Donny Darko seems like a good Soundtrack of the Now [status]

It's frustrating how much one's world contracts when sick. The Quarantine Chamber is chock-full of fun, half-finished projects, but after a day of Zoom meetings and classes, it's hard to work up the motivation to do anything with any of them. Also the classic problem of it being far easier to start projects than finish them.

If I can work up the energy, I should really use it to clean the windows and windowframes with a mild bleach solution. The thought gives me flashbacks to the Lincoln apartment, which was such a perfect space aside from the lack of working laundry facilities, the failed ancient furnace, the initial gas leak incident, but mostly, the mold abatement issues.

Things in here are kind of like the Garage, though, where working on any one project involves putting a bunch of things away in order to get things set up for that particular project. I should just accept this as a fact of life.

PBP 2023: Mental Preparation

(This post was started on September 26, 2023; Finished November 10, 2023)

Last week, while bicycling home from work on a dark, rainy evening, I suddenly realized that something I'd grown accustomed to thinking while on that type of ride no longer rang true: the dreary, unpleasant conditions were no longer part of some larger-scale preparations for completing Paris-Brest-Paris again. I will have to rethink the things I tell myself to try and get through the tough commuting moments. Commuting by bicycle isn’t always roses and sunshine.

But I should back up for a moment. It's perhaps more interesting to reflect on the differences in my mental preparation for PBP 2023, compared to 2015, especially in light of some recent conversation threads about DNF experiences in a PBP discussion group. DNF is "did not finish," also known as "abandoning" a brevet. That's what I concluded I needed to do in 2011, after riding "only" 500 miles.

( Long, rambling details... )