My calves are still sore

This weekend, we took the family out for the Providence Bridge Pedal. This is an annual event, in which the city closes half of each bridge for exclusive bike traffic, including the two interstate bridges. This does not amuse drivers, who are stuck with detours and delays all morning. Too bad. Actually, due to the fact that one of our kids only has a plastic tricycle and the other one barely has feet, we chose to do the Bridge Stride instead, which only covers two bridges. I'm not sure how many walkers there were, but there were 18,000 total walkers and bikers. The Mizz rode in the backpack (hence my sore calves), and D rode in the stroller and slept, the lazy bum. Here is a picture of us setting out.


And here we are heading up an off-ramp onto I-405. This felt wrong in more ways than the sign can convey. For an added dose of wrong, marvel at the optical illusion created by the confluence of the dark pad on the backpack, my cargo pockets, and the Mizz's shoes, making my backside look positively enormous. Perhaps I should walk on the freeway a little more often.


Here is a view from the top of the Freemont Bridge. This was pretty cool, since you usually see it at 55 mph, when you are not up there for long and you really ought to be watching the road anyway.


And finally, I don't understand all the fuss about closing Starbucks stores. We can get lattes in the middle of a frickin interstate highway down here. High speed drive-through is the wave of the future.

Peaberry Coffee

The last time we were at Trader Joe's, I needed some more coffee beans. Joe's has a pretty interesting selection, and I found something new: peaberry coffee. I don't suppose it's actually new, but I've never seen it before. It sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Plus it was on sale.

Peaberry coffee is an oddity of coffee growing. The half-oval beans you're used to grow in pairs. They are actually two separate fruits that grow together in the same "cherry." However, about 5% of the time, only one of the fruits is fertilized, and the other doesn't develop. The fertilized one fills the whole cherry, resulting in the shape shown above. Here's a page with more detail from some Canadian coffee company.

This stuff was marketed as "smoother" or "more complex" or some such thing. It was fine coffee, but no better than other good coffees I've had in the past. From what I can tell, these beans used to be discarded as less desirable. However, I think some coffee marketer looked at the beans and his gears started turning. "Hey," he thought, rubbing his hands together as an evil leer wormed its way across his face, "Instead of throwing these beans away as 'defective,' we could package them as 'special' and market them to coffee snobs, thereby making 5% more money off the backs of these poor tropical people and thus allowing us to buy 5% larger private jets and 5% more attractive servants." At least that's how I picture it. Maybe they just woke up and realized it's silly to throw away a perfectly good 5% of your crop just because it looks a little different.

I just found it a little odd that, after all these years of drinking coffee, I just now heard about these wonderful new defective beans. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I spend too much time at Starbucks and therefore miss out on the more gourmet coffee options out there. Whatever. It's fine coffee, but I'm not sure it's as special as Trader Joe's tried to make me believe.

Dave 0, Coffee 1

I give up. I like the idea of not having to be caffeinated, but it seems beyond me right now. I haven't had much in maybe a month, but I've spent most of the month tired. It turns out that if you can't consistently get a good amount of sleep, the coffee serves an important purpose. Between work, a toddler, and the pressure I put on myself to "get...things...done", I rarely get a good night's sleep. So although I'm no longer getting headaches from missing my morning cuppa joe, I'm always exhausted. This might be tolerable if I was actually "getting...anything...done", but I think I'm just putting up a fight to put up a fight. Anyway, after another short night, I've succumbed to the beast this morning. Maybe I can at least drink a little less than I used to. We'll see how that goes.

As an added bonus, I can stop having to worry about Portlanders looking at me like I just sprouted an extra head every time I refuse a cup of coffee. I thought the masses with the torches and pitchforks were going to run me right out of town. At least I never stopped drinking beer, so that kept them somewhat at bay.

Eating toast shouldn't be such a big effort

Yesterday sucked. I couldn't finish a second piece of toast because it was more work than it was worth. Pathetic. Walking up and even down stairs was a chore too. Mostly I just laid around watching movies. The first two Lord of the Rings movies and some subtitled Chinese sword fighting/westernish thing. It doesn't matter, since I mostly slept through them anyway. I also had a raging headache by the evening. I was a little better off this morning, so I was able to at least keep Mizz out of too much trouble while Franny was out, but I fell asleep again as soon as she got home. The stomach seems to be happier, but I still have a nasty sinus cold, so nothing tastes good. I now have the strength to get through toast, but it might as well be cardboard for all I can taste.

The only benefit to all this is that I haven't had much caffiene the last couple days. 2 1/2 cans of soda. Typically over a couple days, I would have had at least 4 cups of coffee and 3 or 4 cans of soda, maybe much more depending on the day. I like to get away from the need for all that. If I can get down to maybe a cup of coffee in the morning and nothing else, I'd be happy. I don't mind a little bit, but I don't like being completely addicted. I'd like to be a casual user who only drinks coffee for the taste. Right now I'm a pathetic junky who can't move without it and who's always looking for his next fix.