Riding the Horse on the Goose.

My latest carrot acquisition:

Its girthiness is typical of that carrot variety (Kuroda, maybe?), but I’m easily impressed these days. With the latest travel restrictions, my world is limited to eating, sleeping, and playing on the island. But my interest in oversized vegetables started when Zoée shared with me a video featuring her friend’s butternut squash. Zoée did an artful slow pan of the seemingly never-ending squash, which was at least five feet long…. maybe ten? I was already shocked by its length when I realized that I was only halfway through the video. I was inspired to look up vegetable world records.

There, I found my new dad:

He doesn’t know I exist, but that’s not important. His name is Peter Glazebrook, and his thing is growing massive vegetables and posing adorably with them. I wonder if competitive vegetable growers are fascinating people to be around or total bores.

I’ve yet to decide who to make my new mom and brother. My real sister can keep her post: she’s chill.

Other than provide my friends with a carrot update, I surveyed them on their pet peeves. I let them tell me–in a roundabout way–what little things I do that they find annoying. They all agreed that it was difficult to separate a pet peeve from just being overly judgmental, or what counts as a pet peeve in general. For example, littering isn’t a pet peeve because it makes you an objectively terrible person. The only people okay with littering are the ones doing it themselves.

Thanks to a friend’s pet peeve, I have eliminated a word from my vocabulary. This person despises this word so much that I am afraid even to type it out. The word means to use but has more letters, including a ‘z’.

I have a few pet peeves that I recognize as being ridiculous, such as:

1. Slow walkers. It is a horrible pet peeve to have in a city like Victoria. Everybody walks slowly here. Pre-COVID, I was passing walking clubs: those members should have walked home in shame.
2. People who lick their fingers to turn pages or count money. I hated this before COVID made it okay to hate it.
3. The way some (a lot of) people eat ice cream. They’ll put a spoonful in their mouth and then pull out the spoon with some ice cream still on the spoon. Ditto with eating a cone and kind of spitting the ice cream back out. Like a weird ice cream blowjob. I’m lactose intolerant so I can’t eat ice cream without consequences, but being subjected to people’s annoying ice cream eating habits is my number one reason for not wanting to go out for ice cream.
4. Unnecessary lols. Typing lol isn’t bad in itself, but have people forgotten that it stands for “laughing out loud”? I’d ask someone, “How was your day?,” and have their response be something like, “lol it was good”. So, I’m imagining them reading my message and going, “HAHAHAHA, WHAT A QUESTION!” And I’m not buying it. Lol responsibly around me, please. (Oh, and do not write lol if you are conversing with me by paper and pen. I will judge you up and down.)
5. The sentence, “You have way too much time on your hands.” Yes, I try to spend my time doing things I enjoy. What the devil?

With my overabundance of time, on Sunday, I went for that second ride with Maggie and Davy, with a special guest appearance by… Yann! I already can’t avoid Yann: we work together. Anyway, he’s still an enjoyable riding buddy to have.

Here I am, holding up two fingers to indicate the number of new riding buddies I have, both of whom are behind me:

We cycled the Galloping Goose Trail, a 55km trail that begins in Victoria and ends in Sooke. I did not notice any geese, but at one point, we found ourselves behind three unleashed dogs with peculiar gaits. “Dogs or goats?” Yann asked.

They were goats: a couple had taken their pet goats out for a walk on the trail. I was impressed by Yann’s goat-spotting skills.

Horseback riding is permitted on this trail, so was a lot of weaving around horse poo.

Speaking of poo:

These three are good at pointing out poo while cycling. All their poo alerts may have stopped me from getting horse poo on my Horse.

I’d never cycled the full length of the Galloping Goose. Instead, I’ve stopped about ten kilometers before the end. I’d been edging the trail the whole time. Not by choice, but because one of the bridges had been closed for more than a year and I never cared to take the dodgy detour for the sake of reaching the end.

The end of not making it to the end ended on Sunday. Look at the range of emotions displayed here:

Glum, indifferent, and happy.

Although I’d been in the saddle for more than five hours cycling on Sunday, I thought it’d be a good idea to hop on the trainer to do an extra hour. The reason is that I signed up for a six-week Zwift training program called FTP Builder. The last day to do the last workout of week four was on Sunday, and up until then, I hadn’t skipped a workout. I felt lightheaded thirty minutes in, so I dismounted my bike, mopped up my pool of sweat, and went to bed.

Having all that time on my hands is exhausting.

Back to pet peeves, here’s my #6:

Towels folded like this:

This is an especially irrational pet peeve. But, why fold it like that when you could tuck the edges away neatly like this:

It doesn’t take more effort. You can fold your towels however you like in your home. Just know that I’ll be drying my hands on them in contempt.

My future partner, however, will be required to go beyond tucking the edges in when folding the laundry. I want towel swans. I demand to open the bathroom cabinet to find a family of towel swans waiting to be rubbed all over my body!