'Tis the tubular season

So maybe I missed the first 'cross race of the season in Livermore--but I have my first set of tubular tires stretching on my first set of tubular rims. I'll be out there, eventually.

Two photos

Two photos of my own, 'cuz I like them.

First photo, taken this summer with an in-phone camera:


Little did I know that my in-phone camera seems to want everything to look like a watercolor, sorta smudgey-like. In the end, it's a nice effect, but couldn't it be applied afterward, by choice? The pictures is of the beach at Cosens Bay, Kalamalka Lake Provincial Park.

Second photo, taken last December in Mexico City with an actual digital camera, and my desktop background photo ever since (be warned, 2-3 MB file size when I uploaded):


The original 640x480 photo was taken hand-held, about 2 feet above my head, macro setting-point-click before the bird turned around, and came out looking quite crude. However, by some magic, when set up as a desktop wallpaper, all sorts of details "appear" as it's stretched, and the photo that you get by clicking through is actually from taking a screenshot of my desktop. The original is this:

Petty office kitchen politics - win?

Work is nice: every Monday, they order a bunch of food and stock the office kitchen, to keep us well-fed and happy (and presumably working). So, with people eating a lot, it implies dirty dishes, which were accumulating in the small and awkward office kitchen sink with depressing regularity. There's a sign posted asking people to wash their dishes, with humor but sad ineffectiveness.

Last week, failing to find a single clean knife with which to spread Nutella for a snack, I decided something had to be done to make a point. Tempering my first instinct to simply throw all the dirty dishes left behind into the dumpster, I boxed them and hid them. (Not too carefully, a couple of knives were recovered by another spreader-seeker.) I also made the point to the few present at the time that any more dirty dishes left in the sink would also be "disappeared".

Results? Upon arriving at work the next morning, and indeed for the past week, I have failed to find a single dirty dish in the sink. Perhaps more of them are collecting on people's desks instead, but I don't have to live with that mess.

I was kindly asked to return the missing dishes this morning, and did so, washing them and putting them away. However, the threat of disappearing dishes has not been revoked. I'm interested to see how long it can last.

PS. Long time, no post. What drove me to it? The alternative activity for the evening is to do my tax return, due in the mail on Wednesday.