The unexpected

A few things in the past few days I haven't expected:

I didn't expect to be able to ride 12 miles. I did on Sunday.

I didn't expect that if I did ride 12 miles to avoid deep pain. I felt great on Monday.

I didn't expect my spokes on my rear wheel to go "pling" and lose their spokey integrity on my follow-up "12 miles twice in three days" ride yesterday. Result: Three miles and some tears. Honey rode 19.

I didn't expect to make a good peach cobbler. I did.

I didn't expect that the guy at the local bike shop (LBS) where I had never been and to which I took my wheel today would be so nice. Me: "I push the limits of my bike." Him: "No you don't. You're out there having fun and exercising. The new wheel will be fine." $257 and a kind word. The latter made me feel a lot better about the former. I'll go back to this bike shop. The new wheel will be ready on Friday. The old one will go up on ebay. Anybody need a 32 spoke Open Pro rear wheel with an Ultegra hub? I'm having it re-trued.

I didn't expect the Angels to score 14 runs in one game this whole season. Yea Halos.

I didn't expect to get out of last place in batting average in my fantasy baseball league. Oh wait, I didn't.

I didn't expect that an off-hand comment by my Honey would result in a new presidential candidate. Bailey in '08!

I didn't expect Italy to beat Germany in the World Cup. I also didn't expect the World Cup to be an area of conversation at the "lesbians in academia" barbecue we attended last night. They did and it was.

I didn't expect Kenneth Lay to die. I wasn't really thinking about him or anything, but I was surprised this morning when I heard he had.

I didn't expect Biscuit to make it through the night with any aplomb. She was stressed when we got home. But she went to sleep and didn't bark or whine at all. To celebrate, I've contracted with the Dog Patrol (shameless plug if anyone needs dog walking in L.A.) to walk her on Thursdays. She totally deserves it. She also deserves "total football access" but doesn't get that because she can't handle it.

I didn't expect to so easily dissuade Wendy from calling me "Grits." : ) Was it the reference to the CIA?

Mostly, despite the tears yesterday, I didn't expect to feel so good today. Happy Wednesday everybody.

Boom, Cobbler, and Pedals

Honey and I have been invited to a 4th of July party tomorrow. I waffled on going at first because the Dean who just hired me will be there and I was invited before she offered me the job. It didn't seem good to go if I didn't get the job. I am also afraid on behalf of Biscuit about the fireworks. Reddo was very afraid of fireworks. In fact, one of my last clear memories of him is him running back up onto the porch to be let in almost immediately after asking for a "woof about" in the yard. With Reddo there were woof abouts, with Biscuit, now it's "Bisc-abouts"). Reddo's great regret about our house, I'm sure, was that our bed was too low for him to crawl under during fireworks. Before he lived with us, he had been my parents' dog and my mother has this massive bed with a springer spaniel size crawl under space. Biscuit did not like the thunder storm that happened shortly after we got her. There was a lot of yelping and crying. She's calmed down a lot since her feverish first six-seven months in our house. I'm going to give her a Benadryl and hope for the best. We may or may not take her with us to the party. She's been pseudo-invited.

I'm supposed to bring cobbler to the party. How I got myself into bringing cobbler is a testament to my "sure, I know how to do that/know all about that" bravado. Since I'm from the South, the hosts made an assumption that I could cook, and what's more I could cook cobbler. I didn't do a thing to dissuade that notion. I made it two years ago for this same event. I didn't think it was very good. Nevertheless, the cobbler has been requested again. Sigh.

My mother is an excellent cook. She rejects many of the fussier aspects of Southern womanhood--lace, pink, sewing, flower arranging--but embraces others--shoe coordinating, cooking, ablutions, baby powder. She didn't teach me any of them. Why she didn't teach me to cook probably has a lot to do with her impatience in teaching anyone to do anything and my life-long weight issues. To this day, she is disappointed in my unwillingness to be girly. Whatever.

So I'm off in a bit to buy some ingredients for the cobbler. I don't know what recipe I used last time. I'm using a different one this time. I wonder if anyone will notice.

On the bright side, I bought some tough looking new pedals for my new bike. Nothing girly about them.

Happy 4th everybody. May your cobbler be tasty, your dogs be calm, and your mothers be accepting.

Thor

I am going to try to resist the temptation to blog a lot about the Tour de France. I'm a sports fan. It's a status I denied for many years because my honey didn't so much like it. She's come around, which is sweet.

I tried hard during the Winter Olympics to not blog solely about them. It got me (and Honey )off on an unfortunate trajectory about Neve and Gliz. So, I'm going to make a rule for myself during the 21 days of the Tour. You ready? I can have the TdF in my blog five times total in the next three weeks. Here's #1.

I won't try to top Honey who wrote beautifully about the doping scandal yesterday. It's not just because she's my honey and found a really nice calf picture...I have to see that's as succinct and right a piece on drugs in sports as I've read in a while.

We just watched the prologue of the TdF on our Tifaux. Honey has persuaded me to not root for Floyd Landis or Dave Zabriskie because they've given two joint interviews--one in Outside the other in Bicycling--in which they said homophobic things. So we're rooting for a few other guys. I confess to having a weakness for the best Norwegian cyclist ever (tm). It's not that competitive a thing really, but he's good beyond Norway. He's big for a cyclist and races for the French Credit Agricole team. One (ok the main) reason I like him is that his name is Thor Hushovd. There are other things to like. He won the green sprinter's jersey last year in the TdF when no one expected him to. He doesn't head butt people like Robbie McEwan. (McEwan named his son Ewan--Do I need to say more? Ewan McEwan. Sigh.) I can hope that, because he's from Norway, he holds more worldy views than Landis and Zabriskie. I also like Agricole's kit. It's green and fairly understated. I love the colors of cycling but there are some ugly ass kits (that's uniforms in non sports geek speak) out there. There's T-Mobile's pink mess:



And Euskaltel-Eukadi's orange yuck:



And then today was a time trial, so they ride the alien bikes with the alien helmets. Here's a good example:



That's Levi Leipheimer. Odd looking itnit?

Thor's name appeals to me in part because of an interest in mythology I developed when I was but a child. As a bookish kid, I spent as much time as I could in the Maud Burrus Library in Decatur, Georgia where I grew up. Mrs. Burrus was the first director of that library, which opened in 1925.



Even though Decatur is in the Atlanta area, there were lots of things that made it seem like a small town. The Maud Burrus Library was one of them. I don't think I read every book in the kids' wing, but it seemed that way to me sometimes when I was looking for something new. Then, I moved into the adult section and never looked back. Among my favorites books in that library were the books on mythology. This early interest MAY have influenced my academic interests later in life.* : )

While the Norse gods didn't do as much for me as the Greek and Roman ones, I liked them enough to read whatever I could find on them. Thor wasn't as cool as Loki and I lacked the sophistication as a child to understand that flawed "people" were more interesting than purely "good" ones. But I was a kid who liked things to be fair. And Thor got treated unfairly by Loki. Of course that was Loki's thing.

So when I started watching cycling and found there was this semi-underdog cyclist named Thor, I couldn't resist pulling for him. (It's worth noting, I think, that Thor Hushovd is one of the top 15 or 20 cyclists in the whole world. He's not exactly Seabiscuit. But then Seabiscuit wasn't really that much of underdog ether. So maybe he is Seabiscuit. Oh, never mind. My point is that Boonen, Pettachi, and McEwan are better sprinters).

He wasn't supposed to win today.



He did. By .73 of a second over George Hincapie. Floyd and his homophobia had a flat tire and finished 8 or 9 second backs. So there. No Loki today. And I hope no drugs. It seems a little victory for fair. Mrs. Burrus would certainly agree that it's a good day when fair wins.

*I have a PhD in Folklore and Mythology