Yep, It's Monday

It's good that there are articles like this floating around. Otherwise it would be hard to explain away my complete lack of results this season. But put in the proper perspective, I'm just pacing myself. I'm aiming to peak for the late season races, so doing well now would mean I'm peaking too early. Yeah, that's it.

Two weeks to Copperopolis. I'm sure that one will hurt me. Hopefully I can improve my standings a bit though.

Good thing Isbell is coming into town, a diversion will be nice. Hopefully SF will show up in support. The previous times I've seen him, SF did not represent itself well. This surprises me because peeps show up big-time for DBT.

My Journey Through Hell

The light at the end of the tunnel.

Home

Is good...

What should have been a simple, fly out, meet, fly back kind of trip turned into- oh so much more.

Durango, Co is a great place. I love the Southwest and even though it was cold, it was quite beautiful. The high desert air is great, and everything was going fine.

Come yesterday morning, we wake up to snow (expected). We head to the airport to see if we can get earlier flights (since everything was going so well, we got to leave early) only to find lines- long lines. The Durango airport is not big, so lines were a surprise. This is when things started getting bad. The first two flights of the day to Denver had already been cancelled, and though the forecast was predicted to get worse, United didn't cancel the remaining three flights (Thanks United!), so we waited. After they cancelled the 1:20 flight it was clear that alternative plans were needed. We then found out that all the flights on Friday (today) were already sold- not good.

Our choices, hang in Durango on indefinate standby, til who knows when (edit: Isn't that what indefinate means?); or get a car and drive somewhere else . ABQ is the closest airport, but we were initially told that there were no available flights until Sat AM. That was going to work for me because I have a race Saturday (tomorrow) morning. Where else can we go? Phoenix? Vegas? (Vegas!). Time for help, and who better to help than the wonderful E. First off, E says it's 9 hours to drive to Phoenix and almost 10 to drive to Vegas (Vegas!). That's far... too far. Now I guess I could have figured this out if the Durango airport free wifi worked, but it didn't. But since E is better than free, I was better off anyway. E finds flights out of ABQ the same night. "Book 'em" says I (probably a little more pleading than that). So I read her info and she fills out the 73 pages worth of info required to buy a plane ticket, and presto! No flights left. Try again, repeat, give up.

Ok, no flights out of Durango, no flights out of ABQ, what to do? I try to call Delta, and spend a few moments yelling at the f^&%$ing automated voice system (hint for Delta, when I say "representative" it means I'm tired of talking to your stupid computer and would like to talk to a stupid human- maybe even two or three stupid humans before I finally would get to talk to someone useful) when I see E on call waiting. I click over, and she has good news. Flights out of ABQ the next morning. Booked, done. Now I need to get to ABQ, and the fun just begins...

Three of us rent a piece-of-crap American rental car and hit the road.

SW Colorado/NW New Mexico is both beautiful and mortifying. Allow me to illustrate:

A Church:


A Better (?) Church:



A Beauty Salon:



And a Sypmosium (you have to trust me that it really did say UFO on the left)



A view from the road:



A Different View From The Same Road:


The picture can't really illustrate how cool this was, but look at it big and marvel:



The Sandia Mountains, and the end of our Journey:



But of course it's not complete without the crappy phone pic of the casino tent in the middle of nowhere:



ABQ was great. We had a great dinner, I met Uncle & Aunt E, and I went to bed, woke up and came home.

The End

At least there's this

Where there's a will, there's a way.

As a bartender and trainer at a national restaurant chain, Rebecca Brown earned a couple thousand dollars in a really good week. Now, as a dancer at Chicago's Pink Monkey gentleman's club, she makes almost that much in one good night.

Damn I'm slow

The Bariani Road Race was yesterday. Great race, great course, well run event. The weather wasn't too bad, some wind, a little rain, a little hail, but not bad.

My day started ok, I was too far back from the start. The narrow roads made it really hard to move up, and there was a lot of speed up/ slow down going on as the accordian effect played its part. Then came the climb, not even much of a climb really, but then, I'm not much of a climber. Somehow I went from being mid-pack to back of pack at the bottom of the climb (I think from people dropping off moreso than people passing me). About 30m from the top, I was dangling off the back, struggling to latch back on, and I popped. After muttering some expletives about getting dropped (again) I realized I needed to gear down, spin over the hill and try and blast the downhill to latch back on. One problem, the F&^%ing derailer won't budge, nothing, the lever is completely locked up. So I'm mashing the big ring trying to get over this little hill that has managed to separate me from the group, I get to the top, and I pull over to fix the stupid bike! WTF?? I was at the top of the hill, I didn't need the stupid little ring anymore! Yeah, just a little shy of brilliant there.

So I spent the next 2+ laps busting ass to salvage what I could, and at least make it a good training ride. Resulting in a most awesome 35th, out of 41 finishers, and a few DNF's.

Fail

Lot's more racing coming up, I need to step things up or it's going to be a very humiliating few weeks.

But enough about my own failings, let's turn to Failblog so I can laugh at the failings of others.

To wit:



and

Think You've Got it Bad?

At least your not Dude.

The Bethlehem Township man accused of throwing a drinking party for his 16-year-old son last year tried to kill himself and his 4-year-old son this week, according to Northampton County Court records.

Unfortunately this will disqualify him from the Father Of The Year competition.

Bullshit!

I've ridden through this intersection many times. I guess the MVPD has decided they can use cyclists to raise enough $$ to justify their existence.

I'm sure there are people that would argue the justification on something this ridiculous (probably the same people that agree with the Pope).

The whole concept of "To Protect and Serve" is a farce. The only thing something like this serves, is to clog up the courts while all 30 of these guys have to individually dispute the charge, which will get reduced, if not dismissed.

It seems that rules/laws were put in a place for a reason. I'll assume that the reason, in this case, was not to create municipal revinue. When the laws aren't used for the purpose they were created (ie safety), then what good are they?

This serves no good. It's a waste of much time and throws away a lot of good will that might be needed some day (like the next time a vote comes up for law enforcement?).

Oh Well

I'd been doing really well too. But moving, being busy at work, being unable to successfully negotiate AT&T into installing a phone line, have all conspired to keep me from updating this little bloggy thing.

Moving is not fun. It's annoying, frustrating, exhausting, and frustrating. It means having to deal with entities like AT&T and Ikea. AT&T gives me a headache, you think it would be more efficient for them to just do the work that I'm paying them for than to have to listen to me complain about it every day. But maybe that's just me, I like to make problems go away by solving them, not just ignoring them.

I realized last night, that Ikea is a lot like a casino. They just batter you into submission by overloading your senses. Giving you way too much to look at, while contantly interupting the music with announcements in an overly crowded area designed to not let you move freely through the space.

It's enough to make we want a drink.

But it's a nice place, and E is cool, when she's not hitting me in the head with Ikea parts. (Oh sorry, babe, No! put that down! AAAHHHHhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!)

I did manage to get a 50 mile ride in Saturday, and another 35 yesterday. I hadn't ridden Tam in a while. I remembered it was hard, but it was harder than I remembered.

Bariani RR is this weekend. It will be fun. My first race with the ZR team, hopefully it goes well.

Moving

No riding for me this weekend. My weekend was basically:

1 Pick up item
2 Place item in box, repeat until full.
3 Carry box down stairs.
4 Move stack of boxes down the street
5 Walk back up the street, return to #1

Continue until exhaustion, then go to Yancy's and drink beer while surfing.

Since my dsl isn't installed yet.

At least I have an apartment full of boxes to show for two days of work.

But it's mostly over, and we've mostly survived. So all is well

... And the Horse You Rode In On

Apparently the saying "Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child" isn't quite severe enough for the Catholic Church. They're going with "Kill the Bitch, Go To Heaven." Awesome. Y'all just keep supporting them- doing whatever you want to whoever/whatever you want. Just make sure to confess and say a few "Hail Mary's" and you'll be Dead living the Good Life.

Jason F@cking Isbell

Jason tore up the Beachland Ballroom. Good crowd, great show, really good time. This was probably my favorite Isbell show yet. I can't wait to see him again next month. So far SF hasn't shown Isbell the love that it shows the Truckers, and I don't know why. Hopefully that all changes