i'm sitting here with my coffee while linda reads blogs. no racing for us today. she's out-loud thinking and flying high from the coffee so it's hard to write with her endless blib-blabbing. but i'll try.

there she goes,

"Hmmm..hhh, that makes sense...Oh, that's funny..."

i don't even pretend to listen.

when she posts a response her lips move as she writes. kinda cute.

it's grey and foggy out and i really kind of like it.

"Anyhooo...." that's Linda again. the laptop is balanced on her belly. her hands are curled over the edge.

i went to Andronicos this morning for cat food. i really didn't have any choice because linda wasn't going and minnie was plopping his emaciated orange carcass on my head to get me up.

"oooh...she's got a link..."

no more coffee for Linda.

i pulled on yesterday's (or was it Thursday's?) old clothes and drove me and the manwig down the block through the mist to Telegraph. One car in the parking lot. my eyes were so puffy and caked in eyesnot that it was hard to see all the obnoxious Andronico prices that can stop me in my path and make me say, "you've got to be fucking kidding?"

"The fifth anual West Coast Festival for Highly Sensitive People" she reads "...now there's a fair for you"

so anyhow there i was too gorgeous for words -- commando in last weeks dirty clothes -- and i see this guy at the deli section getting a sandwhich made. who eats a sandwhich at this hour?

i can't help but think to myself, what a buttag shirt that guy ordering the sandwhich is wearing. really pretty hid with pineapples, and hula girls, palm trees, surfboards, leis.

i've got some nerve. i mean i have some clothes that i think of as my "good" clothes simply because they don't have food stains on them. and one shirt, the only way i can only tell the front from back, is by looking for the hole on the right shoulder.

so where do i get the nerve to judge a guy wearing at nicely ironed Hawaiian shirt at 8:00? who knows? probably the same place andronicos gets pricing bing cherries at $4.99 a pound.

anyhow, the room has become oddly quiet now. i think she's coming down.

i'm in cafe trieste on San Pablo right now. it's 8:53. way past my normal bed time and now that i've dranken me a coffee and eaten $1.25 (bloated Andronico price) worth of chocolate covered cranberries i'm totally whacked out on sugar and caffeine and will surely be up until midnight. Linda is probably out now, sleeping off her $5 margarita as the hookers prowl around her Extended stay retirement home. this is a pretty good cafe. it's got wireless and usually they have a nice band playing jazz or some earthy crunchy accoustic stuff. last night, i liked the music a lot. and so did this guy in the audience. he liked it so much he clapped in the middle of the song. one of those really loud claps from cupping your hands together. the old lady in me wanted to go over and ask him not to clap so loud. but you can't really do that can you?

but now they have some light rock playing and it's way too loud and I might have to leave asap. the lady sitting next to me keeps banging her clog against my foot. her foot really is in my airspace and I don't know why she can't just sit in the middle of the table instead of hanging off the edge of it. she's reading a book that's filled with pictures and she has a really annoying laugh. "HA!" like she has something stuck in her throat. "HA" if she does it one more time i'm doing the Heimlich on her whether she likes it or not. did she just say something to me? don't look up. keep typing. i wish to hell they'd change the radio station. maybe i don't like this cafe. maybe i don't like cafes, after all. tho i do find the noise and distractions good for the writing. if i was at home right now i'd be danging string in front of the kitties or standing in front of the refrigerator wondering, "do i really want a pickle?"

okay, she's talking outloud now. "WOW, Intense. that was just fabulous!" out of the side of my eye, i can see her gazing at the book cover, shaking her head in amazement. "so good," she says. how do people get that way? i mean feeling so free, to speak outloud, say whatever the hell crap they feel like in public? did they learn it at home? did she come from a family of out-loud thinkers, all walking around the house saying whatever came into their heads?

maybe i'm hung up. but in my family, just asking someone to pass the salt at the dinner table could stir up all kinds of shit.



she closes the book, whacks me one more time with her clog and takes her outloud thoughts with her out the door. AND she doesn't even take her plate and cup to the dirty plate tub. i can't imagine just getting up like that. they sell wine here. maybe i want a wine. $8 a glass. i've been watching my pennies. going home for lunch eating dinner at home since Linda's been in Fresno. Suddenly coughing up $8 for a glass of wine seems kind of extravagant. pretty sure that'll change tomorrow.

okay, i'm going home to dangle some string for the kitties. and maybe eat a pickle.

minnie is blue
he misses you










daisy hasn't a clue
why minnie is blue














i think he's just gonna sit and fret till you come home.








and daisy is just gonna eat.

i love this picture. it capture all of the sweetness of linda. she did me a big favor this weekend by joining me up at Sattley right before her bidness trip down to Fresno today. she didn't want to go, told me she didn't want to go but I kept trying to register late. finally, she helped me by looking up the right number. i'm so pig headed.

she hates time-trials more than i hate them and i hate them a lot. so it was a stressful trip and really no fun at all. it didn't help that we stayed in the Great Western Saloon in Loyalton about 12 miles from the course. what a stinkhole of a place, tho the people were friendly enough. we ordered two margaritas as soon as we checked in. "do you do top shelf?" linda asked the guy behind the bar who looked like he was the owner "with a splash of Cointreau," she explained. "kwan-what?" he asked. as he poured in some coolant colored mix he felt the bottle with his palm " kinda warm" he said. couldn't wait.

the restaurant had a brownish greyish moldish colored shag carpet covering the floor and a stone fountain that looked like it had been plopped there because whoever was carrying it outside (where it belonged) ran out of energy. no water flowed in it. it just was there, in the middle of the dining floor. perhaps a previous owner's good idea gone bad and forgotten.


we ordered two beers because we weren't feeling anything from the warm margarita engine coolant.

"this place is depressing," linda said.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, I wanted to say. tho it's usually no good to say sorry once you're already in purgatory. best to wait until things look up a little. but with a 40k tt the next morning and then a 4 hour drive home before her 4 hour trip to fresNO, there wasn't much looking up on the horizon.

I'd chosen my seat so as not to face the restaurant's far wall/shed area -- the final resting place of empty boxes, aerosal cleaning cans, dusty plastic flowers and a boom box from circa 1973. instead, i stared at the poster on the far right wall. a picture of a hunk of chocolate cake and a can of diet coke. "Eat American" it said.

"remember that poster from last time we were here?" i asked linda who looked small and forlorn sitting across from me. she glanced over her shoulder. "maybe," she said and then, "we're never staying here again."

the menu was a binder of odd pictures of food clipped from magazines like some seventh grade art project. and if any crime had been committed by a customer at the Great Western Saloon in the past twenty years, i would direct detectives to this thing. no need to dust for prints, i turned each page with the tips of my fingers.

"Best dang food you ever had" read a caption beneath a picture of spaghetti. who'd ever clipped the picture must have been in a rush because they'd chopped right through the top of the meatball.

"is the spaghetti sauce homemade?" linda asked the waitress.
"no it's Prego," she said.

later, in our room, i tried not to let anything i'd brought touch anything. i would have put kleenex boxes on my feet and rubber gloves on my hands if i had them. i noticed linda had put a plastic bag under her toiletry bag on the sink counter. and i'm 100% certain there was semen on that bedspread cover, no fibre analysis required. the blinds wouldn't open, the window wouldn't open. it was like we were in an acquarium floating in shag carpet fumes. linda took a shower and went to sleep immediately.

i turned off the lights and turned on the TV, strapped to the ceiling. and we still had a 40k TT to do.

outsourcing my time trial

any Slovenians want to do it for me?

I found this article "Outsource Your Chores, Save Your Cash", exceptionally disgusting. Here's a little snippet. Just the thing for lazy ol' Americans:


"When David San Filippo decided to create a tribute video in honor of his sister's wedding, he could have gotten a recommendation from a friend or looked up video editors in the phone book. Instead, he did what big corporations have been doing for more than a decade: sent the work offshore.

On the Internet, Mr. San Filippo located a graphic artist in Romania who agreed to do the whole thing for $59. The result was a splashy two-minute video with a space theme and "Star Wars" soundtrack. It won raves at the wedding.

Offshore outsourcing has transformed the way U.S. companies do business. Now, some early adopters are figuring out how to tap overseas workers for personal tasks. They're turning to a vast talent pool in India, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere for jobs ranging from landscape architecture to kitchen remodeling and math tutoring. They're also outsourcing some surprisingly small jobs, including getting a dress designed, creating address labels for wedding invitations or finding a good deal on a hotel room, for example."

What next?

"Er excuse me Mr. Romanian, can you wipe my butt?"

if only she hadn't had that budino...