally started making some stupid speeches that we couldn’t hear because the stage was a 1/4 mile distant. Lance Armstrong appeared, said something unintelligible, and then wandered off. Eventually they announced something that sounded like “Evrrlo hnret…GO!” and we deduced they were sending off the 100-milers, which took a while because there were something like 800 riders, Lance among them, and then the 70-milers, and finally we poor 45-mile participants were let loose around 8:15.

Sarah and Kyle and I had made absolutely sure to place ourselves at the back of the field; Kyle would probably be able to take off, ’cause he weighs approximately 75 pounds and appeared to be made entirely of protein, but Sarah and I knew we needed to start slow, and then continue slow, and finally finish slow. So we pedaled along carefully, trying to avoid running anyone over (it was a big crowd), and finally things started to thin out. Kyle said, “Man, I really want to attack this hill, but I don’t wanna leave you guys,” but I urged him on, and he disappeared into the crowd.

Sarah and I puttered along, but she was riding a mountain bike that couldn’t really hustle on the downhills, so she fell further behind, and I would wait, but finally she told me to just go, and I did. Got about two miles before I heard the tell-tale “fwap fwap fwap fwap” that indicated I was losing a tire. I looked back, and sure enough my rear was deflating with great gusto.

(My rear tire, I mean. Not my rear end. I’d like to see that deflate, but it doesn’t appear to be filled with air. Mostly shoo-fly pie and prime rib.)

I had a spare tube, so I stopped, got out my kit, and set about replacing it, which is when the SAG car rolled up, and a nice gentleman got out and did the job for me. It was a good thing he did, since he found the pin in the tire that I had missed, and got me going much faster than I would have by myself. Plus, I got to stand and enjoy my beef jerky and icy water.

Once that was done, I got back on and went on my merry way. Now there was no one in front of me that I could see, so I didn’t have to worry about bicicular (not a real word) traffic, so I could ride at my own slow pace, which I did until I reached the first rest station, which my odometer said was at mile 11. (Note: this later proved…inaccurate.) I ran across Sarah again, who had somehow passed me on the side of the road without seeing one another, and we loaded up on snacks and water and made off again. Sarah kept with me for a little ways, but after a while my powerful thigh muscles led me away. Just kidding; we found a long downhill and my sheer mass powered me down the slope.

Speaking of slopes: I topped out at somewhere around 38mph on this ride, going down an enormous hill. It doesn’t seem like that’s all that fast, but you have to realize that in a car, the tires have a contact patch (where the rubber meets the road) of 30-40 square inches per tire. Each of my bike’s tires met the asphalt in an area smaller than my wang. It’s…scary. Making it worse are the many people who don’t seem to realize that for every big hill we have to go down, we have to climb back up an equally large one, and it behooves one to build up as much momentum as one can; I’m flying down the hill at 35+, blowing by people taking up valuable road space who are holding on to their brakes and cruising at 20mph or less.

(Bike people, sadly, are no better at traffic maintenance than the average American driver; the concept of keeping to the right to stay out of the way of faster bikes is well-known but largely ignored. Unbelievable, and very frustrating.)

Going up hills was a big problem because I am not built for it. Good climbers are always skinny little guys who may not be long on leg muscle but are so light that they just scoot right on up. I weigh just shy of 250 pounds; going up hills just flat out sucks. A lot of people were having similar problems and remedied it by getting off and walking. I couldn’t do that, though; I didn’t mind stopping for little breaks, but I didn’t sign up for a 45 mile ride just to say I walked up all the hills. So I would go as hard up the hill as I could for as long as I could, and then would stop, put my feet down, eat some jerky, drink some water, and wait for the intense burning in my thighs to ease. Then I’d hop back on and get moving. Some climbs were so steep and long that I would do this two or three times. I passed the time while resting by cracking jokes with the walkers, like “Next year: Nebraska!” or “Who put this hill here? I’m going to have a word with Mr. Armstrong about this.” They’re not exactly knee-slappers right now, but let me tell you, they KILLED among the “exhausted and in staggering pain” demographic.

Cruising along, I was surprised to see how many people were just standing outside their homes to wave and clap as cyclists went by. Some people had set up their own small water stands, in addition to the sanctioned rest stops, just because they or someone they knew had cancer, and they wanted to help in some small way. It was rather moving to accept a free cup of ice-cold water from someone and have her thanking me.

Eventually I made it to the second rest stop, which appeared to be at the 22 mile mark, so I confidently sent a text message to HW to say I was halfway through. By this point it was about 10:30am, so my original plan to finish by noon was tossed by the wayside. I got moving again, and then climbed several of the largest hills I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it was like I was in Switzerland, and I made a pact with Jesus that if he let me finish I would totally stop taking His name in vain in front of elementary schoolchildren. (I’m trying, dangit.)

Then Jesus messed with me by making my rear tire pop again, this time with a loud BANG. I stopped just shy of an intersection where a nice policeman was directing traffic, and he came over to see if I could use some help. I told him I just needed to wait for a SAG van to replace my tube, and he said he could call for one, but the next rest stop was just about a half-mile away, and it was downhill. If I could carefully coast to it I wouldn’t have to wait.

So I did. Think it’s dangerous going downhill at 35mph? Try doing it at 7.5 on a flat rear tire. But I made it, and in fact they replaced the tube and the tread, which was described by the tech as “suspicious.” Going to refill my water bottles, I checked my odometer and was chagrined to discover that because of the hills I’d only really gone about 6 miles since the last stop. The good news: by my calculations I’d gone 28 miles in total, so I only had 17 to go! I was, like, 60% done! I checked my phone to see if HW had written back, and had a few congratulatory messages from her, but was saddened to see that Sarah B had had to bail out after a truck pulled out in front of her and she twisted her knee screeching to a halt. I felt pretty guilty, since I had told her, her brother, and her dad that I wouldn’t leave her behind, and…um…did. Twice, in fact. I hoped she wasn’t too badly injured, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it now.

So I got moving. I knew the next rest stop had been 11 miles from the beginning (about which, you may recall, I was incorrect). I believed myself to be 17 miles from the end, and since it was just a big out-and-back trip, I only had to go 6 more miles to the last rest station. I figured I’d stop, take a long rest, load up on jerky and water for the last (mercifully flat) stretch of the ride.

Imagine my surprise when I got to mile 34 and there was no sign of the rest station. Nor at mile 35, or 36. I was starting to worry I’d gotten off the course, but was still seeing signs directing bicyclists, as well as other riders. I worried most that I’d somehow gotten redirected onto the 70- or 100-mile courses, where I would die a painful and tragic death, I was sure.

Then, at mile 38, I came upon the station. As I loaded up on water, I overheard someone saying that there were only 9 miles left (not the 11 I thought), and I remembered: I had reset my odometer after unloading the bike from the car, but NOT after riding about two miles to warm up and look for Sarah B and her boys. So all my distance calculations were about 2 miles optimistic. I hadn’t gone 38 miles; only 36. And the first stop hadn’t been at 11 miles, it had been at 9. Oh well.

The last stretch was indeed largely climb-free, but at that stage of my exhaustion even the smallest hills required the slowest gear and a great deal of agony. Finally I started crossing roads that I remembered being close to the end, and by my corrected odometer I realized I was only two miles away, then one, and then I saw Montgomery County Community College. I had never been so eager to see an accredited institution of secondary education in my entire life. I ended up rolling into the finish at approximately 1:15, 5 hours after I started.

The end was a little emotional; they radio ahead your number so the announcer can look up your name and shout it over the PA system as you ride in, and there were literally hundreds of people clapping, waving, screaming, and having a high old time. There are actually two lanes for finishers: regular participants like me, and cancer survivors, who are greeted with flowers and extra adulation. Coupled with the fact that I was completely exhausted and excited to have finished, and I almost got a little choked up by it all.

I tried to track down Sarah B and her peeps, but never managed to; I went to the post-race party, where I kept getting dust in my eye as they introduced cancer survivors and entire teams of people who were riding for their grandfather or aunt or just a good friend. I got a beer, some pasta (eff low-carbing it, I was hungry), looked around for my friends (no dice), and headed home.

I did later find out that Sarah B didn’t hurt her knee too badly, and now she had something fun to brag about (apparently her parents already turned the story from “A pickup pulled out and I had to stop short” to “A mack truck cut me off and flung me into a ditch”), so all’s well that ends well, although frankly I still kinda feel like a dick. As usual.

On the other hand, I did successfully cycle 45 miles in 5 hours. So go me.

A big hearty thanks to everyone who donated; I’ll be sending out personal thanks over the next few weeks but would feel bad if you felt unappreciated in the meantime. So…THANKS!

Sarah and I went to Baltimore last weekend. Short version? Hella fun. Long version? Here we go:

We got up with Charles on Saturday morning at his usual time, aka 0-dark-30. We played with him a good bit, he jumped on my belly, I almost threw up, just laughs galore. Meanwhile, Sarah got all packed up and ready to go, and then dropped Charles off with her parents whilst I showered, did a little ironing, and packed.

She got back, we both used the bathroom like responsible adults, and got on the road. We were in East Baltimore in just over an hour, which was pretty remarkable, both the speed of the drive as well as East Baltimore itself. The place goes very suddenly from “horrifically seedy” to “heck of yuppie” in approximately a block, something we were to discover later in our walking travels.

We found reasonable parking ($20 for 24 hours) near our hotel, got checked in, and decided our best option for fun and frolic was to go to Fell’s Point. We had in fact selected our hotel in the belief that it was reasonably near Fell’s Point, but it was technically closest to the Inner Harbor. Either way, everything was pretty much in walking distance. So we hoofed it into Fell’s.

We expected to see a bunch of fun little shops and restaurants, and while there were a few of the former and a bunch of the latter, what there was more than anything else was bars. Sadly, few of them were my speed (quiet, probably expensive, full of dapper gentlemen in ascots and expensive sports coats and plasticine blondes with large white teeth), but we ventured into one that we had a coupon for from our hotel package, mostly because Sarah had to pee. It was named Max’s Taproom, and it was unpleasant. Loud, filled with post-graduate D-bags, and featuring skanky waitresses attempting to cash in on Hooters-style garb.

Hooters sounds like a great idea on paper; decent food, particularly good wings, and hot waitresses wandering around in tight clothing delivering the grub. Unfortunately, in practice, you leave the place unsatisfied. I’ve never been served by a waitress at a Hooters that had, you know, Hooters. They try and synthesize them by wearing brassieres that would be tight on a Chinese gymnast, but meh. Plus they wear enough makeup that you really have no idea what their facial features look like. Is that a mole, or a goiter? Who can say? And Max’s had nothing but Hooters cast-offs. It was depressing.

HW drained her urine tank and we scuttled out of there without having purchased a drink, for which I felt guilty a bit, until I had to scrape my feet on the sidewalk a few times to remove nasty beer stickum. We went across the street to the Greene Turtle to cool our heels, as we had more discount coupons for that. Went inside, saw a waitress who invited us to sit wherever, we said we’d be outside at a table that just opened up, and she said she’d be right out. So we sat outside for ten minutes until she finally poked her out of a nearby door and said, “Has anybody helped you?”

“No, not since you said you’d be right out,” I didn’t say.

“Not yet!” I actually said, cheerily, because I find in life that there is absolutely no sense in irritating someone who could spit herpes simplex-laden saliva into your drink if she senses her tip will be anything less than 25%.

The coupons specified that we could get a two-for-one drink deal if we ordered identical drinks, and this is where the complexity began: I have decided, as a result of tipping the scales north of 250 pounds, to go back on the low-carb diet. The only booze you can have (and they don’t recommend you have any) is straight stuff, because theoretically all the carbs in it have been turned to alcohol, which I guess doesn’t count as carbs for whatever reason despite the fact that it’s still pure calories. Whatever. Sarah agreed to drink whatever I planned to order, so I got us two vodka martinis. Then I drank hers, because she thought it tasted like brake fluid. I think she then ordered a beer. Might have been a rum-and-Coke. I honestly do not recall vividly, because if you’re keeping score I’d had most of two vodka martinis to this point.

I had a third, while we enjoyed some wings, and then asked for the bill. We had to do a bit of haggling with the check; the first time she brought it to us, none of our discounts had been added. The second time, the discounts had been applied to the wrong drink (costing us $3, but hey man, that’s three double cheeseburgers), but the third time, all was well, so I threw some cash at the bill and we went a-wandering yet again.

We tried to find some shops and things to look at, but aside from a gallery of photographs that were retouched to look like paintings (which I guess qualifies as art, in the same way that Photoshop-filtered puppy pictures are art) and a jewelry store where HW bought me a nice silver ring, there wasn’t much. Just bar after bar filled with drunks. Not that I’m much complaining; I’d had three martinis, after all, after not having had a drink in about a week, and was walking on air, or would have been had I not been so fat that the air was unwilling to support my heft.

We wandered north up Broadway a bit, and were bemused to discover that the quality of shops went from “10% off summer Silver” to “25% off all Hemp wear!” to “75% of weavs” in about a block. North of that, there be monsters. We came about smartly and headed back south.

After walking some more blisters into our feet, we decided to find a place to eat, and here was where the brilliant luck occurred: we had another coupon from our hotel good for $50 off of any one of three restaurants, and so we selected “Kali’s Garden,” which sadly has no website other than a few google links that seem to think it’s a Middle Eastern restaurant, which it is most definitely not.

Kali’s Garden is gourmet American cuisine done right. A good dose of seafood, of course; I had raw oysters that were YUMMMMMM, and bouillabaisse that was disappointing, although I don’t think that was the restaurant’s fault as much as me realizing that I don’t much care for bouillabaisse. Sarah had a filet that was like butter, although filet is rather hard to screw up. Even my incompetent hands can cook tenderloin to a state of scrumptiousness.

The service was, as you might expect at a place charging upwards of $32 for a basic entree, spectacular and friendly. Sarah closed the meal with crème brûlée that was quite fantastic, although again it’s difficult to screw up, while I polished off my 7th martini of the day and a free glass of champagne. Then we stumbled back to the hotel.

It was early yet, only about 7:30pm; we were tired of walking, but still too ramped up to sleep. So we wandered the Inner Harbor, did a spate of shopping (we bought a little wind-up crab for Charles, which he inexplicably hates because once it’s wound up, it can’t be turned off), and decided the sensible thing to do was go back to the hotel and get more drinks.

The hotel featured three on-site establishments: a Ruth’s Chris franchise, something called “McCormick and Schmicks” or something like that (it seemed profoundly shady, and we avoided it) and a small bistro called “My Panini.” We figured our best shot at cheap fare was at My Panini, particularly since we discovered it had a functioning bar. We wandered in and sat, and a nice gentleman handed us two menus. We decided what we wanted to snack on and drink, and waited for service.

And waited.

And waited a weeeee bit longer.

Finally a breathless young man came over, apologized profusely, took our drink and food orders, and then sprinted back to the bar and disappeared. We watched the bartender, not 15 feet from us, pour our drinks and sit them on the edge of the bar to get nice and warm, and waited for our waiter, who finally came back and delivered my salad (disappointing) and the drinks. We drank those and chatted, and he came back after a bit to get a further order, which we gave him, and he disappeared, such that we finally tired of waiting and simply got up to the bar to get our own drinks and place our own orders. On the plus side, we didn’t get charged for something like 3 of the 5 drinks we had, so I didn’t undertip too harshly.

We headed back upstairs and passed out like a hurricane.

The next morning, we planned to go see the Maryland Science Center, so we chugged some tylenol against our staggering hangovers and went downstairs to My Panini (where we were eligible for free breakfast) to fortify ourselves. We were told upon entrance that our coupons were good for a free cold breakfast, which amounted to cereal and fruit (neither of which I could eat), or $5 off of the hot breakfast, bringing the price down to $6.99 per person, plus drinks, which were exorbitant: $2.19 for a cup of coffee that tasted of seawater? What is this insanity?

My Panini, I’ll say this once, and you should listen: suck it. Your prices are ridiculous, the food is disappointing, and your service is an abomination before the Lord.

After this disheartening experience, we decided that the Maryland Science Center was too great a task for the day, so we decided to wander the Inner Harbor in daylight, do some more shopping, take some pictures of various ocean-going vessels, and partake of as many tasty snacks as we could. It was a limited success; there were certainly plenty of people wandering around, though many of them were bums hassling the tourists for “spare” change. We did get to “enjoy” a “juggler” who did a minimum of juggling and a maximum of insulting his audience in a way that was 10% funny and 90% awkward. I’m glad he spent the first 5 minutes of his act reminding everyone that he’d appeared on Jay Leno and David Letterman and yet had time to come down and do his routine for the moron tourists of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. That really made us want to open our wallets. I don’t think the guy made 50 cents all day, which is definitely not nearly as good as when the Y-chromes went to Baltimore my senior year and did an impromptu five-song concert in the middle of the…campus? whatever it is- and netted a small fortune, enough to keep us pretty much hammered the rest of the day, which was a spectacular idea since we had a concert that evening and I ended up throwing up on a frat couch at the after-party and got everybody kicked out.

But that is another story for another time.

Once we got our fill of wandering, we tried to find a nice little bistro for snacks, but unfortunately there’s nothing in the Inner Harbor but chain restaurants, so we settled for a Houlihan’s where we had Diet Cokes and mediocre spinach dip.

And then we drove home.

Here’s an update, bulleted with a blue sky:

• The LiveSTRONG Challenge donations continue apace! A big thanks to everyone who has donated. You’ll all be getting much more personal thanks from me than just a mention on my blog, don’t worry. (The promised hugs will most definitely be forthcoming.) I’ve been training, including doing some ridiculous hills (because the route’s out in Montgomery County and promises to be fluctuous). I’m still working up my distance; the furthest I’ve ever gone is about 20 miles (the route is 45 miles), but I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to finish. For one thing, I’m riding with my homegirl Sarah and her brother, and for another, the course opens at like 8am and doesn’t close until somewhere around 4. Even my fat butt can finish a 45 mile bike ride in 8 freakin’ hours. I’ll be disappointed if it takes more then 3.5, although my pace will be dictated by whomever in our party is the slowest; I’m not leaving anybody behind. Of course, the odds are I will be the one getting left behind, which is fine with me. I ain’t holdin’ anybody up. If you’d like to donate and make my sacrifice worthwhile, use the link above and chip in some ducats, doggle.
• Oklahoma! wrapped up, I have something like 3,000 pictures from two photographers (Kate and myself) to go through and pick the cream of the crop. It may take some time, so if cast members are coming here wondering where the heck the pictures be at: patience is a virtue. I won’t even have the full set of pictures until at least the cast party on Saturday ’cause Lord knows we need documentary evidence of that freakish dance party FOR. REALS.
• Charles sings the ABC song as follows: “A B C D F G H I J K L P Q R S two Vs double X Y Z Now know ABDs next sing me!” It’s priceless.

That’s what I’ve got. Challa.

Dr. Tea-Gar pointed out in a comment to my last post that I was horribly remiss to not report the birth of my niece. Yeah, I am dumb. Somehow, the birth of my parents’ first granddaughter slipped my mind. And I wasn’t even drinking at the time! Of course, statistics show that I actually have a more reliable memory when I’m half in the bag.

Anyway. Moving on:

I would like to present Kathryn Amelia, born at 8 pounds 1 ounce, 20 inches long, on July the First.

(Link goes to Shutterfly, where those of you who are so inclined could order prints. It’s a 10MP shot, so it should inflate to just about poster-sized, although it’ll be grainy ’cause it’s ISO1600.)

Wow, it’s been like 3 weeks and a day. That is pretty sad, for someone who prides himself on…well…I’m not sure what I pride myself on. Food consumption, I guess, and I’m also remarkably good at growing zits.

Anyway, you might be curious about what’s been going on, but probably not. The new job really has me hoppin’, and I’m loathe to do anything but, you know, actually work, because I’d like to keep my job. (At CSC getting fired would have been almost a pleasure, so I did a significant portion of my blogging from the office.) The Brandywiners show (“Oklahoma!”) has me at one rehearsal or another almost every night, and we haven’t even gone out to Longwood (the location of the outdoor theater) yet. Things are gonna get mad hectic. MAD. HEC. TIC. TAC. TOE.

That went to a weird place.

Anyway, some quicky notes:

• I love my new MacBook. (You may have read about it in an earlier post.) There’s all kinds of radness associated with it, and I finally managed to get all my favorite programs installed. Woo! Woo. If you’ve got the means (they’re roughly twice as expensive as a comparable PC), I highly recommend picking one up.
• I finally got around to starting to use Shutterfly, bringing me into approximately 2004. I’m catching up, I swear! Anyway, you can hit up matthearn.shutterfly.com to look at some recent pictures, and even download or order quality prints of ’em if you’ve of a mind to.
• While I’m in the picture-editing mode, hopefully I’ll have new pictures of Charles to put up in the next day or two. I mean, I have the pictures; hopefully they’ll be up. If you’re curious, he’s the size of a prize calf. It’s like feeding a full-grown St. Bernard, except blonder and louder.

Yeah, that’s what I got. Hopefully I’ll see you in less than 3 weeks. No promises, though.

It’s been some time, so we’re gonna break it down West Virginia-style. Show me what you got!

• I may or may not have mentioned, I got a new job! Actually, I know I didn’t mention it, because nothing was finalized until just a few weeks ago, I didn’t want to jynx anything, and then things were insanely busy for the last few weeks at CSC and then of course the first week at AIG.

  I’m not gonna say anything rude about CSC, since that seems tacky and possibly actionable at law, but I will say this: wow, what a difference. AIG is just a completely different environment. In some ways that’s great, and in some ways it’s not so great, but the aggregate result is general awesomeness.

• I’m finally going over to the dark side. Or was I already on the dark side, and now I’m going over to the light side? Hard to say, but it is certainly the whitest piece of electronic equipment I’ve ever owned. I, of course, ordered it on a Friday afternoon before a holiday, so I’ll be lucky if I have it by mid-June.
• Speaking of computational power, I got permission to buy MYSELF a new lappy by fixing my wife’s, a 2-year-old Dell Inspiron B130 that had developed the following inexplicable behaviors:
  1. Getting hotter than a melon picker’s taint in August. Seriously, if you turned it on and sat it on your bare legs, after a while you’d start to smell singed hair and be like, the hell? OW!
  2. Ridiculous slowdowns at completely random times. Work in Photoshop for 45 minutes? No problem! Attempt to open up Wordpad? Oh, that’s gonna take me a few minutes. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
  3. Heat-related shutoffs. Basically the box would just turn itself off, and then turned it on after it cooled, you’d get this nice message saying “I turned myself off ’cause it was too hot out!” Really great.

  I did a little googlin’ and found two possible solutions to the problem:

  • Take the lappy apart and blow the dust out of it. I took it apart as far as I dared (didn’t wanna break anything) and didn’t see much in the way of dust, but I sprayed it with a can of air anyway. No effect.
  • Undervolt the CPU so that it absorbs less electricity, and thusly, less heat. Turns out this model CAN’T undervolted. Yay!

  So I was getting pretty pissed, and finally went to the Dell website to see if I could find instructions on complete disassembly of the system, and found a thing saying “if your B130 is overheating, here is how to take out the heat sink and clean the dust out of it.” What? Why didn’t Google turn this up? Google, you have led me astray!

  So I took the heat sink out, and sure enough, there was a clump of cat hair in there big enough to roll into felt and make a hat from. I got that out, blew some can o’ air in there, and put everything back together. Now there’s no heat problems at all. I’ve had this sitting on my junk for the time it’s taken me to type this out (maybe 20 minutes) and nothing’s afire! Woo!

  As an added bonus, the CPU processing power has gone from about 1GHz to 1.4GHz. I guess processors have ways of detecting when things are too hot and just slowing everything down. Ain’t a problem no more, this puppy’s whirling like a dervish.

  So in short, if your compy is too hot and it’s burning your groin, pop the heat sink out and clean it.

The end.

Go see “In The Heights” on Broadway, as it is totally rad. Don’t believe me? Here’s what the NY Times had to say on the subject. I think they’re pretty much spot-on, which means I agree with the Times on something, a scary thought. The music and dancing are FANTASTIC (the pit orchestra is particularly good), the dialogue reasonably funny, the plot sort of predictable and disjointed, but it’s Musical Theater, not an Albee play.

It doesn’t hurt that our friend Shaun is in it, primarily as a chorus member but also an understudy for two of the leads. So go see it.

We drove up last Saturday, a day those of you on the Eastern Seaboard was mostly one long torrential downpour. The drive was stressful. Two hours of driving at 60mph on horrible New Jersey roads, not being able to see more than about 100 feet in front of the car. Seriously, NJ, is there any reason why your roads have to be bumpier than my face? The Jersey Turnpike is one long rumble strip. It was particularly nice when the wind would blow from right to left, and I’d steer to the right to keep in my lane, and watch in wonder as the car continued to drift to the left because the front wheels had started hydroplaning. I’d lift off the gas, the wheels would stick, and the car would jerk to the right. One poor soul almost spun his Jetta in front of me, would would have resulted in Death and Dismemberment for all concerned.

We finally arrived in Manhattan, parked at a reasonably non-shady parking garage near Times Square, and walked the half-block to the DoubleTree Suites. My parents were up for the weekend as well and had already checked in, so we just grabbed a room key from the desk and headed up. Thank SGLBJ for high-speed elevators, says I, because we were on the 29th floor. The view was fantastic, and I had my camera, so it’s a surprising oversight of mine that I didn’t take a single picture of anything all weekend. Sorry about that.

I plopped myself in a chair to try and bleed off some stress, while Sarah mixed me a tasty intoxicating beverage from the stash we’d brought with us (because if you’re going to open the minibar at a hotel anywhere in the world, and triply so in New York, you may as well just start wiping your ass with twenties). After we changed clothes and relaxed a bit, we headed out to meet our friends for dinner at “El Deportivo,” which sounds like some kind of place the INS takes detainees for a last meal before shipping them back to Nicaragua. We ordered drinks, met up with our friends, and then I left.

I had to work, you see. Some application guys had scheduled a major upgrade for the weekend, and needed someone to run a backup of their system first, and I was the guy. I’m always the guy. Remember when I said I’d been working too hard? Yeah, having to interrupt drinking and fun to go do work is not good times. Luckily, it went superfast, so I ran back out to meet up with the family and friends at a bar near the Richard Rodgers theatre named “House of Brews,” which had cask ale. This is not something one normally finds in America, so I had one, and it was fantastic. Man…English beer. Good stuff.

The theatre was pretty bumpin’, a good crowd for the last preview show before Opening Night (which was on Sunday). We had pretty decent seats, on the lower level, good view of the stage. My knees were pressed hard into the back of the seat in front of me, which kinda sucked for the guy sitting therein, because I have a tendency to start pretending to play the drums when I hear funky latin beats, and my bass-drum leg was making that poor fellow’s seat bounce up and down like Carmen Electra on a trampoline. He almost turned around to say something and I realized and stopped, but it was an effort to remain reasonably still for the remainder of the performance.

Luckily, it was captivating. Like I said, a little predictable, but who cares about that. I know how “No Country For Old Men” ends (I read the book), but I’m still beyond stoked to see the movie. “In The Heights” is the kind of show that I almost hope doesn’t have too long a run, because it’d be nice to have MTI or Tams-Witmark get hold of it so I could do it at Brandywine High in a few years, although we’d have to have one HELL of a pit band to pull it off. It’s just fun from beginning to end. And the guy that wrote it, and stars in it, is all of 28. Speaking as someone who is slightly older than 28: I hate him. Go see the show.

After the show, we met Shaun at the stage door, and he was able to take us inside and show us the set, which was ridiculously detailed. One of the leads had brought in a high school portrait of herself which they hung in the shop owned by her character’s parents. There was an ATM with graffiti on it (it appeared to have signatures of the cast and/or crew all over it in bright neon colors). The sidewalk upstage had GUM STAINS ON IT. These are the kind of details you can do, I guess, when you have months to construct a set. (My favorite set of all time, although I’m hardly an expert on such things, was the one they had for “Sunset Boulevard” where a house descended from the rafters. Not a small house, either, but the entire downstairs interior of a Hollywood mansion, covering almost the entire stage, simply dropped into place, with Glenn Close walking around on it as they did so.)

Sarah and I took the opportunity to bust a few moves on the stage, so we can now say (and in fact have been telling everyone we know) that we have Danced On Broadway.

Afterwards, Shaun took us to a club named either “W” or “The Whiskey,” I’m not entirely sure which. The confusion stemmed from the fact that it was all basically one club, but with two completely separate environments: a 7th floor lounge, where we stood around for a while and were bored, and a basement dance club, where we found ourselves around midnight and simply threw down the moves for upwards of 90 minutes. I awoke on Sunday with crippling thigh pain because of my unstoppableness on the dance floor. Eventually, we tired, and some folks had to take trains and cars to get back to their normal lives, but the rest of us headed to a pizza place, where I ate half a pie and part of another to soak up the staggering amount of gin I’d taken in by that point. Eventually, Sarah and I made it back to the hotel, where we crashed hard on the pull-out bed.

The next day, we managed to actually get up, get breakfast, and get on the road shortly after noon, and aside from an incident where I did something stupid in the Lincoln Tunnel and almost caused an accident, made it back to Delaware safe and sound. Whoo. The next day, I went back to work, and nearly wept at my desk.

Tomorrow: the final installment of pictures of Charles from like 2 months ago. I’ll have to take some more; he’s probably grown an inch since then.

Okay, so here is what has been going on, and it is crazy.

We have a new customer at work, about whom I can basically say nothing, except that

1. it’s actually a pretty cool client to work with, and
2. contractual obligations have required us to have things in place on an INSANE timetable.

So, in short, I’ve been working ridiculously hard, something that is anathema to my very soul. This has left little time for sleep, not least because the stress prevents me from sleeping very well, and when coupled with the spring high school show we’re doing again this year (Wizard of Oz, April 10th,11th,12th, be there or be crushed by a flying house) and the supposedly-only-21-months-old-but-the-size-of-a-3-year-old toddler that’s destroying my house, I end up doing things like writing 89-word run-on sentences with multiple nested parenthetical asides (like this one (and this one)).

Luckily, things at work have slowed JUST a teense (although I still have some stuff ramping up that I’m hoping to get ahead of before it gets too insane), just in time of course for the musical to get super busy. Extra-luckily, we learned from our mistake with last year’s show (doing it in mid-March after only about 2 months of rehearsals, many of which got snowed out) and are doing it almost a full month later this year, plus not many rehearsals got snowed out, so we’re in good shape. Of course, we have to deal with spring break in the middle of rehearsals, because Easter is about as early as it can possibly be, but that’s a small price to pay for, say, not opening this weekend, which would have me cutting my legs like emo girl.

Plus, I found a little time to start working on a novel. Yes, I’m writing a novel! As you might expect, it’s pretty bad! Like, almost painful. But I’ve decided that dammit, I’m gonna finish it, even if it’s just a practice one. If it turns out to be not a complete embarrassment, I might share it with you. If after about 17 drafts it actually ends up being half-decent, I might send it around to some publishers, as soon as I figure out how to do that. This is not likely, however, as so far the only redeeming quality seems to be that some of my fishing reel trivia is correct.

See? I told you. BAD.

Later this week, you’ll have one more righteous picture update from Charles, and I might actually take a break from going insane to tell you all about going to see “In The Heights” on Broadway last week. Hint: I HAVE DANCED ON THE BROADWAY STAGE!

In my never-ending quest to be exactly 4 years behind my peers, technologically, I finally got an iPod. For a long time I maintained that any music player was as good as another, and in fact convinced my wife a few years ago to buy me a little 256MB player that held 70 or 80 songs and was very small and compact and handy. It had some downsides, though: it used a single AAA battery, which it would burn through in about 45 minutes; it was nearly impossible to control the volume easily, which probably took a few hertz off of my audible range; and also it required a proprietary USB cable which I immediately lost, so the songs that were on it were gonna stay on it, which is unacceptable as long as Justin Timberlake keeps releasing albums.

So anyway, I put an iPod nano on my Amazon.com wishlist a while back, and managed to update it to the new video version long enough before Xmas that HW bought me one. It’s simply fantastic. It’s like a monolith, and it has changed me from a raving caveman into a hip Seattle-style intellectual. (Sorry, I just read 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time.)

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into some kind of indie band blog, ’cause let’s face it: 99.9% of indie bands are independent of the major labels because they suck Donkey Kong.

Anyway, a few thoughts on the iPod nano:

• It is ridiculously small. Seriously, I look at it and marvel at what science can do. It’s about the size of 3 credit cards stuck together, and holds 8 freaking gigabytes of data, be it mp3s, videos, photos, or even games. Note: playing games on an iPod is kinda sucky.
• I had never really gotten into the whole “podcast” thing, because without an actual iPod I could only listen to them on my computer, and if I’m sitting in front of my computer I’m undoubtedly reading something or playing a game, and can’t concentrate on the voices in my ear. Having an iPod changes everything; I download podcasts and listen to them in my car, which is fantastic because the average podcast is roughly 25-30 minutes, and it takes me 25-30 minutes to get from where I work to Sarah’s parents’ house to pick up Charles. So awesome.
• Perhaps it’s just the shape of my lobes, but the earbuds just won’t stay in my ear very well. It’s not a problem if I’m just sitting at my desk listening to tunes, but I can’t imagine jogging with them. I think my ears are just too big. They make decent headphones that wrap around the ear (I have a pair I bought for my other mp3 player, although they’re kinda beat up now), but the iPod earbuds sound particularly good, and I don’t think a cheapy set would fit the bill. Some of my readers are enormous individuals who probably have iPods; how do you guys listen to your jams?

Also, since I’m always about 2 years behind on pop culture, HW and I are getting caught up on “Heroes,” which I think is the best network drama on TV. More about that later in the week.

This is the cold that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. Some germs got in my body made me feel filled up with fuzz, I can’t seem to get rid of them and it’s all just because this is the cold that never ends…

It’s not a BAD cold, it’s just ANNOYING. Just a sort of general ague that leaves my nose running, though I can still breathe through it, and my throat filled with various goos that I can’t seem to cough up. Plus my earache comes and goes, that’s an added bonus. I managed to fight through it for a Messiah performance yesterday, but that’s mostly because my solos were all in the first part, so I didn’t have to try and save myself for stuff towards the end. All the worrisome bits were done by intermission, which meant I could just stand up and sit down and periodically yell in baroque counterpoint, while stuffing cough drops into my mouth and yawning to drain my eustachian tubes. It was good times for all! Yes, yes it was.

The performance went superbly, actually; we had some new soloists this year, a tenor named Ken, and an old acquaintance named Gus singing countertenor. Dude sings like a lady! It’s awesome.

The rest of the weekend was spent completely ignoring my self-imposed dietary restrictions in favor of chips, fudge, and alcohol. These are a few of my favorite things, particularly when the chips are Grandma Utz’s, the fudge is handmade by yours truly, and the alcohol is in vast quantities. Plus my wife let me sleep in on Saturday for no good reason at all. If I could have figured out a way to not get called for work all weekend (despite not actually being on call; my job is really great) it would have been very restful.

I hope your Christmas shopping is in a better state than mine; my usual effort to make up for being a dick 364 days a year by spending too much money on friends, family, and charities is WAAAAAAY behind. I have some stuff, but need to make an inventory before making any further purchases so I don’t end up with a situation in which I have 17 items for my father and 3 for my mother. (This is hyperbole, you understand, but I’m pretty sure as of now I have 2 or 3 big presents for Dad and not one thing for Mom. Although I think Sarah has stuff for her; I’ll just replace her labels with ones that say “from your loving eldest progeny.” Just like every year!) Usually by this time I’ve already basically completed my purchases and just have to make with the wrapping, but it’s been a busy fall. BTW: people that want good presents make and update their Amazon wishlists. If you leave me to just buy you whatever I think you might like, well, that’s how people end up with CDs like this.