Tangerine Dream On

First thing's first - for those who are waiting with baited breath, yes, I actually did get on the exercise bike last night. Though it wasn't that straightforward. I finished the last blog entry, and got up from watching the DIY. Went around to the bike, took some of the hats and other clutter off it.
"What the hell are ya doin'?" asked d, not unreasonably.
"I'm ridin' my ass off baby," I replied...as it turned out, entirely unreasonably. You see, since the last time I got on the bike, we've moved the room around, and, as it turned out, the power cord for the bike no longer reached any available socket. Now, my previously noted DIY skills (ahem) pretty much reached out, covered me in confusion, and made me breathe out and scratch my head and go "hmm."
"Seriously, what are ya doin' over there?"
d was getting pissed off, because I was quite seriously interrupting her increasingly desperate attempts to like Nicholas Lyndhurst in something other than "Goodnight Sweetheart", and because I'd waited till late in the night to decide to get healthy.

Then she read the blog, and laughed.
I laughed too, and came and sat down, giving up on the idea of getting on the bike. d got up, found an extension lead (personally, I think she has a thing going with the extension lead fairy), and plugged it in.
So, thanks, as ever, to the wonder that is my wife, I managed to cram some exercise into Sunday too.

But today's subject is fruit. As you know, I've been trying to raise my metabolic rate by eating fruit between meals, and continually stimulating the system. But in the spirit of "I cannot tell a lie", I need to come clean on something.

All last week, I said I was eating tangerines. I'm here to tell you, that's simply not true.
Turns out I was eating clementines.
Simple mistake, right?

Can I ask - has there been some weird Homeland Security Act covering tangerines in the last few years that I wasn't previously aware of? I mean, when I was a kid, everything that was round and orange and wasn't an orange...was a freakin' tangerine as far as anyone in Britain knew! But you could get into them with a thumb and a bit of persuasion. Now there are tangerines, clementines, tangellos, mandarins, and half a dozen other small, peelable orange...things. But I'm here to tell you, while the proliferation has been wild, the original tangerine has become one tough-ass sonofabitch. I tried to get into one this morning and nearly broke a thumb. I scraped and pulled and refused to bite into the damn thing, and ended up sawing into it with a letter-opener. It was like someone had encryped the juice with multiple security files and dropped it a vault at the CIA or something. By the time I was done, there was peel everywhere, and juice splattered over everything...including my computer. I have a sticky z key now...

So, to be clear, if you wanna get into a modern, tough-ass 21st century tangerine - give up, it's really not worth it. Yes, Clementines may be small and relatively tasteless, but ease of access is...pretty much everything.