Bacon-pa-looza

For some reason I got it in my head to soak and cook some black-eyed peas, but without a plan for a meal. So I find myself looking in Bittman, and find out that I need some slab bacon or other pork product... and off I go to the Kroger around the corner. What I find, and cannot seem to live without, is a spectrum of the salted pork products, which I find myself chuckling at when I got home. Sure, all the Vegans and Veggies will be horrified, but hopefully this is somehow set off by the recent delight I have found in tempeh. And if I ever need to defend myself against roving bands of veggies, I'm sure Matt, Jeff, Warren, and other bacon enthusiasts will back me up on the pork product issue.

As I'm slicing the fat off the salted pork, I can help but hear the line "richest creamiest fat in the world..." repeating over and over in my head.

While seeking out aformentioned pork products, I walk past this label, and double-triple-take ("as the vivacious feline makes her way into the delta of the alleyway" - 10 points and a slice of bacon to whoever can name the song without reaching for a search engine. Bonus points and a full breakfast if you know the whole song/poem) as I pass by this label. I swear the first time I saw it, it was Dirt Green Tea. "Now who the heck would want any of that?"

And then this afternoon in the bank parking lot, I walked over this sad little scene. This poor little pipe fitting, forever embedded in the asphalt, never to be a proper pipe fitting in the wild and woolly world out there. How very, very sad.

So yeah, that was my afternoon/evening.

Oh yeah, I got on the bike and went to crit practice. It was hot out. My fitness is lacking. I was slow, and fell off the back lots of times.

Let's not talk about it... mmmkay?

(still) too many

Yesterday on the Diane Rehm Show, author Alan Weisman was talking about his new book and associated topics. The premise of the book and conversation had to do with what the earth would look like if humans weren't around any more, how long it would take for ecologies to re-establish and stabilize, how long human monuments would remain... things like that. Along the way, the unavoidable issue of (over)population came up.

Overpopulation has been a long-standing gripe for me. There's a whole collection of problems that lead back to this one simple fact: there are too many humans on this planet, and they don't seem to notice that it's a problem.

We're producing ever-increasing debris and garbage. We're struggling (and even fighting wars) over sources of energy. We're gobbling up land needlessly and shitting all over it. And by "we" I mean all of us humans. And few notice or seem to care - everyone just wants to breed, breed, breed. When there is no food, no space, no peaceful places, one should not produce new children.

Consider China for a moment - about a billion people (uhh... I mean 'consumers'). 60 years ago, the government even put in place a one-child policy to avoid the pending meltdown that would occur due to over-population. Unintended consequence: with a preference for male children, China now has a large population of young and middle-aged single men, whose female counterparts may all have been married off already. I don't think I need to explain how a couple million rowdy boys can be a serious political stability problem. (it even makes a cameo appearance as a plot device in Shadow of the Hegemon) ... and that even before talking about all the other wacky situations China is facing.

Heck, even the Dali Lama knows it's a problem - though for him, it's more of a problem reconciling his environmentalism with his love for every human life (so he says, in "10 Questions for the Dali Lama"). Me, not so much with the paradox reconciliation.

There's just too many people on the planet. It was 6,000,000,000 in 1999. 7 years later, it's around 6,600,000,000. Think it's going to stop growing any time soon? If only...

Icelanders/shark

Seems like a lot of work to eat an animal full of toxins. Don't they have baby seals to eat?

Walmart-ification

The saddest thing about the Wal-mart-ification of America? Not that every product sold was outsourced overseas, has a design lifetime of 1 year, is non-repairable/disposable, and gives you cancer... and not that every job will be as either a cashier or a greeter at Wal-mart... it's that we'll all be shopping at Wal-mart, which, given what I've seen at their stores, means the average waist measurement of the population will be 52 and we'll have to use walkers and canes to walk because we'll have lost the ability to move under our own power.

not-so-criminal

Technically they're still probably guilty of trespassing and illegal entry, but still, it's pretty funny.

Death Ride wrap-up

It was good. Hard. Long. Getting on the bike at 6:00 am and rolling back to the cabin at 6:30 pm makes for a loooong day. Fred described it best: "You know what it's like to go for a 4-5 hour ride and think 'that was a long ride', but in this case, it's a whole day that disappeared while you were on the bike."

The track here shows the route - out and back to the far side bottom of Monitor Pass, same for Ebbett's, and then to the top of Carson's and then back. 127 miles total. Max speed: 53.6 mph



We got in on Thursday, assembled from various flight schedules, picked up luggage, bikes, and drove to the cabin. Along the way, little would we know that the playing of Rammstein's Amerika would result in it becoming the theme song for Team Old Style. We got unpacked at the cabin and went for a Massive Dinner and grocery shopping trip. Ate at a Basque restaurant family-style. That means sit down at long tables and food just starts showing up. No need for a menu - your only choice is what kind of meat you want, otherwise you eat what's put in front of you. And then food just keeps on coming... and coming... and coming...

Needless to say that with all the "Got Picon?" joke-y shirts and bumper stickers and such, some of us were compelled to try it. Not exactly going to become a household name anytime soon, but definitely better than moutai. A little bit of Port, some soaking in Diana's hot tub, some more Port, some staring at the stars, and then Team Old Style vent off to schleep.

Friday morning saw us putting bikes together by the light of the morning sun. Beautiful scenery, but dudes be looking pretty rough around the edges early in the morning. Faces only a mother could love. Figured we'd go for a ride to loosen the legs a bit and see what the countryside looked like - went for 40-miler with 3000 ft of up in it, out to Markleeville and the hot springs (beautiful, by the way) and then back past the cabin and out along Airport Rd, which is... duh, by the airport (basically, a strip of asphalt that has FAA signs on it - not much else).

So then we get to the sketchy bit - on the map when I was plotting a route for the GPS to guide us through, I thought "hmm... the dotted line usually means dirt road. Looks like this road suddenly becomes dirt. Think we should re-route? Nah. Just power through. It's only 1-2 miles of dirt. How bad can it be?" Well, it was the chunkiest bunch of buried sharp rocks I've ever had to dodge on a road bike with dainty tires. Steve apparently dodged all of 'em except one, so he got the first and only (as far as I know) flat of the trip. Good time for pictures, and I gotta say, if you're going to flat, you might as well flat in a nice little valley next to a pretty little lake.

So then we get back from the warmup ride and go to registration and find out that, contrary to our imaginings, registering as a team (even an ersatz one) does not simplify registration. It actually was more than frustrating, and there were other "teams" in the same boat. They told us to come back at 9pm and it'd all be sorted out. Annoying, to say the least. But the good thing was that there was lots of pretty eye-candy at the registration expo. I gotta say, I could get used to showing up at events for endurance athletes. Death Ride, dirt-triathlon, crit... damn there's a lot of toned, tanned, beautiful women hanging out wearing snug/skimpy clothing over their hardbodies. Meeeow.

With time to waste, we figure it's a good time to shop for brake pads and cassette for Andrew (his pads on the Cane Creek brakes were heinously hard and slippery), grab a coffee, and then head over Monitor Pass (the first one on the route for the event) to go to the casino with the all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinner. Along the way, seeing the road and the climb, that's when Andrew started metaphorically shitting his pants about the ride. He hadn't been getting any training in because of work and new baby at home, was feeling out of shape and heavy, and seeing the length and grade of the climb had him moaning and keening in the back seat. Eventually we got to the casino, it was a no-go for spaghetti, so we found a pizza/pasta joint down the road and ordered a shitload of food. 5 dudes polished away: 2 orders of spaghetti/meatballs, 2 orders of ravioli, 1 order of lasagna, and 2 pizzas. It was... a lot. All in the service of preparing for a long day ahead. Some burping, farting, and registration details later, we were tucked away in bed for a good night's sleep and a 4am wakeup.

The next morning was early. We elected to wait until the sun was up so that we wouldn't have to carry lights, so we hit the road at about 6:00. While still together on the Montior Pass climb, we got a kind fellow Death Rider to snap a photo of us while we were still all riding together. It's silly to try to stick together over 130 miles - people's rhythms on the climbs just don't match up, and everyone needs to go at their own pace. But for the first pass at least, we were reasonably together.

Later on in the day saw us catching up with each other at the rest/feed stops, and in at least one instance, Steve and Karl seem to have met up in the porta-potty.

Of course, some of the times we would meet up because someone was just getting to the top, and the other had already been down the other side and had come back up, but still, it was nice to be able to catch up and see how everyone was feeling. And it may have seemed silly getting matching jerseys before the ride, but it sure is easy to spot your buddies in rest areas and when they are blasting down at you at 50 mph. Not only that, but we got more than a few nice compliments on our stylish Old Style jerseys. So there. Team Old Style in tha' hizzie.

Technology-wise, what I feared might happen, happened.. the battery in my Garmin 305 wasn't up to the task of a 12-hour day. I got the "battery low" message at the start of the 5th climb, but wanting to record the high-speed descending, I turned it off for the climb and turned it on before blasting down (thus the missing 17 miles at mile 95).

When it comes to blasting down, I might weigh 200 lbs, and that's a non-trivial thing when you're trying to turn the 39x23 up the 10% and 12%. But when the direction is down? Oh, it's a different story. It's awfully easy to go fast down the hill.

I don't have balls big enough to let go and bomb down Ebbett's at Stupid Speed - there's some wacky bits on the way down. But Carson is wide open, and though it was open to traffic, there wasn't much (traffic). Besides, who in their right mind is going to try to pass a cyclist in the middle of the lane going 50 mph when there's oncoming traffic? None that I saw. Motorists were really pretty easy-going on the road. Heck, there's 3000 cyclists out there. By the time they got to passing me, they were used to the idea of bikes on the road.

So yeah, back to the "it was a long ride" part - my tender sitting places hurt a bit on Saturday night. Not to say that there weren't breaks from pedaling to be had - water and food stops at the top and bottom of each mountain pass. But at the top of Carson's Pass when I got back on my bike, clipping in and sitting down... yoinks. Cabin proprietress and masseuse extraordinare Diana tells me that it wasn't a sore muscle, but likely a tissue bruise (and we'll call it "minor", I know she meant to say so, even though the word didn't come out of her mouth)

So did I mention that I was pedaling a 39x23 on this? Yeah, that was stupid. Manly and awe-inspiring... but stupid.

Sure, it gave me something to brag about later at the cabin (i.e. "you buncha weines with your compact cranks and 11-27s... sissies, all o' youse."), but for many, many hours I would finding myself riding next to people spinning a much easier gear (triples, or 34x28s) and silently lust for their gearing. Oh yeah, and the simple fact that I could see what their gearing was means that I could see the right side of their bike (meaning that they were to the left of me, meaning that they were passing me). There's meaning in there somewhere, I'm sure of it. Regardless, when I back out the calculation of a 39x23 being 143 gear-inches, at 7mph on the up-sections, it would appear that I was climbing with a cadence of about 50 rpm. Not so good in the long term leg health, but my knees have felt fine during and ever since. Lucky, I guess.

But more importantly, it was pretty. Fun and pretty. Sure, slogging up the mountain is work. But when you turn around and tuck in and blast down the mountain faster than you've ever been, you very easily forget about the previous 2 hours of slow climbing that it took to get there. The views were amazing. The instant camaraderie with 3000 other people was unexpected, but in a day of shared suffering and exhilaration, a rather nice thing.

A couple days after getting back from the ride, someone asked me "so.. would you do it again? Maybe not next year, but some other time?" My free-association response: "I'd do it again next month if it wasn't so damn far away. Where do I sign up?"

overdue happenings

Been a while, I know. Just haven't exactly felt bloggish. Plenty been going on though...

At the moment I'm sitting in the Vegas airport on my [cough] 4 hour [gack] layover between Detroitia and Reno. Hey, at least they've got the free WiFi here - I sure as hell don't pay for access in airports. Internet access sure is handy when you're wringing your hands for 4 hours holding out hope that my bike got loaded on the plane at DTW and will make the transition in Vegas. AND I'm hoping it doesn't get murdered by the baggage handlers. You see, I'm heading out to ride the bike in the California Death Ride.

I'm certain of two things:
- There's no possible way that I'm trained up and "ready" for a ride like this. There's just no mountains in Michigan to practice on.
- Of all of my admirable qualities [ahem], tolerating pain and discomfort are two of them... along with stubbornness, of course.

These, along with my charming personality, shall see me through the day.

So what's been going on lately? Well, Andre had a birthday a couple weeks back, so he had a party. I entertained my aspirations of animatronic cake sculpturing, but discovered that maybe I was setting the bar too high for my second cake ever. I learned that buttercream frosting is NOT a good idea for a summer party - it just gets too thin when the temps go up. Imagine that, a forsting made predominantly out of butter... melts. Who'da thunk it?

Much carousing and fun was had. Folks got out instruments and played for a while on the back porch. Ok, who am I kidding, "a while" = 'til 2 or so. Gerry and Sean were guitaring, Dave with the keyboardin', and varying other people bopping in and out on the tunes. Dave played ALL night - I was worried that he might be glued to the keyboard, but it just seems that he be liking to play and don't like to stop. Hammed it up for the camera, too. (thanks Dave!)

I can't tell exactly what happened here though - either Warren got assaulted by his own accordion, or the mood lighting and relaxing effects of beverages made Accordion a little extra amorous, and this should have been a "private" moment.

Sheesh, hippies these days.

Stacey had a party a couple days later to celebrate the 4th and all things Americana, including such cocktails as "Old Fashioneds" and Manhattans. All sorts of hot-dish-esque American foods too - the pigs-in-a-blanket apparently were a hit, and the veggie-dog versions went over pretty well too. Of course, the kids got to 'em first, so that might explain things. And while Stacey might complain about not wanting people posting pictures of her, she can rest assured that, while I'm shameless about sharing some of them, the picture staring down into her cleavage will never leave my computer. See? It's all upside from here.

On the 7th (7/7/07), Jimmy organized another alleycat in Ann Arbor. It being a nighttime race was cool, especially since then there's this crazy train of silly bike people with blinky light charging through downtown terrorizing pedestrians and pissing off motorists in a mad dash to beat it to the next checkpoint, or beat out other racers, or whatever. I'm normally really quite law-abiding and peaceful, but when there's a race on, I let my good example self stay home (heck, there really wasn't even a prize, but winning be what matters and people and things are only obstacles in the way). Most motorists don't know what to do when they encounter bicyclists on the roads (other than yell or throw shit at us) so I think of it as removing the necessity for them to make a decision. I'll only be going into oncoming traffic for a second or two, and I'll be through the intersection faster than they can decide what to do.

So this was a scavenger-hunt format on the theme of the seven deadly sins, with mostly picture-taking to prove you were there, but at gluttony, you had to down 10 saltines without drinking anything before leaving the checkpoint. Which sucked. Riding hard, all out of breath and cottonmouth-y, then 10 crackers? I guess I'm glad it wasn't fat-free matzo or anything.

Things I learned this time? When there's a starting sprint to a checkpoint for dice roll to decide where to go first, you gotta be the first one to hit that. Standing in line behind other people who are already riding off makes me antsy as hell. So yeah, that's the occasion for the balls-out sprint. Oh yeah, and when you get in and take 2nd place, check the cameras of the team that took first. I swear, those dudes weren't even sweaty, and it was a hot night - did they even hit all of their checkpoints? I say this afterwards, but didn't think of it at the time, and Jimmy wasn't really checking, electing more for the honor system than anything else. Dang. Coulda had 1st. Next time maybe.

Funny thing, I *just* saw the baby-faced young guy (on the team that took first) out at the track a couple days previous when I went to "beginner's night". I was kinda bummed out because by the time I got there it was threatening to rain, and by the time I got changed, it rained. We waited, and it stopped and almost dried out, but then it rained again, and that sucked. Ah well, I'll have to wait until some other week. The track looks like fun. I don't know if I've got what it takes, but heck, what can it hurt? (oh yeah, legs and lungs, that's right...)

Alrightey, time to get on a plane. Cross your fingers and wish the baggage handlers luck in getting the bike on the same plane that I'm on.