Coming Up: The rapacious quest of power draws our hero to the siren strains of shaky-cam chaos. Will Orson Welles' Youtube in Yonkers: The Third Cyclist make a splash and win the day? At the end of the anomie, will anyone want to have won?? Time tangoes tentatively in sprawl across a three-day weekend, and Adella loses orientation. Will she recapture her momentum or fall eternally away, dropped by the temporal peleton? If time pulls back, will our A-Team survive the starvation?? And Vegan launch a sneak attack to pull in front, but will the milky chalk of fridge-lore shut it down? The Tour de Awesome-July-Obsessions Premiers with Chaos and Carnage. Will our fans survive the madness?
Strap on your camera mount, track down that bikini, and draft along the merry way to discover these crucial answers...
Independence From Work (and other stuff that had something to do with tea and dudes in what would definitely be considered offensive costuming having a wild party on the Boston Waterfront... or something) Day!
This 4th of July is an actual holiday in (W)rightlandia. Last year... not so much. Last year, in fact, we had a looming trial smacking its lusty maw in our general direction, and I spent a good chunk of the day treading water in an eddy of legal papers. This year is, of course, The Year of the Mediation in Late July to Early August, (roughly coevalent to The Year of the Depends Adult Diaper, I believe). As such, "things" (i.e. emotions, horrifyingly convoluted paperwork purportedly documenting and supporting our client's statements of "fact" and "conclusions of client", and usually Adella's head) won't be erupting until later in the month. Possibly around the same time that Mr. (W)right has promised his own worksplosion reminiscent of Screwpocalypse 2014 in terms in intensity (albeit with hopefully more productive results).
Unlike last year, we don't have a house guest for Andrew to take out and kill with athletic feats beyond the range of normal humans (Poor dear Daddy W is still in recovery from last summer's trip I believe). But Andrew will not be absent an audience for his high-mountain hijinks. Because he's got a GO-PRO and he's not (overly) afraid to use it. Hmmm, how to continue from here. How about we go the legislative route and begin with definitions:
SECTION 23.04.001 - Definitions:
GoPro - Is a camera that athletes attach to their bodies and/or bikes to "record the ride" so that they can give other's a Blair Witch Project version of being there themselves. Why? Because it is always necessary to upload indistinct and nauseating footage of whatever bodaciousness you just hit onto Youtube in between updating your Strava challenges and cross-posting to Facebook, your favorite forums, and Golden Cheetah... or else it never happened.
Power Meters - in this instance refer to little computers that cyclists mount on their bikes to measure the "power output" of the rider. I am neither a rider nor the nerd with advanced degree in engineering required to understand this concept, but I believe it's roughly analogous to those little light up bars that old fitness machines used to show watts created (the harder you go, the higher the bars). I am told that the appeal is one gets a thoroughly objective metric (unlike heart rate, which is completely personal, has a lag time and is variable depending on myriad other conditions). I can also assume that it observes how many hair dryers you would power were you - as a cyclist - chained up in a basement and forced to ride really hard as a means of alternative energy production for a very vain metrosexual. Power meters are all the rage in cycle training, and no GPS/HRM/Hormone and Blood Doping Meter Analysis/Impure-Thoughts-Tracker/Strava training log update would be complete without adding in a Power Meter.
Brim Brothers Zone - Is a Power Meter that promises to defy convention by attaching to a rider's shoes. This is huge in Andrew-land. Most Power Meters have to be installed on the bike, which is great if you only have (get ready for a gut wrenching laughter here, because seriously who does this?) only one bike. If somebody has, say, five bikes then "somebody" would either have to only have a power meter on a single bike (perish the thought) OR buy FIVE power meters of the conventional sort. As they're big ticket items, this would be prohibitive for anyone who is not one of those stereotypical mid-life dentists who flock the slightly higher age categories. And/or a pro. Possibly, as we'll get to, a Go-Proer.
Promotional Contest - A way in which manufacturers of new products milk free marketing out of their avid fans in lieu of traditional ad methods. Thousands of free man hours, lots of hype, and a few lucky folks get something for "free" (that will then require them to buy a lot of upgrades to work with whatever the new free something was).
Section Next.0291:
Ok, definitions finished. Brim Brothers are having a contest. Some handful of lucky social media savy cyclists will get to "beta-test" the portable speed meter, provided that they create a heavy social media presence of their usage of said meter. In order to be selected one must (1) be invited (Andrew was on the pre-order list, so he was invited), (2) write an essay on why the portable power meter will save Western Civilization, cure cancer and reverse global warming, all the while making consumers super fast on their bikes, (3) create a video blog (VLOG! Which is a fun word to say and sounds like a slavic conqueror circa 19th Century and/or Sci-Fi) on the same topics.
Hence the Go-Pro. Andrew theoretically finds them suspect, but needs to make a VLOG(!!!) And he doesn't want one that's just him talking. Having maybe been a little too inundated in his prior work in stagecraft, he wants STORY. I've offered to come up with several, and to start rounding up the costumes (cast of "extras" to be culled lovingly from my stuffed animal collection), but apparently he's going with "Preparing for my race at Padden." Not my first choice (where are The Avengers? What about Ivan D's Grand Inquisitor musical number? What am I going to do with all these flares and neon jumpsuits??), but it should work.
So... he borrowed a Go-Pro from a teammate and will be going off to try it out today. I anticipate that he'll be calling in "sick" on Monday with a major headache from trying to edit several hours of ride videos.
I'll have to find him a red-white-and-blue beret to for the holiday weekend.
Happy Friday and/or Fourth o'July to all y'all!
One-Day Sunday Funday Weekend Gets an Encore
Must remember today is Sunday. Must remember today is Sunday. Given that I had apparently turned the alarm on this morning, such temporal awareness has yet to sink in. Thank stars (and stripes, since it's Independence Weekend) that I noticed before it started chirp chirping at full pitch to rouse the slumbering loris. It helps to chronically arise several minutes before an alarm that slowly lightens.
I'm not really at risk of ending up at the office today, but forgetting it is Sunday could have other effects. Friday was the 4th, so I started it like a weekend day, down to the maniacal chopping and kitchen related madness. In my brain, this has become abridged as "the weekend kitchen stuff I do to prepare for the week." Which is great, except all that Friday kitchen stuff has long settled in the stomachs of revelers. Meaning I still have a full day - joy of joyous joyful joynesses - of groceries and chopping and tupperware top-offing. It would be a shame to miss this.
Come the work week, such weekend omission would also leave us (oh the horror)... living out of the chili cans I compulsively buy whenever they're half price (fairly often at Freddy's), and several bags of rice that weigh more than your average five year old. Kind of a throwback to the days of Andrew's bachelorhood, except I have a fully stocked grain pantry and a freezer bursting with pre-made meals and veggies. BUT Andrew WOULD RUN OUT OF BREAD! And eventually EGGS! And, given his metabolism, he'd probably starve to death in a day or two. Which would be sad. So I should remember it's Sunday and do all my complicated food related rituals...
... After the Tour. Yesterday was a pretty wild start to the Tour de France in that it wasn't a tepid time trial or a dull flat spring. There were crashes. There were hills. Things got serious much more quickly. And today, by god there shall be categorized hill climbs!
But then, then by God there shall be grocery shopping. For me. Andrew's going to go off on another heart-ripping ride while toting the go-pro shaky cam atop his pate. He's gone all Orson Welles on this Brim Brothers contest, trust me. We've had some very nuanced discussions on how to break the "Most Boring Kind of Nauseating Videos Ever Put on Youtube" Go-Pro tedium. I'm not sure it's entirely sunk in, but I've gotten some demonstrations on what not to do. That's a start. Taking photo stills every 2 seconds is not particularly useful and will devour your storage capacity. Filming first person on steep continuous grades probably hasn't captured the pitch unless you've really taken time to frame the shot for perspective (inevitably causing yourself to wipe out, which admitetdly makes for some interesting footage). Videos of yourself setting up the Go-Pro are far less shaky-cam nauseating than anything captured while riding... the list goes on.
I recommended that having me riding in front in a bikini would probably do a heckuva lot for plot and interest, but who am I kidding I don't own a bikini. Oh and I don't really bike. Actually, that could actually add a lot of interest to the video. I also suggested that he just wear the Go-Pro to film watching the Tour de France. I'm not sure how that would demonstrate his need for a Power Meter, but it would generate some more interesting footage for subsequent editing. Especially if he Go-Pro filmed his first person view of me watching the Tour (in a bikini, of course - man I obviously need to go shopping for a bikini). I could pretend to be one of those crazy fans who tries to kill herself and the cyclists by running into the road screaming! Except I'd just start cheering and charge the tv screen, with a loud crash to follow. Again, pretty entertaining footage compared to 45 minutes of straight road riding...
God I should be a Go-Pro producer.
Do Not Stir With the Socks! They Are Not Kosher!! De-Vegafying Veganified Vittles and Tour de Madness Kicks Off Mountain Style
Our regular Sunday morning was preempted by a very important activity: Watching the Tour De France in (almost) live time ... except we fudged it a bit, due to the Tour starting at 3:00 a.m. our time, and loving the fast forwarding leisure of a good dvr performance. BUT, we did watch the first half of the tour while it was still going on. This definitely made it less of a challenge to avoid spoilers.
In the spirit of campouts and festivals all the world over, we went straight from our cozy bed to the car (with a short stop at the bathroom and maybe a breeze through the kitchen to pack up breakfast ingredients and scads of ebony grog). Our brains rose to the peppy palaver of Paul and Phil, and maybe a few thousand replays of the crash that took out Cavindish yesterday. There were no additional golden fleeced sheep, but there was most definitely an interview with the little farmer boy who'd dyed them that color. And several montages, of course. With our trusty remote control, we managed to wade through the muck and mire to capture a relatively insane Second Stage course of hills hills hills and more hills until our tooshes ached in empathy.
Eventually, several hours later, there was a very exciting finish, some post-finish revelrie and - just after 11:00 a.m. - our regular (W)right morning resumed. The bike-and-chain went back to his Go-Pro to plot out some seriously succulent MTB footage. Yes, there are producer's notes sitting on the study sofa. They're a little confusing, because on top of the rest of the notes is an antediluvian scribble that reads "Another cookbook by that guy who wrote Plenty" This would be a gift idea for Xmas Past, if my memory is pulling any modicum of weight today. But, I like to think that he will be starting his epic shaky cam with recipes to add spice (har har). And, really, with my ascendance into the heavy-weight food blogger pantheon, perhaps I should be looking into this Go-Pro cooking, here!
Speaking of recipes, while at the casa del Touro de Franco, I found an old recipe book that I'd been gifted a few years back. Given my inability to follow any recipe straight, bestie Molly thought I might enjoy this book dedicated to subbing out and swapping regular cooking items for vegan substitutes.
Lest we wonder, I am no vegan. I am a vegetarian. I don't know why. I am, in fact, quite happy to have become a vegetarian far before the age where I needed any particular personal justification that might sediment with time into a smug zealotry. It's just part of who I am. Sure I could cite studies about environmental consciousness or moral yadda yadda yadda, but really it's more that my body has adapted and my ego has gormandized this dietary preference into an aspect of identity. While vegetarianism and my several thousand other quirky dietary preferences limits my good-guest repertoire, the lack of purpose behind it does spare me from being that obnoxious vegan. Or from getting too emotionally involved in the debate, period. If any one really blames religion for the cause of all the ills and assholishness of the human race, they may never have wandered into a heated discussion between evangelical food zealots. That crap gets heated (unless you're a raw foodie, then maybe it just gets sprouted).
So, yes, not a vegan, but - as Molly rightly recognized - I can't follow a recipe straight to save either my life or that of several adorable school children.
And of course, I couldn't follow these recipes right either, but we'll get to that.
I also don't generally keep physical cookbooks. I have enough detritus, and an internet full of too many ideas already. And this book, being a little pro-Vegan (shockingly) can also be a bit smarmy in its presentation. I am also a little disappointed that between all the really bizarre only-vegans-and-yippees-have-heard-of-or-used-this ingredients (is it just me or does anyone else think "suck on it!" when they read sucanat?), a lot of recipes recommend just buying "store made meat substitutes" of several varieties. Where's the fun in that? Do I really need a cookbook to figure that out??
So, while I don't want to hold onto this book, I do like to experiment and it did have some promising recipes. During the more ovine portions of the Tour coverage, I may have rifled through all five billion recipes and marked up about 20 that I wanted to try/adapt/record.
And, seeing as I can't stick to a recipe, I obviously subbed in MILK for coconut milk. Actually that was largely because of two extraneous factors: (1) I don't have any coconut milk and my soy milk is vanilla flavored, (2) I did have this extra little bit of chalk-water, er, skim milk from my purchasing mishap last week. I'd been contemplating some kind of baking, but when this recipe called for "mostly stuff I both like and have around the house plus ____ milk," it seemed like destiny.
Anyways, the recipe was called Triple-B Stew, although Mine would have been more like BBT Stew, since I inevitably messed with one of the impliedly eponymous ingredients, barley. The two "B's" that made it were black-eyed peas and banana. I'm a suckah for any recipe that gives banana a savory spa treatment, especially with loads of spice. This one had ginger, garlic, onion, and chili powder.
The abandoned "B" was cooked barley since I didn't have any barley about the house, and failed to locate a suitable "B" replacement (beer? blueberries? baking soda?). So I went with Teff, (Teff: the other brown couscous). Probably because I'd just received an amazon subscribe and save package the size of a Great Dane containing enough Wasa Flatbread to flatten Florida, and several tons of Teff to feed the Floridian refugees.
Teff is a happy accident from many years back. After my first experience with Injera (that bread they use as a plate in Ethiopian restaurants), I ordered some, knowing it to be the staple flour. Ended up with the grain instead. Decided, having re-read the injera recipe, that I was too lazy to make bread anyways, but realized that teff made an awesome sweet or savory porridge with minimal fuss. It's also pretty healthy, but that's a side benefit. So... forget the non-existent barley and throw in some (brownish) teff.
Basic recipe involved:
(1) Sauteeing onions, garlic, a large chopped banana (chopped too thin under the recipe's advice, but I liked it), cayenne, ginger (powder, not gratings because I'm lazy and routinely allow my actual ginger root to sprout and go senile), salt, chili powder, and some random extra veggies from the roughly twenty pounds I purchased in my grocery trip through Hades at noon Fred Meyer's time earlier in the day (shudder).
(2) Heating a 1/4 cup of teff in a teeny tiny pot with 1 cup of water up to a boil; then simmering until the lid exploded and teff spewed everywhere (or roughly fifteen minutes). Actually, I started this teff project, before the sauteeing, which only took a few minutes. But too late to turn back now!
(3) Adding roughly a cup of chalk-water and/or skim milk. Allowing to simmer for about ten minutes. Midway through tasting it and - feeling it wasn't thick enough due to the skimmed nature of the milk - subsequently adding a scoop of avocado.
(4) Adding the rest of a package of frozen black-eyed peas (thawed earlier in the day). Roughly a cup. Then slooping the teff goop into the mix.
(5) Stirring and simmering for another four or five minutes.
(6) Throwing a bunch of chopped bok choi into the bottom of Andrew's enormous pho bowl (recipe recommended spinach, but I had bok choi damnit and I was not afraid to use it). Then gooping out the BBT Stew into the bowl to let the bok choi wilt like a lady in tropical heat waves (after her can-can).
(7) Peppering on some left-over chopped parsley, then eating most of it before serving. Some survived.
I'm pleased to report that - while completely distracted from any sensory experience of eating by his ongoing obsession with editing the perfect Go-Pro video experience - Mr. (W)right did not reach desperately for the salt while inhaling his little alphabet stew.
Also, it tastes pretty darned good to my palate. I'm a little impressed with myself and my de-veganified stew thingy.
Of course, I scooped out some leftovers for today. After my twenty ton veggie shopping trip and subsequent food prep-bacchanale, I used my last available jar to do so. I'm totally out of storage capacity after emptying out the veggie-prep-ort broth I also made. Must go out and purchase pre-made food so I can have the jars! This makes sense, right?? Pickled asparagus, here we come!
Today is Monday. It is humid. There is some sort of work lingering about that I refuse to acknowledge. I can't find a live stream of the Tour that doesn't bloat up my computer with new crapware, so I'm just checking the little tour ticker from time to time. Not the same. Maybe, with the heat and humidity of the week, it's time to close the office again and work from home.. Probably so. The servers seemed to feel this way when I tried to boot up this morning. Who am I to argue?
Go-Pro Brim Bro Cribz The Battle for Power (Meter) Heats up... or is that just the July humidity?
The Brim Brothers power meter beta-blitz contest continues in our little (W)right home. Honestly, we're fathoms into sunk cost territory at this point. So far we know that winning this contest would (1) require a fair investment on new bike parts to be compatible with the power meter, (2) require a whole lot of apparently burdensome neck-straining go-pro-ing on a semi-regular basis and possibly retaining a chiropractor, and (3) possibly crash the heck out of Andrew's computer, what with the file sizes and byzantine borgesian labyrinths required to "edit" any of these go-pro videos. So, maybe a power meter isn't such an awesome thing to have after all... but gosh darnit, there are billions of hours of Blair Witch 3: Terror of Galbraith Mountain already accumulated and by golly this video shall be made!
Yesterday I got to be part of the crew for the big shoot: an introduction to Mr. (W)right's many bikes. This scene sadly might be scrapped. Alas. My husband in his dorkiest of team-chapeaus delivering "yo yo yo this is the MTV Cribz portion of the video" with his heavily-aspirated consonants (a theater degree will do weird things to one's speech, particularly when it comes to bleaching out all elision and drawl that accompanies average American argot) and self-consciously restrained timbre. Merrily, by my troth, these be my staltworth steeds, yo! I got to watch the video once, but I fear he's already deleted it, upon realizing just how much storage space each GoPro video actually requires.
Still, it was nice to be a part of the team. And in the garage. Where it's cool. Because it's not super cool uptop. We've got enough fans to set up an indoor skydiving gym, but they only barely keep up with the greedy greenhouse insulation of our fastidiously fenestrated abode.
It didn't last but a minute or two, the garage photo shoot, but it was nice while it lasted. Yes, Andrew parked his car outside last night to give his bikes a bit more breathing room after their star turns.
He was intending to osmose into THE STUDY for the rest of the evening, taken with a final editing blitz of epic proportions, but his senescent computer was only able to sluggishly convert videos at a rate of one meg per eon. After some waiting, we instead watched a Futurama and lolled under the breeziest of fans for most of the rest of the evening.
So, editing blitz shall resume tonight! But will there be more shooting for me to undertake? He's promised to do an intro. I'm ready with the sparklers and the little clapboard.
In my little world, work continues on with a slight upsurge. This is expected after my grandiose offer of "more volunteer hours" at the WDRC on the basis of "July being slow". I actually haven't worked out what those might look like yet, because my shift was cancelled last Thursday, which was when we might discuss it. I'm hoping that by now, they're making progress on hiring a genuine replacement supervisor/case manager, so we can continue learning together. And maybe they'll be so busy tending the new hire that good old generous volunteer Adella's ambitions.
If nobody else raises it, I may just let the volunteer hours lay. But there's something about shifting up one's schedule that makes one hungry for more! I've been insisting on coffee dates during working hours. And yesterday, I determined to try to make the newly reshuffled Thursday pilates class at 7:30 a.m. (used to be at 4:00, which just didn't work with my schedule)... at some point. Maybe add that midweek run back into my schedule, gosh darnit. Maybe take a Russian class or programming or... maybe just hop on a last minute flight to Alberta just for the heckuvit. The heat at the office doesn't necessarily help my desire to stay sessile.
Also, the Tour is happening without me! Watching the little picture-cyclists on letour.com's live feed is somehow slightly less engaging. Work. PSHAW!! Silly clients.
Happy whatever day it might strike you as being. I don't wanna stand in the way of your dreams!
No comments:
Post a Comment