I don’t really have much all to report on. For the most part, I had a pretty relaxing weekend. Friday night began my weekend of epic eating. We went to Applebee’s for dinner because Carol remembered that they had some healthier Weight Watchers items on their menu. I pretty much knew that given the choice between something healthy and something that actually tastes good, I’d be going with the latter. An appetizer sampler and a bleu cheese and bacon cheeseburger later, I was feel pretty content.

Saturday was Carol’s birthday which was pretty low key. We went running in the morning and ate lunch and walked around the mall in the afternoon. I got flowers for her after work on Friday, but I still haven’t gotten her a present so to speak. She said she wanted an MP3 player, but I already have two of those and I said she could use mine all she wants. Plus, the iPod mini (which I think was the one she wanted primarily because it was pink :P) got some mixed reviews in terms of using it while running. I know my iPod doesn’t really work so well and actually shuts itself off after 20-30 minutes of running so I wasn’t too keen on buying another one if it is just going to do that. So I told her I’d take her bicycle shopping sometime this week. She wants one, but (1) I don’t really know if she’ll ride it or like riding and (2) I don’t know if I can walk into a bike store and buy something that I wouldn’t at least ride myself… so that could be quite expensive. We’ll see…

We spend that evening with some friends that I haven’t seen in months (Hi, Amy and Jon!). That was really fun and was the second day of my epic eating. They grilled out steaks which I haven’t had in quite a while, so I took the opportunity to eat three. :P They were cut up into smaller portions before they were cooked, but it was still three pieces of meat! That was in addition to the other yummy stuff that they made that evening and we had cake and ice cream for dessert, too. I’m quite certain that the calories I burned in my run that morning paled in comparison to what I consumed that evening. But it sure tasted good! :)

For lunch yesterday, I had this enormous burrito and a couple baskets of chips and salsa at a local Mexican restaurant (I totally have a weakness for Mexican food). I was pretty stuffed and that combined with the fact that I had only done six hours of exercise that week had me feeling pretty guilty. So I ended up pushing off for a ride around 5:30 last night. Just an easy paced 30 miles to take away some of my guilt of my bad eating weekend and my shorter than planned recovery week. I only have two recovery weeks left and still have eight weeks of hard, good quality workouts ahead of me. I figured I should enjoy the rest while I can.

Happy birthday to the future Mrs! (I don’t know if she’s going to like that picture, but it’s the most recent one of the two of us)

The cool link of the day award goes to Phil for finding the Gmaps Pedometer.

What is this?
This is a little hack that uses Google’s superb mapping application to help record distances traveled during a running or walking workout.

Works fine for cycling too. Below is the map of my normal out and back long ride. The mileage was pretty much spot on. What’ll they think of next?

Ahhh… a massage. So relaxing, so soothing. Nothing like having someone rub you down with lotion to just whisk all the stress of your life away… (I promise, this is rated PG)

(more…)

By suggestion of my good friend Biberfan, I’m going to start cleaning up my website. I’ll be trying to ensure that my pages are valid XHTML as well as cleaning up my CSS files to make them more readable and taking out a bunch of junk that shouldn’t be there. It’s his belief that the fix that I introduced yesterday to fix the problems folks were having while browsing with Safari was only coincidental and didn’t cure the heart of the problem. Hopefully, this cleanup will do that now (as well as satisfy my OCD). So things may get a whole lot uglier here before they get better. Please excuse the mess.

Also, some of you may have already noticed that my site now exists just as http://www.chivalry.net. The trailing “wordpress,” while still functional (for now), is no longer needed. It’s certainly not a pressing issue, but please update your bookmarks when you get a chance (and sorry to those folks that just did this exercise a few months ago when I changed domains back to this one).

I’ve been tagged to list my food addictions. There really is only one consistent thing that I absolutely must have day in and day out. I’m not even really sure it’s “food,” but I don’t care. Diet A&W Root Beer is pure, liquid goodness. I drink a good amount of it daily - well over six cans a day and probably closer to twelve. When I go to the store and buy some, I don’t leave without at least several cases. If I find it on sale, I normally clear out that store’s supply. I once had a stack of Diet A&W in my kitchen that, on its side, stood taller than me. Actually, it was actually even taller than my kitchen cabinets, come to think of it. I start to panic when I only have four or five cases at home.

Honorable mentions for foods that I’m addicted to are In-N-Out Burger, Chipotle, and Pringles. You’ll notice that all those are incredibly healthy for me. It’s no wonder why I gain so much darn weight in the off-season. :(

I’m hereby tagging Phil, Mike, Nancy, and Boulder to share their food addictions.

Favorite songs coming soon (that’ll require more thought)…

Thanks to Wil for triggering my OCD and letting me know that my site was all messed up looking in Safari. ;) I spent the last couple of days trying to figure out what the heck was going on and why my site looked ok in Firefox, IE, and Opera, but was all messed up in Safari. This is especially hard when you don’t have access to a Mac and can’t see in realtime if your changes have any affect.

In any case, I think the problem is solved. Turns out, I needed the following in my CSS file:

ul.post-meta {list-style: none;}
ul.post-meta span.post-meta-key {font-weight: bold;}

If you view my pages source code, I don’t see any reason why any of the above would be triggered or necessary. But the above is indeed essential for the page to look right in Safari. Any CSS gurus know why this is the case?

I’m on day three of my recovery week. I just had an hour swim yesterday and I’ll probably just do an hour run today. I live for weeks like these! :)

I’m trying to be really careful with my diet here this week. I need to make sure I don’t have a week of “base” eating instead of “recovery” eating. I did wake up this morning to find myself at my lightest morning weight ever, though! I’m down 20 pounds from three months ago to the day where I said I wanted to lose exactly that much weight. I’m at least at where I was last fall when I left for Wisconsin. I’d like to lose a few more pounds just for S&G. Anything extra that I don’t have to carry around for 140.6 miles is good in my book. It’s nice being ahead of schedule in something for once.

No spoilers here. But I just got back from my early lunch break where I escaped to watch my favorite stage of the tour. It’s simply poetry in motion.

I can’t wait for the mountains…

Don’t try and do a two and a half hour brick fueled by an apple for brunch and one bottle of sports drink. It doesn’t work so well.

Happy Independence Day, everyone! :)