If I want to work out at the gym, I have to get up at 5:15am in order to make it to work on time. That, combined with driving to work while listening to NPR, makes me grumpy. In theory, the drive to work should be just 10 minutes less than the public transit version. Due to the unreliable nature of the Expo-line-to-bus connection, however, when taking public transit I often wound up being late, which also made me grumpy.

I looked at the bike commuting route from the Metro station to work and realized that it was pretty much the same mileage I was doing on the exercycle - which meant that by biking to and from work, I'd get twice the workout. I also ran the numbers on my biking speed vs. how long the bus from the Metro takes and realized that I could bike to work in the same amount of time as the bus takes, if not less. If my train is delayed and I miss the bus by one minute, that makes me an hour late to work. If my train is delayed and I'm a minute late on the bike path, that makes me one minute late to work, which no one will give me grief for. And, to get this workout, I only have to wake up 15 minutes earlier rather than an hour and a half earlier! My choice was clear.

My bike ride to work is 80% awesome and 3% utter terror. The 80% awesome is the Ballona Creek bike path:


( More photos, 3% terror, and thoughts on being trapped in a box in LA.Collapse )

If I needed evidence that all this extra exertion was worth it, I got it on Friday. I got a little tied up at work and got on my bike slightly later than usual, and several minutes after I would have had to catch the bus back to the train. As I sped down the final quarter mile of the bike path, I could see the Expo Line train coming in at the elevated station. Dang! I missed it. While waiting on the train platform for the next train, I watched the bus that I would have been on, had I taken the bus, pull up to the train station and let several people off. As they got off the bus, the train pulled up. My bike and I got on, but none of the bus riders even made it to the station staircase before the train left. I beat the bus - and I've barely even gotten started at building up my speed.

As just about anyone who has been in a relationship with me can tell you, I am extremely persnickety about my bags. It has to hang right, have lots of interior pockets and compartments as well as a larger space where I can dump things. And, it goes without saying, it has to be stylish. These are across-the-board requirements, from hydropacks to purses to laptop bags.

I love the Crumpler laptop bag I have from work, but one thing has become painfully apparent as I bike to and from work: it is a laptop bag, and in no way a messenger bag.

I also have a much larger Timbuk2 D-Lux bag that I bought several years ago, which is an extremely effective messenger bag and is great when I'm cycling. My issue with it is that it does not have the truly amazing pocket system that the Crumpler laptop bag has; the pockets are not sufficient to hold the stuff I have that need pockets. However, it has MOLLE-style straps on the interior to allow the user to attach various widgets where they want. The concept was that you could get a water bottle holder, cellphone pocket, iPod pocket, etc. and latch them on in a spot that work for you - but I'd never gotten around to going to the site and adding on modules. So I decided to take a look and see which modules would do the trick.

There are no modules at all. I poked around the Internet for more information. It appears Timbuk2 released this, trumpeting the awesome modular system, and then immediately abandoned it without ever creating any internal modules for the thing.

Grrrr. Now I'm going to have to see if MOLLE-style attachments fit in my bag so I can make it the bag I want to have. They'd better because I don't want to spend the money or go through the challenge of finding the actual ideal bag. That's a year long process for me at minimum. (No, I am not joking. Ask emdiar about going purse shopping with me sometime.)

Dear advertising salesperson,

I understand you have quotas to make and your job is tough, and your boss is probably pestering you to set up meetings in LA. However, if I have told you TWICE via email that I am completely booked up on the days that you want to book a meeting, you should not then call me on the telephone to pester me.

If you have made the mistake of calling me at that juncture and I say that I'm about to be late to a meeting and could we talk later, the very last thing you should do next is pester me for names of other people in the office and try to keep me on the line for several minutes.

Because when I am late for said meeting and it's because of you, you can bet that I'll remember you as "that person who totally screwed up my day and made me late for an important meeting." That does not bode well for you doing business with me in the future.

No love,

Me

Today was CicLAvia. 15 miles of streets in Los Angeles were shut down for motor traffic and opened for people using non-motorized transport (predominantly bikes, but also rollerskates, rollerblades, skateboards, and their own two feet). The route started in our neighborhood and ended at Venice Beach.

In total, today we biked 31 miles. That is the furthest I have ever biked in one day. I feel proud of myself. I'm also sore and every time I move my body says, "What the HELL are you doing? Stay still, for gods' sake! Can't you lie down or something?"

We biked with two friends of emdiar's, both of whom I would consider to be better cyclists than I am (one of them even uses clip-in pedals!) I warned both of them that I was a really slow cyclist. In the middle of the ride, both of them told me I was not a slow cyclist. (One of them actually sounded a little snarky about it, as if I'd been trying to put something over on him.)

I will have much more to say about how amazing this event was, but I can barely put together a sentence right now. I need a night of sleep before I can put it all down.

Today we added a new element to our riding mix. I downloaded the mobile/web cycling tracking app Strava so we could see what our speed actually was. I had assumed that I was cycling at around 6-7 mph. It turns out that our average speed was 10.3 mph with stoplights - and when you get to the segments where we don't have any stop lights, just long stretches of fairly empty road, it's 12.3 mph.

Another thing I discovered, while weighing my bike so I could log it in to Strava: my bike weighs just under 40 pounds! Since Strava's default bike weight is 18 pounds, I gather mine is pretty heavy. Perhaps that's why Giant doesn't list the weight of the bike ANYWHERE on their site or in the manual. I love my bike, but that sure explains why lifting it up the stairs at the end of my ride takes such an effort.

For the bike geeks: yes, I recognize that an iPhone app is not quite as accurate as a bike computer, but it's a hell of a lot more accurate than my gut instinct - and from the reviews where people are comparing it to their bike computers, the difference seems to be minimal.

The other thing I learned today: Don't chug a full cup of hot coffee in the middle of your ride, or you will be overwhelmingly queasy for the next four miles.

Today we ran our normal Saturday-morning errands by bike rather than by car. We haven't biked most of these areas before, but Saturday mornings in downtown LA are generally quiet for traffic, and even more on a day with such LA-bad weather as today. What's LA-bad weather, you might ask? It's overcast. Hey, we have very little weather in this town, so it doesn't take much to keep people at home.

Total distance: a tiny fraction under 10 miles. I developed new skills today, including: biking in street clothes, biking over steel plates, biking over train tracks, biking through road construction zones, biking through tunnels, and coasting v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y up to lights so that they would change before I actually hit them and I wouldn't have to start from a full stop.

A couple of years ago this bike ride would have been very scary for me; I really feel like I've leveled up as a cyclist.

( This may be boring for everyone else, but I want to log the experience for future reference.Collapse )

One thing today's ride taught us: my bargain-basement panniers are not quite large enough to hold our entire farmbox contents. emdiar wore a backpack and I took a messenger bag in order to make up the difference, but it may be time for me to invest in some better and more substantial panniers. Anyone have a recommendation?

This weekend we went to Seattle for several days for an extended family reunion with emdiar's mom and sister. Sorry to everyone I did not see, but unfortunately due to the fact that we were committed to seeing them we were only able to arrange to see other people spontaneously.

We did get to see my old DC friends seditiouscanary and the_czarevna while we were up there. M said after we left, "About five minutes after we walked in there I remembered, "Oh yeah, when I'm with these people I have to talk LOUD if I want to be heard." He didn't mean that in a bad way, though. He got some nice guy-bonding, tool-and-bike geeking time in with seditiouscanary and the_czarevna and I got to talk about all kinds of girlie things that you can only talk about with a woman you've known for 20 years and talked about absolutely EVERYTHING with. It was just a blast and one of those things that made me wish I lived in Seattle.

Another thing that made me wish I lived in Seattle was the food. It seems irrational that here, in a much larger city, there is exactly one indie ice cream maker that makes ice cream I can eat, while in Seattle there's seven or eight (one of which, Molly Moon, is a pretty robust mini-chain that does exotic flavors). I guess it's better for my weight this way, but I would dearly love to be able to go out for strawberry and balsamic vinegar ice cream. Clearly we're not the only ones that feel that Seattle's a more fertile spot for the indie ice cream maker - the guy who ran another indie ice cream place, Lick, moved up from LA to start his business.

A great thing about Seattle is that there are several places that serve vegan comfort food. The downside is that the vegan restaurants seem to think that vegans are required to eat soy in every dish. Since I'm allergic to soy, I did not get to eat any of those possibly yummy things. The beer everywhere was cheap and good, however, and there were plenty of places that we found enjoyable vegetarian food for me. One oddity, however: the ability to get a salad the size of your head seems to be very limited in Seattle. I had not realized how much they anchor my eating-out diet until we were there.

One thing that helped burn off all that good food was the fact that we were staying on Queen Anne. Queen Anne is a neighborhood built on a hill that is so steep that, in order to get between certain streets, you either have to drive/bike/walk out of your way by several blocks or, if you're a pedestrian, you need to take the stairs. There are all in all about 120 staircases on Queen Anne. Someone's set up a helpful Google Map with photos, there's a hard-copy map that one can buy. In addition to the staircases, there are hills with sidewalks that have these large treads on them, about 6 inches wide, perhaps to give the pedestrian more traction, or something to push off on, or something to keep their foot from sliding when they go downhill.

The best part? Seattle put together 5 days in a row of great weather for us to enjoy. "Yeah," M said. "This is the sort of thing that tempts people to move here. And then they move here and it doesn't stop raining for 92 days."

Yesterday here in my LJ I complained that downtown doesn't have any east-west bike lanes.

Today I found out they're converting one lane on my street into a westbound bike lane.

Yay!

Technically it's my second bike ride in DTLA, but the first was during Ciclavia and thus there were no cars that we had to deal with.

The end goal is to be able to bike all of Ciclavia, round trip, at the end of April. The next Ciclavia will be the biggest one ever, going from my neighborhood 15 miles down Venice Blvd. to Venice Beach. I want to be able to bike there AND back.

It was interesting riding in DTLA vs. Monterey, where I've done most of my biking. My thoughts:
+ No gigantic hills to ascend, and no 30-mile-per-hour constant headwind making it feel like even a slight downhill is an uphill ride
- No gorgeous seaside view
+ But lots of interesting buildings to look at, plus the occasional film/TV shoot
+ There would be a gorgeous hill view except that...
- Today was smog-tastic!
+ A slight gradual elevation gain on our way north, which gave added exercise AND meant there was a very slight downhill all the way home!
- The individual drivers in LA are not any worse than those in Monterey, but LA has a lot more of them.
- Traffic lights are timed for drivers, not cyclists, which meant we had to cool our heels at every other intersection waiting for the lights to change
+ This is an incentive to become a faster biker
+ Bike lanes that go north-south for several miles
- No east-west bike lanes, which made getting to the north-south bike lanes an interesting exercise in dealing with live traffic (especially because the intersections up by Chinatown are a complete c.f.)
+ Plenty of other cyclists out there
- some of whom opt to ride on the sidewalk
+ I biked 5.6 miles and did not feel like throwing up after!

Oh, I know many people on here will appreciate this.

Hey, LJ, have any of you ever house-swapped? What did you think?

Happy birthday jenlev! I know that where you are it's already the day after your birthday, but due to time zones it's still your birthday here and this will hopefully lead to a little extended birthday delight tomorrow. I love your gentleness and your cheer. You're wonderful.

I get sad when I don't read things on LJ, but I'm part of the problem because I don't write things on LJ. I think I have gotten past my exhibitionist period, or perhaps I've just gotten out of the habit and need to get back into it.

Last weekend emdiar and I went to Portland, Oregon for a quick four-day vacation. I will start with the funniest thing that happened, which may be of especial interest to Grimm fans:

We were walking back to our hotel at about 11pm after having a couple of beers at the Rogue brewpub. Downtown seemed fairly quiet. Then, suddenly, we saw that a police car had blocked off the road a couple of blocks down. Then we saw a bunch of camera trucks in a parking lot. Oooo, a shoot! Sure, we see lots of those in our neighborhood, but it was kind of interesting to see it in another town and we thought we'd see what was up.

The crew was shooting a guy running up the sidewalk screaming in terror. There was a golf cart driving up the sidewalk in front of him with a camera on the back. Clearly, this was Grimm and not Portlandia. Mike squinted at the figure across the street and said, "Those screams of terror sound familiar!" After the next take, the crew started resetting the scene, giving Mike the opportunity to see if his suspicions were true without interrupting the shoot. "Brian Finney!" he shouted.



The actor immediately trotted over and, surprise! It was in fact Mike's old friend Brian, who he's known since they both lived in Seattle in the '90s, doing independent theater and making ends meet by working together at a produce stand at Pike Place Market. Brian was just as surprised to find us there as we were to find him. We chatted with him for a few minutes and got to meet the star of the show, David Giuntoli, who seemed incredibly nice.

In addition to this run-in with one of Mike's old friends, we got to see several of my old friends from my Hampshire days (including one, greyaenigma, who is on LJ). Three of the four I hadn't seen for probably 15 years. For the most part, it was like we were picking up exactly where we had left off. It was great to see how many of our interests still dovetail and how many new interests that I've developed which they are also interested in; it was great to know that they are people I still want to be friends with. I also got to briefly see some folks I know from my professional life; it was nice to see that they are all doing great.



One of the highlights of our visit, however, was the eating out. Oh, the eating out! From food carts to fancy restaurants, we had some truly exceptional meals there. We got coffee at Stumptown, which puts every single coffee shop on Coffee Row in DTLA to shame. I had a vegetarian Philly "cheese steak," with seitan substituting for the cheese. There was a Middle Eastern food cart that served me a falafel wrap that had some of the best falafel I've ever eaten, and a tasty noodle dish from Hale Pele, a tiki bar with serious ambiance. We ate at the legendary Mother's Bistro and Bar, which has the Platonic ideal of biscuits as well as what I'm told are fantastic Bloody Marys. And we had some of the best ice cream I've ever eaten at Cool Moon Ice Cream (while I've heard great things about Salt and Straw, they use a corn syrup base so that was out).

The dining highlight of our week, however, was Natural Selection, a fancy vegetable-focused restaurant. All selections are either vegetarian or vegan; however, they don't call themselves a vegetarian restaurant. Unlike just about every other vegetarian restaurant I've ever visited, Natural Selection does not fall into the trap of substituting tofu for meat, but instead creates intriguing dishes that don't need either meat or a meat substitute. We had a four-course meal with wine pairings that was the most exquisite meal I've had since we ate at Marinus for our anniversary a couple of years ago. If we lived in Portland I'd go there every week. Instead, I'll just have to find ways to go to Portland more!

We hadn't realized that Portland was such a rugged town. Thank goodness I had Mike there to protect me, as the video shows!

The more I read about Portland the more I want to spend more time there...and we haven't even gotten there yet.

It has all of the things we love: great food, brewpubs and microdistilleries, wineries within an easy drive, public transit, BOOKS, and all kinds of great activities to be involved in last night.

However, it also has rain like Seattle has rain. Considering that emdiar moved here to escape the rain, I think Portland will always be "that place we go to visit."

I am in the midst of reading Wolf Hall, the novel by Hilary Mantel that won the Man Booker Prize, among many other prizes.

As I read it, I wonder to myself, why is this so lauded while Phillipa Gregory's novel The Other Boleyn Girl, which takes place in exactly the same era, is considered trashy? Is it because Wolf Hall deals exclusively with the men's sphere while The Other Boleyn Girl focuses on the women's sphere? Is it that The Other Boleyn Girl features sex as something other than an item for the characters to make snarky jokes about? I'm not the only person that thinks that; a writer at the University of Pennsylvania says:

By leaving sex out of it, for the most part, and putting men rather than women at the heart of her story, Mantel raises the prestige of the historical novel set in Tudor England and has collected kudos as a consequence.

(In that article, interestingly, it is clear that the author genuinely believes that writing about men raises the prestige of novels. Don't write about those silly girls!)

In many ways, Wolf Hall reads to me like someone who decides to fanfic another work by picking a minor character in the original work, making them the major character and telling the story from their perspective. There's even aspects of Mantel's prose stylings that, to me, echo Gregory's, but it feels like a clumsier and plainer version of Gregory's writing.

I know that you folks out there in LJ-land have far more elevated tastes than I do. So what am I missing about this book? I'd especially love to hear from people who have read both books.

Side note: the film of The Other Boleyn Girl was dreadful, so it is not a good comparison point. The casting of the leads was disastrous and the script was a mess.

When I travel I like to eat.

However, I am a vegetarian and allergic to soy and corn. This makes things complicated. At omnivore-focused restaurants, often the only vegetarian thing on the menu includes one or the other. At vegetarian restaurants, soy is usually in EVERYTHING. Interestingly, the omnivore restaurants are by and large more accommodating to my soy allergy. (I have had a server at a vegetarian restaurant tell me that my soy allergy was all in my head when I tried to modify a dish for my allergies.)

We're going on vacation to Portland shortly. Because I like to eat I spent some time cruising around Yelp looking for restaurants we could go to. And I hit the MOTHERLODE. A food truck that serves seitan "cheese steaks". A deli with a separate and extensive vegetarian/vegan menu. Oh, wait, another place with seitan cheese steaks. And a fancy fine-dining vegetarian/vegan restaurant with no soy on the menu. And a vegan strip club?

Normally I lean pretty hard on Italian, Greek and Indian food when I go out, because they're the cuisines where I usually have a choice between at least two dishes. But in Portland it seems that I could get completely fat without ever sampling any of those cuisines. I love those three cuisines, but it's a refreshing change.

This was in the Encounters restaurant at LAX, which is located at the former air control tower. I think it was renovated in the '90s and it was given a retro-space-age feel. It's seen better days, but the views are great (on a clear day you can see downtown and the mountains beyond) and at night when the lights go down the flaws are covered and it had a really nifty feel.

We transferred our AAA membership from Northern California to Southern California (they're two different districts).

As a result, AAA owed us a refund, and they diligently sent it. The refund? Three cents. Postage was 37 cents, plus paper and envelope means the cost of sending the refund was at least 13 times the value of the refund.

I admire their dedication, and I appreciate the fact that there's probably a legal reason behind it, but gosh, there should be some way for them to do an accounting and just absorb that three cents. I wouldn't begrudge it.