“I pledge allegiance to my bike, as a patriotic cure for America…”

I attended my first Tour De Fat today.  It rocked my entire existance.  I was supposed to update about other stuff first(like my first con experience at Dragon*Con  last weekend) but I have to talk about what i experienced today.

What is Tour de Fat you ask?  Well New Belgium Brewing company, known by the masses for being the creators of the beer, Fat Tire,  known in Fort Collins as giver off free delicious beers in their tasting room.  New Belgium is pretty passionate about the biking revolution and really encourage people to become bike commuters and love their bikes.  They celebrate the wonderful invention that is the bicycle with a now traveling festival call the Tour de Fat .  It’s bicycle festival with beer(and not the other way around, as they reminded us) used to raise money for local bike charities and encourage you to “come dressed as your favorite alter ego,because when everyone’s weird, no one is”

The day started with a bike parade through Fort Collins. We pretty much took over the streets.  I can’texpress the shear number of people riding bicycles through town.  We got to the end of the route and there were still people starting.  It probably sounds cheesy but when  i joined the parade i actually got a little teary eyed.  All i could think was that this is how life SHOULD be.  As we rode through town, it was great to watch the other side of the road when the parade route doubled back and not just see the awesome costumes , bike mods , and other fun accessories, but also hear the constant joyful cheers, bike bells, and the phrase “Happy Saturday” fill the air.  It was so much fun.

We got to the festival next.  There were several stages,  a tent for buying beer tokens, places to trade in your tokens for beer, vendor booths, and food booths.  There was also a fun little area where you could test drive some of the specialty bikes and play games.   The entertainment was… entertaining to say the least.  A really fun group of “ninjas” was there who specialized in juggling,fight choreography, and dancing  was pretty hysterical.  There was also probably one of the best live performances i’ve ever seen by the March Fourth Marching Band ,based out of Portland.  The best  way i can think to describe them is if you asked a bunch of circus performers to start a marching band, this is what you’d get.  Stilts, twirlers, dancers, hula hoopers and lots of great music.  They’re amazing and if you ever get the chance,you should check them out.   Sadly my camera was dead by that point so idon’t have any pictures.

Finally one of the most inspiring parts of the whole day was watching the celebration ensue as a local women agreed to give her car up in exchange for an awesome new bike and the promise to live car free for 1 year.  She probably needed all the encouragement she could get as she actually handed over the keys AND the TITLE to her car on stage.  This all went along with Team Wonderbike, a social movement started by the new belgium crew to encourage people to take an oath to use their bikes instead of their cars.  I joined and pledged 150 miles a month(for serious, i’m sure there will be updating on that in weeks and months to come).    I encourage everyone to check the website and consider making a pledge.  There’s no losers here, you will use less gas, have fun, and stay in shape.

If the going gets rough, i’m just going to remember the pledge:

I Pledge Allegiance To My Bike,
As A Patriotic Cure For America.
And To The Public, With Whom We Stand,
One Elation, Undeniable,
With Community And Transportation
For All

-Team Wonderbike

 

“The above 20 parameter partial differential equation can be easily solved as an exercise to the reader”

My favorite quote by someone i met here at the conference.  And he meant it.

i don’t have a lot of time.  But here’s the over all gist.  Having a GREAT time at the Health Physics Society annual meeting in Pittsburgh.  More details about pittsburgh later, but i would vote A+ for better city than expected.  Sat in on some great lectures.  Especially one about creating imaging models for rad therapy with specifics for infants, including accurate marrow to surface ratios(instead of just constant volume that they’ve used in the past).  I’ve also met lots of fun people and had a great time getting lots of schwag.  my favorite so far was the plastic nuclear watste 55 gal drum model filled with candy, but i just got a pretty funny beer glass from Ortec, that likening one of their latest products to a variety of beer.   

Got to run, people waiting for the computer.

 

Leaving on a jet plane… god that was lame

So i managed to find a time to get all involved in the internet again and i’m about to go away and be really busy for a while.  I will be attending the Health Physics Society annual meeting in the magical land of Pittsburgh.  I leave tomorrow at 7:30 am… which means i have to be up at 4:30 and it’s 11:30 now… opps.  I’m pretty excited about this trip.   The first reason is that I’ll be presenting my research and that’s always a great opportunity, especially at a national meeting.  Another reason is that one of my good friends, margaret, who left for the summer to do an internship at Oak Ridge Nationals Labs will be there.  We’re sharing a hotel room so it should be fun times.   Finally, this probably sounds rediculous, but i have always actually wanted to go to Pittsburgh.  It’s a long story that i can make fairly brief.  My dad used to travel there on business a lot when i was a little kid, and once he brought me a red teddy bear sweatshirt that i really loved so that made Pittsburgh stand out to me as what was quite obviously the most awesome of my dad’s regular business locations.   So i decided that i really reallywanted to go to “Pippsburgh” with him. i begged and i begged and i begged, but dad never did take me to pittsburgh.  It’s been a little bit of a family joke ever since.  I told my dad about this conference and he actually got a little miffed that i was going without him.  Seriously, dad, you’ve had over TWENTY YEARS.

After the meeting is over,  I’m going to straight to seattle to meet up with my brother(who will be traveling there on business) and my sister-in-law(who is going to have fun).   He invited meknowing that Seattle todenver can be a pretty reasonable air fare.  But since the HPS is paying me a pretty generous travel stipend, i figured i could tack this on, still stay under my stipend and only have to pay for the $80 plane ticket home from Seattle.   It seemed like a good idea at the time.  I’m kicking myself a little because i reallydon’t have much money right now.  But overall i’m quite excited.  It will be my first time to Seattle.  The tops of my list are ride a ferry, see the science fiction museum, and visit KEXP(my favorite radio station that i stream online all the time).  i don’t know if KEXP will work out because i’ve been too busy fighting with electronic equipment in my lab to remember to e-mail them about a studio tour, but we’ll see if can get access to a computer at least twice this week.  So basically i’ll be gone until July 21st…. in case anyone ever decides to read this.

 

MARIAN WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME…

One of my favorite players on the Atlanta Thrashers(once my home team, i know they suck, i openly admit it, but i lived in Atlanta when i first got into hockey and you gotta love the home team) got late season traded(with mixed reviews, a lot people were happy to see him go) to the Pittsburgh Penguins.  I was really ok with this because i also enjoy the Penguins… but it’s been confirmed, he just signed a one year 7.45 mil contract with none other than the Detroit Red Wings.. NOOOOOOOOOO I’m in serious mourning right now.  Please take a moment of silence for Marian Hossa, one of my favorite players who i will no longer be able to cheer for for at least the 2008-2009 NHL season.

 

Bachelor Chow?

So i looked in my fridge last night closely and realised how pathetic it really was.  It looks so full, but if you actually examine the contents, it’s little more than beer and condiments.

not much here...

Really the only things with an substance in that fridge are a block of tofu, some tofu hot dogs, a few eggs, and some questionable grapes.  I’m not actually a vegetarian, i just don’t really like cooking meat that much.  The gladware is full of fruit salad that’s a week old and the only reason i have milk is because there is actually a grocery store directly on my bike route home so there is no going out of my way to stop.  Anyway, it makes me wonder about how many people feel that when left to themselves, most men don’t really feed themselves much but soup and cereal.  Maybe it’s true but i’m starting to think that reason that women tend to “gain weight when they’re in relationships” is that women who live alone don’t really feed themselves either so they’re skinny.  Seriously, my fridge has looked like this all week, do you think i’ve been eating something besides ramen and cereal for dinner every night?  well you’re wrong, you can’t see the bag of shredded cheese hidden in the drawer.  I had a quesadilla one night.  But seriously, women can be as bad at cooking for themselves when they live alone, look at me.  It doesn’t mean we can’t cook, we just… don’t.  Or maybe this is just the lifestyle of a scientist… one that seems to transcend genders.

 

Maybe I should explain…

So i made the first post without any mention of what’s going on here.  I’m both new and very old to the blogging community.  You see back in day, and by that i mean late high school and early college,  i was big into the popular thing then.  I know you’re probably thinking livejournal, but no, even older and sadder, open diary.  I regularly posted on their for a few years and then eventually lost interest.  I’ve tried a few times in the past few years to get into blogging, but it never really worked out.  I think the difference this time is that i’m looking to get a little more involved in the internet community.  That might be my eloquent way saying that i’m lonely.  Shhh don’t tell.  Anyway, wordpress seemed like to be a good place to start that.  So that’s that.  I’m just a 24 year old grad student that wants a new outlet and to maybe share experiences with a few other bloggers out there.  I’ll leave you with this picture i took today.  It’s from my least favorite grocery store(however the only one on my usual bike route home) that i hate because it’s so disorganized… don’t believe me? This is the aisle number for the aisle where i finally found the granola bars:

 

Moved Post…

Inspired by shoes, just a warning to those of you that are less frivolous.
I have a lot of shoes. Really. But i only have one pair that i call my “sensible shoes.” They’re simple black, share toed, black leather heels of about an inch and half. They go with business clothes. They don’t draw attention to themselves, which is why i only own one pair of shoes like this. I’m a young, poor graduate student. I don’t have money to waste on shoes to begin with, but if i’m going to waste money on shoes, they sure as hell aren’t going to be something that no one would ever notice. They have their place, however. For example, i’m attending the professional society meeting for my field next week, and while i have to play dress up all week, sensible shoes are definitely in order. I assume that i’ll at minimum have to have a PhD before i can show my personality through my shoes… but the delicate balance of dressing like a woman in a male dominated field is a subject for another blog post on another day. What i’m really here to talk about it what i realised when i noticed how beat up my sensible shoes were. The leather was really peeled on the toe of one of them and the heel of the other was wearing through the black polished part of the leather. Of course my first instinct was that i had to find a way to fix them because i certainly don’t have the money to spend on new sensible shoes right now. A quick brainstorming session lead me to a bottle of black nail polish. Sitting on the floor of my bathroom i started to think that one day i would be past the point in my life where i needed to fix my shoes with nail polish. I wondered if i would think back on this memory and laugh to myself about the time in my life where that was my best[only] option. I suppose i started to associate this with a point in my life where i would be more “grown up”. But what does that really mean anyway. And who’s to say that just because i reach a point in my life where i have the means to have other shoe care options, that things couldn’t happen in life and i could be right back here one day, on this now metaphorical bathroom floor.
I’m starting to realise that “growing up” is more complicated than the steps that i’ve been lead to believe. It seemed to follow a simple order… graduate high school, graduate college, get a job/go to grad school then get a job, maybe get married, maybe have kids, freak out at mile stone birthday(40, 50, 55, whatever) and realise that you’re over the hill, retire. That seems really naive now. For starters, i grew up three times in college: having my heart broken, paying my own bills, and then the end of my 5th year(which was all too complicated of a time to explain in this post). But furthermore, it seems like a rather linear way to view things. It’s now starting to seem that “growing up” is a multi-dimensional process. I’d been led to believe that one is immature or naive about something and a life experience makes them more “grown up.” But it seems that that isn’t how things work at all. Deciding that Ryan was the man i wanted to marry was as much of a growing up experience as actually marrying him will be. I’m not even sure that he realises how much i made a sudden and drastic change in how i imagined my life after beginning to date him. It wasn’t that i never wanted to get married. i just thought that life had a different set of cards for me. I didn’t discount that i would meet someone around the time i finished my PhD and started to be in a place where my life could be more predictable, but i had pretty much entirely written off finding someone who wanted to spend the rest of their life with me before then. It was a big gulp to swallow: not that i had to become a “we” but that i *wanted* to. My vision of my future changed dramatically, and so, i suppose in a way i “grew up” with that realisation. But i don’t think that i was immature, naive, or even selfish before for not wanting to be a “we.” It’s not that i didn’t understand why being a “we” was a good thing. I just saw things for myself differently. The process of growing up isn’t a line, or even a plane. It’s a true infinite space. It’s probably not cartesian either, or we’d have too easy a time finding the shortest path vectors to where we need to be.
By the way, the shoes actually came out pretty well. one would only notice the nailpolish at very close inspection, and as i previously mentioned, that’s not what these shoes are for.