Tag Archives: bike

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. I have an exercise bike I’ve used pretty consistently since I lived in Tennessee. It was my one concession to coming home from siting at a desk all day and then sitting down at home and sitting in front of another monitor for three or four hours. Since I moved to the new place here, it’s been a dust collector. With the yard demanding less attention and slowly gearing up for the part of the year when I don’t want to be outside, I though it was high time to get it our of semi-retirement and get back into the routine… which would have been good except for the electrical system that fried somewhere between here and there. As per usual, due to planned obsolescence the repair parts commonly available don’t quite fit, so the whole things is sitting in pieces in the back bedroom waiting to see whether it gets repaired, replaced, or if I just say the hell with my head nod towards exercise.

2. Every afternoon I pass a deli that offers steamed crabs in the summer. They’re good crabs. A few times I summer I’ll stop on a Friday night and pick up a dozen with a six pack. It’s hard not to like that kind of dinner. The thing that annoys me is the enormous sign that says “CRABS!!! EBT Welcome!!!” People end up getting food assistance for all manner or reason, but there’s just something about a taxpayer subsidized steamed crab dinner that makes me twitchy. With a bushel of #1 jimmy’s running upwards of $200 in mid-summer, it feels like an extravagant thing to even advertise. Paying for the essentials is one thing, but using public assistance for what by any assessment is a pure luxury feels wrong. If that makes me sound like a judgmental prick, well, ok. Maybe I’d be less annoyed if someone else was paying for my blue crabs.

3. I’ve seen several articles this week where robots are taking the place of flesh and blood workers. I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised by this. With the push for a $15 an hour minimum wage I suspect we’ll see a lot more people replaced with technology. Those jobs that can be automated, will be automated. Gaining operational efficiencies like that will be the corporate solution for paying $15 an hour to people doing work that can’t be effectively automated. No business that wants to stay in business is going to stand quietly and take it in the bottom line. They’ll find their cost savings somewhere – and with the biggest expense of many service oriented businesses being personnel costs, none of us should be surprised where they go to find those savings. It’s what happens when we pass laws without consideration for second or third level effects. Whoops.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Bikers. Not the ones on motorcycles. The ones who put on brightly colored spandex and take their peddle bikes for a ride at 6:30 AM. On a narrow, winding country road. When the rest of us are trying to get to work and do something productive with our day. Yeah. Those guys are a real pain in the ass. Sure, technically they’re legally entitled to use the road, but really if your vehicle of choice can’t manage to make at least the posted speed limit I think your decision to do so is suspect at best. Someone driving their car uphill at six miles an hour would be considered a hazard to traffic, I don’t have any earthly idea why peddle pushers doing exactly that aren’t lumped into the same category.

2. The week. I can’t remember the last week that has left me so utterly tired as it draws towards its conclusion. Suddenly everything is busy. Quitting time sneaks up on me at work, catching me unaware – that almost never happens. The nights at home stream away like we were dealing with minutes instead of hours. Despite all the motion, there isn’t feel like there’s all that much to show for it. Maybe that’s the real source of frustration. I don’t mind being bone tired when I know what I’m getting for the trouble, but when there’s no apparent reason, well, that’s just obnoxious.

3. Presidential politics. Here it is, more than a year before the next president is elected and the two hardest charging candidates are an avowed socialist and Donald Trump. Do I even need to explain why this might be considered annoying in some circles? It’s also why I try not to pay much attention to what’s going on this early in primary season… But Sanders and Trump. Sweet lord, this can’t be real life can it?

Doing it wrong…

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I smoked a pack a day for the better part of 14 years. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me I’d feel better if I quit, I’d have something like $210 and change. I’ve been fat for way longer than I smoked and it was the same story: You’ll feel better if you start exercising and eating better. I haven’t had a smoke in more than nine months. I’m eating more salad than a triceratops. And if I spent as much time on a real bike as I have on that bloody stationary bike, I’d be a front runner for the Tour de France.

The fact is, I don’t feel any different than I did I did six months ago or even a year before that. I’m apparently missing the part of this process that people rave about on Facebook. People say they feel energized following a workout. After mine, I’m pretty much just sore. And tired, which I already was before the exercise. I’m told I can be less than a ray of sunshine on my best day, so you can imagine what a great mood I’m in by that point.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I feel particularly bad. I wasn’t expecting the skies to open up, or the choir invisible to thunder into song, I was expecting to, you know, feel better than I did before or at the very least to feel different. As it stands, I’m pretty much just not doing something that I enjoyed and eating alot things I don’t like. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong…