People

I apparently suck at updating lately.  My most recent post was going to be a cooking post entitled "How to Fry Everything" (in honor of the Super Bowl, I made risotto balls and onion rings), but I forgot and I suppose that will have to come later.

My old blog sort of devolved into a series of rants of things that annoyed me, so I would like to revert to that version of me for just a minute.

A memo to the world: If you enter a place of business where there is someone waiting to serve you, GET OFF YOUR CELL PHONE BEFORE ENGAGING THAT PERSON IN CONVERSATION.  As a fellow human, I deserve your full attention when you are ordering.  None of this "Yeah, did you see what she was wearing last night?--Um, excuse me!--Ugh, it was totally awful--I'd like that cupcake and, um, hang on--oh my gosh, I KNOW...--and a half-caff soy latte with no foam" hand me your credit card with nary another word directed to me bullshit.  This happens.  Especially in DC, where everyone is apparently too rich and important to give their full attention to the scum of the earth who are, based on various life decisions, working a service job.  I have made it my policy to pointedly ignore anyone who walks in while yakking on their cell phone until they directly acknowledge me.  If they insist on talking to me while talking to someone else, I respond as loudly as possible.  Just to make sure they hear me.

While we're at it....a memo to all men, especially those who are my father's age: if you see a girl sitting alone in a bar, drinking a beer, wearing ratty clothing, watching a hockey game and constantly checking the door and her phone....she probably doesn't want you to sit next to her.  And then she probably doesn't want you to share your life story with her.  Or talk about hers.  Or have you make comments about how young and hot she is. In fact, she'd probably like to sit there and watch the game and enjoy her beer.  Thanks.

Ugh.

To flip it over completely, few things brighten my day more than cyclists who look like they're really enjoying themselves.  I tend to wear my "intense" face when I'm on a bike, but some people just chug along with a grin.  A man on a hybrid passed on the other side of the Pennsylvania bike lane with such a look this morning.  I smiled back.  There was also a girl on a pink cruiser coasting down Massachusetts--she had something that looked like neon extenders on her rear hubs?  There were too many cars in the way for me to get a good look, but I wonder if that's a tool to force drivers to give you space.  Anyone know what those might have been?

The same orange-hatted hipster who passed me last week was making it a point to ignore every traffic law every while weaving down 15th with a cigarette jammed into his face.  This confuses me.  You wouldn't run while smoking, so why would you smoke on a bike?  Seems sort of counter-productive.  He also wasn't wearing a helmet (not that I should judge or anything), so maybe he was just trying to jeopardize his life as much as humanly possible.  I guess adrenaline rushes can be fun.

Some lady walked directly into my path in the bike lane today.  I saw her coming, so I steered around her.  I opted not to be a douche and yell at her, and instead hoped that passing her closely would startle her and make her more alert in the future.  Maybe that was more douche-y.  I don't know.

Speaking of un-alert folks, I was walking a friend's dog the other day, and he stopped to sniff another dog.  I tried to drag him away since we were blocking the sidewalk, but he's a strong pup and was being pretty insistent.  As the dogs were parting ways, a jogger came by and tripped over him.  She somehow failed to see a 35 pound beagle (and another dog and 2 humans) in her path.  Instead of apologizing for being completely dumb (and perfectly exemplifying what Sharrows refers to as 'zombie joggers') she said "UGH" in a very annoyed tone and continued jogging.  I figured someone needed to apologize, so I yelled "Sorry!" as she ran away.  I wonder if it's not even zombie jogging so much as territorial jogging.  Like--"I AM FASTER THAN YOU SO THIS WHOLE SIDEWALK IS MINE AND YOU HAD BETTER MOVE OUT OF MY EFFING WAY."  Then again, zombies are pretty territorial.

They're calling for a wintry mix tonight...hopefully nothing too icy.  I do love cycling when the weather is in the upper 30s/lower 40s, though...it's really the ideal temperature.  I enjoy springtime and everything, but given that I have horrendous allergies, late winter is where it's at.

Highlights

Last night:

Went to Dupont.  Locked Vancouver (my bike, not the city) to a pole. Bought a terrible mocha (seriously, Firehook?) and a cookie with a friend.  Observed that there are lots of cyclists when the weather hits 60-something degrees.  Observed that there is definitely a Dupont type.  For men it involves hipster glasses and a beard.  For women, hipster glasses and a yoga mat.  Or high heels.  Biked up Massachusetts and discovered that the left side of the street (closer to the Observatory) may be slightly less steep.  Maybe.  It was the first time I have ever biked up that side in 5 years.  Change is good.

This morning:

Threw Vancouver on the D1 and read Moby Dick (only a part of it--the bus ride isn't that long).  It's the best kind of bike commuting some mornings.  Got off at 10th and Constitution, near the very long Bikeshare docking station and biked on over to L'Enfant.  Caught up with one of my office's curators at the bike rack, and he chastised me for not wearing a helmet.  I probably should bring one, even for short distances.


At internship:

L'Enfant has a post office!  Who knew.  Took about half an hour to find it.

Went to a seminar about graduate school and worried over the fact that I haven't gotten any acceptance letters yet.  Said a prayer to the school gods that the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) accepts me with full tuition.  Looked up cycle commuting in Anchorage.  Turns out it is a thing.  Planned a very, very, very tentative move to Anchorage.  Decided to bike or road trip if possible. We'll see what Stanford, GW and UBC have to say.


This evening:

Probably should also have brought a jacket, because the wind ate right through my sweater.  Also, my back bike light remains broken, even after I changed the batteries.  Today was an unprepared sort of day for me. Continued home anyway.  Some hipster in an orange cap and a shiny red racing bike rode next to me on Penn (in the wrong lane) for a spell.  Got mumbled at and glared at by a disgruntled pedestrian crossing on 15th (I was just sitting there!).  Got sprayed in the face with windshield cleaner on Sheridan Circle, shortly after nearly being sideswiped by GB1OWN from Texas.  Common sense should dictate that if there is a cyclist behind you, you can wait about 2 seconds  to spray chemicals from your car.  Unless, of course, you are aiming to be a dick.  But not the Moby kind because whales probably shouldn't drive cars.

Now:

Sitting on the couch and eating a giant bag of rice crackers.  Welcome to my life.

On passing and communing (or not) with fellow cyclists

It's been a week since I last posted.  I apologize--this will go down in the personal record books (I don't actually have those) as the worst week of my life thus far, so I haven't much felt like blogging.  

If you can pass me when we're both supposed to be stopped at a red light, and you dodge through cars in order to do it, that doesn't make you faster or any more bad-ass than me. 

Is this passive aggression?  Do people get angry when you pass them while you're both actually moving, and thus pass you at red lights out of spite?  I kept this going with a girl all the way from Calvert Street down Massachusetts.  Passing people is not fun for me.  Sometimes I wish that everyone would just go faster so that I don't have to deal with the pressure of passing someone and then trying to stay ahead of them--sometimes it stresses me out so badly that I have a hard time breathing and get light-headed. Perhaps I should see someone about this.  It may also have something to do with the fact that I bike with a messenger bag wrapped around my lungs.

Oh well.  Maybe the girl and I will be friends someday.  In retrospect, I probably should have stopped to ask her if she was OK when she stopped on the sidewalk of Massachusetts instead of biking by her (really really slowly, while saying, "Excuse me"), but it looked like she was just adjusting her saddle bag.  I would have been annoyed had someone done that to me. Once upon a time, I used to be good at acknowledging strangers.  No more.  Not sure what happened there. 

Rode behind a guy down the 15th Street bike lane, and it turns out he works in the same building as me.  He had a sweet green steel frame bike with fenders and a giraffe horn on the front.  We walked into Starbucks within 30 seconds of each other, and because again, strange people are often not my thing, I didn't say anything but instead kind of half-smiled at him as if to say, "Hey, I bike too!  Cool!"  He didn't see me.  Next time.

LOTS of bikers out today.  The plaza on the North side of the White House was kuh-razy.  I do kind of miss the solitude of wintertime riding because, oh yeah, we've barely had a winter.

Ode to a Strange Dog

So this is about neither biking nor food, but rather something much more important.

Remember this little screwball that I posted a picture of around Christmas?

That's Shelby.  When I was 12, I went to the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania with my mom, grandparents (who were visiting from Arizona) and sister, and we made the mistake of wandering into the pet store.  Now, my family are a bunch of hopeless dog-lovers through and through, so although we don't support the sort of stores that sell animals like they're things (it even makes my ears twitch when I hear someone call a dog "it"), our hearts melted when we saw a four-month old cocker spaniel who was shoved into a cage that was too small for her.  She was on clearance.  While I'm not sure if they were planning to euthanize her, I doubt that her future was looking too bright.

So after much begging from my sister and myself, Mom let us play with her.  She had a lot of pent-up energy and she was really skittish.  Not exactly a cute and adorable fuzzball, either--she had awkwardly large feet, a lazy eye, and scraggly fur.  After looking at her pedigree, we discovered her father's name was "Booger".  We loved her.  Though my grandfather wasn't at all pleased, we took her home.

When we all piled out of the car, the neighborhood kids immediately saw her and taunted, "She looks like an upside-down cow!"  And they weren't totally wrong.  Shelby had all-white legs and a mostly black body, and she had spots everywhere.  On the pads of her feet, on the skin around her eye (which accounted for the "lazy eye" look)--even her toenails were different colors.

Her personality matched her goofy appearance.  She remained skittish, and she was mean to other dogs.  Although Mom had bought her partially to liven up our older cocker spaniel, Lady, Shelby assumed the position of alpha dog, bossed her around and stole her toys. (As an aside, Lady was the nicest, gentlest dog anyone could ask for.  She got put down when I was in high school.)  She liked to chase cars, and she would do so while woofing with her stuffed pink pig (i.e. "The Pig of Safety") in her mouth.  After she ran away one time, we had an electric fence installed, but that hardly stopped her.  She would just bound across the yard along with the cars as they drove by, muffled woofs emanating from her jaws.  Shelby also had "submissive urination" issues, and she would pee all over the floor whenever she got too excited or scared.  Oh, and she was racist and didn't like men--she barked especially loudly when black or Hispanic males came to the door.  She also hated my ex boyfriend.

She was very curious about my sister's parakeet.

In spite of her quirks, Shelby quickly became a member of the family.  We're all a little nuts, too, so the relationship worked somehow.  She learned to come when she was called, she learned how to walk on a leash, and we taught her how to sit/shake/down/roll over (and once taught, she would only ever do those tricks in that order).  Rebecca discovered that she howled when she heard the sound of a sheep, so we spent many fun hours going "Baaaaaa!" at her and making her howl.  We even found her a toy sheep that baaed.

Ultimately, she morphed into adulthood well.  She loved car rides and got really excited when Mom jingled the car keys and said, "Let's go get the girls!" When my sister moved out of the house, and when I went off to college, Shelby still got excited whenever we were coming home and she heard, "Let's go get the girls!" When my parents moved back to Arizona, Shelby patiently rode with them in the truck's jumpseat across the entire country.

Most of all, she loved my mom.  She would follow her around the house, "helping" with various chores, shoving her nose into Christmas boxes as Mom wrapped them, snuffling around for crumbs whenever she cooked, wandering around listlessly with the pink pig in her mouth whenever she got tired and wanted Mom to go to bed (so she could go with her, of course).  She liked to spread herself out on my parents' king-size bed, and we have more than one photograph of Shelby's head resting atop one of Mom's legs as they both slept.

Unfortunately, this past Christmas was the last time I got to see Shelby.  I knew something was wrong because rather than running around and unwrapping everyone's presents for them (she loved the sound of ripping paper), she just laid quietly on her side.  On Christmas Eve, we discovered blood on the floor, called the vet, and on his advice, took her to the ER.  After a vet tech ran $500 worth of tests, we were told that the results were inconclusive, and that we would have to wait.  They gave her some antibiotics, the bleeding mostly stopped, and Shelby seemed to get a little better.

Last night, I got a call (well, four calls) from my sister.  Apparently after looking at some ultrasounds, the vet discovered a rapidly-spreading form of cancer.  Chemo would only have bought her a few more months, and my parents had to make the very tough decision to put her down.  My parents fed her lots of roast beef and peanut butter, I got to see her on Skype, and Dad was tasked with driving her to the vet this morning.  He did take her pink pig with her.

I can't write conclusions for crap, and now I'm crying all over my keyboard in the middle of an office building, but needless to say, we love her and we'll miss her.

Snow

God bless the person who thought to put bike racks on buses.

When you think to yourself "I should wear my ski jacket today", you should probably actually do it.  I have established that pea coats are useless about seven times this winter.

Kate is less of a wuss than I am and biked back in the snow.  To be fair, I was nowhere near properly dressed.

On the way TO work, a man stopped next to me on Western Avenue, rolled down his window, and said, "Man, you must be cold."  Yes sir, thank you, I was.

On the way home FROM work/a friend's/getting off the bus, this guy commented "I've never understood how people do that" as I took my bike off the rack.  Is it really that hard?  Am I missing something?

Snow is pretty.  Sort of wishing I had been wearing proper attire and biked home like a non-wuss.

2 recipes from a blender

Man.  Blenders and food processors are great.  Don't ever let anyone bullshit you into thinking they're not, because once you have one (or both), you'll never look back.  Yes, there's lots of components to clean, and yes, there's blades that can slice up your fingers, but if you don't feel like chopping, dicing, or mixing, these will do all of that work for you.  You can taste as you go, and change the flavor profile of a sauce or drink with just the touch of a button.  Here are two of my favorites:


The best peanut sauce ever...

I don't know if any of you readers own the Moosewood Cookbook, but I found a copy of an older edition awhile back, and I found a recipe for fragrant rice noodles with peanut sauce.  This is one of the simplest, most delicious peanut sauces I have ever made. You'll need:

1/2 c. peanut butter (the original recipe calls for creamy, but I prefer chunky)
1 scant c. vegetable broth
2 tsp. brown sugar
1 tsp. salt, soy sauce or fish sauce (I strongly prefer the third option)
the juice from 1/2 lime, along with most of the rind, grated
3 gloves of garlic (or 4, if you're like me)

Throw ingredients in a blender or food processor and blend. 

This is tremendously versatile and quick.  I like to add cilantro and ginger to mine, but you could also add white wine, beer or coconut milk as part of the liquid or maybe some Sriracha or other hot sauce to make it zingy.  Typically, I eat this on rice noodles or Asian wheat noodles, but it would be reeeeallly tasty as a dip for grilled chicken or shrimp, or possibly as a marinade (you'd probably need some more liquid if that were the case).

A drink the whole family will enjoy...

Irish cream!  A friend made a bunch for a Christmas party, and my grandmother makes it at home, so I wanted to try my hand at it, too.  I went to go find some whiskey for this a couple of weeks ago, and when I asked an employee at Pearson's what he recommended (I hate whiskey unless it's mixed with lots of stuff, and thus I know nothing about it), he got down a bottle of Bailey's and said, rather condescendingly, "Well you know...this stuff is called Bailey's, and it's a pre-mixed Irish cream..."  Wellll no shit, Sherlock.  Did he really think I had never heard of Bailey's?  I adore car bombs and Irish coffee. But where's the fun in just buying a bottle?

There's a way to make this with eggs (my grandma does), and I imagine that would make it thicker, but I didn't feel like straining it or making a mess, so I opted for the simpler version, found on allrecipes.com.

Take:

1 c. cream (light or heavy--I used light to make it less rich)
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 1/2 - 2 c. Jameson's, or whatever whiskey you have on hand (how much you add depends on how much you like whiskey)
1 tsp. instant coffee granules (I thought it needed more, but I love coffee)
2 tbsp. chocolate syrup (mine was homemade--probably should have added a touch more)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
A dash of cinnamon would be really good in this

Slop all of the ingredients in a blender, blend, pour contents into an old bottle.  Bring to a party where everyone is so liquored up that they forget it's there so that you look like a good house guest, then take it home and enjoy it as a dessert for a couple of months to come.  I like to mix this with coffee and Kahlua.  In fact, I'm drinking it as I write this.

Observations

Sometimes I find it easier to blog in list format, especially since I don't blog about my rides every day...I'm not terribly creative, so it would get monotonous.  So here's a summary of the last few days...

1) Connecticut Avenue during rush hour is not a good route to take into Bethesda.  Connecticut Avenue during rush hour is not a good route to take anywhere if you're riding a bike.  The last time I rode all the way up, the road was under construction through Woodley Park and nearly rattled my teeth out...and it had been that way for a few months.  It's finally nice and smooth there, but becomes a total shambles again around Van Ness.  Chevy Chase Circle scares me, so I just took the sidewalk.

2) There is no way to get to Bethesda via a street that is not a major road because the back roads between DC and Montgomery County are blocked by a country club and a golf course.  Sigh.

3) I may be keeping my brakes too tight.  I like them that way, but I have about 1/32" of clearance between the brake pads and the rims.  They rub a lot (especially when it rains and all the buildup somehow gets magnetically attracted to that area), and it makes me feel very slow.  Center-pull brakes are not my favorite.  My boss talked me out of disc brakes due to my complete lack of ability to ever fix them should they come out of alignment, but I'm not sure that was the correct decision.

4) Though I often love the general public, being a lone, young female working in a gigantic, obvious glass shop with thousands of dollars worth of bikes next to a very busy train station can sometimes be unnerving.  I had to put my rude "go away" face on for a few creepers today who just didn't get the message.

5) 4 layers of shirts/jackets + fleece-lined cycling tights + wool crew socks + hiking shoes + a hood + mittens = the ultimate in dorkdom....and somehow still cold.  WTF.

6) Hikers often say that they prefer ascents over descents.  In the cold weather, I'm inclined (ha!) to feel the same way about cycling.

Got the day off (finally) tomorrow, so I'd like to try out a recipe I got for a salted caramel pie...