Sunday afternoon, I finished all my homework early. I wanted to have a nice long workout, and I debated going for a bike ride or going for a swim. It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a bike ride.

I should have gone for a swim.

About 32 miles into my ride, I was coming back towards the Marina near LAX, when a pair of tourists decided that they should cross the bike path in order to get down to the beach.

Bikers have the right of way on this path, but it’s not terribly well-marked so you get a lot of idiots meandering across it and causing all sorts of problems.

I saw them going at a speed that would cause me to run into them, so I rang my bell at them and then shouted when that didn’t seem to budge them. They sped up imperceptibly, causing me to have to swerve around them.

I swerved right onto what turned out to be more sand than I thought, and I lost traction completely. I was probably going about 15-16 miles an hour, and I ate it hard right onto the concrete bike path.

I was down for a few seconds after it happened, and several bystanders rushed over to ask if I was all right. I was definitely a little dazed, but I also definitely noticed that the idiot/asshole tourists just kept on walking towards the beach, not even caring that they made me crash.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it now with significantly more vehemence: Fucking tourists.

I was very, very glad I was wearing a helmet – my brain would have been splattered on the concrete if I hadn’t been. All in all, I’m pretty lucky – I could have done much more serious damage to my head and could have really fucked up my shoulder if I’d landed a little differently.

I’m still pretty banged up. Almost all my weight came down on my left arm and my left leg, causing some really awesome road rash on the former and since I carry my phone in my left front pocket, shattering my phone and leaving the biggest, nastiest bruise I’ve ever had (more on that later).

I wasn’t anywhere near a place where someone could come pick me up easily, and my bike was too jacked up to ride, so I started walking with the bike towards the Marina.

As I did, I figured out that although the screen was shattered and the LCD was shot, I could make phone calls using the voice command feature on my phone, and about 1/10 of the time manage to swipe frantically enough at the shattered glass to answer incoming calls.

After lots and lots of phone calls and about three miles of walking, I walked into an ER in Marina del Rey, where I was promptly informed there was a 6-8 hour wait.

Luckily, my friend Jessica, who is my new hero, called me back right then and after I was miraculously able to answer the phone, she offered to come rescue me and my bike, which was pretty much the best timing ever.

We took my bike home, making a pit stop at Carl’s Jr. on the way since I was ravenously hungry. I’d basically biked off about 2500 calories before I crashed, then walked for an hour after the crash.

We then went to UCLA medical center, where the wait was only 2.5 hours, which seemed so much more civilized. Gotta love the ER theory of relativity.

The ER docs determined that since I didn’t have a headache and that eating a Western Bacon Cheeseburger made me feel better and not worse, I didn’t need a CAT scan, and gave me a metric ton of antibiotic ointment for all my road rash.

Jessica dropped me off around 11:30, and I noticed just before I went to bed that where my phone had hit, the bruise hadn’t formed yet, but there was a big swollen lump about the size of a baseball. “That’s going to get ugly,” I thought.

It’s now a bruise the size of an appetizer plate, and about 15 different shades of purple. I do not bruise easily – a spot on my right leg where it’d hit the pedal hard enough to leave an outline of where it hit is barely discolored – so for me to have a bruise this gnarly is something of an accomplishment.

The bruise is still warm to the touch, which I suspect means it’s still not done forming. I put the over/under on how long it’s going to take to dissipate at 2 months, and so far, anyone who’s seen it in person has taken the over.

I managed to get the phone fixed for about $150 and was back up and running on Monday. If you’re in LA and you bust your iPhone, the guy at LAiPhoneRepair.com is the man.

The bike’s still at the shop – I was due for a warranty tune-up so that will probably take at least some of the sting out of it, but they’re going to have to clean about four tons of sand out of the chain, gears, and brakes, not to mention all the damage done to same by the actual crash. I’ll be stunned if I get out of that for under $200.

Plus my $100 ER copay plus whatever else UCLAMC decides to ding me for (I’m sure that big pile of what’s essentially Neosporin will wind up costing me about $45), plus having to buy a new helmet because they’re really only designed for one good hit, and the total cost of crashing my bike will come in somewhere between $300-500, probably.

I’m extremely glad this was more of a fiscal misadventure than a medical one, but still: Fucking tourists.

—–

Addendum: This is apparently Bad Bike week for everyone I know. I had two friends have bikes stolen (one off a second floor balcony, apparently by Spider-Man), I crashed, Lindsay crashed – Seriously, if you know me, lock your bike up tight and then stay the hell away from it.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that I’ve lost a lot of weight – at my lowest point, I’d lost 86 pounds. I am literally a different person than I was when this all started President’s day weekend of 2007.

But in the last couple of months since school started, I’ve gained about ten pounds back, and that realization has been extremely frustrating.

I can tell you exactly why: I’ve eaten like crap. Being back in school, exercising a lot, and bike commuting have made me feel like I had a license to eat whatever the hell I want.

The problem is, eating whatever the hell *I* want means eating about 30-50% more than I actually should eat. I’ve always been terrible at portion control unless I’m really, really concentrating on how much I’m eating.

And if you’re eating that much, unless you’re Michael Phelps swimming 10,000+ meters a day, you’re not going to burn all that shit off.

I always felt when I was working and trying to lose the weight that I would treat the weight loss as my second job. I think I need to get back to that mentality, because I’d slipped away from it for the last 3-4 months and that’s when things started to fall apart.

The thing that’s probably going to help me the most in getting back into physical shape is the fact that I am a complete tightwad: Most of the additional calories I’ve been taking in have been purchased in restaurants or off Twittering food trucks and not in grocery stores, and are thus expensive in both cash money and fat-assery.

So I’m getting back on the Public Declarations of Nutritional Intent bandwagon with a few resolutions to get this shit back under control, because I can already tell if I don’t it’s going bad, bad places which will require much larger pants:

- I will no longer count my bike commute as part of my exercise for the day. Either I actually work out or I have to really watch what I eat – I must choose one. It’s only about 2 miles each way anyway, and it’ll be a lot less strenuous in the uphill direction once I buy a bike that’s not a completely rusted out piece of shit (more to come on that in a couple weeks, hopefully).

- For larger platters, I need to stop stop eating halfway through, wait 15 minutes, and then decide if I am actually hungry for more or just wanting to finish it for the sake of finishing it. I have always been the “I must finish everything on my plate” type, often to my detriment. I need to be a lot better about stopping when I’m physically full.

- I will order healthier stuff when eating out. I will, in fact, have the salad. I will stop ordering the freakishly enormous chicken burrito from every Korean/Mexican Fusion food truck that pulls up to the quad. The healthier stuff, unsurprisingly, is usually cheaper because it’s just physically less food.

Proofreading this post, I realize I sound like I’ve become a little unhealthily fixated on food, but the problem is that if I’m not, I become flat-out unhealthy.

The good news is, I think I’ve identified the problem before I allowed it to get completely out of hand. We’ll see how it goes undoing the damage I’ve already done.

I made the absolute rightest decision I have ever made when I decided that I need to get out of show business.

Garfield Minus Garfield

My friends Jessica and Dan were kind enough to invite me along when they wound up with an extra ticket to today’s Rose Bowl. The only difficulty was that Northwestern was playing in the Outback Bowl at 8am, and the Rose Bowl was in Pasadena at 1:30pm.

I initially figured I’d just watch the NU game downtown and take the train up to Pasadena after it ended and walk to the Rose Bowl. The problem with this idea was that none of the bars I’d been planning to go to downtown opened until 10am.

So I said screw it, I’ll just go to Pasadena. I can take the express bus to Union Station and the train to Pasadena, and it’ll all be good. I’d make it at about 7:45 for an 8am kickoff and I’d have to fight Rose Parade crowds, but it was totally doable.

I should have known better than to make a plan that relied on LA County public transportation being on time.

I walked the 20 minutes down to the express bus stop and got there at about 6:15 for what was supposed to be a 6:31 bus. With no sign of it at 6:47 and the next express bus not scheduled until 7:31, I said screw it and hopped on a crosstown bus instead.

I eventually wound up on an LA city bus with a bus driver who was either insane, high, or both. He mumbled in misunderstanding if I asked him if he went to the Gold Line, and he literally shut the door on people and took off giggling if they dared ask him questions about the line if they didn’t get on the bus before they did so.

I was very, very happy when someone (talking to him in Spanish and still making very little headway, but at least more than I made) managed to figure out that the light rail stop he was driving up to was at least on the line I wanted to be on, and I could at least get off his goddamn bus.

So I finally got to the Barney’s Beanery in Pasadena at about 8:30am, which was not horrible, all things considered. The game was…the game.

It went badly until I ordered a beer, and then it started going great so I ordered another. I got about 2/3 of the way through the second when the bartender, in the midst of mixing drinks, knocked the rest of my beer onto my lap. And of course that was when it all went completely to hell for Northwestern.

Clearly, the lesson for whatever game I wind up watching next year is that I need to make sure that a) I start drinking at kickoff, no matter how early it is, and b) do said drinking from a sippy cup.

Anyway, it was heartening to see an entire bar full of Ohio State fans having a post-parade, pre-game beer cheering for Northwestern to beat Auburn, and all of them consoling me as I was banging my head on the bar after that stupid fake field goal failed at the end of OT.

After that I blew off steam by walking to the Rose Bowl (a considerably longer walk than I’d anticipated). I actually had quite a bit of fun for a game that I was very minimally invested in, though it probably helped that I was sitting with a bunch of rabid Ohio State fans who were really, really entertaining.

I promised my friends who got me a ticket to this game that I’d get them tickets to the Rose Bowl the next time Northwestern made it, a promise that got a slightly bigger laugh than intended. But they gave me a ride home, so I forgave them that.

All in all, it was a damn fun day and a great way to kick off the year, despite that ridiculously frustrating NU loss. We’ll get ‘em next year.

Click this link to the Air Quality map for the greater Los Angeles area. Hover over zone 2, Northwest Coastal L.A. County.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 50 (yellow), that’s bad, and I am probably cranky and complaining a bit about my athsma, but mostly just being bored and unemployed and watching too much TV.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 100 (orange), that’s awful, and I am probably completely miserable and whining about nothing but how much my lungs hate me.

If the AQI Value is anywhere over 150 (red), that’s atrocious, and either a) I’m dead, b) I’m in the hospital, or c) I’ve grabbed the cat and just started driving someplace where I can actually fucking breathe, and will send for my stuff at a later date.

Repeat for the next week or two to know how my life is going.

Nothing quite so brick-shitting as the drive with a clone of your main hard drive up and dying just as you need to reimport its contents onto your main hard drive after doing a clean install of a new operating system.

Thank Jeebus I’m paranoid and made a second backup on a different disk before I blew away the main drive. That’s what’s reimporting to my computer at the moment. If I didn’t have that, I’d be completely screwed.

What kills me is that I’d just gotten the computer to boot off the cloned drive half an hour earlier, and there were zero signs the drive was about to die. Second I hooked it up after installing Snow Leopard, it started clicking and refusing to spin up, dead as a doornail.

Now I just have to hope to hell this copy works right when it’s done importing in…1 hour and 15 minutes.

Edit, 2am: Couple nasty bugs in the 10.6.0 version that took me a while and a bunch of Googling to squash, but I think I’ve got the nastiest issues squared away. And even if I don’t…I’m going to bed.

I’ve been back in LA for a few days. My timing was miserable, showing up just as the forested hills around the city decided to burst into flames.

There have been fires here before, and they’ve aggravated my lungs a bit, but nothing’s set off my asthma like the giant fire that’s still burning almost completely out of control tonight.

My one attempt to work out since getting home ended rather disastrously after half an hour on Thursday, having to come home and use my inhaler like I used to when I was a kid and just a little exercise would set my lungs off.

I haven’t had to use my inhaler daily in years, but I’ve had to every day since then. And that’s without working out at all.

What gets me is that the smoke really isn’t that bad in my neighborhood – It’s certainly not as bad as when there was a smaller, much closer fire a couple of years ago. That fire was only three or four miles away at its worst point (I could smell the smoke much more distinctly), and I don’t think I had to use my inhaler once.

I don’t know if it’s the lack of transition after being up in the bracingly clear, thin air of Idaho for a week, or if there’s something in my air conditioner (running non-stop for the first time in well over a year) that’s making my lungs even angrier.

The bottom line is, I’m stuck at home, waiting for the air to clear out, unable to get my stress out through working out, and feeling like my old, fat, sickly self as I manage to need a hit off the inhaler from the strenuous effort of watching TV.

I thought I was losing my mind before I left. I thought the walls were closing in on me before.

I’d been a little reluctant to go to a family event in Denver this coming weekend. Now I wish I’d decided to spend this week there, because at least I could fucking breathe.

I really need to start just bookmarking articles I want to read instead of leaving the tabs open all the time for the rare instance where I do something stupid (like accidentally clicking a link right after Firefox crashes, then quitting when I see that link opening because I think “Oh no, that’s going to fuck up my session!”, and thereby erasing my entire record of the session) and Session Restore can’t save my ass.

Oh, technology. It makes your life so much easier until it fails, and then it totally fucks you.

Very, very little is happening in my world right now, and there are two things to blame for this. One is a usual suspect: Unemployment.

The more unusual suspect is my car. My car has been a rock. Ten years old, eight of them under my care. Other than routine maintenance and a couple cosmetic scrapes, it’s been quite solid.

Now, however, it’s starting to get old and cranky. It all started when my regular mechanic pointed out that the A/C and alternator belts were really worn out, and that I probably needed to get my timing belt changed.

It’s recommended at either 90 or 105,000 miles, and neither he nor I could find any record it had ever been changed. My car is currently at around 134,000 miles, and if the timing belt breaks it pretty much takes out half the engine, so it’s definitely a bit of maintenance I wanted to get taken care of ASAP once I realized it needed to be done.

My regular guy couldn’t do it because you basically have to take apart half the engine to change it. After getting an obscene quote from a dealer, I was referred by Nate to someone his friends had used, who quoted me a third of what the dealer wanted (and less than half of what my regular mechanic had guesstimated).

So I took the car in on Wednesday, and they shaped up the timing, alternator, and AC belts for exactly what they quoted me, to the penny. Great news, right? Except for one tiny detail.

There’s a thing that goes around the axle, inside the wheel (what it’s called is written on the quote they gave me, but I’m currently too hot and lazy to get up and look for it), and it has a bunch of axle grease in it to keep the axle running smoothly.

So the guy opened the hood, took out what’s basically a flashlight on a long snaky pole, pointed out this item, showed me the decent sized crack in it, and showed me the large amount of axle grease it had kicked out.

It was one of those, “I don’t know what the hell that is or what it does, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to look like that” moments. Obviously, it needs to be replaced before the axle gets fucked up, since I do know that if the axle gets fucked up, that’s INCREDIBLY expensive to fix.

And of course, since it involves the wheels, if you change one side, you have to change the other so it doesn’t get thrown out of whack. The quote to get it completely fixed brought the total I’m going to wind up sinking into keeping the car running to just over $1000.

Normally, that would be bad, but it wouldn’t be terrible. But since I have no current income beyond the unemployment checks Unkle Ahnuld’s been sending me, it basically means I am a LOT broker than I already was.

Where I previously thought going out once a week for a night with my friends for $25-40 was a splurge, at this point I’m finding that going once a week to In-N-Out burger ($6.10 for a double-double, fries and a soda) is a splurge.

Hopefully something will come through soon and I’ll be able to start living like a normal-ish human again. Or I’ll finally snap and convince myself that living with a roommate wouldn’t be that horrifying. We shall see.

I’ve written repeatedly about how I hate Sprint and their shitty shitty reception with the fire of a thousand suns, but last night just about tore it for me.

I had what the phone kept telling me were four bars of reception and yet:

• I could not place an outgoing phone call for over 20 minutes, and did not receive an important call I’d been waiting all day for
• When I tried to text people to complain about it, I kept getting error messages indicating said messages had not gone through. Of course, the recipients informed me this morning that they’d all gotten multiple copies of the text.

I really need to line up my next job to be able to afford the switch, but I’m perilously close to flinging my financial rectitude to the wind and just buying a goddamn iPhone.

I’ve said it before (and I’m sure I’ll be saying it again): Fuck Sprint.