2001-11-04 - 9:02 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Somebody to Love", by, uh Jefferson Airplane, or Jefferson Starship, or something.

If your reaction to my bike, uh, adventures, is "Why don't you stop riding the goddamn thing if you're gonna keep falling off it?!?!" you might want to skip this section.

So, I fell off my bike today on a rut in a curve and bumped my noggin a bit. Goddammit, shit, fuck. I was pissed. Hurt my head a little at the time (rather like the weather-related headaches I get), but felt fine within a few minutes later and so far have suffered no ill effects. In retrospect I think it wasn't my head I hurt -- Poindexter was behind me and saw the fall, and said it only looked like I tapped my head -- it was the muscles in my neck and head. I might have a neckache tomorrow. (Update: Yes, I have a neckache. I've had worse muscle aches from working in the garden, though.)

Argh.

The stupid thing was, when I first started doing this my big fear was that the bike would fall on me and break something. I'm beginning to see here that the bike is not the thing to worry about. It fell on my leg today and didn't hurt it a bit. The other four times I fell I was nowhere near the bike.

Word to the wise: WEAR YOUR HELMET. There are a few idiots here and there that I see riding without helmets, and first I cringe, and then I want to scream at them. It is also wise to fasten your seatbelt, as Steph can attest.

I did well otherwise, so there's that. And it really wasn't a bad spill. Before and after the spill I was having a hell of a lot of fun -- it was sunny and warm and I was handling everything fine. Poindexter tried a creek crossing that looked shallow, but it suddenly got deep just before the other side and he got completely soaked. Poor thing. It was cold.

We didn't go to Tower City after all. Once I phrased it to Poindexter as "six hours in a car to ride for four", and he considered that riding after a three-hour drive isn't all that fun, we decided to wait for that 80-degree weekend in December that we will hopefully be having. We had 'em two years in a row, after all, in 1998 and 1999. Hopefully the Rutter's will still be serving pumpkin spice cappuccino then.

My parents' birthdays are both this month, so they're coming down this weekend for a dual celebration. I'm trying to get my brother to come too, but he might be busy. We'll cook them each the dinner of their request, and I hit on the perfect present for them today: crab cakes.

(Big whoop, you're thinking. But my parents love crab cakes. They drive through Maryland on the way here and have a couple favorite places to stop and eat crab cakes. If there are crab cakes on the menu, they order 'em. It's like they're on a perpetual crab cake quest. They enjoy crab cakes the way I get all excited over tea and scones or pumpkin spice cappuccino.)

About two years ago, some guy came to our door with a bunch of frozen meat and fish. Says he was delivering in the neighborhood and had some extras, and did we want to buy them. It sounded, er, fishy to me, although I know my stepmom-in-law uses this service, so I called Poindexter over to deal with it.

Poindexter, however, was recovering from a bad cold and was a little woozy (or at least, that's his excuse). He also has a weakness for anything that means he doesn't have to make a trip to the grocery store (back then it was a shared chore; now it's just my chore). That, plus me and my complete inability to do arithmetic in my head (and I was a math major, for godsakes), meant that we thought we were getting a good deal. We actually paid something outrageously high for this particular convenience (over $10/lb, I think), and we haven't even finished eating the damn things. Shit.

After we bought them I suffered from an enormous attack of miserly guilt and wouldn't let either of us buy lunch at work or get takeout for quite some time. I think we made up for the $12-a-pound salmon within a few months, but that miserly attitude has stuck with me ever since. We actually eat takeout and McD's far less often than we did back when we were relatively poor, living in a one-bedroom in San Jose.

(Mr. Chau's ... sigh ...)

Anyway, we got some salmon, tuna, filet mignon, some other kind of steak, and one box of crab cakes. I gave the crab cakes to my parents, and they languished in their freezer for at least six months, and then one night they pulled 'em out and tried 'em and they were great, considering how convenient they were.

About a month ago, Mom asked where they came from, 'cause they wanted to buy more. I said I'd check, but I thought we'd thrown out the business card since the food was so expensive. Today, though, I actually turned up the order form mixed in with our takeout menus. Yippee. We can probably have it delivered here before my parents arrive, and hand them the box with a bow. That should be fun.

So. The cool thing is that they're both equally interested in them, and they're something I can *buy* for them (their tastes otherwise are often out of my price range, especially my Dad's). By now the damn things are probably about $60 for a box of 10-12 cakes, so it seems like a good frivolous birthday-present kind of purchase.

Speaking of takeout in San Jose, I shall reminisce a bit about our eating habits then:

We had no dishwasher. Poindexter hated doing dishes, and I didn't mind but wasn't real excited about it either. So we never cooked anything except:

- tacos
- ginger & sesame chicken over pasta
- sauteed garlic to eat with bread, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (still a favorite today).

What we ate at home was ham sandwiches (Poindexter), angel hair pasta with Contadina pesto (me), iceberg salads, and frozen dinners. We supplemented the frozen dinners with extra pasta, since they never do give you enough. My parents came to visit once and opened the freezer for ice and laughed hysterically at the entire freezer being stuffed with frozen dinners. They still talk about that.

When we ordered takeout, it was usually cheap Chinese from Mr. Chau's, more expensive Chinese from House of Cathay (their garlic chicken and minced chicken is the best Chinese I have ever eaten, anywhere), Thai food, Taco Bell, McD's, Round Table Pizza or Burger King. Boy, we were real gourmets back then. Well, that was the best Chinese food I've ever had. And Round Table is ten steps above Pizza Hut or any of the absolute crap pizza chains around here (Papa John's, ugh).

Since we lived within two miles of all these places, living downtown and all, occasionally we went all out and went to three different places to get the different items we wanted for a single meal. Chinese chicken salad from Mr. Chau's, the aforementioned items from Cathay, and chicken panang from the Thai place, Krung Thai I think it was called.

It was nutty. But fun. Well worth it. We've done it here, too, but only when we have guests and we can't agree on Thai or Japanese.

We lived a block from an IHOP, so I was forever dragging Poindexter over there for pancakes at 9pm. We went on Sundays sometimes, too, and we'd bring the paper and read together while we ate. It was nice. It was a nice, small IHOP (blue roof and all).

Since we moved back east, we've always had a dishwasher, so that's when Poindexter started to cook and I discovered I had a gourmet chef on my hands. Gotta love that. In the last week or two he's cooked:

- Pasta shells and chicken with garlic, broccoli, and peppers sauteed in a pink wine/lemon juice/balsamic vinegar concoction, with pine nuts
- Sausage, bean & pasta soup with rosemary and Italian parsley
- Chicken with sun-dried tomato, basil, and balsamic vinegar dressing
- Sloppy joes

All these meals are low-fat, too (we use chicken breast and ground turkey and turkey sausage). And they're YUMMY.

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