Lawryde Improves

I attempted to Hypermile for two days to and from work to see how fuel efficient I could drive my manual transmission 2007 Elantra.

The key to hypermiling is to have a good CD you want to listen to so you’re not bored with all the extra time it’s going to take you or embarrassed by all the people who pass you. Basically you drive how old people fuck. The goal is to keep moving at all times and have the engine RPM as low as possible. This means getting into 5th gear as quickly as possible and using the cruise control whenever possible.

My round trip is about 20 miles. I travel through the city with stop and go driving onto a state highway that is 55 and then onto a country back road which is 40. The EPA lists my vehicle at 28/36.

The Elantra has a running average MPG calculator. I was able to get 37.6, 36.1, 36.7, and 36.3 as measured work to home, home to work and the same the second day. That’s pretty fucking good. I did better than the EPA estimate which is basically a rating that is given at 55 mph without getting the vehicle up to speed. Did it really make a difference? It isn’t particularly fun to drive that way, and it takes longer to get everywhere. I think I normally get around 28 on my trip to and from work. So in those two trips I burned 1.11 gallons of gas. It cost me about $4.52 based on the price of light sweet crude. If I had driven the way I normally do I would have burned 1.43 gallons of gas spent about $5.81. So if there are 260 work days in a year I’d save around $168 assuming I could drive like that in the winter. Maybe if the cost of gas doubles it would become more worth it, but until then I’ll drive how I normally do.

I’ve been playing hockey twice a week to try and improve my game and my hands. Based on my performance last night at rat hockey it seems to be working. I had a goal and two assists. The Bradley hockey players are actually passing me the puck and telling me I’m doing a good job. I understand the dynamics of the game and where I should be better now too. It was a good skate and I feel pretty good about how I’m progressing. I feel old now though that I can make the excuse that I can’t play as well some of the dudes on the ice because I’m 10 years older than they are. I think I had more points though than these two high school kids who came out to skate. They were quick and got a bunch of shots, but they just weren’t patient enough, too much semen backed-up in their brains.

And I leave you with that eloquence.

I feel kind of dirty

I was in one of those online mudslinging debates with a bunch of angry feminists.

I preface this by saying my wife would identify herself as a feminist. She’s made a choice that I think these angry feminists would abhor. She’s decided to get married, have children, and stay at home with them while they are young. (The horror!) My boss at work is an intelligent, strong woman who has the respect of her piers. The validation engineer, whom I go to for advice on testing is also a woman engineer, also intelligent and well respected. When I come to her seeking advice she takes the time to have a thoughtful discussion with me, free of personal attacks and thinking every word that comes out of my mouth is an attempt to show my male dominance over her.

I share in the housework; regardless of what it’s gender roll is considered. I also take an active role in raising our children. I cook dinner every night because I like to.

It turns out I’m a closet sexist.

Why?

I made the assertion that based on observing my son, and many other young children at our Attachment Parenting functions that very young children have a hard-wired propensity to play with gender specific toys.

Carter likes trucks and cars. He doesn’t like baby dolls.

I was met with rude personal attacks on my intelligence level and claims of being an “armchair scientist” and a sexist.

I never said that girls and boys CAN’T or SHOULDN’T or WON’T EVER play with opposing genders toys. I simply said they tend to gravitate to those toys and a certain type of play.

I was initially wrong in thinking that it was due to instincts from when we were uncivilized monkey men living to survive. It turns out that it’s actually hormonal, and studies were done that supported this, although I found them in an undergrad text (how yucky and common).

They disregarded these decade old studies and sited a study not specifically looking at children’s play and propensity to toy choosing, simply on hormones creating both boy and girl behavior in both sexes. I’m sure that study is true. It still doesn’t address my point. Carter wanted to dress and carry around a doll for about 2 days after Oz was born, but he was right back to the trucks and cars after he lost interest in the baby. I guess the rampant sexism in Sesame Street has thwarted our parenting attempts to let him play with any toys he wants.

I was then told that raising kids gives you no special knowledge.

The responsibility for another human being’s life doesn’t teach you anything, or give you any special insight into the human condition.

So I thought maybe I was crazy and I spoke to my validation engineer who has 3 kids, 2 boys and a girl. She was a successful woman. Did she see the same things as sexist Lawryde?

I asked her about it cold, without prefacing her to my debate. She agreed that her boys gravitate to boy toys and a rough type of play. I asked her if she thought it was a social thing or if it was just the way they were.

She thought it was just the way they were. I said, well are you sure that television and your parents and how you treat them doesn’t affect it. She said it would have some affect, WHICH I AGREE WITH. I talked to her about those first moments when they were just starting to choose what they like (around 1.5 years and 2) and asked her if they just kind of gravitated towards gender specific toys. She agreed and agreed that social factors would be almost non-existent at that point. We have different parenting styles so now I have a sample size of two with the same results and 10-year-old research that backs me up.

I then told her about my debate with these immature (still in school or just starting their real adult lives, no kids of their own, not responsible for anyone but themselves, but experts on child development, can’t see the forest for the trees, full of advanced degrees and debt from going to school but no idea how practical things work, knowing everything about me and my typical feminist thoughts, enlarge clitoris’ and labia that look like balls due to high androgen hormone levels during gestation, not understanding respect is something that is earned not implied, mad that I was, by all standard measures, smarter than all of them in high school and now make more money than they do and I’m happy with my loving beautiful family, should be wondering if maybe it’s not that I’m facing sexism on a daily basis, but that really I’m just a big fucking jerk and a terrible excuse for a human being.) (Was that just immature of me? Fuck it. This is my corner of the internet.) girls I knew from high school who were convinced that only social factors affect toy choice in children. She said that before she had kids she had some of the same thoughts, but after having both boys and girls she sees things differently.

The angry feminist will be talking about me now, because that’s what women do. Emails and text messages and phone calls. “Oh, my God. Look what Lawryde wrote. What a sexist asshole!” “He’s so predictable and stupid and his children are going to grow up objectifying women and raping goats.” “We’re so right, and so awesome and so much smarter and better than him.” “Yay, Us!”

I’m sad, it also looks like I lost a facebook friend. (Tear)

I feel clean now.

Full Text of Debate

And I think the modern philosopher Kanye West put it best:

Kick-Off to Kitchen ‘08

As I said before, our kitchen sucks balls, deep full mouth sucking.

We’ve gone through several design sit-downs with Lowes. Today I laid down some cash and got the cabinets and countertops ordered.

They’ll be delivered on the first of March.

Our build date is March 15. My dad and I will be doing 100% of the labor. The wealthy don’t understand the satisfaction you can get from putting something together with your own sweat and blood.

I’m looking forward to the new kitchen.

There will be pictures of the process, as with all of my remodel projects.

I shaved my beard last night. Just had one of those feelings it needed to be gone and grown again. My face was cold this morning in the –20°C wind chill.

It’ll grow back in like a week.

Until then I look like my naïve high school self, with the wonder and horror of 10 years since then only evident in my eyes.

That didn't take long

Wow, one day and some dude looking for dog on woman action was directed to last nights post. It's a crazy world we live in. I'm trying to think of some joke about kosher food, but it's not really coming to me.

We got our asses handed to us today against the B-league team. It was a good skate. I had one assist. We lost 12-3.

After, me and my hockey comrades went to Taco Johns for some food. The dudes I hang out with are cool and tattooed. Good people. NOT ENGINEERS. We're going to hang out and drink some beer tomorrow night. I'm going to be a bad kid and stay out late on a school night. It's not every week you have no responsibilities other than letting your dog out, and not burning down the house.