It's the perfect Olympia place: delicious food in a funky/surly atmosphere. I can't imagine any Olympians who have NOT been there, so for the out-of-towners:

A brick storefront between a vintage store & a beat-up parking lot; on the parking lot side, a mural of superheros (mostly). Inside, the walls are covered with posters & other random flat things from the late 70s and 80s, many with specific northwest significance; but it doesn't have that "crazy crap on the walls" feel of a TGIFriday's, because it's genuinely shabby & time-worn, as are the vinyl booths & stools, the vintage video games, etc. Curiously, there's an enormous aquarium in the front window. The queuing space is cramped and awkward, and sometimes splits off towards both of the two doors. Staff tends towards the usual Oly-style punks, so some tattoos, some oddball hair, a little short/surly but not excessively so.

The pizza itself is mostly of the thin enormous slice variety. (They added a "Sicilian style" pizza a while ago, but I don't ever get it.) Great crust, a bit of a crunch but not too crispy. The basic varieties are rock solid, but I have a fondness for some of the oddball versions, particularly anything without sauce: the Greek (iirc), which includes spinach & feta -- we usually add sausage if getting a whole pie, and the Al Green, just cheeses and broccoli. No, seriously, the broccoli is really good. Eating there, a single slice is enough to fill me up most of the time. When we get a pizza to go, I have to be careful not to scarf down WAY too much.

I just wish they delivered. (I did once bring home a pizza on the Xtracycle. In the rain. It was AWESOME.)

When I was a teenager, in college, and a young adult fresh out of school, I didn't know how to drive. Oddly enough, that's not the thing I wish I'd learned earlier in my life. Between the bus, walking, and friends, I got around pretty well, and I have a life-long comfort with getting around without a car.

But....

I really wish I'd learned how to ride a bike before age 30! So many places I could've gotten to so much more quickly, for one thing. It's an interesting hypothetical question to wonder what would've happened to my weight if I'd been able to bike to UWPC, at least some of the year, when we lived in East Tacoma. (Altho that would have been a sketchy 'hood to bike through.) And it would've been fun to have a bike handy when we lived in Lakewood. Not that biking to work would have been that big a deal, but it would have been nice to bike from work through Fort Steilacoom Park and out to the grocery store.

I also wonder if a lot of late night walks would have been late night bike rides, and if that would have been a better thing. Yes, I was probably insane in my younger years; I took a lot of really long walks quite late a night, particularly during my time in Tacoma. But it was how kept what I had of my sanity back in the day: thinking by walking, plus the time alone that I often needed. What would those times have been like if I'd had the extra speed, range, and exercise intensity of a bike?

It also seems entirely possible to me that riding a bike earlier in my life would have made it easier for me to finally learn how to drive. These last 5+ years I've increased my sense of balance, my ability to judge traffic, and my understanding of gear ratios. :) Not that I'm all that as it is by any means! Still, I can imagine what it would have meant to have gotten all that earlier.

All that said, I try not to indulge in that sort of wishful thinking too often. It happened when it happened, and that turned out to be a good moment in my life to have begun bicycling. The Townie had just come out, I was living somewhere with good places to bike, C was there to encourage me. As I said on the day I got it, "suffice it to say that I am very happy I finally got a bike, and oddly enough, happy I waited until C discovered this one."

I tend to get the occasional sinus headache, and in the main it seems to be an issue of hydration. Counter-intuitively, headache formulas that include caffeine seem to be the only thing that works. And even better on top of that is a coffee-based beverage, like a mocha. Just opens my head right up again.

Several years ago, I suffered from excruciating and frequent headaches, including the worst of my entire life, one that sent me home from work in a freaking cab. I was given some medication that knocked out the headaches, but knocked me out too. Massage helped, chiropractic not so much.

And then they went away. I don't really know what happened. (Well, I have a reasonably good idea, but it's just a wild hunch.)

So I'm happy to just get ordinary headaches that I can deal with in ordinary ways.