Cereal joy and more

I'm a posting MACHINE!

Can you tell it's spring break and I have less everyday pressure? I'm working on real stuff, too. I've graded 10 midterms a day all three days this week, wrote two probationary performance evaluations, reviewed an article for a journal, created some new curriculum, cleaned out my e-mail, and it's not even noon on Wednesday.

Anyway...I have been in cereal crisis. Honey and I like cereal for breakfast and for the past few months, we have given over to the magic that is Kashi. Honey likes Go Lean Crunch. I like it too. But I found personal cereal nirvana in Strawberry Fields. What's not to like? Organic? Check. Available at Trader Joe's? Why yes. Tasty? Mmm Hmm. Soggy danger? Low.

That's all well and good, until it disappeared from Trader Joe's. No shelf space disappeared. One week there were a few boxes. The next, no space. I searched for it. Honey, sweet person that she is, went to another Trader Joe's looking for it. No luck. What was I to do?

I made do with Cinnamon Harvest, which is tasty. Then I went to Trader Joe's Vanilla Wheat Squares. Bereft probably best describes my cereal feeling as I spooned the vanilla pockets into my mouth on Monday.

Then I remembered that there's a wondrous new invention called the internets. You can type something into a box and it will spit back information. So off to the internets I went and found Kashi's own site. I was hoping they'd have a way to match my cereal desires with a store in my area. Kashi did me one better. For a small fee (a pittance really), they sent me a CASE of Strawberry Fields in a big brown truck. Incredible!

This morning, I opened the box and there were twelve friendly box tops staring back at me. Waiting to be my cereal.

A nice Wednesday today, a fields of berry of straw morning and a labor settlement with guaranteed raises for me and my kind. *Contented Sigh*

Posterior crisis

When it gets right down to it, I'm not very fond of my butt. I recognize that it serves a needed function. But were I to list my own favorite parts of the anatomical mess that is me, my butt wouldn't make the top ten. And, no, I'm not going to list the ten I would choose. Shout out to my ears!

Bottom line (har!), my butt has been hurting me lately. I was blaming my newish chair, which is a mesh deal rip-off of a Herman Miller Aeron chair.



My very smart Honey pointed out that the chair was probably not to blame. Rather, the most likely culprit was the Gunnar. No, not the twin son of Rick Nelson. Nor is Gunnar Peterson, the work-out guru, to blame. Instead it's my new-to-me Gunnar Rockhound.

What, you ask, is a Gunnar Rockhound? Why, it's a bicycle. A fancy green bicycle.



I often use my mountain bike to get around campus. My old mountain bike, a Cannondale F400, was aluminium. Here's the thing about aluminum. It's light. It's strong. It's rigid. It makes your teeth fall out rigid. Plus, the C'dale was too big for me. So, after months of obsessing on ebay, I bought the Gunnar and sold the Cannondale.

The Gunnar? She's steel. Flexy, comfy steel. And a blast to ride.

Since the picture above was taken, I've swapped out the seat to this:



My biggest change to the bike, though, courtesy of a conspiracy of the best kind--a birthday conspiracy--was an upgrade the the front fork. Forks are the shocks on the front of mountain bikes. They make riding more fun. I asked for high end in the fork department. I got it. Everybody say woo-whee.



So, now that my bike is everything I want to be and more, I've been riding it. And my butt hurts. Leave it to Honey to see the connection.

It's a hardtail, which means it has no shock on the back end. I am not a hardtail, which means I do have cushioning. But not so much a swingarm or 100mm of travel (that's about 4 inches). That and I'm not a good mountain biker. I gather I should ride out of the saddle more.

I have my bike with me today. My butt's here, too. How much more sore can it get? Maybe I don't want the answer to that question. I might get it anyway.

Spring's kind of fragile

It's spring break here at the fine institution of higher education. Since I am a twelve month employee, I'm here. That and my assistant director gave almost everyone the week off. Somebody's got to be here in case the provost calls. He never does, but I worry that he might.

I'm going to try to get caught up on my backlog of big projects. I lack motivation for most of them, which is why they're un or half done. I'm going to try to do a little every day on most of them. Small bites are easier to swallow.

Spring is here. I know this because UCLA lost again in some ignominy and baseball started.

Fantasy baseball drafts happened over the weekend. I didn't end up with many distasteful Yankees in the American League only Blogleague. Jorge Posada seems like a good guy, despite his lifelong Yankee status and I can still picture Johnny Damon as a Royal if I squint. Plus, I got some Angel pitchers.

In my money league (which is NL-only), I drafted better this year than I did last year. I had a little money to spare and targeted players I wanted without overpaying. As of right this moment, I'm in second place after one game. Shawn Green, bless his heart, went 2 for 4 last night in the Mets win over the Cards. That was my only stat from the night, but it was a good one. Let's just call the season done, shall we?

I tried to get Chris Carpenter and didn't succeed. While I don't think his ERA will stay at 7.5, I take a little guilty pleasure in his bad outing last night.

Plus, Tom Glavine, who I still like from his Braves days, got one win closer to 300. He needs 9 more to get to 300 and will be only the fifth lefty to get there. My favorite game of his doesn't even count in that total. It was his 1-0 masterpiece over the Indians in Game 6 of the 1995 World Series. Glavine is not on my fantasy team, and he's now a Metropolitan, but I hope he does well this year. The big numbers (like 300) can still matter.

Baseball, as Bart Giamatti famously said, is designed to break your heart. It will break my heart this year when Bonds passes Aaron. That number will not matter to me. Hank Aaron will be the Home Run king in my mind until a clean player passes him. It will also break my heart when the Angels and Braves, once again, fail to match up in the World Series. I trust that Bill Hall and Barry Zito will do their respective parts to break my heart a little, too. My fantasy players don't care enough about me

For now, though, fragile Spring holds promise. And pollen. Maybe that's why it's so fragile. All that pollen could make things brittle.