I survived my birthday celebration

Yesterday we went to the local Red Robin to celebrate my surviving 62 years, and the quantity of food was almost unsurvivable. Since pictures speak louder than words time for the two pictures I took of the meal.

Mrs. the Poet had a bacon cheeseburger with “only” a quarter pound patty, and an iced tea with a side of sweet potato fries. She wasn’t able to finish her fries or burger. We also got the large stack of onion rings, and brought a third back.

Now I don’t recommend this as a steady diet, but for a celebration, it rocked.

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Just got back from another adventure in overeating

I had money left on my gift card, but not enough to pay for two to eat at Red Robin, and getting Mrs. the Poet out of the house is pretty much a futile effort unless the ride comes right to the front door. So not enough money on the card for two meals and not enough money in the bank account to pay for another Lyft both ways added up to lunch by myself.

Something else it added up to was trying not to waste food, as I was inundated with fry refills and soft drink refills. Depending on how big those glasses were the amount of Diet Coke I swam through went from a half-gallon to a gallon and a half, this was on top of the 750 ml “cup” of coffee I drink every morning, and my kidneys have been singing arias in praise of getting thoroughly flushed out. My bladder on the other hand has been plotting my demise as it strains to provide temporary storage for what the kidneys are so happy to flush through. Then add trying to get home and take care of an errand on the way to the DART tarantella and I left the house at 1300 and got home about 1900, still stuffed from lunch/kidney irrigation. After spending a while on the toilet letting my kidneys flush continuously to return my fluid balance to something close to normal, I sat down to compose this post. Yay, for the post.

Now, I’m pretty much at a stalemate on the design of the Sprint-T with no budget to buy any more parts or raw stock. Also at the point of freezing the design for the A-MOD SCCA racer unless someone gives me a different engine. I have too much time to think about things and not enough money to do things. That is a dangerous combination, because eventually I turn into Wile E. Coyote pursuing the Road Runner. Or as I called it over on the Driveway Engineer page on FB I go into Mad Scientist Mode. And going into Mad Scientist Mode is doubleplus ungood. And how about that, the spell check doesn’t recognize Newspeak spelling.

Well, I’m tired and I still have stuff to do on the computer and the Internet, so this is time to put this to bed.

After too much partying I’m (mostly) back

It’s a good thing I don’t have a birthday every weekend, because I would never get anything done. Many beers were consumed, much meat and cheese was consumed, and there was also pie and ice cream destroyed. I’m way over my daily average on caloric consumption (dinner yesterday alone was nearly 2000 calories when appetizers and beverages were included) and probably should take a day or two off from eating just to burn off some of those excess calories.

There was a pre-party on Saturday, I forgot what we had, just that there was too much of it, and I had a Sam Adams Oktoberfest to drink and a Shiner Oktoberfest with lunch, then on my actual birthday on Sunday we had 3 meat pizza and cherry pie with ice cream, and I think I had a Sam Adams to go with the pizza because there is nothing that pairs up with pizza like beer. Yesterday we went to Red Robin to get my free burger and ice cream. I had the Royal Red Robin with the egg on top and the short tower of onion rings for my appetizer, and a local beer by Lakewood Brewing that they modestly call their lager. The sandwich was messy and good, the onion rings were good when they cooled off enough to be eaten, and the only disappointment was the sundae was made with the hot fudge laying on the bottom of the parfait glass instead of between the ice cream and the whipped cream, but they did at least remember to put the cherry on top😁.

I got some money for my birthday so I’m going to get my toes done this week and a massage, too.

And I haven’t stopped thinking about and researching the Sprint-T, I got in touch with Hoosier about the best tires for when I’m running SCCA events, and what they came up with was the catalog number 09120 24″ tall 11″ wide with a very sticky rubber compound, originally made for the left front on pavement sprint cars and supermodified racers where physics dictates that there isn’t a lot of normal force when the tire is under side load because it is on the lighter end of the car and also the side that gets unloaded by weight transfer when turning. It fits a less expensive 15″ x 10″ wheel compared to the 17″ X 10″ wheel I need to run for the sanctioning body that requires a 300 treadwear tire because I couldn’t find a 300 TW performance tire for a 15″ rim that was wide enough to hook 400 HP in a 2000 pound car, the widest 15″ 300 TW performance tire I could find was a 205/50-15, most were 195/50-15. It was strange because I could find 100 TW tires all the way up to 275mm, but the 200 stopped at 245/40 and the 300 stopped 205mm, but the 400 and above went all the way up to 295mm.

Now when I look in 17″ rims I find all kinds of nice wide tires with 300 TW ratings and above and very high ratings for dry traction and handling. Not quite as impressive ultimate grip levels as the 200 TW tires in the same sizes, but still lightyears ahead of what was available a few years back when I started this process. The downside of running 17″ rims is the increased inertia because the diameter is 2″ more than it would be in a 15″ rim. The annoying part is this design procedure has become a moving target, about the time I settle on a tire it either goes out of production or gets changed to a lower treadwear rating. I think I need to just build the car and decide what tires to use depending on what’s available when it gets done.

And speaking of done, I think it’s time to stick a fork in this one.

We survived Non-family Thanksgiving

One of the traditions we have here at Casa de El Poeta is dinner the Sunday after Thanksgiving for people who either don’t have family or who live too far away to visit their family on Thanksgiving. I don’t think I ever actually mentioned it as a thing we do because it’s just like “this thing we do”, and I never thought it was out of the ordinary because we have done this since I was a kid. So I guess you could call it a family tradition. Some years we couldn’t afford to feed ourselves so we couldn’t feed other people that year. But when we have enough to buy the food, we do the thing.

We had 24 pounds (10.88 kg) of turkey that took almost 5 hours to cook, (a) yam, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and tea. And only one guest. I guess that means lots of turkey sandwiches the next few weeks…

After the meal the guest brought a DVD to watch (Solo) so we watched the movie (not bad 👍 ) and then had pumpkin pie about 2 hours after dinner. I ended up eating too much, but unlike Friday I don’t feel like I swallowed a large farm animal whole today. I had a “cup” of coffee (my insulated cup holds a full quart now) and a package of PopTarts. Later I will have a PBJ and a diet cola for lunch. Maybe. Maybe I will just skip until dinner.

Off to stuff my face, Happy Thanksgiving

And a pleasant Thursday to the rest of the world. I’m not going to bore you with a recitation of traditional Thanksgiving dishes I hope to consume, just assume if you know of one that is generic across the US I will probably consume some today, plus some Texas-specific dishes like Jalapeño corn casserole. This is kind of a group dinner with one person coordinating the menu and sides, someone else cooking the turkeys and other meats (smoked brisket is a popular Texas Thanksgiving entré) and the rest of us bringing the assigned sides.

We finished the Egyptian Run and brought back the Pyrite Cube of Great Power and up next is the barbecue and followed by Glorious Training! (trope stolen from dozens of anime and specifically Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki a goofy web comic that hasn’t updated in months but the creator assures me will update “soon”). I really need to upgrade my blades and pistols skills and also develop the Observe skill. I forgot to include that at character creation, so I will spend Karma points and nuyen to get it now. The group decided to go out for dinner and bought me some too, which was nice of them because I think I’m down to about $15 until the end of the month in my checking account, and while we have food at the house last night was the first calamari I’ve had in years. Of the group I had the cheapest dinner which gives you and idea of what kind of dinner they bought, everyone else had a pound of snow crab plus something else, and I got some of that too because who really eats that much crab in one sitting unless they have been starving all day. I should also mention for the sake of full disclosure that I had calamari since the last time I had crab of any type, so I was out of practice at extracting the meat from the shell.

So to recap, Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers, happy Thursday to everyone else, and all you still hanging on from when this was a bicycle safety blog, this is a good day for a ride.🚴‍♂️ 👍🏼

The hone is here, and I’m exhausted

I’m watching the 24 Hours of Le Mans since shortly after the start at 0700, when I couldn’t get to sleep until after 0530. I keep falling asleep and faceplanting in the keyboard. And I just got back from my Father’s Day dinner at the Texas Roadhouse, where I had a Bacon Cheeseburger that must have weighed at least a pound total, 1020 Calories plus 400 Calories of steak fries. So besides being tired I’m dealing with a Food Coma.

So now Imma go have another lie-down. I get my present tomorrow.