Ok — so it’s my birthday and I’ve decided to make it easy on the world. No guessing what I want this year because I’m just going to tell you all. I want an electric car. I’m tired of spending $60/week on gas. All I want is a tiny, lightweight, plug-in electric commuter vehicle. Ideally – it needs about a 40-50 mile range per charge. Why the hell don’t these exist? The Tango is close, as is the Myers Motors NmG (formerly the Corbin Sparrow). Unfortunately, the only Tango that you can actually *get* is currently $108,000 – and the NmG only has a 30 mile range – which would just barely get me from my house to my office. Additionally, the $36,000 price tag for the one-seat NmG is ridiculous. If you assume $4/gallon gasoline in my 22mpg Blazer versus the $0.02/mile electric NmG, I would need to put 225,000 miles (5000 commutes – or about 14.5 years) on an NmG just to break even… Versus an SUV!!!

Why isn’t there a fully electric version of the SmartCar yet? I guess I’ll just have to wait until my Blazer goes tits-up and see what’s available then. I hope that, by then, they’ll have figured out how to make an affordable, composite frame/body, fully electric, two seat commuter vehicle.

Last night at the gym was “Karen.” As workouts go, Karen is frighteningly simple to describe. You take a 20 pound medicine ball and hit a 10-foot-high target 150 times, making sure to squat down with the ball upon every catch (CrossFit calls this activity ‘wall-ball’). While “Karen” may be simple to describe, it is stupid hard for me to do. I’m short — I can admit it. My license says 5′6″, but in reality it’s more like 5′5″. In addition to just being short, I also have proportionally short arms. This is great for stuff like push-ups and overhead press, but it sucks for wall-ball. In fact, it’s almost as if I was engineered to suck at wall-ball. Here’s a list of things that make wall-ball suck:

• I have to jump with every shot to have a chance of getting the stupid ball to the target. After about 50 jumps, my calves began a very angry dialog with my brain.
• When the ball finally returns to my outstretched hands, gravity has had enough time to accelerate it to approximately Mach 0.98. It takes force of will to fight off the leading pressure wave.
• The only part of my body that seems capable of consistently slowing the medicine ball upon re-entry is my face. My face feels like I pissed off Mike Tyson last night.
• Once I’m actually holding the ball, my short arms and big head make it impossible to rest the ball against my chest. Instead, I end up holding it aloft in front of my face, burning my shoulders out throwing off my center of gravity.
• My altered center of gravity makes it hard to squat on my heels. Instead, I end up coming onto my toes, making even more work for my angry calves and causing my quads to do a whole lot of work that my hamstrings should be doing.

The end result of all this is me whining on my blog… At least I finished the workout – a first for me. I was hoping for under 10 minutes, but in the end wound up with 10:23.

I’m drained… I’m tempted to say that they’ve been “putting the wood” to us at the gym, but the tone of this post is intended to be upbeat and celebratory and the combination of the two might skew slightly homoerotic. So instead, I’ll just say that this week has been one hell of an ass-pounding.

• Monday: Max Squat & Overhead Press (2 PRs: 115kg and 67kg)
• Tuesday: Cindy (PR: 21 rounds)
• Wednesday: 5K run (PR: 19:54)
• Thursday: Diane (first attempt & PR: 9:05)
• Friday: 5-round Fight Gone Bad (PR: 402)

In general, things have felt a lot easier at the gym since I stopped losing weight. It’s amazing how different it feels when I’m not operating under a caloric deficit. It’s been a little over a month since I started eating to gain and I’m up from a low of 137 pounds to about 145 pounds. I figure I’ll just keep going up until I either look like a fatty or feel like the additional weight is hindering me, neither of which is the case yet.