I saw it in the distance. And I thought,”What the fuck is that sitting on the sand? It looks like a boat. It…is a boat…”:

Okay, so it’s a boat just sitting in the middle of the sand on the middle of a very busy beach. I have a few questions.

1. How exactly did this boat get there? It hasn’t been stormy enough for the damn thing to just wash up, especially not that far up the beach and particularly not relatively upright and totally intact.

2. Why is it just sitting there? If it’s for a TV show or a movie or something, which is about the only rational explanation I could think of besides it just washing up, why is there nobody guarding it?

3. If it actually did wash up, why the hell did they put a fence around it instead of removing it?

So bizarre. I’m hoping I can do some more riding this coming week – though I seem to have re-aggravated a pectoral muscle that’s been giving me trouble for a couple weeks by hauling my heavy-ass backpack around for 31 miles, so I may have to figure out an alternate way to carry all my water and Gatorade and granola bars before I go out again.

But we’ll see if the boat is still there in a few days or a couple of weeks. Anybody else got ideas of why the hell a boat would randomly wind up sitting on the beach a couple hundred feet in from the high tide mark?

In case you’ve ever wondered, “So, what happens when you’re biking along and a car creates a small pothole and sends little chunks of asphalt everywhere?”

I can now say: You hear the bang, and half a second later you feel an intense pain in your thigh. You pull over for a second, say, “OW, what the FUCK?” and stare at your thigh, and see a little red circle about the size of a dime where the chunk hit you.

The red circle will turn into an angry red welt, but the pain at least goes away after five minutes or so (or at least it does if you continue biking). However, as my dad pointed out: Better that it hit me in the thigh than in the face.

What the fuck is going on with the weather out West? First it snows six inches in Antelope Valley (just north of Los Angeles) this morning, then I see this:

That’s the big fake Pharoah at the Luxor. In fucking LAS VEGAS. Yes, that’s right, folks, Las Vegas got six inches of snow today, too.

I first heard about this when Joel told me his trip had been cancelled because his co-workers got stranded in a snowstorm in Vegas. The Vegas airport owns neither a snowplow nor a de-icer, so they called him at O’Hare to say, “Yeah, don’t get on the plane.”

Seriously, this is just ridiculous. I’ve had one big shoot that keeps getting cancelled because of weather, and at the rate things are going with both that shoot and the overall weather, the next cancellation is going to be because it’s raining blood.

Two bits of interest from my annual physical this morning.

First of all, I’ve grown an inch. I’ve never measured above 5’4″, and often called myself 5’4″ on a good day. For some reason, today, I measured 5’5″ even.

Not that I’m complaining, particularly since this height change knocks a solid point off my BMI. Still, it’s a little odd that after somewhere between 10 and 15 years of not growing a bit, I suddenly got an inch taller in the last year.

Secondly, I have to say, it is a rather distressing sign for your love life when even your doctor says, “So, why aren’t you seeing anybody?”

I went fishing with my dad today, and he did really well. He caught five fish: two HUGE cutthroat trout, two good-sized rainbows, and a pretty decent-sized brook trout.

I, on the other hand…I hooked one fish myself. Well, hooked might not be the right word. I had a little rainbow that was maybe five or six inches long bite on my fly, and I yanked the hook to set it.

Except I apparently yanked a little too hard for a fish that small, because this poor fish went FLYING out of the water, at least 10 yards onto the bank, and right next to the surprised and very amused guide.

The guide was nice enough to put what I’m sure was a very confused fish back in the water. His friends will never believe the story he tells: “My god, I saw giants!”

Today’s forecast was partly cloudy, 0% chance of rain, as it normally is between mid-March and late October in Southern California.

I thought it was weird enough when I looked out the window around noon, and there was a freak rainstorm downtown with raindrops so large that I thought it was hailing.

But out in the Inland Empire (L.A.’s multitudinous eastern suburbs), it got a little hairier:

That’s a fairly unusual sight for SoCal, and it seems a slightly ominous portent. I’m just hoping I don’t look out tomorrow and see locusts.

But I’ll enjoy it while it lasts:

So confused…Orioles…winning? Bwah?

I saw this in a comment thread on Fark today, and I couldn’t stop laughing for about five minutes afterwards.

I don’t know why I found this so goddamn funny, but it still makes me snicker when I look at it.

I just had the fifth person I know tell me unsolicited that they watched Juno and she reminded them of me. I take it as a compliment, since I really liked the character.

However, this raises two related questions for me:

1. How much weirder does this trend make it that this movie made me have a huge crush on Ellen Page?

2. As a subquestion to the above, does that somehow make me a narcissist?