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Awesome!

May 26th, 2009 by

I rode the Redline to work today to make sure that all is in good order for the Dirty Kanza, which is only days away at this point. All, indeed, is. That bike is such a pleasure and a joy to ride in any of its many guises. For the upcoming weekend, it’s done up “Octocog” style (1×8). This bike has taken me from coast to coast, to work, to the trails, and I almost always have a mighty fine time when I ride it. Really, the only time I didn’t have a good time when I was riding it, I was coming down with a cold, fighting my way up the Sierra Nevadas, and toting around 35lb of gear on top of all that. Who would be whooping it up under such circumstances?

Anyway, the DK200 is almost upon us, and by gosh and by golly, I’m freakin’ nervous! It’s a pretty big damn undertaking and you know last year I kind of flubbed the dang thing. I’m hoping to hook up with some riders who carry a similar pace and trust their navigational instincts, considering that mine are…shitty to say the least.

For example, I’ve been trying to squeeze in a few long rides in preparation for the upcoming madness. My work schedule is erratic to say the very least, but I do what I can. I ended up having the whole of last Friday off, so I thought I would make a big loop out of a bunch of cool routes and make a day of it.

I took off bright and early (well around 9:00 a.m.) into the Fairfax industrial district. I figured I’d take Fairfax Trfwy out to just before it splits up to cross the river, then track back into KCK via 7th Street. I did just than & took 7th Street to its logical conclusion, Rainbow Blvd. I took Rainbow south to 50-somethingth, and took a left, trying my luck at hitting the Plaza. I had to do some jiggery-pokery through the ultraposh neighborhoods (which have excellent speed-bumps for bunny-hopping assistance) but eventually I made my way to Brookside Blvd, which I wanted in the first place. Took Brookside down to Meyer Blvd, Meyer to Swope Park, and there the bungling began.

My big idea was to hit Blue Parkway, but darned if I could find Blue Parkway. I don’t know why I am entirely incapable of finding Blue Pkwy, but every stinkin’ time I try to go out there & cruise Blue Parkway, I utterly fail to find said fabled byway. I ended up riding out to freakin’ Raytown on 63rd St. (which I highly recommend that you don’t do) because I did as I always do and missed some crucial turnoff somewhere. What a pain in the ass!

Anyway, after I realized I’d hit the city limit & that I wasn’t about to find Blue Parkway, I gave up and headed west again until I could catch Paseo and head North. I took Paseo to the western entrance to Cliff Drive, took Cliff Drive to where it dumps out on Gladstone Blvd, Gladstone to where it curves south of the Indian Mound, then did that infamous illegal U-turn, and cruised the East Bottoms. Basically went back West through the East Bottoms, where it dumps you out in the River Market. Third Street to Woodswether, Woodswether on through to the little jog over to James Street, across the bridge, and back to home-sweet-Strawberry-Hill-home. Dunno what I did for mileage, but I know I got home about 3:00 p.m. happy and hungry. A little disgusted with myself for being incapable of finding a major and fabled scenic byway in town, but otherwise just fine.

I honestly get my “sense of direction” from my Dad. A couple of weeks ago, my folks were down visiting from Nebraska, and Dad’s unerringly erroneous sense of direction struck again. They overshot the turnoff to our neighborhood, and by a freakish coincidence, we happened to be out in Joel’s truck wrapping up a little errand running and spotted them driving west on Truman Rd. I rolled down a window and hollered out a greeting, and we arranged for them to follow us back to the house.

It was the Saturday of the famous ACME Tour De Cowtown, and my folks got into the festive mode! Dad, via a little goading from Mom, was convinced to participate in his first alleycat race ever. Mom, via a little goading from the ACME girls, was press-ganged into helping score the race. In my misguided but friendly fashion, I rounded up a few more alleycat newbies and (here’s where anybody who knows me will be shaking their heads in disbelief) volunteered to squire them around from point to point.

I have a history, people. I think I have been disqualified, DNF-ed, or just generally muffed every Alleycat I’ve ever participated in. I’m always the last one in, with half the clues or checkpoints. I did one of Forrester’s races BACKWARDS. And not on purpose. Me, Dumbassina, I volunteered to help other people find various sites, landmarks, and highlights in Kansas City.

As you may well guess, I led the posse on a rather fruitless but merry gallivant around the higher and lower points of KCMO/KCKS, and the West Bottoms in between the two towns. I think we answered about a third of the questions, and got back shockingly late. I also managed to convince two girls who weren’t even participating in the alleycat to come back for the afterparty.
Two really cute girls I talked into coming to the party.
Cute girls who aren’t quite sure what sort of party I’d just dragged them into…

Randall & Dad swapping tales of incendiary mayhem.
Randall and my Dad swapping tales about incendiary mayhem.

When I found out that my folks would be visiting on the weekend of the Tour De Cowtown, I kind of started rolling through a mental list of some of our friends I’d hoped they’d get a chance to meet. Randall was one of them. He and my Dad share a similar absurdist approach to things. I’d told my folks about Calvert Guthrie’s workshop down in the basement of the Hobbes building and they were hoping to get to meet him, too. In fact one of our stops on the race was at his shop, so Dad got to see his whole setup in the Kansas City Center for the Ink and Paper Arts As I’d suspected, they clicked, and how! It was a lot of fun for me to finally introduce my folks to a bunch of the characters they’re always hearing about from me.

My pictures from the Tour De Cowtown are here and Nancy of re-Velo has some here. If anyone knows of any more, please let me know, ’cause I’d love to see them!

Posted in Adventures, biking, dumb things I have done, Family, Party, Redline Monocog 29er, Utter Silliness | 1 Comment »

Announcement!

May 12th, 2009 by

As You Like It Design hats will be available for purchase at the annual Everything Bicycle swap meet this coming Saturday.

Come on down and say “hi” and see what I have on offer. I’ll be darn glad to see ya!

Posted in Art Projects & Making Things, Party, Sewing | No Comments »

Do not play in, on, or around

May 10th, 2009 by

Want pants?
Who says I’m playing? Trash-pickin’ is serious business you guys!

Anyway, yesterday we found a dumpster that was a BONANZA of clothing…good stuff too, some of it with the tags still on it!

The stuff not taken
We actually ended up leaving plenty for the next scavengers! Melissa nabbed a pair of lime green pants and a shirt that she wants me to make into a hat. Christi bagged a couple of skirts that looked like they could be re-made into something else, and I was all for getting every pair of black pants that looked close to my size, so I would have plenty for work.

4 pairs of black pants from the dumpster!
As you can see, that was 4 pairs total. They’re all about a size too big, and way too long as they were designed to be worn with high-heels, but that’s no problem for me! I have a sewing machine and I am not afraid to use it. Considering they’re free pants, I have no problem investing a little bit of time into them to make them work better for my purposes.

IMG_2182
I also snagged a cute pair of tan cotton twill capris with great waistband trim & pockets.

Brown pants waistline detail
Also a pair of chocolate-brown brushed cotton pants with a cool waistband & button-down belt loops.
Back end of the brown pants
Back view…the dark spot on the pocket is from my stupid cat drooling on them. It will wash off.

Both of these were from Talbots originally…the tan knickers still had the tag on them. They’d gone on sale @ $48. I got ’em for the price of climbing into a dumpster. Sweeeet!

Chameleon stealth shirt blending into the bedspread...
I also got a chameleon stealth shirt: super cute and highly subtle…if your environment is a lime green bedspread, of course! It has two of my favorite colors, lime green and hot pink, so I consider it a fine find.

Obnoxious pants!
Obnoxious butt-coverings! Yay! The long pants in the middle I am going to cut off to capri-length. They are kind of high-waters on me as they are. Also need to take ’em in. They’re kind of jodhpur-fitting right now – balloony about the hips. I’m way enthusiastic about the Hawaiian-print shorts…they are so silly and go really well with a bunch of my summer shirts. The blue knickers aren’t my usual style, but go pretty well with some of the stuff I have around and are really comfortable, so I’m gonna keep ’em for now, though I may donate them to Goodwill sooner or later.

fancy-pantsy embroidered a-line woolen skirt.
My final great find in that dumpster was this nice A-line wool skirt. You can’t tell in this picture, but it has a pattern of medallions embroidered around the hem in just slightly darker thread:

Awesome wool skirt embroidery detail
Of all the stuff I dug out of that dumpster, this skirt is the most perfect fit. It is like it was made just for me.

IMG_2165
We also found an animatronic Mrs. Santa Claus doll that Christi & Melissa were planning to come back and retrieve later. I think Christi has an art project in mind for Mrs. Santa Claus. I will find out soon, I am sure.

Posted in Adventures, biking, dumb things I have done, Oh, for fuck's sake, Shopping, Utter Silliness, Well I'll Be Darned | 6 Comments »

Is it Boda's Japanese cousin?

May 7th, 2009 by

This entry is mainly for my sister’s amusement, though I am sure other folks will enjoy the adventures of Maru, a Scottish Fold cat from Japan. You can watch videos of Maru in bouncey, pouncey action, too.

Maru is a round-faced, round-eyed, stocky mostly-grey-tabby cat who reminds me of Boda, my sister’s glorious oaf of a cat.

Boda, who is enormous and has saucer-eyes.
Boda, the saucer-eyed, striped, noisy, and portly.


This is the start of a series of photos from Boda’s kittenhood, when he got an empty soda box stuck on his head. Of course, first, he stuck his head in the box.

Then, he tried to back out of the box, but his big ears kept the box firmly lodged on his head.

He backed right into the water bowl!

Detail of the water he kicked out of the bowl.

Boda is quite the fellow. He’s amazingly patient with my overly-enthusiastic nephew’s affections. He likes food, attention, and eating the broom-straws until he throws up. See also curly ribbon from gift-wrapping.

Anyway, I hope this was amusing to cat people in general and to my sister in particular.

Posted in Cats, Distractions, Family, Utter Silliness | 4 Comments »

Go out and read these!!!

May 6th, 2009 by

I just finished reading the last of Terry Moore’s Strangers In Paradise series and I am going to be recommending it to everyone I can, because it was just that good. I’m going to link the Wikipedia synopsis of the series which gives you an idea of what the stories are about, though it completely fails to explain how compelling the stories and characters are. When you are reading it, you care about the characters; you really, really want everything to turn out all right for them.

I read this series in the Pocket Book trade format, but when I get them for myself, I will probably invest in the full-size trades (“graphic novels”). I was aware of this series a few years ago; a friend of mine who has very similar reading tastes was reading them as they came out (this series was originally published as a comic book series) but I don’t do the whole comic book thing. I want to read a story or series in as close to one go as possible, so if it sounds like my kind of thing, I will wait for the trades to come out. As it turns out, they had these at the library, and on a whim I checked out the first two. After those, I knew I had to read the rest of the series ASAP. And I think it’s a series that will merit re-reading, hence the addition of the trades to my Amazon list.

This is a series that when it ended (and it ended beautifully and tidily) you wish it could still go on a little further. I’m going to look into his other series, “Echo,” pretty soon and see if it is half as gripping. If it is, it will be well worth it at that.

Posted in books, Recommendations | No Comments »

May 6th, 2009 by

Dam!

Yesterday was one of those action-packed non-adventure days. It was my day off, so of course I was twice as busy as if I were working, right?

I woke up in the dead of the night realizing that it was already May, it’s been raining like The Deluge, and I haven’t been over to the old house to mow since before we went on our tour last fall. Visions of furious neighbors and tickets from the City danced in my head. Niiiiice.

I’d had other plans for my day off, but I figured staying in the reasonable good graces of my ex-neighbors and on the right side of City ordinance was probably more important than doing laundry and making hats. Also, I needed to get groceries, so I figured I’d just hitch up the BOB trailer and go to my old house, do the mowing, tidy up a little bit, and swing by the Price Chopper in my old neighborhood & stock up. It was one of those trips, where I was out of pretty much everything, including many heavy staple items like flour, bleach, and canned tomatoes. Hence the trailer.

Anyway, I went over to the old house, and things were indeed looking jungley. Also, my one next door neighbor’s yard was in similarly overgrown condition. She’s an older woman with really severe arthritis, and she doesn’t have anyone who’ll do her yard for her regularly. Both her yard and mine are adjoining (no fence) so I just went back and forth across lots and knocked it out. She’s got a couple of nephews who by rights ought to be doing her yard for her, but they’re lousy little punkasses. I tried to browbeat one of them into maintaining her yard for her, and he allowed as how he should, but came up with some big ol’ sob story about how he was recovering from being stabbed in a hold-up. Mmm-hmm, whatever. I noticed he was feeling good enough to be hooning around the neighborhood on some sort of ATV the whole time I was there and mowing the yards.

After I got done with the yards and put everything up, I went to the store and took care of my shopping. You’d think I wouldn’t allow shortages to happen at home now that I’m working at a grocery store, but you’d be thinking wrong. In fact, I am particularly bad about ending shift, clocking out, hopping on my bike, and gettin’ gone. You’d think that since I spend most days in at a grocery store, that I’d be opposed to going grocery shopping on my day off, and you’d be kind of right. I don’t necessarily feel like going shopping, but it beats trying to make a dinner out of carrots, cornstarch, and a dubious jar of marmelade. The pleasure of having a well-stocked refrigerator and cupboards overrides the “do I gotta?” feeling I have about errand running.

So after I mowed two lawns and schlepped about 50lb of groceries from the east-side to KCK, I set out on a recreational ride with a couple of friends. It was darn fortunate for me that both of them were kind of tired last night, too, or I’d be hurtin-hurtin-hurtin’ today. We just did a nice little loop from midtown to Northeast, out 18th toward Van Brunt, up Van Brunt to Gladstone, Gladstone to Cliff Drive, Cliff Drive to Paseo, and Paseo back on down to 31st where we started. It was quite a relaxing way to wind up a day like that.

Posted in Too lazy to classify | 2 Comments »

Name your fictitious punk-rock band

May 2nd, 2009 by

Some friends of mine in grad school invented a fictitious Scandinavian death-metal band called Smorgasbord because they were bored and silly. Is there any better reason to invent a fictitious band than boredom and silliness?

Today on the ride, Christi, Melissa, Randall, and I got on the topic of fictitious bands and invented one for ourselves. Bear with me, because this is going to be convoluted and very silly.

A few weeks ago, on the Saturday ride, we found a bunch of large letters from some sort of wall sign. They were about two and a half feet tall and green, and we (we being Melissa, Christi, Andy, Olivia, and me) started playing Gigantic Scrabble with them. Ultimately, our best word combination spelled out “GROIN PIE SLUTS.” Every bit as good as Toaster Strudel Bitches.

Today was one of those days when every weird, random phrase sounded like it could be a band name or a song title:

The Lilacs
Dead Grackle
Artificial Possum

We settled on “Groin Pie Sluts” as our fictitioius band name, then snippets of conversation began to fill our fictitious playlist:

She Can Do It In Her Waders
There’s Something Furry In My Pocket
Groin Pie Manifesto

We figured on being a fictitious punk band, but not the yelling-and-guitars kind of punk band. More like the unconventional instruments, noise, and spoken-word kind of punk band. Christi offered to play her spectacularly squeaky brakes, and I’m all over the idea of playing a jug. Melissa was talking kazoo, and I think Randall, who could eke a triple out of a double entendre, would be our wordsmith. With a name like the Groin Pie Sluts, highly suggestive lyrics would be pretty much mandatory.

Christi noted that our debut song should be the Manifesto, since the chance would be that we’d have everyone’s attention, so we’d best make good on it.

What the credo of Groin Pie Sluts might be is quite another question. Humm, humm…it’s certainly something to contemplate on a quiet evening with my feet up and a cat on my lap.

Oh, and besides riding our bikes, talking foolishness, and inventing fictitious punk rock groups, we did a little dumpstering. My scores of the day are as follows:

One pink-haired troll/Bratz-type doll. A pink Strawberry Shortcake mini-backpack/purse. A cowgirl-print reusable shopping bag, and a children’s straw cowboy hat:

IMG_8974
I had the yellow haired doll already…she, I found on the side of the street a couple of years ago.

Strawberry shortcake backpack purse found in a dumpster.
Score!

IMG_8972
I always did like Strawberry.

kids cowboyhat from the dumpster
I know I look like a DB, but here’s the cowboy hat.

I didn’t take a picture of the shopping bag, but that’s okay…it’s not that cute, but it is good and sturdy and FREE. I’ve got a good selection of re-useable shopping bags now, and most of them I have either found on the side of the road or in a dumpster. (Don’t worry, they all get washed before being put into use!)

Tags:

Posted in Art Projects & Making Things, dumb things I have done | 1 Comment »

"It never gets easier…

Apr 29th, 2009 by

…you just go faster”
–Greg LeMond, on cycling.

“When it gets easier, you have to do more?!”
–me, on weight training

So yeah, I started lifting recently because I represent the double-threat of having the typical upper body strength of both a cyclist and a woman. Which is to say that I have noodly little chicken-girl arms. No damn use at all, these wings of mine, so I figured that I ought to do something about that.

Plus, I was inspired by a friend of mine who does a crap-ton of Yoga and has the prettiest arms I’ve ever seen anywhere. Honestly, I’d love to have arms that looked half as good as Jen’s do, so I’m hoping that my basement sessions with the free-weights will pretty-up my arms a little while also making it easier for me to sling milk-jugs at work.

As yet another bonus to my new-found fitness regimen, I’m finding that I get my laundry done a whole lot more efficiently, and I’ll tell you why and how.

My washing machine is slowly and annoyingly dying. It started getting glitchy about switching cycles nearly a year ago, and finally gave up the ghost about three months ago.

For those of you new to the chronicles of Meetzorp, I was unemployed for about half a year, so the machine crapped out halfway through my span of joblessness. So replacing it was out of the cards, and Joel learned that the part needed to fix it cost as much as, if not more than, another used washer, so…

Whenever we need to do laundry, whoever’s doing the wash has to keep running down to the basement and switch the machine’s cycles manually.

I’m a really crap multitasker, so I’ll start a load of laundry and forget about it.

3 hours later, and the machine’s still churning away at the wash cycle. Or spin, spin, spin, spin, spinning its little metal guts out. I’m amazed that it hasn’t broken the rest of the way, really.

But with the advent of me taking up weight training, I find myself spending more quality time in the basement, and I have discovered a set of things I can multitask at brilliantly.

Weightlifting and laundry!

It turns out that one full circuit is about half a cycle of wash. So I start the wash, do two circuits, switch the cycle, do my third cycle, switch it to rinse, go upstairs, have a cup of tea, go back down, switch it to spin, go back upstairs, do the dishes, go back down, bung it in the dryer. It times out almost perfectly!

And since I lift every other day (it’s working out to be Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, most generally, I can do two-three loads a week & stay ahead of the game.

I don’t see myself ever joining a gym; I’d never get the laundry done so efficiently.

Posted in dumb things I have done, Utter Silliness | 3 Comments »

Toothpaste?

Apr 28th, 2009 by

Y’all, I can’t even think up a title for this entry, so you’re just gonna have to deal with the toothpaste situation.

As am I.

I’ve got kind of a history of weird toothpaste-related issues with the Wild Oats (now Whole Foods) down on 44th & Main. There was, as you can go back and read, the incident where the one gal who used to work there informed me that my toothpaste was once used for Nazi mind-control experiments.

There’s also the issue of the toothpaste migrating around. They seem to willy-nilly move the shelves of toothpaste every few months or so, possibly in tune with the equinoxes and solstices, possibly just because the store is so tiny you have to grease up and slide in sideways to shop. Seriously, the store is extraordinarily “bijou” therefore their selection of various goods is necessarily limited and anything that isn’t a regular seller doesn’t get carried. That’s just how grocery stores work anyway, and especially ones with such limited floorspace.

So, the toothpaste I’ve been using since god-knows-when-in-the-mid-1990s was Tom’s Of Main, Cinnamint flavor, with fluoride. Apparently, they no longer offer Cinnamint with fluoride. You can only get their propolis & myrrh fake-o non-fluoride-having shitty toothpaste in the Cinnamint flavor. Suck! (why yes, I do feel unusually strongly about my toothpaste options). I also feel that toothpaste without fluoride is just no damn good at all.

The Cinnamon-Clove flavor is pretty good, but it’s only available in their Whole Care which is a whitening toothpaste, and I don’t really want to harsh my enamel any more than it already suffers, considering.

Soooo…my options…

I don’t really like minty toothpaste…that is why I started with the Cinnamint in the first place. I believe that it is imperative that toothpaste have fluoride. I don’t want “whitening” ’cause my teeth are already under abrasive forces they don’t really need. So, what am I left with?

Well, what I was left with this time around was this stuff in the fennel flavor, and I am here to tell you that I will be pursuing other options after we work our way through this tube of toothpaste.

It is ass-nasty and I’m not joking you. This is some dee-sgusting toothpaste! This one is for people who are very-very-afwaid of Sodium Laurel Sulfate, which is the stuff that makes your toothpaste, shampoo, etc. get foamy when agitated.

According to the Tom’s folks:

The foaming properties of glycyrrhizin (from purified licorice root) replace the need for SLS (which may, for some people, occasionally be irritating) or an SLS alternative.

Be all that as it may, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t foam. It really doesn’t. So I end up using twice as much to feel like I’ve done something. Also, it is kind of mushy, and the flavor is truly shocking. I mean, it tastes slightly dirt-y, slightly mold-y, and very sickeningly sweet. It’s even grosser than the Ginger flavor that Tom’s used to offer which just tasted like dirt, but not mold and wasn’t cloyingly sweet. If it were even slightly more disgusting, I’d have just thrown the tube away and chalked it up to a bad lesson learned the hard way. But we’re also talkin’ about a $5.25 tube of toothpaste, which doesn’t strictly grow on trees, so I reckon I’ll just tough it out and seek out a better alternative after we use it up.

I expect I’m going to be on the lookout for a new cinnamon toothpaste that doesn’t suck. Crest’s Cinnamon products suck, if the sample tubes of their “Whitening Expressions” that I got from my dentist are anything to go by. If it weren’t flaming red and the tube didn’t say CINNAMON all over it in big letters, I’d have never guessed that was what it was getting at. It’s just like the old Closeup disappointment from many years past. Supposedly they had a cinnamon flavor, but it didn’t seem to even hint at anything other than BURN YOUR LIPS OFF MINTYMINTMINTMINT!

Probably I ought to start looking around now, and see if I can’t find some toothpaste that isn’t gross, whitening, hideously expensive, or devoid of precious, precious fluoride.

Posted in grumbles gripes and pointless bitching, Recommendations | 5 Comments »

re-ignited the flame

Apr 27th, 2009 by

It’s really been since the tour that I’ve had a good, long, leg-stretcher of a ride, but on Sunday, Joel and I carved a nice chunk of the day out for a 60-mile spin about.

We went out past Longview Lake, which is a pretty popular cycling route, though it was a new one on me. It was a great day for it, warm, but cloudy. Sure, it was windy, but Joel’s a great route-picker…he’ll take you into a headwind on the way out so that you get a much-needed boost on the way back home, when you really do want it!

Man, it was a pretty day, and it just felt great to get out and about and see a little countryside.

Now, since we did that ride, I keep thinking of other long-ride routes that I want to revisit. I’m also feeling a little more confident about the Dirty Kanza. My legs are still there, even after a fairly hibernate-y winter. I’m surely not going to be setting the gravel aflame, but I reckon that so long as I don’t get myself lost again, I should at least be able to finish.

I did a little jaunt through Swope Park, Swope Parkway, and out Blue River Rd. after work the other day, but given my crapful direction sense, I didn’t push it real far for fear of getting myself lost in the hinterlands and having the devil of a time getting back home. I need to have Joel come with me out that loop and help me solidify the route in my mind. I’ve done it a few times with a group, but I’m not good at remembering routes from group rides, since most of my energy is usually going on to keeping up the pace & not getting dropped!

I’ve done the Blue Moose ride a dozen times & couldn’t tell you the route. Ditto the 75th St. Brewery ride and the Brookside Ride. I know that any and all of the above share some of the same turf, but I couldn’t take somebody else out on that loop.

My fairly random peregrinations around the city have started to serve me in a practical sense though. I admittedly have lousy directional sense, but I do have a good memory for coordinates. Therefore, when I had to ride out to the boondocks for an appointment with a recruiter a couple of weeks ago, I was able to piece together a bikeable route with a few suggestions from Joel and my admittedly sketchy knowledge of that part of town. Then, last week, when I had training far in the southeast of Kansas City (almost in Raytown!) and I took a wrong turn on my way back home & ended up over by the casinos, I was able to figure out a back way into the City Market, thence to the West Bottoms, and on to home without too much sweat.

Randomly riding around town has given me an intimate knowledge of specific parts of the city. Most of the time this knowledge serves only for amusement, but occasionally, it really, really comes in handy.

Posted in biking | No Comments »

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