May miscellanea

The week started cold and snowy, and I always love cold May days. I don't know why, I just do.

On Wednesday, I went to ride my bike, and I was dismayed to find that it had a flat tire. And it was the back tire, which I have never replaced before. This was annoying, especially as I was preparing for my triathlon. So I figured out how to take it off. The tube had popped, and my guess is it was just too old (almost fourteen years). So then I replaced the tube with an old tube I had patched last year, but I had to put an additional patch on it. I got the tire back on, and as a decidedly nonmechanical person with a desk job, I was pleased with myself for figuring it out. I took a test ride, and it worked fine.

But on Thursday, I could tell that . . .

Actually, as I started writing this story, I realized it was really boring. So I'll just say that I bought a new tube and replaced it, but the circumstances meant that it took a while.

On Saturday, I participated in the Splash 'n' Sprint Triathlon at the South Davis Recreation Center. I got the number 188 written on my arm and leg, which is the same number I had at the Labor Day tri. (On Labor Day, the teen writing on my arm asked me if I was Bigfoot.) 

This was my fifth triathlon at the rec center (four in May, one on Labor Day). And at this point, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Seven laps in a pool is NBD. Twelve miles on a bike is NBD. Three miles running is NBD. But it was fun, and I enjoy doing them. And since I've been practicing swimming, I finished the swim faster than usual. And of course running was my strongest portion. Maybe one day I'll do a different triathlon, but I need to improve my swim endurance (and maybe look into a road bike).

During the pandemic, the children of an animator dug through original Vince Guaraldi recordings for the Peanuts TV specials. In 2022, they began releasing the original soundtracks, including outtakes, and they have been selling better than expected. It's wild to me that the music from short cartoons that are more than fifty years old is still getting noticed and bought! But I love it. It shows how much of a musical genius Guaraldi was, overlapping with the artistic and comedic genius of Charles Schulz.

The next release is It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown, slated for July 5. But I preordered it directly from the shop, and I got my copy this week, almost two months early! It Was a Short Summer was one of the weaker Peanuts specials of the 1960s, IMO, but the music is fantastic. It was able to share musicians with the feature film A Boy Named Charlie Brown (a very trippy movie with a spectacular soundtrack).

Thursday night, I had a dream that I was at a Christmas brunch, and I bought a cranberry-orange tart made with human jerky. But when I opened the package, it was more like a human roast with cranberry dressing. I kept gagging on it, because it tasted like a rancid pork roast.

Of course, I like to describe my dreams to an AI image generator, and this is what it came up with.

Last night, I drove with a friend to Brigham City to see if we could see the aurora borealis. But, unfortunately, we couldn't.

Now, on a more serious note: my grandpa entered the ICU this week. We don't know what the outcome will be, and it certainly altered our Mother's Day plans. But I thought I needed to mention it if I'm going to talk about all those silly things as well.