Last January I made a pledge to ride 3000 miles by spring. I accomplished my goal by April, 2006 and have put about 8000 miles on my bike since purchasing it last fall.

I am going to put another three thousand miles on Cylon before next April, which might be an interesting feat if the weather is worse this year than last year. It’s over 70 right now, but when it has been cold, it has been cold. The humidity really makes the cold stick to your bones out here. Anyway, probable short-distance ride destinations include Williamsburg, Charlottesville, and Rockville. I had considered going to Charleston, SC based on some feedback from the Ars Lounge, but that’s too far to leave Lady Jaye and the dogs behind on a “just because” trip.

I have considered trying to find some independent coffee roasters within 200 miles of Richmond, but haven’t quite figured out a way to search for that yet.

Anyway, please join me in welcoming the “Winter Miles” tag back into active use.

Winter miles so far: 110.

I thought another quiz would be a fun companion post to my review of the Fobus E2 Evolution holster. Check out the latest edition of the “Is DrFaulken Packing Heat?” quiz. Most of you did pretty well last time, let’s see how you do this time. There are eight photos in the quiz, none of which are pictures of my hairy back like last time. ;)

My very first holster for my Glock 27 was an Uncle Mike’s inside the waistband holster made out of nylon. It did one job very well: concealment, but failed miserably at another job: comfort. It was tough sitting in a car or up against a chair with a gun jammed inside my pants. It also made my jeans fit funny, and I didn’t like the idea of sweating directly onto the grip of my Glock.

I bought another Uncle Mike’s holster, a typical design that attached via two belt loops. It was also nylon and was very lightweight. When I used to shoot a lot it was difficult for me to clear my gun from the holster before engaging my targets. I bought a leather Yaqui slide holster from Galco, and while it was beautiful and made for fast presentation, it stuck out pretty far and wasn’t concealable. Comfort, concealment, concealment, comfort. Motherfucker.

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We received the boardgame ImagiNiff from Lady Jaye’s folks as an early Christmas present. There are eight blank spaces around the oval-shaped game board. Players write their names on the dry-erasable surface (marker included), filling in any remaining spaces with names of people everyone knows. We had six people in our game, and put in “Batman” and “George W. Bush” as our two non-player characters. The object of the game is to be the first to cross the finish line by answering questions about yourself and other players.

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Stilts’ review on the Adagio IngenuiTEA was so good I thought it was worth linking here for those of you who don’t normally make it over to his blog. Make sure you watch the video, the amazing AWESOME POWAH of the IngenuiTEA needs to be viewed in order to be fully comprehended.

Well, maybe we’ve started a new tradition at Gibberish: fried turkey and rangetime during the Thanksgiving holiday. Lady Jaye’s mother and father (code-named “Steve” thanks to a misprint in his hometown paper) were down from New York state. We had two friends over from our AD&D group and we all ate a ton of great food and enjoyed some even better company.

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What’s a pistol-packing, AK-47 owning, sociopath to eat in the upcoming zombie apocalypse? Why, Kellogg’s Hello Kitty Meow-Berry PopTarts, of course.

Let me tell you, these things are pretty fucking good. Like “omg I hope I’m not susceptible to type II diabetes” good. They have a dark “berry” filling of some kind, with pink frosting, and multicolored sugar stars atop the frosting. The Meow-Berries are much better if they are toasted, but if you’re pressed for time they taste okay cold. Do yourself a favor and take one packet out at a time, and lock the rest in something sturdy. Watch out for the gnarly artificial flavoring aftertaste — I recommend chasing your Meow-Berries with a cup or seven of coffee.

Of course, into every life a little rain must fall. The bad news is that a pair of pastries will set you back 400 calories and account for over a quarter of your RDA in fat. You could eat one at a time, but what fun is that? Eat the whole packet and then plan on an extra hour or two at the gym.

Lady Jaye and I filled another 70+ 33 gallon bags of leaves yesterday. That brings our two week total to somewhere around 145 bags of leaves. This picture doesn’t do it justice. We have bags lined up all around the base of our deck (which goes the entire length of our house). There are bags lined up against the back of the fence, two deep; another row of bags half the length of our driveway. We have built a bulkhead of leaf bags between us and our neighbors in the side yard. We even put a dozen bags on our front porch. Our next problem to solve is disposal: our trash company will only take five bags a week, which puts us somewhere in May or June. We have considered renting a UHaul truck and going to the dump — except we would have to empty out all the bags at the landfill.

We talked with our neighbors and are going to use the same fellow they like to cut down our trees next spring. I don’t have the cash to do it right now; the estimate is between $300 and $400 per tree, including stump grinding. Aw yeah. Stump grinding. We’re going to cut down at least a dozen oaks in the back, plus maybe one or two in the front and an equal number in the side yard.

One of my sisters has an opera-class voice. She soaked up all the music genes, and while I have a decent sense of rythm, my musical ability pretty much stops there. I used to think I was a badass whistler until I was told I’m off key and flat. :)

So, seeing this video of a Lasse Gjertsen using video editing and sound samples of himself banging on a set of drums and a piano gave me hope. Gjertsen can play neither the piano or the drums. My favorite is when he cracks himself in the head with the drumstick, or maybe when he cries out “WHOO!” Sampling to create music isn’t anything new, but it made me smile. It generated some hope for those of us with more musical inclination than talent.

Big thanks to Lady Jaye’s father for sending this along to me today.

I’m a big fan of RSS feeds. I wrote an article about setting up RSS feeds in Firefox with an accompanying how-to on the Tome of Useless Knowledge. Firefox’s built-in RSS support was great, until I got about twenty feeds. It became a pain in the ass to navigate through all the Live Bookmark (RSS) folders. It was hard to remember what articles I’d already read on some high-volume sites, particularly CNN or Ars Technica. I started researching RSS aggregators. Aggregators are (usually) desktop programs that keep track of RSS feeds. I wasn’t excited about installing yet another application, and that’s when I found Google Reader.
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