This is rather interesting, no? How appropriate is it that a pill designed to allow a woman to put an end to her period (and presumably to PMS) should be named after the avenging spirit of wronged womanhood? I’m not going to comment on political or social, or even possibly theological interpretations of this story. I just thought it was kinda funny. Hooray, Anya!

Howdy all. I hope you like the new look, but don’t expect it to stick around too long. I’ve switched the site to running on WordPress. There are several reasons why this seemed like a good idea. 1) WordPress is open source and truly free. 2) I was playing with WordPress for another application and found it far easier to use. 3) WordPress allows me (in theory) to post by sending an email, which I was never able to figure out how to do with Movable Type.

I want to take a moment to thank the folks at MovableType for helping me get this thing started so long ago, but it’s definitely a good move for me to go to a completely open source platform.

WordPress is a platform I will feel comfortable deploying for customers, not least of which because of its sheer ease of install. There was far less configuration to do, and the whole thing started when I just got bored of looking at the stock WP install on a virtual machine (UltimateLAMP running on VMware Fusion both of which I’m having a lot of fun with and learning a lot from) and I decided to go ahead and see how easy it would be to populate the blog with my MT backup. Turns out it was crazy-easy, and I was hooked right there. So I started poking around with the tweaks and settings available for WP and I was blown away by how easy it is to completely reconfigure my site. I’ll soon be crafting my own template, but wow, what’s already out there is pretty stunning. (I don’t pretend that I’m up to the minute with what is available right now on MT, but I spend many, many hours hand-coding much of my site, and still never got completely happy with what I could do.) We’ll see what I can really get out of WP. Wish me luck!

So I’ve tried to learn the lesson of not announcing things prematurely, but I figure I’m to the point where it’s safe to announce my current exercise plan. My goal is to ride my bike for 100 straight days.

Today will be day 67. I’m officially past the 2/3 mark. I’m pretty stoked. I pretty much wore out my old piece of shit Mongoose bike, and I’d like to take a moment to say how much I dislike Mongoose bikes in general. While in college, I spent an obscene amount of money on what should have been a decent bike, and within six months, I had managed to break several teeth off some of the gears. My last Mongoose didn’t break any teeth, but so many of them twisted out of shape that every single gear was a nightmare to try and use, because the chain constantly skipped teeth. So a couple of days ago I got myself a nice moderately priced steel-frame Schwinn. My brother got a Schwinn a little while back, and I really liked the ride. I got one similar without getting the same model. That would have just been silly.

So anyway, I’m 2/3 of the way to 100 days in a row. I’m averaging around 2 miles a day. Nothing fierce, but enough to work up a sweat. I was sick one day and only got to the end of my block and back, but I rode. And a few times I’ve gotten home really late and only done about a half a mile. But then again, there have been several days I’ve done three miles or more. My crazy-ass goal is to start taking the bus to work in June, and bringing my bike along. I’m hoping that by the end of June, I’ll be able to make it to the top of Madonna. I’ll let y’all know how that goes.

So for Mother’s Day, we took a cheeful band of mothers to a local hoity-toity restaurant. When my dinner (Pasta and Filet Mignon) arrived, it was yummy. It was even yummy enough that I didn’t panic when I found a shor, curly black hair in it.

I carefully sequestered the offending hair in hopes I’d be able to ransom it for a free dessert. After we’d pretty much all demolished our meals, I said to our very pleasant waitress:

“What’s the chance I can trade this for a free dessert?” She gamely returned a few minutes later with a really yummy light cheesecake unlike any cheesecake I’d ever had. We shared it around the table, and about three bites in, I won round 2 of Find the Hair, in which I had been challenged to find a much finer and straighter hair, almost certainly synthetic in nature. In good humor, I pointed that one out to our waitress as well, and made clear that the cheesecake was good enough I wasn’t upset in the least over this second, and probably much more sanitary hair.

Encouraged by the yumminess of the first dessert, someone else at the table ordered one to share around, and this time, it was my super sharp-eyed neice who won the round. In round three, we had been challenged to find an ultra-fine and undoubtedly sythetic white fiber in the whipped cream portion of the dessert. Needless to say, my neice was delighted to win the third round, and we were all a little tired of the game by this point, so we retired as champions.

Happy Mother’s Day, all!