But I’m not. However, that still is one of my goals for this afternoon, while J is off on a road bike ride in Malibu.

It’s been a busy weekend, and it’s barely Sunday afternoon. Yesterday we decided to see Iron Man, so we headed over to the theater to buy tickets. However, we soon found that between us and the theater was a huge traffic jam, due to a nearby car show. We decided to continue with our errands and go to a different theater once we were done. The next stop was at the Goodwill donation point, where I gave away the first item for the 29-Day Giving Challenge–a lawn bag full of clothes. Now, there were probably more than 29 items in the bag, so I suppose I could have doled them out over the course of the Challenge. But that doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of much of anything, so I’m counting the bag as one item.

Next, we went to the pool, where I swam 900 meters and J swam 1100. I’m hoping to be swimming twice a week, and doing 1000 on one of those swims for at least a few weeks before the triathlon. We also need to do some ocean swimming, and I still need to get on the bike. Well, not this weekend.

After the pool, we ate at The Stand. This is probably the fanciest hot dog stand you’ll ever eat at. J had the Chili Dog and I had the Kraut Dog. The sauerkraut didn’t have the tang I was hoping for, but the hot dog and bun were quite good. This is a little splurgy for hot dogs, but I’d come back. Oh, and they have Thomas Kemper cream soda on tap, which is very nice.

We made a brief stop at home, where we learned that the car show was over, and headed out for Iron Man. The movie was a lot of fun, and Robert Downey, Jr., did a great job as Tony Stark. I’m still not all that taken with Gwyneth Paltrow, but I think the problems I had with Pepper Potts had more to do with the writing than with Paltrow’s performance.

Back home again, I said, “How do we not own Raiders of the Lost Ark on DVD? Check TiVo and see if it’s showing tonight.” J did and said, “Believe it or not, it’s starting in 10 minutes.” So we watched Raiders (as edited for television) for the umpteen-millionth time. It’s always good.

Today has been a little slower, although of course there was plenty of laundry to do. When J left on the bike, I headed out with a grocery bag full of movies on VHS. We’ve been replacing our VHS tapes with DVDs wherever possible, and the stack of outbound tapes was getting pretty high. This seemed like a worthy second day of giving for the Challenge, so I dropped them off at one of the local libraries.

I’m not sure how I’m going to fulfill the Challenge during the work week, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. I do know that I need to get up off the couch and work out!

In the interests of simplifying my life–and hopefully our home–I’ve joined the 29-Day Giving Challenge. I’ll be giving away something every day for 29 days. So I suppose that means I should find something to give away, and a way to do that.

Here’s hoping that I’ll be more successful at completing the challenge than I am at displaying the badge.

View my page on 29-Day Giving Challenge

All of my life, we’ve eaten a lot of Chinese food. When my brother and I were very young, our family didn’t eat out much. One of the few excursions we could afford on a semi-regular basis was dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I think there were two reasons for this. For starters, Chinese food was proportionally cheaper than it is now. And also we would only order three dishes–one for my mother, one for my father, and one for both my brother and me (that one was usually Beef with Oyster Sauce).

Later, it turned out that we just liked Chinese food, although the restaurant name wasn’t supposed to be that all-encompassing. In my mother’s opinion, a restaurant that didn’t specify its region wasn’t going to be any good. It wasn’t enough to advertise “Chinese food,” it had to specify Szechwan, Hunan, Cantonese, etc. We liked them all, so a specific region wasn’t the deciding factor. She felt that if the restaurant didn’t have a predominant regional identification, the owners and/or cooks didn’t know enough about the food they were making. Interestingly, many of our favorite restaurants did not meet this standard.

In Rockville, Maryland, the Far East Restaurant was our establishment of choice. Although the naming principle doesn’t seem to have held here, we always noticed that the Chinese patrons got porcelain teapots, while the European-descended patrons got plain metal teapots. These days that policy has changed, and there is equality of teapots at the Far East.

We moved to San Antonio, where we found the Wah Kee Seafood Restaurant. After several years in San Antonio, a multiplex movie theater opened near us, and the Wah Kee opened up in the adjacent shopping center. Another favorite was the Chinatown Cafe, which we liked so much that in 2004 J and I had our wedding rehearsal dinner there.

I found good Chinese food right away when I moved to New Jersey (good Mexican food proved more elusive). Unfortunately, several months later the restaurant burned to the ground. While that was definitely a loss, I can recommend Lotus Cafe in Hackensack and Taipei Noodle House in Teaneck.

There is a surprising lack of good Chinese food on the Westside of Los Angeles. About the best you can do is Hop Li. It’s pretty good, but not what it could be. No doubt this is largely because the center of Chinese restaurants in the area is in the San Gabriel Valley, but it’s still surprising that so densely populated an area can’t do better. When my grandparents lived in Monterey Park, my favorite restaurant was the Dragon Regency, where one night the chef made me a special dish of lemon cod fillets. I never ordered anything else, and eventually they put it on the menu. My grandparents and I were such loyal patrons that not only did they make me special dishes, they also gave me impromptu birthday celebrations, complete with bean cakes and gifts. Prior to our wedding, J and I went to Engaged Encounter (we will never get that weekend back), and I suggested that we have dinner at the Dragon Regency on our way to the seminary. I was devastated to find that the restaurant had closed, and I have yet to find anyone who can make that perfect lemon cod. Not even the excellent NBC Seafood, where we had dinner with two of J’s friends last year, can manage that particular dish.

So Chinese food has always played an important role in my family’s meals, although these days I haven’t got the slightest interest in Beef with Oyster Sauce. Chinese food was my brother’s comfort food when he was home sick from school, and I love it so much that one year I gave it up for Lent. And it’s one of the ways that my brother and I choose to honor my mother on her birthday. The two of them both loved Peking Duck, so that’s one of the dishes he’s sure to order. I don’t order any particular dish–but aside from the Dragon Regency’s lemon cod, I’ve never had one.

Tonight J and I had dinner at Yang Chow, in L.A.’s Chinatown. We found it a couple of years ago with my brother and his girlfriend (now his wife), and it seemed like the right place to celebrate my mother’s birthday this year. That was a good choice, as was the Beef with Black Bean Sauce that the chef made on request (oddly, the menu does include black bean sauce–but only on squid).

I just wish she’d been there to join us.

I’m starting to think that’s what got me into this triathlon. Sure, I did two last fall (one as a relay, in which I only did the swim). So logically I could do another. But somehow I’ve done almost no training, and I’m starting to wonder just how badly I may do, when the race is only a month away.

I’m not too worried about the bike and the run portions, because the race distances are so short. Still, I need to get on the bike a few times before the race, and I ought to do some walking.

The swim, though, is another matter. We’ll be swimming 1/2 mile, which is manageable when I’m training properly. But right now I’m not training properly. On Saturday we went to the pool, and I finished 600 meters. I’ll have to do 800 in the race, and that’s assuming that the course is accurate. To be on the safe side, I should be doing 1000 in the pool. I also need to get in a couple of ocean swims, although the 58-degree water temperature is not very inviting.

Now, I hope you’ll excuse me as I eat a vanilla cupcake from Sprinkles.

This weekend has been really hot, and it’s the kind of heat that comes with no air movement whatsoever. Naturally, this is when we ran out of water.

I believe that the city water supplies are safe. I’m not too worried about the pharmaceuticals in the water–the amounts, while measurable, are very low. Based on what I can tell, this is something that we should know about, not something that the media needed to turn into a panic-fest.

But our water tastes bad. It’s the pipes, not the water itself, so we get the reverse-osmosis water from those machines outside the supermarket, and have a stock of 5-gallon bottles that fit into a dispenser in our kitchen. This system works well until we stop paying attention to how many full bottles remain, and suddenly run out. So we just got back from a trip to the grocery store, where we also bought ice. Sometimes we also run out of ice.

Of course, it could always be worse. It looks like fire season may be starting, even though it’s early.

So if you go to Google and type in “Tragic Sandwich,” guess what comes up first! Of course you didn’t need to know that, because you’re already here. But I think it’s pretty cool, because the old Tragic Sandwich, which was on the Google-owned Blogger, never came up at all. Now I feel famous.

Last weekend was fun, although I still wish I’d been healthier, so that I could have enjoyed it even more. This coming weekend will also be busy, because we’re getting together with friends who moved out of town recently and are back for a visit, and we need to actually do more swimming. The triathlon isn’t coming up immediately, but we’re behind schedule in our training. Lousy colds. But by this weekend we both should be healthy again, and ready to swim…well, as many laps as we possibly can.

I wound up driving to work today so that I could get the smog test done on the way home. And it turns out that the shops I’m most likely to go to are in the neighborhood where we live. So I could have taken the bus and then just driven to the smog test location. On the other hand, I’m more confident that I’ll get there before they close if I drive straight there, instead of timing my departure from work to the bus schedule.

But still.

Does it make me a bad person if I don’t do anything? I mean, I’ll do the usual things. For example, I’ll ride the bus to work. I’ll eat organic yogurt for one of my snacks. But these are things I do every day, not things that I do specifically because it’s Earth Day.

It’s just…I have the feeling that the Farmer’s Market is going to be really crowded. And I have to work during all of the celebrations that I’ve been reading about. Yet I do think that Earth Day is important. I’m conflicted.

Also, is it appropriate or ironic if, after work, I get my car smog-tested?

I’m glad that I bought a really comfortable couch when I moved to New Jersey, and that I brought it with me to California when J and I got married, because I’ve spent a lot of time on it over the past two days. Both days I went to work in the morning, and then came home. Yesterday I spent all afternoon on the couch with a book, and I don’t think today shows signs of being any different.

Sadly, my weekend isn’t going to be a chance to recover. Tomorrow I have a fundraising benefit for my alumni club, and I can’t skip it because I’m the president. That ought to teach me to agree to run for office. After that we’re getting together for my sister-in-law’s birthday dinner. She and my brother are in town, and we’ll be joining them and her dad and stepmom. All of this is good, of course, but I wish I felt healthier so that I could enjoy it more! Plus I’m not entirely sure why people would want to be around me in the condition I’m in. Blech.

By the way, if anyone is looking for the old blogs (Cake Batter and the previous incarnation of Tragic Sandwich), they’re still out there. But rather than reconceive them, I decided to start fresh. But “Tragic Sandwich”? That’s a keeper regardless of blog hosting site.

All kinds of bugs have been floating around my office. I know people who have stayed home sick for days on end, more than once, with flu and stomach yucks. So far I’ve managed to avoid being sick, with the exception of one sinus infection back in late December and early January. But it looks like my run of luck is coming to an end, because I have definitely got a cold.

And of course, the weather is bizarre. I know that weather doesn’t cause illness, but it’s sure hard to feel that weather doesn’t cause illness when the highs are bouncing around the way they are. 70s today, 80 tomorrow, low 60s over the weekend. What the heck is that?

I’m not sure who sold me this virus, but it was a lousy deal.