Jordi helped me break into my dad’s house a few weeks ago. I stayed outside on the front lawn while he entered the house using my spare key. Moments later, Jordi trotted out of the house, cradling a bunch of goods in his arms. He told me he’d scored a bunch of spark plugs. But why? I didn’t ask for spark plugs. I didn’t even need spark plugs. I looked at the so-called spark plugs and recognized them as cheap MEC bike lights. Wonderful. Thanks, Jordi.
Fortunately, all this happened in my sleep. My dreams are usually a mishmash of recent events, conversation topics, and things I’ve seen. The appearance of MEC bike lights happened in reserve. Just now, Jordi asked whether I still had the rear bike light I’d borrowed from him over a month ago. I recall returning it to him ASAP, but I had a medley of cheap rear lights in my bike stuff bin and gave those to him.
In reality, screens have overtaken my life. Jordi and I started the new Goosebumps on Disney+ at the start of October, expecting it to be similarly cheesy to the original series from the 90s.
But, ermahgerd, no, this is good. Remember Justin Long? He finally stopped looking like a teenager, and it’s jarring. The show is still full of the juvenile horror elements RL Stine is known for, such as a ventriloquist’s dummy coming to life, but the special effects has come a long way since its glowing-eyed golden retriever days.
Zoée also alerted me that there was a new cult docuseries on Netflix: Escaping Twin Flames. Twin Flames Universe appears to be similar to the NXIVM cult, without the subtlety or midnight volleyball. The documentary gave me the impression that not much coercion or manipulation was needed to recruit members. It’s almost as if a Jesus-lookalike leader is all that is required to convince people to make 12 monthly installments of $333 for online classes.
The objective of the Twin Flames Universe is to find the person formed from the same original soul as yourself. The guru and his wife promises to connect their recruits to their Twin Flame and coach them through the path of eternal love. Their mission statement can be found on their website, a terrible mess of word salad and photos overlayed with animated effects. Whoever designed their website picked up all their coding knowledge from their MySpace era.
I laughed when an interviewee discussed her identical twin who’d abandoned her family for the Twin Flames Universe said, “It was interesting to me because she already had a twin, which is me.”
When I realized the documentary wasn’t rationalizing the allure of this cult, I became a little invested in the fruit bowls that often appeared in the foreground.
That bowl is unfit to accommodate that many oranges. I was waiting for a runaway orange.
Which is what probably happened at some point and got edited out of the interviews. And if you go back to that first photo, there’s also an orange on the kitchen counter, deemed unworthy of being the apex orange.
It wasn’t just Keely who overestimated the capacity of their fruit bowl, but also the cult expert, Dr. Lalich.
That’s one precarious apple!
Overall, I was entranced by this docuseries for the wrong reasons. Strangely, I found Goosebumps more believable, too.
To add to my screen time, I’ve been getting on the trainer every other night. As it turns out, I’m unfit to train 5/7 nights a week. I’ve been running my Garmin simultaneously to collect data from my heart rate monitor and the power meter pedals. (I don’t have a paid Strava subscription now, and Zwift doesn’t display data in a practical format.)
With my Garmin enabled, the data gets uploaded to the Garmin Connect website. One of the charts displayed is “Performance Condition,” which is generated using the real-time percentage deviation from my baseline VO2 max. estimate. In simpler terms, it’s a measure of my fitness based on my usual standard. This is from my November 4th session:
I started crapping out after 17 minutes and never recovered. This graph looked more reasonable for the November 3rd session. I won’t be able to complete the TT Tune-Up Plan in the proposed 8 weeks. 10, maybe?
My bike fit on the trainer needs some adjustment as well. The power meter pedals measure the force applied across the axle on which the pedal body sits.
This is from a typical outdoors ride:
Rarely has there been a disparity greater than 3mm. On the trainer, however, this is my norm:
This is even after I added washers to the pedal threads and sliding my cleats over a bit. How? Why? I’d ignore this data, except the discomfort in my left foot/knee is noticeable. Have I become bow-legged? Should I be compensating with excessive fruit? I have small bowls that would be perfect for a tower of oranges.
To bide my time until I get a sewing machine, I enlarged the templates from the great white shark kit and made a Halloween edition BLÅHAJ.
I give you ZOMBLÅHAJ! 20% greater! 100% bloodier!
AND THE EYES GLOW IN THE DARK!
squaremeat.com 