Ahh! Apologies for a gross lack of content lately. For her part, The Lovely One has been roundly chastised, and will be back on schedule shortly.

For my part, too much stuff, almost all of it blandly personal and not really informative in some external way. Enjoy a peek behind the curtain of my posts for a moment: I don't know if it's obvious, but I've used a general principle with my posts that they should be of external interest whenever possible. That means I favour commentary, recommendations, the rare tasty link, and intrinsically interesting photos. Whether I succeed is left as an exercise for the reader. I try to write somewhere between the exposed diaries of LiveJournal and the very non-personal posting of pros like Kausfiles. If I were to create some sort of target for these posts, I'd say I want to provide an interesting thing every day.

Back to the salt mines. First the impersonal. Yay Iraq. While the enemies of democracy threatened to (according to that article) "wash the streets with 'voters' blood'" (and presumably to clean the windows with their bile, and sweep the sidewalks with their intestines...say what you want, those suicidal terrorists have an ear for dialogue), Iraqis voted in numbers on par with the most recent elections in Canada and the U.S.

Now for the personal, which has been pretty frantic lately. Last night, I stayed up until 0130h doing as-yet-invisible prep work on my club's website. Due to some internal household rearrangement, TLO and I have decided it's time to get a new computer, and the last desktop machine in the house, the reliable and silent Indigo Montoya, will be retired for a cheap-and-cheerful 12" iBook. Those things are tiny! More like a hulking PDA than a small laptop. Speaking of PDAs, whatever happened to inkwell? There's an OS X technology that was either intended for a device that didn't come out, or is intended for a device that will come out, or was waiting for tablet PCs to succeed (which they have not, and probably will not: the problem is that keyboards are faster than pens). Speaking of OS X, the one thing holding me back from actually purchasing the iBook is my interest in figuring out when Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") and the next revision of iBooks will be released.

I think at some point I have to admit I'm not an edge-chaser. If I get a G4 this month and G5 iBooks are announced in two months, I'll live. Anyone want to buy an iMac?

Meanwhile, I also want to sell one or two of my bikes. Too many bikes, not enough riding to go around, and the race bike needs an upgrade. Time to fix that by getting rid of the MTB for now. Anyone want to buy a Kona Kilauea with a Marzocchi Z2 fork?

But now I'm thinking about some New Year's resolutions that are coming to the fore. One of those was to think seriously about making myself more valuable, or at least better compensated. Taking a page from my father-in-law, I intend to stay at my day job, but make my after-hours work pay better. This will help with a lot of things, for a lot of reasons. More on this and other plans later. Also in the short term, I have to rack that crab apple wine!

The job jar is plumb full: take down the rest of the Christmas lights (I'm still way ahead of last year, when the husk of the Christmas tree mocked us from the backyard around Easter; this year it became mulch about two days after Epiphany), finish a bunch of side projects, work more on the bike-club site, and fit in some training. Maybe the most important project is this: I want to do a much better job of keeping my to-do list in hand. Not sure how yet, but I finally understand why both my father and my grandfather always have a small notepad in their breast pocket. It's because no Cousineau can remember anything.

Did I mention the bike training? I feel great! Motivated, well-planned, and ready to shock the world! This year, I have a plan, I have guidance, and I know what I'm going to do. I'm putting every Cat 4 in the Lower Mainland on notice now: Don't bother peaking between June 26 and July 3, because I am going to be in perfect form then, with patient tactics, a quiet soul, a sharp mind, and a strong body. I recommend you all go to the July 2-3 Race at the Edge in the Queen Charlottes, because I will be at the PoCo Classic (the, er, inagural running...) on July 3, and I will be so strong, determined, and successful that you will feel the sour kind of pain while I revel in the sweet kind of pain!