should I make more but smaller posts?

spazzkat and I biked to the hardware store, and also stopped by the bookstore so he could pick up a book for his shiny new contract that starts tomorrow. It was a nice ride. The best part was that I made it all the way up the hairpin-curve trail from Burke-Gilman to Bothell Way. The hard part hasn't been the severe angle (not too hard) or the severe slope (not too easy @_@) but the fact that they're combined in such a way that it makes me want to flip backwards off my bike. Until now, anyway. I finally got enough weight forward - hm, I was carrying cargo in backpack, I wonder if that helped - so that I could keep going forward and not lift the front wheel and tip backwards.

Monday's miles: 15.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 732.2
Miles out of Rivendell: 272.4
Miles to Lothlórien: 194

Anyway, most of today's miles are from that; then I walked down to the shops to meet Anna coming back on the bus, and we ran a couple of errands and got some salad stuff while we were down there. It was nice.

I didn't get a new watering can, though. The plastic nozzle on the one I have now disintegrated last summer, and I taped it back together from its assortment of pieces using high-strength clear shipping tape, because you can't buy replacement shower nozzles for these little plastic watering cans. Astoundingly, that worked all last summer and into this spring, and, in fact, the part that I fixed that way is still fine - but the parts I hadn't taped are taking their turn at disintegrating. And when I started taping those parts back together (at a loss of some of the holes in the shower head), it cracked in a couple more places. It really is like an eggshell at this point.

Despite that, I've taped it some more and it's working, less some of its spread. I wanted to get a new one at the shops, but the only ones they had at the Rite-Aid were also plastic, and I think I've had just about enough of that.

Watering can,
Watering can,
Watering things that only it can,
What's it like? It's made of metal!
Watering can.

Meanwhile, there go the last fleeting remnants of my heterosexualityrespect for the American electorate. Read the graph carefully. There are only two lines. One line is Bush's approval rating. The other line is the inverse of the price of gasoline; up means cheaper. Particularly over the last several weeks, it's just kind of, um, yeah. From here.


The Old Gateway

Oh, and jwz's post earlier today, about this story? As soon as I saw it I knew it was Dr. Bach-y-Rita's little startup he set up to commercialise the work that got me interested in going back to graduate school. And I was right - it's him, with his first commercial application. Not the direction I'd have gone. But that's why I need to be in graduate school, dammit! I've got these ideas!

Oh well. Time to take college chemistry, I guess. Tra la la!