So I got the bike all back together last weekend. What sucks totally is that I put a new chain on it this weekend, and since the gears are all worn apparently, it slips all the time. I didn’t notice this riding around in town on flat ground so much, but when I went out with Dimitri and JR, I noticed it rather drastically when I hit the first hill. So, thinking stupidly I had perhaps put one extra chain link too many in the chain when I replaced it, I removed one. This got me a short distance before I hit the right gear combo and jammed the chain on. When I tried to remedy the situation by popping the chain to add the extra link back in, the part of the chain tool that pops the pin out got stuck by the force of the stretched chain, and when I spun the wheel to release it it went sailing out into the leaves. I never found it, despite 5 or so minutes of searching.

I realize that to anyone who has ever ridden a bike before, this seems like an impossible lame situation. I bow my head in stupid-shame. The worst part was, I had given Dimitri and JR a roughly 20 minute head start, and they each left on different trails, and JR had taken the keys to the car so I couldn’t go back and leave my bike there. To compensate I ran with the bike for about two miles I think…occasionally coasting down hills on it. I finally caught up with them right as Dimitri came down the trail from the much more hilly and generally sucky trail to the lake. Then we smoked a joint, and walked back together.

Not much of a ride for the first attempt on an actual trail this season. But once I get the new gears, we should be all set.

So we went hiking again last night, making that 3 time in one week. That also makes it by far the most exercise I’ve got in one week in oh, say 3 or 4 years.

Today, we’re going kayaking on the Farmington river, as it is currently flowing like a bastard and has broken it’s banks in some spots.

Tomorrow or tonight, I’m going to get the Cannondale out of storage, fix the front tire, and get back on that as well. The motivation from that comes from several sources, not the least of which is Joel Young, the person who’s life I’ve been obsessively reading the last few days. It’s a pretty great blog.

I hate to say it, because it hasn’t happened yet, but this could be the summer I actually get back to a level of fitness where I can run up my office stairs without weezing for 5 minutes.

Check out the archives for April. The link is at the top right of the page. Notice how the chronology reverses and you read from the first post of April forward instead of having to scroll to the bottom of a page and read up like you do on most blogs? Pretty cool huh? Not really, unless you’re a dork. But hey, I take what I can get. It at least makes it easier for someone to read the whole blog from the beginning, should they want to bore themselves that way.

I can’t remember where I found this. Somewhere on the Intarweb thingy…the joys of drunken browsing I guess. I don’t remember downloading it or seeing it before, but it’s on my desktop so it must have been me. Anyway…I’m glad I downloaded it, whenever that was…because it’s cool. Judging by the file name on it when I found it, it’s appearantly from some anti-Bush protest in Oregon.

Salon.com News | Willie’s story

This is an utterly heartbreaking story of how Republican hypocrisy and and the legal wrangling of a particular Bush appointee resulted in the death of a young man in Texas. It requires watching an ad to get a free day pass to Salon.com, but it’s well worth it.

In a car accident, the tensioner on the seatbelt failed and his neck was badly injured resulting in him living the rest of his short life as a quadriplegic.

Priscilla Owen, a current appointee of Bush’s, held up the case in Texas, ruled on points of error not in the actual appeal by Ford, and ultimately is intimately responsible for utterly screwing him and his family over at the behest of Ford, and furthermore Karl Rove.

She’s now about to become the appointee likely to trigger the final battle of the “nuclear option” debate. Make no mistakes about it, she is a hateful, mean spirited cow in need of milking-by-steamroller.

“Culture of Life” my ass. Republicans, especially the supposedly “christian” kind, make me fucking sick. It’s like they revel in and enjoy doing evil. Hypocrisy is like their past time or something. Listen to them whine like the shriveled little twerps they are about “activist judges”, and then tell me that Priscilla Owen is anything but. She had never been a judge before Karl Rove picked her for an open position on the Texas Supreme Court. What was her prior profession you may ask? That’s right….an oil attorney.

Our War for ‘Whatever’

This was a pretty enjoyable article. I’m a bit too stoned to attempt to recount it to you right now…but it’s short, so you should just read it.

So it’s been a few days since I’ve written anything. I don’t know why really, but just haven’t really felt anything was immediately worth reporting.

Last Friday night, I went over to a long time friends house and played guitar, sang, and got totally hammered. It was a really good time. I wish I could provide more details, but it was from what I can recall, perhaps *too* good a time. It was at least nice to have the guitar and amp back in a place where it could be put to use though, and the amp even decided to get in on the fun and stop the annoying buzz of death it had been making the last few times prior.

Saturday morning, or afternoon rather, I went out to breakfast, or lunch as most would call it. DMTri and I went to a diner nearby that I’ve taken Endub to before. We saw an interesting East Hartford style conflict involving a young woman refusing to pay for her pancakes because she had “changed her mind” while they were being made, and now she wanted calamari. Normally, you would think this would end reasonably. But no. It ended with the police forcing her and her friends to pay the $6 minimum table charge.

It seems after the first woman decided she wasn’t going to pay for the pancakes, her friends decided they were also sufficiently aggrieved to also refuse to pay. This resulted in the manager getting rather upset, and calling the police. The police didn’t think it was very funny, but I did. Oddly enough, the police wouldn’t force them to pay for the food they ordered and had delivered to their table before refusing to pay. They were only required to pay the $2 minimum per person table charge. I thought that was weak. I was hoping it would turn into an episode of cops with the women trying to beat up the cops and end up getting billy clubbed arrested or something. But nothing really exciting happened. Just a couple of dumb asses and a couple of cops. It really made me feel bad for the EHPD though. They deal primarily with just flat out DUMB FUCKS. While East Hartford is not the safest feeling area, you can rest assured there are no real criminals, just a spectrum of people ranging from moron to amateur crook. I met a cool guy just out of prison for larceny the other day…funny story…he wanted a cigarette, and remarked he hadn’t seen American Spirits since he had been on tour with The Grateful Dead. We had a pretty good talk about that…but it’s a story for a different time.

I spent the rest of the weekend watching movies, playing Blogshares, and doing fuck all.

Tonight I went on a walk out at a one of the fine state parks we have here in Connecticut. It was a rather short 3/4 (actually on further reading, it was apparently a 1 1/2) mile walk up a hill to a totally awesome summer house of a, from what I can tell, 1930’s liquor runner. (Well, a liquor “runner” in the 20’s, and a legitimate liquor “importer” with a company and all in the 30’s.) Apparently the guy who built it was the first person to introduce Smirnoff Vodka, as well as A-1 Sauce to the United States. He also sold a variety of liquors, including pre-mixed rum drinks.

The place is absolutely beautiful. Totally out of control view. The house is actually a huge tower with a room with walls for all 4 windows at the top. It was pretty awesome.

Does anyone know if the Senate voted on the bullshit nation ID law today? I suppose reading my own link to google news would probably tell me fast enough, but I don’t feel inspired just yet. Well, I should have gone to bed happily ignorant of this fact, but it passed. National ID cards on the way kids…welcome to uh…something less free than America was yesterday…and more run by religio-corporate sluts and whores. Just try to keep in mind while considering the ass raping that freedom got in this country today, that this is supposed to be a democractic styled government, which would imply that there are at least two sides on the issue and yet once again the Democrats can’t pull the dicks out of their mouths long enough to even pretend to be a different party.

If that weren’t enough, why isn’t anyone mentioning the fact that it is now utterly proven that Bush completely lied and premeditated the reasons for the war in Iraq? I mean, it’s all over the media right?

Oh yeah…and it looks like the news page gets a vote of no confidence.

Anyway…exciting stuff, I know….thanks for reading..if any of you three actually did.

t r u t h o u t - Robert S. McNamara | Apocalypse Soon

Robert McNamara is worried, for good reason, about the current adminsitrations handling of fissile material, and about the state of nuclear arms in the world in general.

This is a rather terrifying article, outlining his worries.

I’ve learned to take the man very seriously after watching The Fog of War and realizing the humility he has gained after what he has been through.

Anyway, he’s far too intelligent to be ignored.

So since it is Cinco de Mayo, our plan along with half of Connecticut’s was to go to Margaritas for dinner and drinks. We first attempted this at 4:00pm, only to find a huge line out front with no parking spaces left.

We left, happy in the knowledge that if it sucked that much outside, it was almost certainly going to suck that much inside.

Around 9:00 our friend called, and wanted all of us to meet him down there. We told him the line is most likely even more out of control now, but he didn’t believe us. Since it’s only a couple miles away, we decided to go and meet him on the off chance everyone cleared out right as peak bar hour started.

It hadn’t cleared out, although we did luck out and find a parking spot.

Then we waited for an hour in line to get in. Right when we got to the front of the line DMTri pulled out his ID to get his bracelet, and the state trooper manning the door started questioning him on it. He made a mistake on the zip code, since he had moved just prior to moving out here to CT, and so the douche bag cop refused him entry. DMTri made a valiant effort, even pulling out 4 other pieces of ID, including his Social Security card, to prove it was him. But the bastard was having none of it. My roommate/boss/friend even pulled out his Oregon ID and proclaimed “he works for me, all 3 of us are from Oregon! Look!” but again, fat bastard 5.0 was firm in his misguided judgment

So that’s the story of how I came to hate Margaritas Bar and Grill. And one more in the long, long list of reason that I hate State Cops, and basically Cops in general. The worst of it is that he gave DMTri’s ID back to him. Now if it is fake, and you are a state cop, do you really just let the guy go and give him his ID back? It makes no sense…

Fuck wads..