Bowling, Arrows, Christos, and More

Shortest day of the year! Not that I’d really know. I spent most of it, other than a trip to the local coffee shop and back, indoors and a big chunk of that riding the Zwift. One thing I learned Friday is that unlike IRL bicycling, your ride can get really screwed up if you’re halfway through a mountain climb and your wifi cuts out. I learned afterwards that potentially just staying on the ride might allow you to recover, but it seemed to kick me out. Given I was 1500’ into a 3400’ climb, that was a lot of climb to lose. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of queuing up a number of ride missions that came due simultaneously, so I found myself redoing that mountain climb (so 3400 + somewhere between 1000 and 1500), finishing the MAAP race of 23.1 miles and 1500’ feet of climb, doing the climb of the week (short, but 500’ of climb or so), and doing the race in the current racing set. Depending on whether you use Zwift or Zwiftpower, I placed second or first in that last one by pushing it up to 622 watts in the last seconds. For me, that’s some serious push. Anyway...that was somewhere near 7000’ of climb over the weekend. Even muddling along on some of it and stopping to go start dinner on the Alpe du Zwift (modeled after the Alpe du Huez), my legs are feeling a bit of ache.

The kid and I went bowling for dinner earlier in the week at Bryant Lake Bowl. Neither of us really racked up a good game. It’s been a while, and one of us didn’t bring their custom ball (not me, I gave mine away a LONG time ago). If you get to Bryant Lake, I strongly suggest having their pot roast. That was amazing. It was a single layered bowl of meat and mashed potatoes interspersed with carrots and squash and some thick custom gravy. Whoever is making that over there deserves a handshake.

And Thursday we celebrated our 32^nd anniversary. Getting real close to that third of a century mark. We always celebrate either on the day, or near it, with a family dinner and going to the British Arrow awards at the Walker Art Center. Usually we head to Christo’s Greek restaurant before or after and this year wasn’t an exception. Gyros and saganaki. Opah! You can catch all the commercial awards here. The Walker lays them out by award category. It’s cool they post lists now – I used to have to look them up one at a time and make my own youtube list – but it’s also nice to spend an evening at the Walker taking a quick tour of the galleries on a free Thursday and doing a bit of people watching. Apparently we are bad at people watching, because we didn’t even notice some friends in the audience, and one of the two is like 6’6”. I suggest the Wilkinson videos. And this one is really funny if you worked for Thomson Reuters. Probably funny for other corporate monkeys as well...but it rings true for my cube days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XFXcBdXqKE&list=PLf3CA3DrDBWji-0LaFC32cpqzBE7SHkaQ&index=9. 

Full Arrow list: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf3CA3DrDBWji-0LaFC32cpqzBE7SHkaQ

Bowling and more...

Monday was daddy/daughter spring break outing day.  We went to Bryant Lake Bowl for breakfast/lunch with Grandpa and the Great Uncle (Eryn's, not mine) and then stayed to bowl two lanes.

We had them all to ourselves for most our time there.  Not a lot of people bringing their kids to bowl at noon, although a mom and her two kids did show up about mid way through our second game.



Eryn was very consistent.  38 both games.  She was a little perturbed that she guttered the last few frames of the second game after tying her score from the first game. But not perturbed enough for a third game.


We did not loft the ball.  It was nothing like the night Kyle and I were there and the hipsters were running wild.


See?  Smooth release.


I scored something like a 125 and a 175.  Not bad - that second score is above my average when I was a league bowler.  I like the Bryant-Lake lanes.  They always seem fairly flat to me - lot a not of deviation ball to ball.  Of course, maybe it's all sorts of deviant and just perfectly offsets my own crappy throws.


Here's at least a little bit of a loft.  I was trying to catch her at it so I could report her to the waitress.


Eryn learned to score, although as you can see, she feels she needs to show her work.


After bowling, we went to Particle Fever.  I took us to the Lagoon instead of the Edina, which wasn't a good plan.  But fortunately, we were 45 minutes early, so we had lots of time to get to Edina.  The movie was excellent - lots of first person interviews with folks who had worked (work) on the Large Hadron Collider and their search for the Higgs Boson and hope that when they found it the boson would be light enough to allow them to pursue super-symmetry rather than a multiverse, as a multiverse can preclude additional particles.  I liked the quote, and I paraphrase, "Moving from failure to failure without a diminishment in enthusiasm is one definition of success."  Our co-watchers were all retired guys catching an afternoon movie.  The pair of them behind us were discussing their own physics work back in the day.

Eryn was impressed with the escalator at the Edina Theater.  I'd forgotten it's so big for what seems like a small (four screen) theater.  It goes up two floors without a break and looks like it's been misplaced from the London Tube.

Here's a big head Eryn wouldn't let me take her picture with from the Lagoon, which isn't where we went.  So nothing at all to do with the events on Monday other than to show we were lost and it cost us $1.50 to be lost in the parking lot.  One good thing is that I saw Origami has a store right there behind the Lagoon.  I'm going to have to figure out hours.


We finished off our popcorn and chocolate with a visit to The Edina Creamery.  So we had sports, fine dining, and brain activities all in the same day.  A good Spring Break day, even if it wasn't traveling someplace warm.

MST3k - Eegah

Kyle and I went to Bryant Lake Bowl tonight to watch Eegah, the MST3K episode of the month. Made more enjoyable by chicken nachos and a wide selection of beer. A special surprise tonight was that Trace Beaulieu was there. In case you're not familiar with his role on MST3K, he was both Crow T. Robot and Dr. Clayton Forrester.  He was promoting his new book, Silly Rhymes for Belligerent Children.  He read a few of them, including one that involved a tapeworm.  Seems like Christmas gift material to me.

My favorite quote from Eegah, "He's like a cabbage patch Elvis."