Blessed by the Potato

I picked up a new chinup bar a few weeks ago from the fitness source (? — can’t remember the exact name of the store, but it was on Doncaster across the street from Cayne’s). I had gone in there planning to buy one similar to what Netbug has: something that screwed into the doorframe, since 6 screw holes is a lot less damaging and secure than those compression-fit bars can do. The guy ended up selling me on this one though, a Forza Door Gym, $50 with a $10 off sale. It’s kind of neat: it has handholds sticking out so you can position your hands in different ways in the pull-up, and supports itself partly on the top and partly across the door frame. Chin-ups, I’m finding, are a lot harder than they used to be. I think that’s got a lot to do with the fact that I used to be 120 lbs.

I’ve put it up in the doorway through to the kitchen, which is a good place for it because it means I do a chin-up or two every time I go in for a snack (I’ve heard it said that abs are made in the kitchen, so hopefully that placement will help). It’s very picky on how thick the door frame can be though, so this is also the only doorway in the whole house that this will work on! The other doors in the house are either too wide so it’s at too much of an angle for the part that goes over the top of the door frame to be at a good angle, or the top trim pieces are too tall: notice in the pictures that on this particular doorway, the wood piece over top of the door is smaller and plainer on the kitchen side (where the chinup bar is going over the top) than on the living room side, where the bar is. The bar only fits on this one doorway and only in the one direction: that fancier wood trim piece on the living room side is too tall for the supporting piece to hook over. I think I would recommend it as a neat, very easily removable chin-up bar (though I don’t remove it since it’s high enough that I don’t fear hitting my head, and will actually use it if it’s out all the time), but you should definitely check your doorways to see if it will fit. My parents’ house, however, seemed to have a lot more doors that fit. For reference, that doorway where it does work is 7″ thick, and the top trim piece is 2.5″ tall. A doorway 9.5″ thick is too much for it to fit, and likewise a top trim piece of 6″ was too big.

Note that it is not completely damage-free: after just about a week of use, there is some damage where the ends have dug into the trim (partly due to the trim coming out at that point so it takes a lot of weight on one small spot). I don’t think that our landlord will get too pissed off about that minor damage though, and it’s still less than I’ve seen compression-fit bars do.

Just as I was getting to the Park ‘n Fly the check engine light came on on my car, which is not what I need right now. I’ve got my license renewal/drive clean test coming up in October, and you can’t pass with a CEL on. It used to be that the mechanics would hook up the scan tool and read/clear the codes for free as long as I was in for something else, since of course if the code was something that required fixing, I would then likely fix it there as well… but last time they charged me $90 just to read the code about my O2 sensor starting to go (and I think as long as it hasn’t gotten worse I should still be able to pass). So I’m thinking about getting a scangauge, which can read the OBD-2 codes as well as having some other fuctions such as serving as a fuel consumption meter. It’s pretty expensive at $170, but it would be worth it if I could clear a few codes that I can safely ignore (in my experience with this car, that CEL goes on for a lot of ignorable reasons – including single engine pings).

Chicago is a much bigger city than I had imagined before coming here — bigger than Toronto, even.

The time change has already had one “gotcha” for me: I went down for the opening reception and was an hour early.

From walking around, I can see that Chicago is a city gone mad in a number of ways. The roads and trains and whatnot are all over the place: above ground, at grade, and underground. It still doesn’t seem to make the traffic any better. People honk all the time. Every single light change there’s someone honking somewhere. With all that honking I think the drivers here must just tune it out, so if someone tries to drive into them by changing lanes without looking (which happened to me on the way to the airport — time to take the license away from somebody’s granny!) they probably wouldn’t even react to the warning honk and just plow on through. Last night I saw 15 cars run a red light. A number of them were still running the red when the light for the other direction had already turned green. At that point, the cars running the red were all honking at each other, and some people were honking at the cars that did finally stop for the red!

That said, Chicago does have some nice architecture, as I recall reading about in The Time Traveller’s Wife.

I went out last night (Saturday night) looking for dinner around 11 pm, and almost everything was closed down. Today was no different, with most stores and restaurants being closed for sunday. The famous Uno and Due pizzarias were open, but had lineups spilling out onto the sidewalk.

The internet is working, and there are no cockroaches, which is a huge step up from San Diego. I should mention that the wired internet keeps crapping out, but there is wireless that seems to be working better. With a US IP address, I can finally check out hulu.com, which is how I spent my Saturday night here :) The hotel room is quite nicely furnished and laid out, however there’s no sound insulation from what’s going on in the hallway, so I could hear the maid knocking on everyone’s door in the morning. I think I’ll have to break out the earplugs tonight.