That, blurry though it may be, thanks camera phone, is the mileage I put on the car this weekend. That's nearly 900 miles, slightly less than two tanks of gas, but MAN. I hope this living in Houston phase wears itself out pretty out soon because I'm not going to be able to afford the tires otherwise. But the driving is worth it for now...how many hardcore football-playing yellow labs do you see on a daily basis?
(courtesy of my camera phone)
I also got to drive through the city when I got dinner with my brother at Ninja on Oak St, a sushi place that just recently reopened (still disposable plates, since they can't sanitize with the water), and I also drove from uptown through the Fauborg-Marigny and into Downtown to see a buddy who works at Checkpoint Charlie's on Esplanade Ave. It's still odd there; you drive through pockets of electricity (not so many in Mid-City), alternately stopping at functioning traffic lights and makeshift four-way stops. It's like a DMZ that stutters on the landscape, sometimes just not able to get out the words at all.
These are from Cinco de Mayo, 2005. This was a great day that I still remember choice parts of - though many of those moments are lost forever to a little thing I like to call a stack of ten collectible marguerita go-cups. Yea Serranos. This was also the day of my last exam at law school, ever. It was a good day to be alive. Also please notice the shot glasses on green string around all of our necks; those made it a little messier, and I'm not talking about stains.
This is my awesome new bike, and while I have more pictures of it, I can't post them right now. At least without going insane. You see, I am committing a cardinal sin for uploading/downloading anything larger than a dust mote: I am on dial-up. I forgot just how bad dial-up was, never having had to use it since the late nineties. I remembered I really liked switching to broadband and it being faster, but I didn't exactly recall just how badly dial-up sucked. It really, really sucks. I guess it sucks even more than it used to before broadband, because now I can compare it to something that does not suck. Which is not say I wasn't aware of it at the time, I was. I remember STARING at the computer screen with utter hatred as I attempted to download something as mind-boggling large as a single mp3. Sometimes it would be a "fast" connection and it would only take 30 minutes or so. So all those years of loathing dial-up has sprung anew, the years condensed into a single moment of complete revilement, as I tried to upload this single picture for the viewing public, and yes, it did take as long as a single mp3 in the good old days.
Moving on from the rant, the bike is great. It took me about a mile of riding it to figure out the gear shifters though. If you look at the two metal pieces jutting up right behind the handlebar, those are the shifters. They work like this: one shifts the seven smaller gears (at the back tire), and one shifts the three large gears at the pedals, which is just like a normal, run of the mill gear shifter. Where it is different (and some people will say older) is that when the shifters are at 90 degrees to the frame, they are in the highest gear, and when they are even with the frame, they are both in the lowest gear (unless I'm dyslexic, then vice versa). 
The weird thing is that you move them to the position you want them in, and they stay there. It is not a "click" and change operation, like I've been used to my entire life with bikes. The other weird thing is that the shifters were not tightened when I bought the bike and so would rise to the 90 degree position every time I tried shifting. I thought this was normal, as used to as I am to the "clicking" shifters, but I realized something was amiss when the bike continuously went back to the same damn "pedaling up a vertical surface" gear. You know, the one where you pedal about 20 times to travel 12 inches on a sidewalk. This is not a great gear to travel many miles with, as I was attempting to do, and it took me an entire mile to figure this out. When I did figure out what was wrong (I knew something wasn't right, just not what exactly), there are little spring loaded tighteners on the side of each shifter. So I tightened them and the bike shifted perfectly, and I was loads happier. The problem I picked up after that is that the seat is too low for me, at least bending over to ride the bike with both hands on the brakes as you're supposed to do. My knees were hitting my stomach on every rotation of the pedals, and at first I thought it had just been too damn long since I've had any exercise and I was damn fat. Not to prove this theory wrong, but I figured I haven't gained nearly enough weight to make that level of difference, and realized that the seat just needs to be a lot higher for that type of handlebar. 
All in all, a great buy, especially considering I paid less than $50 for the bike!
Oh, and side-note to Whitman, yes I do have an unhealthy Target addiction. The only thing that saves me is that the coffee shops inside them are all Starbucks, which I despise, and so I don't feel the need to go every day of the week, just every other day.
So wine in a box is not new, but what IS new is GOOD wine in a box. It used to be that you could only get Gallo el Crappo wine in the box, and the bladder the wine was in did make an excellent flotation device in a pool - ah, Hardtner days. The REALLY neat thing about this new wine in the picture is that the boxes featured are perfect squares of 1.5 Liters of wine - twice the amount of wine each as one bottle, conveniently placed next to the boxes for scale (this is at the Millerville Target in Baton Rouge, most lovely of all Target stores, see earlier post #5 for explanation) and really small! These boxes are better for many reasons, first and foremost: (1) the wine stays vacuum sealed the entire time, basically never having the opportunity to go sour on you, (2) you can drink just one glass and not worry about the necessity of opening another bottle of wine the next time you want some fresh, and (3) the wine is compact, and can store anywhere, fits in refrigerators better, etc! 
And seriously, have you EVER had a wine you would even let the bums on the corner drink after three weeks of being open?! Four weeks of freshness is awesome! This particular brand is only available at Target, and they also have larger sizes for the boozers out there.
So Mandy and I drove into Baton Rouge for the weekend because (a) it was a three day weekend because of Columbus Day (and she's working at a federal hospital right now), (b) we may not be able to leave the state again until Thanksgiving, and (c) her car was making some funky clunky sounds and we wanted it checked out by a mechanic we already know. So we thought it was the cv joint on the front driver side tire, fairly easy to fix if the part is available, but that would have been just too damn easy. No, it was the transmission, and it's going to cost a third the value of the car to fix it and we have to leave it in Baton Rouge for over a week. Which is convenient, because we only drove the one car into town and had to be back in Houston 
Monday night. So while we were waiting for the car to be fixed, before we knew the full amount of damage, we were driving around Mandy's grandmother's Camry, which is 6 years old but only has 41,000 miles on it. Basically a new car still, V6 power, fun stuff. Then we found out that the 626 was not going to be doing so hot, and we had to figure out what was going on. We eventually decided to take Mandy's Dad's truck, our third vehicle for the weekend, back to Houston with us. We'll have to be driving back to Sulphur 
in a week or so to trade cars off. Fun. BUT, cool news, I bought a road bike this weekend! I decided since I lost my bike to Katrina (wasted) I would try out something different from the mountain bike, and there ain't exactly a lot of trail riding in our current urban setting, and the main purpose is to keep me from getting fat, anyway. So I 
found this style of road bike I liked at Target in their little bike brochure book at one in Houston, on Spanish Trail Rd. Only Problem? Discontinued model! You can't find it online at Target.com. Online people. I thought that was the death knell for it, but because I am a stubborn ass, I continued to ask at every Target I went to whether they had this bike in the back of the store. In Houston, asking at every Target is not a light comment to make, there are a LOT
of Targets here, every little red Target logo as well as the three black circles represent a store. But, it turns out, none of them had this bike. A little disappointing, especially after the driving required (yes, you can call, but they don't really care about you unless you're taking up physical space in the store). So this weekend I dropped by old roommate Kroger's new house to watch the LSU game and on the way needed to pick up hamburger buns and beer, and the Target on Millerville Rd
is on the way between Albany and his place off Essen. One casual inquiry, beer and
buns in hand, about whether they had it in the back of the store, and 5 minutes later a red and black Canyon Roads road bike being rolled out! I forgot to take a picture of it, and it doesn't exist on the internet, so I'll post one later, but it is really nice! The nicest thing about it is that because there was a rip on the seat, it was marked down to $46.95. I have spent more on nice meals. So I bought a new seat, trucked the bike to Houston, and I am good to go. Lots more to post, but for the sake of both your and my sanity, I'll split it up into other posts. 
I'm in Texas!
