Coming Up: Frisky foreign felines fluff their pedigreed fur atop oleaginous cobblestones. Will Adella's dancing companion go mad under the weight of the oriental purr? Hearts will beat to the boom boom of the old box. Will the truth about hibernation thrust a barrier between beau and belle? The interrogations heat up amid Swiss cheese schedules. Will the introvert crack her compatriots? And the final push for power pulls our hero into the arms of another woman! Will our couple reunite on the morrow? Will the cloud consume its offerings?
Bounce gingerly atop the cobblestones, avoid the carnage and discover the answers below.
Crazy Cat-Lady and the Cranky Cobblestones
I'm at work. Which is totes reeedonkulous considering I could be at my mom's house coopting her television and watching the perilous and equally reeeedonkulous "Cobblestone Stage" of Le Tour de Awesome. "The cobblestones??" you query benightedly. Oh yes. In the spirit of the WWE and every reality show everywhere, I guess the Tour organizers decided that ramming cyclists with news cars, tossing insane fans into the middle of the toughest climbs, sticking a bus underneath the end-sprint line, and throwing cyclists into wire fences just wasn't tantalizing enough (anyone who thinks cycling is a dull sport has not seen the weird crap that happens on the tour - and I'm not just talking about the heavily dyed livestock or the half naked screaming french men dressed as satan).
So instead of just going old-school sadist and throwing in a few stages of glute-guzzling vertical, they are doing the race over portions of cobblestone. Which is a recipe for bumper bikes, seas of wipe outs and the elimination of several otherwise strong contenders. Which irks me (I think this kind of risk is unnecessary to the race and appears to exist solely for "mixing things up"), but of course - like any good train wreck - I can't quite look away. I'm pretty much glued to the dodgy BBC Live News Update ticker.
I don't really ride, so this is hardly firsthand, but I have walked over cobblestone before. And it's not easy to stay upright sometimes. In fact, after two days of wandering around Roman cobblestones, I had to spend an entire day of my whylum Italian summer o'Teenage freedom with a leg elevated. I spent the rest of the trip with various makeshift scarf-braces, and about another year of repeating ankle injuries that seemed to have jump-started from my cobblestone cavortings.
It's also raining today. So basically, it's a big torturous slog fest and everyone is slip-sliding all over the place. Now all they need to do is start littering banana peels and cherry bombs from the backs of the pacer bikes.
At any rate, Chris Damned-Adorable Froome wiped out yesterday and a couple of times today, and has called it quits. This breaks my throbbing little heart. I really like Froome on a personal level, and not just for his buttery accent. He just seems like kind of a decent guy in a sport that can be dominated by alpha males and princesses (glad that's changing - and no, Sagan gets a free pass from any considerations of alphabetism, royalty, or decency). I liked that he was kind of dopey, and always looked fairly awkward on his bike. Really, if the (W)rights end up going the modern fertility route someday, I am hoping to clone him and give my hubby a little baby Froome to join him on mountain climbs. But, I guess this year is not his year. Maybe that means he can join equally adorbs Christian Vande Velde in the NBC Sports Commentator box o'crazy.
While I'm listing adorable cyclists: Sagan (duh), Talansky, and Voegler. Yes, my new hit tv show will be TdF Babies and will feature the above mentioned mini-cyclists. They will solve crimes on the alps with their bikes while battling Catastrophe Contador and Berserker Voit.
And with that I bid an adieu to Mr. Froome and acknowledge I really oughta get back to work... in a bit... soon. Or other activities.
Yesterday I got work done. More importantly, I also had coffee with an extraordinarily ebullient friend of mine from those halcyon ballroom days of yore. She and I connect maybe quarterly, and she fills our brief colloquys with a bubbly burble of peppy palaver. I appreciate,this, since her chatter is neither boring nor heavily taxing on my introvert conversational contributional caches.And I always learn something.
. Yesterday, I learned about the world of cat-shows, South East Asian feline breeding, and South East Asian feline breeds. She had owned two Siamese - the old school kind, not the freakishly bred show-Siamese - for 18 years. One just passed on and the other is lonely. During the grieving process, she's been attending various regional cat-shows and hunting down breeders. Because she's a diehard Siamese-classic fan and these are hard to find. Because, again, there is a difference between New-Siamese and Siamese Classic. Apparently the modern show Siamese are freakish, being bred to exaggerate the Siamese features to cartoonish effect. She is not a fan of ears the size of spindly torsos.
After several Siamese leads ending in blue-eyed mutts and crushed dreams, she expanded her horizons with the help of an Idahoan breeder to include Burmese cats. Mind you, these are Euro-berms, not American Burmese, This again is totally different. I guess Burmese cats are similar in coloring and intelligence to Siamese, but friendlier. After falling in love with a Burmese named Zombie - a kitten she may someday receive but which may be too pedigreed not to stay with the cat-show circuit, she expanded her search once again to include Tonkinese. Tonkinese are a cross-breed of Siamese and Burmese. There are also, now, Thai cats, which are closer to the original flavor of Siamese cats. At the end of these journeys, she is now locked in with one old-school-Siamese kitten with a hold on a second (so he'll have a brother). She has a tentative hold on Euro-Burm Zombie. And she's got a lead on an upcoming litter of Thai cats. And somewhere in this mix, there was a mutant hybrid of a hybrid that turned out hideous but comes from a new Russian breed of small Siamese with a puff tail...
Her neighbors are warning her she'll become the crazy cat lady (as if anything is wrong with that), but I suppose my standard for CCL is whether your cats can polish off your remains before anyone discovers you've passed. Otherwise you're just a looby lass who happens to have felines.
Or lorises... and imaginary child-surrogate sphynx cats. Whatever floats your boat and fits your rental contract!
Anyways, I'd best be back to looking studious and/or watching live updates of crash-fest 2014, so I wish you a day free of tumbles and full of puuurrrrfect little catnaps.
Forget Headphones, and Boom Boom Box-up The Toes
For those of you who live in this century, there once was a device called a "boom box" and/or "ghetto blaster" and/or "portable somethingorother device." Kind of like the portable speakers you may still carry to outdoor dance events if you aren't lazy enough, like me to just make do with your computer. This mythical boom box was a box o'beats, baby. And they stand as tribal totem to my toesies on the tippee toe of Thursday.
Oh what a Thursday it shall be. I'm determined to make this 7:30 pilates class. Since I'd been hoping to start reworking a midweek run into my schedule and I'll already be in my workout clothes anyways (the largest barrier to fitting a run into my weekday schedule = the hassle of changing), I'm going to add just an eensy amount of running on either end. Still babying the arch, so I want to be gradual about total weekly hours. With my weekend runs comfortably hitting the half hour plus mark, I'm keeping it brief and incidental.
And after an intermediate spot of work (most likely still in workout clothes, because heck I don't have any appointments today), I'll be off to the DRC for some volunteerism (at which point, I suspect I'll have donned the skirt that I packed along). Then back to work to pick up some hours. And then to my father's house, if he'll agree to my proposal of "dinner." Together, that is.
Abandoning my darling Mr. (W)right? On a Thursday evening? Never! He's been swallowed by bike-video-go-pro fever. Having let loose a productive cavil on facebook about his go-pro video conundrums, he's managed to locate a FB friend who edits video professionally to help him out. So tonight he'll be leaving work to have dinner and a movie (so to speak) with some other woman. I'm so threatened I could... amble over to my dad's house and insist on some father/daughter bonding. Andrew seems to think this will be a fairly easy venture (the editing, not the father/daughter bonding).. I'm still envisioning them both up at 5 a.m., chain-smoking and shooting whiskey as they tear their hair over those last minute perfection details. As of this morning, his computer was crashing every time he tried to upload his videos into the cloud, so who knows what he'll have by this evening.
Knowing we may never see each other again, we took pains to cherish our possibly final date night with a classier little upgrade on Chinese (Xing's Panda Palace has a fishtank and booths and actual cutlery/service plates! Foppish and indulgent, we were). As all the best date nights do, our evening ended with a spell of laying on the bed in our respective heart rate monitor equipment, and comparing resting heart rates. Andrew's dropped down to lower 60s. About 61. Mine was about 43. Apparently my resting heart rate is... lower... than most living human beings. I may, in fact, be a bear in hibernation. Still gets up to 190 on those hills, at least. And when I gaze into my beloved's eyes, I'm pretty sure my heart rate spikes right up, but I can't say because I am looking away from my watch... Obviously, future experiments must be done.
For most of today, though, I plan to keep it cool and midrange and maybe not entirely hibernating. Because there's a beat in my toes and a song in my brain and I'm ready to barrel through this penultimate climb to the weekend coast!
Peripatetic Prancings in Singlesville and Cycling Video Sirens Go-Pro goes epic, and Adella stays home
The end of the Brim-Brothers-Why-the-Heck-Did-I-Think-I-Wanted-to-Win-This-Nightmare-of-a-Challenge-to-Receive-a-Loaner-of-Equipment-That-Will-Require-Some-Substantial-Financial-Investments-Just-to-Use Contest o'Crazy Video is nigh! The deadline is some time today. Since the Brim Brothers are Irish, I'm not sure if that's some Greenwich time or if there's a little more of our "Friday" involved, but regardless, something will be submitted as soon as humanly possible. Provided no further computer glitches get in the way.
Andrew's 2008 laptop has been doddering for years, but this last excursion through narcissism has more or less tanked the poor thing. Or possibly. It was crashing like the Titanic and reached a standstill yesterday where it just wouldn't boot. I guess Andrew eventually did something with the RAM chip and got it chugging along again, but not quite to the finish line of submitting the three minute Go-Pro Odyssey past the shores of Padden.
All of this happened far afoot, in the lands of Tulalip (a/k/a Casinoland) where some Circe of sorts lured him in with promises of video editing equipment. So cute: when I left the house yesterday morning Andrew said "See you tonight!" Uh huh. I, of course, merely chortled and said "no you won't." I was, of course, right. It was dark when he made it home. Very dark. I don't even know that his eyes were open by the time he crawled into the bedroom (circa 1:30 a.m.). He did not see me that night.
But he did see me roughly four hours later, when I met him and his alarm of chirpy birds with a cup of coffee. Funnily enough, he's actually easier to wake and rouse when he's racking up these major sleep deficits. I'm guessing because he never plumbed the depths of slumber from which elevation gives one the bends. He was, as is often the pattern, up and ready and downstairs before I'd finished breakfast even. It's the day after that's usually the toughest trowel from torpidity.
But he survived and I - being my usual self - operated through yesterday with the quite accurate prediction that it was a single-lady night. Usually on track widow nights, I rush home to read and chop vegetables. This time, I maundered home after mid-afternoon to evening merriment and a rather full day.
Following the theme of parcelling my workday into a swiss cheese schedule, I started the day at work. For an hour. Then I ran to a pilates class. I was one of two students who'd managed to attend, and the only one who stayed the full time. This was theoretically awkward, but the nice thing about the Y is that it doesn't seem to matter to them if classes reach a certain attendance number. The heartbreaks of group lessons of my dancing days (always underpopulated,and always tentative) don't seem to apply. If nobody else shows, the class carries on. And, maybe, even gets a little harder. We broke out the ballet bars yesterday and did an olio of ballet, gyrotonics, classic pilates, and whatever else came into the instructor's head. It burned.
That was an hour, upon which I returned to work. And worked. More or less. For about five and a half hours. Then I went to WDRC for two hours.
I'm having a moment of introvert glow for slowly cracking ajar the floodgates of conversational curiosity. I'm a great listener, but until I am comfortable with somebody, I tend to choke on any inquisition of my interlocutors for fear of prying. I'm personally hesitant to share much and feel very on the spot when subjected to direct questions from people lacking a certain level of intimacy, so - though I know it not to be true - I tend to project my feelings onto others.
Once I know somebody, I might waylay that person for hours with query upon query. Really once I'm midway comfortable with a person, I'm such a master of dialectic deflection that I can turn any conversation back onto the other person within seconds with a bit of curiosity jiu jitsu and an oddly fascinated ability to switch between that old active listening, agile micro-muscular contractions, and a pretty genuine desire to know more. But that takes some comfort and usually a healthy cache of previously filed information about the other person.
Usually when I first start getting to know people, I invite others to talk about themselves by forcing out something about myself and trailing out an invitational ellipsis. If the bait is bitten, I reel in with a show of interest, but let the other person set her own level of disclosure.
Generally the progression of curiosity to actual questioning comes out of prior conversations and topics already breached (i.e. "how is that cold?" or "how was your trip this weekend?" the general bland sort of thing). My big "oooh look at me, I know how to socialize" yesterday was asking one of the staff members "What are you doing up there?" (she was moving upstairs to work on something without distraction). And another one "so, where is this potluck?" Amazingly enough in both cases, these little questions were enough to open a fairly involved stream of new information. One of them had recently received a promotion. One of them was seeing her daughter's work place for the first time... At any rate.
After patting myself on the back and maybe doing some case management volunteering to boot, I returned to the office for another hour and a half. And then I went to dinner with Papa T, who is actually in town this weekend. We went to D'Anna's, an Italian restaurant a few steps away from his home where the minestrone is tasty and the hipsters are kept at bay by the surrounding micropubs and fancy-pants breweries.
Only then did I return home and read a bit before bed. Today I'm as bright eyed and bushy haired as usual and ready for my IRB telephonic "uh huh, I actually can't hear you very well" festival of institutional reviewing!
I can taste the Friday and it has a wicked wild aftertaste.
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