Starch & Carbohydrates

Hello again and welcome.

It's confession time.

I've been eating snickers again.  Let me clarify.  I have been eating multiple snickers "energy bars" every day for eight days without questioning it.  This would be a great opportunity for me to assure you I have been combating this intake of extra chocolatey, melt in your mouth calories with very manly and responsible amounts of push-ups, chin ups and throwing logs.   No.

Daily my job and activities through-out are intense enough and labourious enough that I regularly consume whichever shiny product is bold enough to claim to be food.  This has led to many incarnations of who I, Jesse, have been in the past.   There was Burger-fat Jesse at 220+ lbs's.  Leading to Muscle-armed pizza-fat  Jesse floating around 200 lb's.  Before that we had The" Garb-a-rator" in high school at 156 lb's.  Then Lumber-buff around 180 lb's and sporting the worst teenage beard as i made the move from Truro to Halifax.  I'm aiming for ripped as hell bicycle hunk.  A mix of me from when i had a free gym membership and i could eat as much cafeteria food as i wanted and this past summers "midnight cyclist, what cycles at midnight".

Exercise for me has always been a great excuse to eat.  If do a set of squats followed by an intense push up gauntlet the i'm having a chocolate peanut butter protein shake and a steak.  Motivation!

I offered to put in some extra days at work as an opportunity for me to fill up my back account appeared and I am now remembering why people commented on how much better i looked when i decided to leave my night shift.  I used to buy poptarts after my 12 km cycle to work and then snack on chocolate covered peanuts all shift.  Let's skip what i ate for lunch it's embarrassing how many times i'd have to type pizza-pop.

This i hope has given you a better understanding into what i'm trying to accomplish with my journey across Canada.  I want to break myself out of this habit.  It's not as simple as eat less snickers.  I also want to loose the habit of eating poorly when i'm over worked.  I plan on being over worked in the coming months.

I'm learning bicycle repair and First Aid.  I'm experimenting with painting and writing again.  I have a guitar and a banjo to learn.  I have many many great days ahead.

The first step is to put down the snickers and pick myself up.

P.S. $1.99 for a chocolate bar is as clear a sign of the end times as we're gonna get.

Books and beating hearts.

Welcome to the First installment of what will become a regular feature here.

On this self inflicted journey into mystery i'll be aided by vast tomes of arcane (or mundane, whatever) knowledge.  Books and beating hearts will be my opportunity to share these radical books.

If you recall my most recent post I tried to communicate the vast array of skills I lack.  The embarrassment that is my own ignorance is a powerful tool.  Another powerful tool is the thrift store!   My last trip there netted me a great starter package of books.  A guide to repairing my cycle and what to bring on long tours.  The other is a detailed map book of Canadian cycle tours in each province and territory.  Let's get it started with the former.

Ballantine, Richard & Gran,t Richard. (1998). Ultimate Bicycle book. Willowdale, Ont. Firely.

http://www.amazon.ca/Ultimate-Bicycle-Book-Richard-Ballantine/dp/1552092658


Let's get one thing straight.  This book is a great resource for spandex.  It turns out you're average nineties cyclist looks like Terry fox mixed with Owen hart.  Curly haired and half naked save for a few oddly placed spats of neon.

The Richard's put together a great resource on how to deconstruct, identify and repair the major parts of your cycle.  In addition they have small but informative chapters on selecting your bicycle, sizing a bike and what gear to bring on trips.  I was really impressed with the "Anatomy of" series of photographs they included.  Every style of bike artfully disassembled, displayed and labeled.  I'd love to spend an afternoon re-drawing these pictures.

The book does suffer from the unnecessary clutter which is a mainstay of photo-books.  Needles dual-page spreads on cycle activism containing all of a paragraph divided evenly upon the two pages. A whole quarter of this book is dedicated to "future bikes" and other half cycle/half shelter machines. Nonsense which should be expected of a coffee table style of book. This book may have a very short life here.  Replaced by a dedicated repair manual.

Will this book help my caveman hands overcome the horror of mechanical work tomorrow as I tune up my winter battered bicycle?  Find out next time, same bike channel, same bike time!

Um, like your smile is totally ruling me right now.

Hello all,

Do you remember when you wanted to know exactly how things worked and were precocious enough tear your favourite toys asunder.  Looking upon the mess you would create with awe and curiosity which would eventually term to boredom once you established you had no idea how to reassemble it.  Rest in peace yellow tonka truck circa my childhood, my bad.

My younger brother was always the opposite of me in such a situation.  He would look upon our parents car and instead of wondering how fast it can get us to hockey practice or the beach, he would see an engine filled with all kinds off liquids he could help our dad refill.  He`d see brake lines to drain and tires to fill with air.  He is a great bike mechanic.  I am great at asking him to fix my bike.  

Over the summer He and I restored a BMX we managed to grab on the freesies.  It was a mess.  I`m not talking that the brakes didn`t work, which they did, or  that the rim`s were bent, they were fine.  It was simply lousy with stickers.  The kind of stickers you get from winning energy drink chugging matches in derelict malls.  Once again my brother solved every mechanical problem we would face. I sanded and painted, poorly, But, we did have a working BMX by the end. This would be the bike which re-ignited my passion for cycling.  By way of it being a hate filled conduit of evil which i likened to riding a bad pun. An upgrade was needed.

Newly armed with my Mothers stolen (abandoned for years in our back yard) Raleigh and all the tools i`d need to fix it, provided i could.   I started to really explore Halifax`s parks, and side streets.  This lead to the absolute best summer of dating.  Ice cream, bike rides and Point pleasant park.  I was now a dedicated cyclist putting in  twenty or thirty kilometres a day, everyday.

On one of these great summer days i was on a great summer date.  I suggested she should come over to my apartment and we could tune up our bikes together and read Sci-fi.  Needless to say she was pretty impressed by how confident i was even after i mangled her derailleur.  That was a lie, she made fun of me constantly.  I suggested we go to bike again (a local free bike repair shop ran by sweet anarchist`s) to learn how to fix our bikes. I never followed through. 

As you can see I am the kind of person who should absolutely cycle across multiple provinces.

The Intro

Hello, my name is Jesse and I'm going to bike Canada.

As this is my first ever blog, no livejournal you don't count, I believe an introduction to who am and what my goals are would be appropriate.

It has been said that a persons greatest enemy are themselves. This blog will chronicle the rivalry between who i am and who i want to become. So, Look out self, we're kicking our ass this summer!

Approaching the end of January i'm beginning to transform my life into that of a coffee addled cartographer, a grease stained mechanic and finally, a carbo-loading athlete.  I've some reading to do is what i'm getting at, and I'll be posting what i'm reading and what i've learned from these books here.

I'd like to thank you for reading and hope you can use this as a resource to grow and motivate yourself.

Let's get started before my brain catches up to the mess I've thrown my body into!