i've been thinking a lot lately about the joy of just riding my bike without considering heart rates, intervals, racing.


just riding along relaxing like i did in college. escaping from the frisbees banging against my door, my roommate's ever present sorority sisters, my suitemate barging in, spoon in hand, requesting access to her tub of frozen cool whip stored in our frig because she didn't trust herself to store it in her own.

i would take the back stairs down to the bike rack and ride the nice long winding path from Isla Vista to Santa Barbara with my headphones on. i'd listen to al jarreau

mornin little cheerios, mornin sister Oriole, Did I tell you everything is fine, in my mind.


i know -- very gey.

and everything was fine and gay as long as i was rolling along on my old bike with the worn leather saddle that fit my rump just perfectly.

carbo loading

here we are carbo loading for the training camp.

this is margarita #1










and this is margarita #2


and this is what we ate.


oy




we didn't recommend the food to Andrea and Patrick.

After margarita #2 we suggested to Andrea and Patrick a couple of other places for dinner including

The Luffa Farm.

We showed Patrick the tiny flier from the hotel. He opened it up and looked at it.

I don't think this is a restaurant, he said.

Turns out the Luffa Farm is some kinda spa. Okay, don't go to the Luffa Farm for dinner.

Go for a bath fizzler, don't go for food.

p.s. we're in 129.

i am pre-menstrual. i can feel it.

i just threw a hissy fit. linda likes to use the washer as her personal laundry basket. she gets undressed in the kitchen and tosses everything inside. by the time i get to it, it's 3/4 full, no room for my shit. well i would have none of it today. i yanked her stuff out and threw it on the kitchen floor to make room for my stuff.

"this is coming out!" i said.
"and this!"
"and this!"

(a truly good fit requires plenty of good narration.)

she told me to put it all back in. she thinks i put it all back. well, i did not. and it feels good.

and i feel like eating everything in sight right now. did you know that when you are premenstual you can eat whatever you want and you won't gain weight? it's true. my sister said so.

scientifically, it's cuz your body is working hard and doing all this extra shit. it needs whatever it can get. scones, just f-ing eat'm. don't even worry.

although sometimes after my second cornmeal cherry scone from the cheeseboard i think, woah, steady there. if i'm at work when this voice of moderation hits, i'll scrunch up the scone in its wax-paper sack until it returns to its origninal dough state. and then i'll toss it in my wastepaper basket by my desk. smack my hands and be done with it. i'm in control.

then i'll eye it, just sitting there.

of course, you don't want co-workers seeing you eating from the trash can. although, i think mine would take it in stride.

"oh there's what's her name, eating from the trash again."
"what is her name?"

and while i'm at i want to add that i hate o.b. tampons. hate'm. hate that little plastic wrapper that gets some fierce static charge and will not let go. let go little wrapper. away with you. be gone! but it just clings on to the tip of my finger no matter how hard i shake.

okay, the little woman is up. the laundry is done. time to make dinner.

oh, that's a good one.

looking out the window by my desk this rainy morning.

i wish it would stay like this, dark and quiet, but soon someone comes in and switches on every light in the place.







and then i have to start looking like i'm working, which is very exhausting.

so happy it's friday.

daisy's 2008 resolution: part 2

best viewed with the sound off.

me and linda playing in the park.

pic by my sister, deney.

we look like a couple of trolls.

i have 30 mins to write this post. gotta go pick up linda at the laundry.

our beloved orange cat left us a present on the bed.


a round moist circular present and being the overly fastidious people we are, we left the pee infused blankets in a pile on the floor for, oh, a few days.


daisy even took to napping on them. but one cannot start the new year with cat piddle smelling up the place.

i'm also making a trifle for the new year's eve party. i've never made a trifle. my mother has and i asked her how to make one. she started giving me directions over the phone.

"For the first layer.." she began.

i found a video online. i made some custard but it didn't thicken so i called her. turns out i was using british custard. brits don't like their custards hard.

i told her how i was making it.

"only one layer, huh?" she said.

"just the one layer." we've got cat piddle to clean, mummy.

i'm a little sad the vacation days are coming to an end. time to go back to the yob. the wonderful yob. ack. i've been having dreams, bad, disturbing dreams where i punch people and find myself wandering through china town naked, wearing nothing but a long scarf and holding a purse. a purse -- very disturbing stuff.

but i must go now, because linda's waiting.

happy new year!

linda likes to say that Daisy is president of the math club and i'm the secretary. same for the geography club by which she means to say that i'm no good at math and finding places.

i'm not sure i entirely agree but what do i know? not a lot.

the other day on our ride with lilly the clouds were starting to turn dark, we felt a drop of rain and so linda started calculating: speed over distance divided by velocity multiplied by circumference.

i was thinking pastry divided by butter multiplied by two, let's keep going. and besides, i thought the clouds looked pretty the way they were swirling, streaked silver and gray.

linda said, let's calculate how long it'll take to get back.
lilly rode up along side me.
she said,what's she asking?
i said, she wants help calculating
we looked at each other. we don't do calculations we said.

we could hear her up ahead "that's half an hour plus twenty, if we go at..."

Daisy can be president of the math, geography and whatever else club she wants. i'm declaring myself officially dense. there you have it, no more working on the bright look, no more hiding.

i don't get what you're getting at and i'm gonna let you know.

like the meeting i was in yesterday. put me in a terrible funk. it was a small group of three people, myself included, meaning i was part of the three people, so there weren't four, just three.

oh sorry, i'm dense not you.
i forgot.

i told linda how i got lost in the conversation. couldn't follow what they were discussing.

"well what were they discussing?" she asked.
this stumped me. should i know this?
"right," linda said, quickly, "sorry."

is this contagious?

anyhow, during the meeting, which i vaguely recall was about copyright infringements and student downloads of music, i sensed a general turning away from me, a kind of who invited stupido sensation as they were talking directly to one another, avoiding me.

sensing this, i would awake from my stupor and interject what i thought were meaningful interjections.

"Excuse me, is that Catherine with a 'c' or a 'k'?"

i had my laptop open which i hoped would make up for my dissociative state, the drool pooling in the corner of my mouth.

i tried to stay focused. DMCA someone said. i typed the letters into the laptop. I should know what DMCA is, i thought to myself.

was it a rap group? my head began to bob in my white-girl imitation of dancing. don't do that a voice said. perhaps linda's.

then, one of the three of us, certainly not me, stated, "a non-resident, non-student, using a non-wireless connection, in the resident halls..." which just completely threw me.

too many nons for this brain. nons make my brain do yoga. i have to take out the nons, make them non-nons and, well, fuck it. it was time to cover my tracks, announce my presence.

think. think.

"DMCA -- Digital Millenium Copyright Act!" i said.

now that got their non-non-attention.

this picture just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy!

need something to make me smile today.

here we go:


































believe it or not, that's ippoc in there!










okay, i feel better.

can i go home now?

linda took this picture last night in walgreens. i didn't know dwight yoakam was into packaged food items but then i don't know much about him.

i read sharon stone said that kissing him was like eating a dirt sandwich which is a pretty nasty thing to say, i think; but i've never kissed him.

and i don't think i will be eating his chicken lickins anytime soon. sorry deewight.


my food du jour is pumpkin muffins. i'm growing little ones on my hips.

linda and i had two drinks apiece last night which wasn't smart. one drink is good. two is like trying to enhance heaven. we watched the tour of cali when we got home. somehow the whole crash thing in santa rosa and giving everyone the same time never really sunk in before.

last night i wouldn't shut up. i was annoying myself. "that's just so pathetic," I kept saying. that's reeediculous.

i'm slow to catch on. i sometimes see it in peoples eyes. they look at me like, "ooh you're not as bright as you look," because i've worked very hard on my bright look.

i'm working on it right now.

i had this task at work to add photos of people's mugs to our staff site. click on a link, you see a different mug. i was dreading the part about going up to strangers and asking them if i could take a picture of their mug. i think the fact that i refer to co-works as strangers says a lot about my not so rapid ascent up the corporate ladder.

hey, has anyone seen a ladder around here?



so i made myself do it. i hung my camera around my neck and set out. i avoided bigwigs and people who i generally avoid in general...which is about 75% of staff.

i have a few problems.



they got very serious about which mug they wanted me to shoot. they explained the history of their mugs, decided on one mug then swapped it for another, dug around in drawers for better looking mugs.




i went up to this one guy and asked if he had a coffee mug that i could take a picture of. "nope" he said and turned away.

asshole i thought and strode off. ( increasing my percentage to 76%). then near the end of the photoshoot, he appears in the hallway walking toward me, four mugs hanging off his fingers. apparently, he'd been confused by my request ( been working very, very hard on his bright look too). and he wants me to shoot them all.


his mugs are all pretty boring. this was the best.








this is my favorite.

they've moved people around at my job. purchasing has been moved to banway. the service desk is down on shattuck.

the business and finance team has been moved to my floor.

and, lordy, lordy, they're really smelling up the place. i don't mean a subtle touch of perfume on the neck, a delicate dab on the wrist. no, what i'm smelling wafting from the breakroom to the distribution center appears to have been applied with a leaf blower.

i passed by business and finance the other day and couldn't believe my eyes. a woman spritzed herself in her cube creating a mushroom cloud of perfume rising upward and onward, moving off to rain its smelly fallout across the floor.

isn't this kind of behavior illegal in Berkeley?

later, i walked into the bathroom and caught a whiff. a horrid floral sweet odor like gardenias dipped in caramel then sprinkled with chocolate morsels. a tooth hurting odor. i suspected the heavy applicator from business and finance. so i peeked under the stall. muddy tennis shoes with mis-matched laces -- Bernie from Application Services. not really a perfume sort -- perhaps a little Brut aftershave under the pits, but not this.

When she left, I went about my business, leaving my own devastating bouquet behind, washed my hands, and then saw the source of the stink sitting above the paper towel dispenser (which is always stocked so tightly and you have to tug so hard that the paper towel gets torn into tiny bite-sized pieces -- which is whole 'nother blog.)

there it stood. a tiny glass vase, no bigger than my hand, filled with a honey colored oil with long thin tooth-pick like things soaking in the stuff. I removed one toothpick thingy and ran it under my nose. the scent was as delicate as a sledgehammer and brought back memories of every Motel Six room between here and Fresno trying to pass itself off as non-smoking.

how foul, i said to myself which i am certain is not the response Susie (or any of the other business and finance natural odor haters) probably expected.

my hand twitched to chuck that stinky thing into the waste along with the mounds of damp and shredded paper towels, but i thought no. that would be wrong. people's feelings will get hurt. and the stench will surely soak into the paper towel and spread more easily. best to leave it where it is.

that night while linda was tapping on her new iPhone (the cause of our near breakup, but that too can wait) i said, "business and finance is stinking up the place".

"hmmm," she said which is her standard non-response. she didn't look up. continued tapping with her fingertip. tap. tap.

"really stinks"

tap. tap. tap.

tap.

i have paranoid tendencies, but ever since the iPhone came into the house, i've been feeling a little less interesting. i mean, who can compete with all that?

anyhow, i went on about the stink and such. i may have touched upon my issues with the jammed paper-towel dispenser. and still nothing. tap. tap. tap.

finally, i just said "i'm gonna fucking chuck that thing in the garbage."

of course meaning the perfume dispenser in the 2nd floor toilet. not the iPhone

"do it," she said.

tap. tap. tap.

our daisy

aka: fatness fluffy

i saw this ad in Australia.

supposedly, it's very effective at making men ponder their driving habits.

and now on a completely other note. i hate those stupid fliers one finds rubberbanded (new verb) to one's front door knob. just as i was leaving the house after lunch one of the rubberbanderers was walking down the steps having left his little deposit of waste for me. a free slice of pizza with a carpet cleaning or something or other.

"don't leave this junk on my doorstep," i said to the man. he had a depressed way about him. it showed in his clothing. no consideration to color or style or elastication. loose shorts hanging low on the hips. tube socks up to the knee.

"hey, i make $5 bucks an hour," he said, "don't give me any of your shit."

well, okay. go on your merry way. peace be with you, my brother. and your rubberbands.

ordinarily, though, i don't mind a good fight with a stranger. gives me a chance to let off some steam, open up the lungs a bit.

plus i find, if i don't swear at people on a frequent basis, i get rusty and out-of-date. i catch myself saying things like "piss off you wuss" or "stuff it doofus."

old lady swearing. that's what that is.

gotta keep sharp. practice, practice, practice. that's my motto.

one time i jumped the gun at a four way stop and a woman in a brand new mustang blared her horn at me.

i hadn't been in a good fight for a while so i flipped her off and drove on towards Bettys to get one of their berry scones. i like them warm, just out of the oven.

anyhow, she tailed me all around 4th street, up Oxford, down University. i tried to ditch her in a parking lot. slide in and be all inconspicuous in my 1994 pick-up next to the rows of 4th street SUV caddy's and beemers.

she pulled up behind me. I locked my door. she slammed her door and headed my way.

i took out my cell. i hoped she couldn't see it wasn't charged.

"i'll kick your skinny white ass, bitch," she said and hit my side window. i pretended to dial. poking at the keys elaborately until she walked away. i watched her in my rear view mirror. she was dressed up, like she was on her way to work. so was i but it wasn't so obvious from what i was wearing.

as i drove off, i kept checking for the mustang. i drove around and around, making sure no one was following me.

a good fight gone terribly wrong.

i knew it was just a figure of speech -- skinny white ass -- but it made me think maybe i really didn't need the scone.

sierra point silliness and sufferage

lauren looking pretty at ease before the beebeebees race.











sabine gave me excellent pointers
and felt up my tires.












hi steven!














and hi there katrina.















bunny is focused.

















Linda's first cross race!















go pete!
















Linda "I-don't-like-dirt-and-hills".

















a little flower power.

bought some lovely pink gel tape to re-do my bars. ippoc sweetly offers to redo my tape.



here's one view...something look a little odd?


















here's another angle







i think she's slightly wacked out from her massage today.

am i right?

a day at bondi beach

we took a ferry out to this bay and sat and had a coke and a coffee. on the ferry ride back into Sydney it poured and was so windy i had to remove my Paris Hilton glasses.













a little fun with cameras mirrors and weird bathroom art at Bondi...

for your Friday viewing pleasure...

Tasmanian weather is a bit like Scotland
















Port Arthur in Tasmania...not a pretty story to tell of this town.















Oldest bridge in Australia located in Richmond another town with a not so nice history.












Nice walking and mountain biking trail on Mt. Wellington near Hobart in Tasmania














This looks like a rat, but it really is a kangaroo...













There is a baby in that pouch














Baby wombat not fond of the rain and she looks a lot like Daisy












Two little baby devils














The Sydney Opera house and us














For the doggie people out there...turn your heads please...















please may i have some more....

pics all out of order...i have 3 mins 52 seconds...






i like these little buggers.




this restaurant needs to hire a new ad agency...the ants just don't work for us




can you spot the kuala? did you know that they are not kuala bears, they are just kualas which mean "don't drink"...which must be an awful awful thing...and ippoc who is hovering tells me they are not spelled kuala...oh well, now they are



and the KOALA with the baby was so dang cute...














koala paparazzi...not so cute...but we are in there too




and we would have taken pics of the little penguins too but that was not allowed. we went on the penguin plus tour and got to sit on a private platform out by the beach until the sunset. it was very cold and we were all huddled waiting for them to appear out of the water. they wait until darkness and band together in a little groups for protection. they are the smallest penguins in the world at a foot high. there can be hundreds. and they are so wiped from all their fishing and feeding and penguin swimming that they waddle along the sand and trampled grass (from their endless commutes) to their burrows that some just fall flat on their penguin faces. then they get right up and waddle some more.