Well I’ve been feeling generally lazy and unfit lately, mainly because it’s been hard to get into a groove after coming back from my trips. I haven’t been going to the gym as regularly as I used to. With gas prices so high, and the gym being much further away than it used to be (when I lived on Nash, it was about a 2 minute drive, now it takes 20 to get there) I feel even less motivated. As a result, I spend a lot of time feeling kinda flat and unenergetic. Today I decided to ride my bike down to the mall to grab a chinup bar to tide me over between trips to the gym. On my way there I realized how unfriendly drivers are to bicyclists. Share the road, people! Man, I got pushed out of the way and honked at and shouted at several times, and I was just riding safely, watching for traffic and staying to my lane. It was still kinda fun though. Crazy stuff.

Anyway, I bought a chinup bar at Canadian Tire, and while I was there I bought one of those inflateable rubber balls for stretching and doing crunches on. It came with a fun red syringe thing. I may try to incorporate that into a Hallowe’en costume of some type… hmm…

Currently I’m using the crazy syringe to fill the ball with air. That is a workout in itself. It’s like filling a bucket with a teaspoon. It’s working though.

The chinup bar is great. You basically turn the inner part of it to make the outer parts screw outwards to secure themselves to the inside of a doorframe. I tightened it up and heard a cracking noise. It was basically ratcheting the doorframe apart. Oops. I’ll have to find a better way to secure it without ruining my house. I’ve done some chinups already and my arms and back are tired but happy. I’ve realized that I need regular exercise or my body starts to rebel.

Anyway, back to the lab… I must finish injecting!

I’ve added the words “keyboard confessional” to my blog title, because that’s what I thought it was for a while. This is where I come to write things that I want to share… things that have happened, things that I’ve done… But, how much of a confessional is a blog? Do I feel comfortable enough to share everything here? Could I write things that I’m not proud of in here? There is no ethical code governing blog to blogger confidentiality. A blog is not like a diary. A diary is something you have hidden under your mattress, with a tiny brass clasp around it, secured by a useless little key. A diary is something sacred, private, and forbidden to others. Your blog will share whatever you tell it with anyone who cares to read.

What got me thinking about all of this is the fact that I haven’t been writing a lot in my blog lately. I get like this when I feel like I don’t have anything to say. Whenever I’m away on vacation, I have plenty of things to say. Sometimes I feel like I have enough that I can write one or two entries per day. I’m amusing myself so much that I feel the need to share it.

But it’s not like nothing has been happening in my life right now. There have been plenty of things happening. It’s just that they seem routine. I guess I haven’t written them down because I don’t think that anyone would be interested in reading them. Realizing that, I started to wonder why I write in the first place. Is it for me, or is it for others? I mean, there is a select group of people who comment regularly here, and for that I am very grateful. I love blog comments even more than I love blogging.

If I felt that the commenters were the only ones who were reading, I could address my blog directly to them. Better yet, I could pick up a phone, or Skype, or open an MSN chat window and tell them directly. But, I know this is not the case. I know there are a lot more people who read this and never comment. More than once I’ve met up with a friend or casual acquaintence who has asked me what I’ve been up to, and I mention a trip or a show or something, and they say, “Oh yeah. I read about that in your blog.” That always throws me for a loop. What throws me on an even bigger loop is a look at the stats for this blog. I just started collecting stats on it in August, so it isn’t all that accurate, but already I can see that I’m getting visitors from Turkey, Romania, Colombia, and Morrocco, for instance. I don’t personally know anyone from any of these places.

It’s no mystery how people found this blog. I have it linked from my signature on deviantART, and I’m sure quite a few people see that. Also, I forgot to enter it into the little robot.txt file that you put on your site when you don’t want search engines to index it. So, if anyone was searching for my blog in Google, or even just me in general, they’ll find it easily enough. What boggles me is why does anyone care?

Anyway, the net result of all of this thinking is that as much as I want to think I blog for myself, I’ve realized that I am writing for the benefit of other people. My blog is not a place where you will find “my innermost thoughts, my most intimate details” (thank you Depeche Mode). But, I promise to try to make it interesting and sometimes useful.

And now, I continue with what I’ve been procrastinating from, which I don’t even feel like doing, let alone blogging about.

Ok so one more entry on food. Well, I can’t say “one more entry” because I’m a Thom, and we tend to be obsessed with food. So I’ll just say “another entry” on food. Anyway, enough semantics. Tonight I was exhausted and starving from a long day at work without eating. Normally I’d be too lazy to cook something good, and I’d probably eat microwaved popcorn or somesuch garbage. I thought that might not be good for me, so I decided to make something decent for dinner instead. So, what things go well together? How about lemon, white wine, garlic, basil, tomatoes, butter, parmesan cheese and linguini? Yes, please!

1. Marinate about 8 peeled and deveined shrimp in a half-cup of white wine and the juice of one lemon.
2. Start boiling salted water, then cooking linguine so it’s ready at the right time.
3. Chop up one roma tomato and about 20 leaves of fresh basil.
4. Crush and slice up 3 cloves of garlic.
5. Heat up some olive oil in a large skillet. Fry the garlic in it for a few seconds. Then drop in the shrimp, white wine and lemon juice. Add the tomatoes and basil and stir. You might want to take it off the heat, since shrimp doesn’t need much cooking.
6. Your linguine should be cooked by now. Strain it and then toss it in the skillet with the other ingredients and some butter.
7. Serve with fresh grated parmesan and ground black pepper on top.

Yum.

I’ve always known it’s a bad idea to go grocery shopping while hungry. But, when you’re actually hungry and have no food in your house to eat before going shopping, there’s not much to be done about it. Now I’ve got a whole load of food that I need to deal with. Keep in mind that I usually buy food for one or two meals at a time. Usually one.

From the Chinese grocery store I bought: salmon steak, cilantro, green onions, mango-flavored drink boxes, two kinds of tofu (regular and fried puffy balls of tofu), Shanghai bok choy, superior golden extrafine quality light soya sauce (it had better be damn good with that kind of name), and a few tins of canned Chinese fish with black beans. The Chinese fish is better than it sounds. No, really.

From the No Frills store I bought: ground pork, bread, perogies, sour cream, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, pasta, cheese, milk, South African navel oranges (omg delicious), baby carrots and something I can’t explain my reasoning behind buying… a giant simmering beef roast. So my question is: is there such a thing as a pot roast party, and would anyone attend if there was?

I’ve been wanting to do a bit of a website makeover for a while, and when my weekend at the Magnetewan cottage got cancelled because not enough of the guys could make it, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. Anyway, you probably won’t notice anything different, but a lot of work went into this.

First of all, I split up my About and News pages. There used to be only an About page, with the news on top, but as more news was added, it became pretty awkward and ugly. The “About” information was getting pushed further and further down the page.

Another thing that was bothering me was that I didn’t have an elegant way to add new news to the site. I had to keep editing the actual PHP files to add new items. The solution to this problem was to install another instance of Wordpress, which is what I use to run this blog, and strip it down to the bare essentials. I use it to list the news stories into the News page, and I can add new items just by logging in and writing a blog entry.

The final problem was that I didn’t have a link to the new News page on the side navigation bar. It wasn’t going to be easy to create a new link because it was all fancy tables and Javascript rollover stuff done in Photoshop and then manually squeezed into the web page. I didn’t feel like going through all that trouble again, so as per KPR’s suggestion from about a year ago, I read up on how to do it more elegantly in CSS. I found this page and worked out how to apply it to my specific need. It was a bit difficult to wrap my crusty brain around it, but I got it to work eventually. Now, instead of preloading all kinds of graphics to have things change color when you roll over them with the mouse, I just have one file:

The CSS code I wrote shows just the part of this file that’s necessary, depending on where the mouse is. If you move the mouse over “About” for instance, it shows the part of the graphic where “about” is in orange. I was pretty excited to have figured out how to do this, and have newfound respect for CSS and CSS coders.

After all of this brain work, I decided I needed to ride my bike a bit. It’s been getting dark earlier and earlier these days, so I thought I should take care of a couple of safety issues. I rode down to the bike shop and picked up a tiny LED headlamp and taillamp for $30 including taxes. They’re very bright, and easy to attach/detach because they use these stretchy rubber connector things to hold them to the bike. They’re small, so I can fit them into the saddle bag and carry them with me when I lock the bike up.Ingenious.

Speaking of ingenious, the same company, Topeak, also makes this:

It’s a tent that uses your bike frame as support, so it doesn’t need poles. It weighs about 1300 grams and you carry it in a little bag on your handlebars. Sweet.