It’s difficult to put a full day of racing, and the many weeks of training beforehand, into less than 60 seconds that you shot on a phone. So I won’t try. But this, nevertheless, was Saturday, a half Iron. That’s a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile ride and a 13.1-mile run to you and me:
The Yankee won her age group, cause she’s awesome:
Her goggles broke in the water, so she swam with one eye, and was the fifth woman out of the water. Her knee was aggravating her on the run so she wisely took it easy. What we’re saying here is that she can go faster if she needs to.
adventures / food / Friday / photo — Comments Off on Half parmesan pretzels and a pie, please 13 Sep 19
When I was in college — ahh, sweet college — there came this new restaurant downtown. All the drinkers liked it because they had a bajillion beers on tap. I forget the number, somewhere between 27 and 72, I’m sure. Truly it was impressive for the time, and probably still is today.
It was a pizza joint, and it turned out to be a really good pizza joint. You can have the taps, bring be the pretzels:
Ate there a lot in school. And then we moved back there years later and ate there almost weekly. And by then there were more franchises of Mellow Mushroom opened up nearby. So I could enjoy it several places.
And now I live in a college town with exceedingly average pizza. It’s a bizarre phenomena, really. The old Pizza Hut is now a Mexican restaurant, El Ranchero Mexican, which kept the iconic Hut silhouette and gets good reviews online. The consensus best pizza in town is on par with a good day at the Hut way back when. In a college town. Isn’t that sad?
So to get good pizza, to get Mellow Mushroom, we have to go an hour-and-a-half up the road, to the north side of Indianapolis. If you think I’m not trying to find reasons to go there regularly, or how to enlist students from that neck of the woods to bring me some back when they return from home you’re wrong.
So very wrong.
My social media campaign to get Mellow Mushroom to open a store here and clean up is also underway.
I wondered yesterday about the prospects of maintaining color continuity over the course of the long term. There were blue and tan elements. And so there are today, as well.
I only took this picture to put on Instagram, because, at the end of the day, I wasn’t sure if it was a good look or not. The reviews have been good so far. One follower chimed in “You know I have opinions,” but left it at that. Owing to the flush of information through the Instahose I will now never know what those opinions are. I am sure, though, that this was a bad choice.
Really, it is just a good way to keep track of when I wore what.
We had a bike ride this evening, the last Thursday evening ride I’ll have for a good long while, since we’ll start back up with the television shoots next week. Best not to dwell on the absence of rides for now though. Look! The tar snakes are making a smiley face!
Was there video? You bet there was video, and the audio totally goes with that tie!
I PRed three segments on Strava on this ride. It was one of my better rides of the year to date. Which is something I should have progressively been saying since about June, but the feeling returns when the feeling returns. The title of that workout on Strava became the title of this post. No one considered that in post-post-neo-modernism-ish time we’d have to title our workouts, but that’s the world for you. Wherever you go, there better be a post for it. How else will Buckaroo Bonsai know where you are? Anyway, now, the trick is to get as much out of these more pleasant feeling rides as possible, dovetailing as they are with shorter days and milder temperatures.
And, naturally, I won’t be able to ride again for another four or five days.
As I mentioned last week, The Yankee and I invented a new game. We take photos of nonsensical things for arcane reasons. The game is made up and the points don’t matter, but we had a good time with it. She won this first round, but only barely. Here are a few of my efforts. Remember, friends, I am a professional.
Cream and cream:
I was accused of staging this photograph, but that was before we had rules about staging our shots. (I totally staged that shot.)
I think this one speaks for itself:
From the utilitarian nihilism of the postal system and boxes in general, to the practicality of asphalt paint:
And then of course there’s Max, the standee. I thought this was a great submission in the game at the time, but this game can change on you in a hurry. That’s what Max taught me:
Wouldn’t it be a shame if I lost this game on the Max shot? This game needs rules. That’s what I’ve learned today. Give me rules and a camera and I can put out a good effort. Without that, though, these pictures are just going to get interesting eventually. I am a professional.
Today was a delightful and light day. We drove down to one of the family haunts yesterday for the weekend’s festivities. My sister-friend, my friend-sister Elisabeth — we need a term for someone you meet under the oddest of circumstances who decides to keep you for so many years, and who wants you to them around too — and her husband flew in the other day. People have come in from all over, really.
I had a phone call and a teleconference, which isn’t too bad for a day you take off from work, I guess. They happened at virtually the same time, so, really, you could call it multitasking, which is pretty great for an off day.
I did get to sleep in, which is excellent. And there was a late breakfast, a brunch, really, if we need to be specific. And we should be as specific as possible in as many places as possible. We had dinner at the local Mexican restaurant. I hear it is merely OK, but I enjoyed my fajita enchilada. Probably it was the cheese.
We went to listen to some music after dinner. Dueling pianos don’t get enough credit for their easy entertainment potential.
The personality and the enthusiasm was more important than the soaring solos. There were, I counted, six different performers, and they all just cycled through the full array of instruments they had on stage: two pianos, a handful of different guitar set ups, a small drum kit. And they were a pretty talented bunch. It was nice because two or three of them would play, and the others went … elsewhere … and then they would one at a time rotate off. They didn’t take any set breaks. There wasn’t a lot of inane chatter. They just played covers and everyone there enjoyed themselves pretty well. The lady singing at the beginning of the clip might have been the best performer of the bunch. Sadly the audio of her singing didn’t carry over as well as it should. They were taking requests, as they do in a dueling piano setup, and I tried thinking up the most ridiculous songs I could challenge them with, figuring, They must get bored playing the same tunes every show.
They played four of them: Country Roads, Enter Sandman and the like. It was a nice evening, which is especially great for a day off.
