Archive for May, 2006
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
Shore Run #2
#1)Poverty in Camden makes North Philly look like Bryn Mawr.
#2)Dead animals everywhere. again. Except at the intersection of 557 and 50. There I saw a live snake! Big snake. Black with grey spots.
Thursday, May 25th, 2006
SUPER GREG
Sunday, May 21st, 2006
“Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide…’
#1) The way down was fine. The wind was at our back. We cruised. We took maybe 2 stops, one where 537 meets 661 and one where we got onto 70. I think.
#2) Camden, NJ, 6:30am. There were like 2 people on the street. Still maybe the wickedest scary town ever.
#3) Creepy hollow. There were like 3 towns we went thru that were all creepy and depressed. All of them seemed to have main streets lined with houses with wood frames, wood shingles too. This is less then a 20 minute drive from downtown Philadelphia. Wood houses. I mean, no need for stone, just make wood frames. They all looked like they shouldn’t have lasted as long as they did.
#4) We missed a turn to get onto 661. We would have probably gone 10 miles out of our way before we noticed, but I saw a huge blue heron in a tiny lake, right off the side of the road and had to stop and check him out.
Which gave Andy just enough time to figure out where the turn was.
#5) Other birds: Someplace way past Mt. Laurel, we were riding along a road with a ditch off of it. Out of nowhere a turkey vulture hops out of the ditch. The turkey vulture looked like a vulture in a cartoon. Even Andy noticed.
#6)Which brings me to my next point: No one I ride with ever notices the birds. I’m not sure if it’s a function of my fitness (I was cruising in a very low HR on the way down, esp when drafting), a function of my obsession with bird watching, or I am just alot more observant. I am always like, ‘Did you see that cardinal?’ And then I realize that I’m the only one that doesn’t wear sunglasses, so that brilliant flash of red feathers I saw, no one even noticed, and if they did, it might as well have been a pigeon or a rustle of leaves…
#7) State of New Jersey: You need to take better care of your animals. The above mentioned birds were nice and all. But your roads are strewn with the carcasses of hundreds of animals. I saw 2 deer carcasses, maybe 18 squirrels, tons of birds (10 robins, some starlings, a cardinal), frogs, a few turtles and so on and so forth.
You are the garden state after all. How about not being the garden state of death for woodland creatures? That would be great.
#8) Last animal story, I swear: The ride back was not kind to either me or Andy. We flew down in 4 hours. With the wind. Which meant that we rode back into a headwind. About halfway back, we were in the pinelands. We hadn’t seen a house for at least a couple miles. We wouldn’t see another for a couple more. And then, out of nowhere, there was a big fucking chicken.
Wild, free range, New Jersey Pineland chicken. No idea what it was doing there or why. Probably the best thing I saw all day.
I am fairly certain that I did not hallucinate it. Andy can confirm this.
#9) 125+ miles. This is the most I have ridden in a single day. I am pleased, although I was in total misery for the last 35 miles. When I got home, my entire body was radiating heat. I wasn’t sick, but I was very weak. I think that this is a product of ‘cellular repair.’ I’m only now starting to feel completely normal again.
Thursday, May 18th, 2006
WTF.
Remember that time that I found out that I was sucking down a known carcinogen for like…30 years?
Saturday, May 13th, 2006
H-Mart Comes to Upper Darby
H-Mart Packaged Foods, originally uploaded by chris_mckenna.
I have my complaints about the town where I dwell, but foreign food choices is not one of them. All super markets out here seem to have a huge selection of Goya products, asian sauces, and thanks to all the real Irish in the area, lots of the good snacks/biscuits and the like from the British isles.
Now we have H-Mart. Very clean, very friendly, very very nice food packaging! Sort of like a cross between the supermarket at 11th and Washington and a Whole Foods. Note the haul above.