Miles To Go Before I Sleep

So I bought this scythe/chopper thingy at the hardware store yesterday and spent a nice hour of the afternoon in the backyard working off some of the Hershey’s Kisses I’d indulged in earlier in the day. The thing is shape something like a golf club so I was swinging away at the overgrowing grass and weeds in the rear of the yard.

Didn’t take much to work up a nice blister on my left index finger, but by the end of an hour I’d raked up a pretty nice pile of greenery. There will be many more piles to come.

Baby got home from work and we ordered from Pho, a Vietnamese noodle house across Sunset Boulevard from us that’s too hip to put a sign up on their front. Apparently they’re too hip to recognize me as a regular even though I’ve ordered the same exact thing to go for at least the last four or five Fridays in a row. Each time I walk in to pick up there’s not even the slightest hint of recognition or acknowledgement.
Oh well.

Back at home we watched the debut episode of the new Survivor (that we’d Tivo’d the night before) and were very disappointed at who got voted off. Rugged Tina was shown rocking at everything except the most crucial aspect: alliance building. Meanwhile the woman least qualified to be there and who should have been sent packing proved adept at coalition building and succeeded in coralling the other two women in their group against Tina. Buh-bye!

After that while most civilized and sane people are cozying down for the night, I donned my helmet and flask of Drambuie and rode The Phoenix the five miles over to the corner of Sunset and La Brea to meet up with whoever else was along for the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s (SCI-Arc) RIDE-Arc ride.

Setting out at about 9:30 p.m. with a group of 50 or so other cyclists, we headed down La Brea to Santa Monica, across West Hollywood then up through Beverly Hills to Wilshire, over the corridor to Westwood and up into UCLA before dropping back down into Holmby Hills coming back over the corridor into Beverly Hills and finishing with an exciting sprint through the gridlock and club scenes of the Sunset Strip back to our starting point. Five more miles and I was back home near 1 a.m. having covered 26.7 miles having acquitted myself of the the earlier Hershey’s Kisses quite nicely, thankyouverymuch.

RIDE-Arc is a far different animal than the Midnight Ridazz. The ride’s founder, Alex Amerri, is very conscientious about the “No Rider Left Behind” policy and there were numerous stops along the route to make sure we all stayed together. It was nice to get over to the westside, and the stretch across the Sunset Strip was a great capper to another awesome night ride.

There a small Flickr photoset, here, but I just wasn’t much for taking pictures last night.