The plan was to lose 1 pound per week, and ride 35 miles per week. This is week 27, so I should be -27 pounds, and have 945 miles. As it turns out, I’m -36 pounds and have 489 miles for the year.

I had hoped to be a bit further along on both fronts by this point in the year, but, all things considered, I’m still pretty happy with myself.

I had some pretty gruesome dental surgery done early last month, which gave me a ready-made excuse to live entirely off Shamrock Shakes and mashed potatoes for the past six weeks. I’m no paleontologist, but I’m pretty sure Shamrock shakes were not available to cavemen.

My weight loss has pretty much stalled out at around 20 pounds for the year, and I need to get back on the wagon with the whole Paleo thing.

According to ISO 8601, this is the 12th week of the year, and I’m down 20 pounds, so I’m still ahead of my one-pound-per-week plan, but just barely.

In bicycling news, I’m still getting my new Cross-Check put together, but I’m having some trouble fendering the massive 700×47 Schwalbe marathons, which has me pulling my hair out. I really don’t want to buy a smaller pair of tires, so I may just end up having to live with a skunk stripe on wet days.

Surly says the CC frame will take 700×45 with fenders, and the 700x47s I have only really measure 41.5mm wide on the rims I’m using. I thought everything would work, but maybe Surly meant it would take things labeled as 45, which are actually much smaller than that in real life, I don’t know.

In any event, I want the bike together for the PA Walks and Bikes Summit on May 4th (mark your calendars!)

We’re also having our Bike-The-Burg local advocacy meeting this Wednesday (March 30th) at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore from 7-9PM. If you like bikes, and want to talk about bike advocacy and whatnot, come to the Bookstore at 7.

We’re three weeks in to 2011. I’ve lost 13 pounds, and ridden 25 miles for the year. Bicycling continues to be seriously curtailed by crappy weather. We get a few inches of snow every other day, and then it melts / refreezes, etc. It was 7°F (-14°C) outside this morning. They’re calling for a blizzard this week.

I know all you jokers in Minnesota ride at absolute zero and drink liquid nitrogen from your water bottles, and I’m a big sissy for staying inside. Sweet Jesus, even Dottie’s out in sub zero weather. How embarrassing.

In other news, I’m pretty pleased with how the whole Primal / Paleo thing is going. We’re only 6% through the year, and I’ve already lost 25% of the weight I set out to. Maybe I should have aimed higher.

I just finished reading Why We Get Fat. I’m no scientist, but what it says makes sense to me.

Anyhow, enough rambling about shit nobody but me cares about.

I proposed that we use a wiki.

The mahogany-row big-wigs laughed me out of their office, saying that “wiki” was a stupid name, that it sounded like “dickie,” and that nobody was going to ever use something with such a stupid name. Evidently, these guys had not yet heard of Wikipedia, despite their supposed “leadership” role in the information technology department of a fortune 500 company.

For the past several days, everyone in the news media has been falling all over themselves about the big wikileaks brouhaha.

I hear the word “wiki” mentioned on the radio, the TV news, and all over the Internet numerous times daily. Astonishingly, nobody seems to find the name all that silly, and none of the newscasters confuse wiki-style content management systems with male genitalia.

I would like to take this opportunity to point and laugh at my former bosses, extend a well-meaning middle finger, and shout “TOLD YOU SO!” at the top of my lungs.

In other news, tomorrow marks my four year anniversary with my current company, where I keep all the server and network documentation in MediaWiki, and nobody seems to find this strange or comical.

So I haven’t ridden my bicycle for 2 solid months now.

The upside is that I haven’t had to take a shower, either.

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Somehow it just doesn’t seem quite as authentic as it was when it was an all NASCAR / Deer-hunting hole in the wall like it used to be when it billed itself as a “mountain cookery and saloon“.

If you move north a few clicks, you can see the pine creek rail trail connector in the parking lot.

I plan to celebrate by riding my bike into the woods, stringing up my hammock, and doing absolutely nothing for at least a whole day.

As is turns out, you don’t need songwriters, either. The words to the songs don’t matter. It seems that even nonsensical gibberish can be turned into catchy tunes with the proper application of software.

There is no better source of nonsensical gibberish than the crap that comes out of the mouths of politicians.

So, some people have figured out that you can feed C-SPAN to the pop-music creation machine, and get something that sounds pretty much like everything else on the radio.

Now I have this crazy shit stuck in my head. I go to bed at night, and I can hear John Boehner singing “Hell No! Hell No! Hell Nooooooo!” about the climate change bill.

It’s driving me crazy, but I think I want more.

Legend has it that Kent Peterson makes frequent S24O camping trips to the moon, riding a fixed-gear, while holding his breath.

I can only assume that he is the one painting bike lanes on the lunar regolith.

It’s no surprise that some jerkoff felt the need to park in the bike lane there, too.