Travel Agent Cycling Recommendation

During our honeymoon we did a bike ride down the tallest volcano on Maui. This is the situation: A van picks you up at 3am; you drive around and pick up everyone else in your party; you drive to the top of the mountain; you watch sunrise; you ride a bike halfway down the mountain; you eat breakfast at a country club. Here's what really happened: A van picks you up and drives you to an industrial park of low-slung buildings and sit on the sidewalk eating day-old pastries and drinking instant coffee. After choosing a motorcycle helmet crusted with other peoples' sweat salt, you get back into the van and drive to the top of the mountain; your van goes slower than all other traffic, so you have an excellent view of a huge line of honking cars behind you. Your van driver announces, "We don't offer your money back if there's no sunrise," to which you think, "Buddy, if the sun doesn't rise today, the last thing I'm going to care about is getting my $150 back." Then you stand over a freezing plain of lava rock for an hour and watch the darkness turn to washed out grey, and you realize he meant you might not 'see' the sunrise. Then you get on your beach cruisers, don your crusty helmets, and ride downhill at a pace chosen by the slowest person in your group (slower than you ride on flat land). Cars and other cyclists pass and flick you off. You stop for photos. Then you pull into the country club and eat in the clubhouse, which happens to be a double-wide trailer. They give you a ride home and you spend the rest of the day taking naps since you woke up at 2:30am.

The Looming Storm

New York was meant to get this epic snowstorm that would bury the city under three feet of snow, but instead about six inches dusted in over 24 hours. Everyone blew the storm off when it fizzled out, but if you go back and think about the day before the storm, there was real concern. Lines at grocery stores were backed all the way up aisles. For reasons I'll never comprehend all of the milk and bread was sold out. All city streets were blocked to non-emergency vehicles, and the subways were even shutdown--they were worried it would even snow underground. The one thing not closed? Neighborhood bars. On the eve of a huge snowstorm, the neighborhood bar is packed, but it's the best place to be. Since no one drives or takes the train, the only people there are people who live within walking distance, so it turns into a warm neighborhood club that's part shared panic and part we-have-an-unplanned-day-off tomorrow.

The Rise of the iMachines

I got the new iPhone. I loved my Nexus 5, but I wanted to be able to share photo albums with my wife. There was no super easy cross-platform way to do it, so I switched over. In a way I'm being penalized for embracing forward-thinking software. It's like the mid-80s all over again. I have the Betamax camcorder with its superior image quality, but I can't share my home videos with any of my friends because they all use VHS. Overall, the new iPhone is fine. I like the fingerprint phone unlock feature, though it worries me. I mean, between the fingerprint scanner and health app, Apple is collecting all kinds of biometric data on us. I could see Apple selling all that data to insurance companies when they go out of business in 10 years, but that's not what worries me. I'm more concerned that if the Machines ever rise, they'll have all of this data to track me, and I'll have to chemically alter my fingertips to evade them. And I bet that would be expensive.

I Saw My College Roommate on the Internet

I found my first college roommate on Facebook tonight. I'd forgotten his name for a few years, but it came back to me while I was sitting on the couch trying to remember if he'd actually played accordion or whether that was some kind of false memory I'd created based on my spotty recollection of his erratic behavior. I remember he was very religious, and that he was the only upperclassman with a freshman roommate. I think we lived together for about four months before he requested a transfer; he may have been the only person I didn't get along with. Not that I hated him. I remember trying to show appreciation for the memo he gave me that explained how email works. He meant well, but it was odd that he had a problem with me staying out late. It just didn't work out. And I'd sometimes wondered what had become of him. Well, for once, thanks Facebook.

Say It With Wine

It would be hard to imagine a more spectacular disaster than the end of the Packer's game on Sunday. Then again maybe I don't have all that active of an imagination. Also, I have the pleasure of having led a pretty sheltered life, so the end of football games can qualify as a "disaster" for me. It was suitable that the Packers lost control in the closing few minutes, because it coincided with my losing control. One caused the other. Our neighbors heard me cursing so loudly that they came over. Not to ask us to be quiet (they can yell loud enough to shake the furniture), but to give me a bottle of wine to ease the pain.

Blog Comments

My friend's mother treats the comments on his blog as though they're personal emails that she's sending to him. At first I assumed that it was because she didn't understand how commenting on blogs work, and than it occurred to me that maybe she assumes no one else in the entire world reads his blog, which would make those comments effectively the same thing as personal emails...but it's also really insulting.

Where Did We Go Wrong

I live in one of those old buildings where you don't have control of your own thermostat. Since we have about 1,000 elderly neighbors who complain that the building is cold, our management keeps it at a steady 80°F. When you go outside and look up at the building, just about every other window is halfway open, even when the outside temps drop below zero. And since we're on 14th st and it's too loud to sleep with our window open, we have to run our A/C window unit all night. And since the "fan" setting our our A/C unit doesn't work, so we have run the actual air-conditioning. I'd call our management to fix it, but we signed our lease before they added a per-unit A/C surcharge, but if we get them changed, we have to begin paying that surcharge. So, we run our air conditioning in the middle of the night, all winter long. It's this kind of bureaucratic situation that I think about while lying awake in bed at night, listening to my A/C unit thunder way, and pondering what caused the downfalls of ancient civilizations.

R-E-L-A-X

There's this one tall guy in my building who lives a few floors above me. Whenever I see him in the elevator he seems annoyed, mashing the 'close door' button and sighing loud enough for me to hear over my headphones. The other day I got in the elevator and he went through his normal welcoming routine. Then the elevator stopped again on the next floor to pick up someone else, and he shook his head and muttered "bullshit," so now I know that I wasn't imagining his annoyance with the elevator. If there's anything in the world more futile to get angry about, it's how many times the elevator stops on the way to the ground floor. It's out of your control, and at least you're not walking down all those flights of stairs. Next time I see him in the elevator I'm planning on hitting the button for every floor on our ride down, so I hope he doesn't turn out to be even more insane than I think and stab me.

Survey Says...Don't Write Back

My gym emailed me twice asking me to take a "3-4 minute survey." I complied on the second time, I must have needed a break from work. (It's sad what qualifies as a break.) It was your basic survey loaded with checkboxes asking just how strongly you agreed with statements like, "I hit all my fitness goals," or "The locker room is very clean and well-stocked." There was one open-response field that asked if you had any feedback for club management, and you know what? I did. I wrote them a short note saying that they should turn the music down. It made me feel old to complain about loud music, but I listen to my own stuff on my headphones and I have to turn it up to 11 to drown out their cluby dance music. I don't know why I always assume these kinds of surveys are anonymous (they never are), but I got an email back from the gym manager. I expected a formulaic, "Thanks for your feedback," but instead he told me that the "club complies with OSHA standards on volume" (so do airports, but it doesn't mean I want to workout there) and that he's "never had an issue" listening to music on his own headphones. So, my new feedback to Equinox is this: When you ask for feedback, take it or ignore it. Don't write the person back and tell them why they're wrong.

Not A Horrible Person

So, I'm not a horrible person. It's one of those phrases. "I'm not a horrible person." "I love you." These are phrases that are never supposed to be followed by "but." So, I'm not a horrible person, but my dog at 92 Extra Strength Tums the other day. I called the vet. I called poison control. Poison control told me that they couldn't advise me on dogs, so they'd tell me what they'd tell someone how owned a 40lb kid: "Take him to the emergency room." I could not, so they gave me a phone number for a dog poison control line. That line charged me $39 to tell me that my dog would survive, but he would be sick. Your dog will survive, "but" he's going to be very sick. They were right, which shouldn't have been a surprise. I don't even know if I'd survive eating 92 Tums, but if I did, I'd plan on being very sick after tearing down a plastic gate, eating a bottle of Tums, and then washing it down with Christmas tree water.