integration vs. innovation

What does how we think say about each of us? Not what we think, but how we think.

I walk and talk. I ride a bike. I shower. I sit. I eat. I sleep. I drive. And I hear about/from other people - about when they had this inspiration or that revelation. For some, figuring things out comes from talking through them - not necessarily (but maybe sometimes) because of dialog with another, but just by speaking the words and engaging the verbal brain, the process works something in the clickety-clack and out pops this new thing. For others, it's standing in the shower and the hot water and noise pouring over them smooths over the distractions to find the nugget of Nouveau. Sometimes riding a bike or running works the ideas through to previously undiscovered vistas.

This started out being about riding the bike - on a long ride my brain is more likely to integrate quietly in the background, and conspicuously, not spontaneously innovate. That the long stretches jostle everything around and new information settles in the cracks making itself comfortable, producing a compact solidity that makes room for new things to come in afterward, but keeps new synthesis from poking through to the top. I love the metaphor, but the consequence is not exactly something I'm that keen on. It's been far too easy over the years to adapt to my circumstances, and sometimes I wonder exactly who I am anymore. That I'm too much of an integrator.

At the same time I'm still prickly and argumentative for the sake of argument - to a fault at times. Maybe that's just my inner teenager rebelling for the sake of rebellion and to make its mark on the world. Opposing anything and rejecting everything, good and bad regardless.

But when it comes to the new, everyone has their own style. For me requires a substantial amount of monotony. Digging ditches. Putting Tab A into Slot B and pasting to Sheet C, over and over. I guess my brain has to have the opportunity to wander a bit and clear out the everyday business before getting to somewhere new. I often find that point... somewhere 10-20 miles east of Benton Harbor. On the way to Chicago, it's that point where I've had about 2 - 2.5 hours in the car, a cup of coffee or two, there's not much traffic or distraction, I'm settled enough into driving that I don't feel tired anymore or uncomfortable yet. Of course, I don't go that way that often, but it's predictable enough that the brain be warming up right then.

If only I could turn make it on-demand inspiration...

Bacon-palooza

I've had this idea rolling around in my head for some time, and I know there's support for it in some circles (and opposition in some), but how to make it work... just haven't got that figured yet.

So Bacon-palooza would be an adjunct to an existing party. A side stage. A party auxilliary. Half of a party. Not enough of an excuse for a party itself, but a significant contributor thereto. Basically, a festival of bacon. There's garlic festivals, no? Well what about that most delicious of crispy meat bits? Lots of people (non-vegs, of course) like bacon, and how often to you have an opportunity to celebrate the types of dishes that can "feature" bacon? There's gotta be a recipe for bacon pudding out there somewhere. And bacon chips and salsa. Or how about chips and bacon salsa?

We're not talking about just a salad with hot bacon dressing or a bacon pizza, those are vegetable and bread dishes, with bacon on them. I'm looking for creativity here. Yes, cholesterol counts will skyrocket in the days and weeks after. But unless you've got one foot in the grave already, you'll be fine. And if you've got one foot in the grave already, shouldn't you be out getting some exercise and eating sensibly instead of reading stupid blargs on teh interwebs?


Why? Because everything tastes better with bacon... including bacon.

Halloween is coming up, and plenty of football-season party excuses... thoughts anyone?

(and as far as Maggie is concerned... she's been giving me the silent treatment for months now. If she's going to insult me, I'm not very likely to care about her feelings, now am I?)

back among... the Clean People

Back in town amongst all you freshly washed, shaven, and brushed people (saponophobes, The Bearded, and bald(ing) people excepted)... I am returned.

Rivers, somewhat less choked today than it was a week ago by the evil and invasive Russian Olive: qty 1.











Desert landscape, adored and absorbed: a whole bunch.

Water consumed personally over said week and passed through body one way or another: 10-12 gal.










Miles driven cross-country back and forth: 3600 (...mas o menos)

Bugs squashed on front of car along the way: 1.2 gagjillion

*poof*

Gone, I am.

On walkabout.

This boy has a date with a river. See y'all in a week or two.

more oddness...

Last night's dream included... Hillary Clinton campaigning door-to-door for the upcoming presidential election. I was at the home of my childhood, mowing the lawn (though I apparently owned the house now, and my parents had moved on), and Hilary Clinton just walks right up, nonchalant, with no entourage and no paparazzi. Just a quiet day in the suburbs where she's getting the word out that she's running for office and would like me to vote for her.

Wacky.

Isn't that odd...

In the Land of the Boring and the Waiting (for other people's things to happen) comes the ponderable: Hearing. We learned early on as kids how people (at least with more or less normal hearing) determine where a sound is coming from... that one's brain, through a high-resolution internal timer can tell that the sound arrived at one ear before it arrived at the other, and thus determine whether it is to the left or right of the direction the head is pointed. It's not too much of a stretch to also say that distance can be inferred by the difference in strength of the sound. i.e. If the sound is far away, the difference in distance between your ears is small, so they should hear it the same. But if it's close, the distance between your ears is more significant and the softening of the sound over that distance is noticeable.

But what about front to back and up and down? In this model, ears are point receivers and there's only two of them. There's a plane of symmetry, and since we can't rotate the fleshy flap of our outer ear (like a deer) a sound in front should sound roughly the same as the sound in back. So how do we know? Surely you can tell when a sound is in front or back, right? So how do we do it? Any audiologists out there want to shed some light on the matter?


And then there was this... Windows apparently eating itself.


Ah, the circle of life.

Consolidation (or: how I learned to pack up glassware and love the paper shredder)

Having become tired of my chronic low-grade packrat-itis, I finally made good (or, at least better) on my intention from years ago. My intention to use the Automatic Document Feeder on the scanner I got and scan in all that paper that I've been hanging on to for so long, but thought would have some use (i.e. in the event of a banking collapse, IRS audit, survey of electricity prices from place to place, etc. etc.) Think of it as the Paperwork Reduction Act of 2007.

Yes, they were silly reasons to not throw out all that crap, but at least now I have a clear conscience about it. Digitizing years of stuff, and then shredding like a madman. I'm not sorting or anything, just jam it all in there and burn to DVD. Think of it as a digital shoebox. Along the way I must have tripped the thermal overload on the shredder a dozen times while shredding so much that it filled up 6 packed paper grocery bags with crosscut shredded paper. But now it's mostly gone, and when new stuff comes in, it can go straight to the digital shredfest.

But as I made the keep/scan/shred decisions for a lot of things, it was like a walk down memory lane. And along the way, what did I find? The time, she's a-movin'. The letter to the Chicago Police from after my car was broken into ... that was 2001? And I lived here at this address? I haven't lived here in *this* apartment 6 years, have I? Sheesh. And exactly what was I saving all those blank checkbook deposit slips for? Maybe 'til I had a shredder to shred them with. Those long trips to Ireland, my lost passport, my transcript from the Uni... they seemed only yesterday, but it was a long, long, time ago (relatively).

It ain't exactly over - the tough spots that I've been avoiding are still looming: Car crap and medical/health insurance. Stuff that is all sorts of shapes, so a pain to scan, but don't want to throw it all out at once because there might be some weird billing or history thing that could crop up. Besides, having the dossier on my self or car would be useful later on, methinks. Right? (or is that just the kind of thinking that gets me file drawers full of crap?)

The other benefit from the "clean bench" policy? I'm finally doing something about the dustables. That bunch of stuff that I thought would be appropriate to rescue from Grandma's house after she died, but that has only sat on a shelf collecting dust, annoying me with it's dust collection ability. Sure, I need to remember where "my people" are from and the ornaments of culture, but it doesn't mean that I need to keep boiled egg cups and uselessly small wine glasses to be able to do it.

What was I waiting for all that time? And the other waiting? What's with that? ahh... but that's probably better suited to another time and place.

Gouge Away

So it's late, and a micro-nap earlier this evening seems to have put me into a state of sleeplessness. So I'm up, and tossing and turning, and wondering about that gouge in the space shuttle tiles.

They say it goes all the way through the outer heat shield tile. I'm thinking that's a bad thing. (...but I'm no rocket scientist. [ba-dum])

Gets me wondering about the odds these days. There were 5 shuttles at one time. Two of them became spectacular fireballs that the crews didn't survive. Now about those other 3... I'm wondering at what point NASA starts working on a new design. It's clear that the shuttle is necessary/important (i.e. servicing ISS, bringing astronauts home) or else it wouldn't be flying. But at what point do you say that the vehicle is past its prime? And if, heavens forbid, this shuttle doesn't make it home in one piece, that means there'd only be 2 left. Which makes the notion of a orbital rescue somewhat dodgy indeed.

Missions are planned until 2010 in order to finish assembling the ISS - and it also seems that it's almost all shuttle flights that are sending the goods up there. A couple Russian trips, but mostly shuttle.

Did you know that the Russians had a space shuttle too? Golly, it sure looks a lot like the NASA version. Rumor has it that there was a bit of engineering sharing between countries on this one. I guess it makes sense in the realm of "both nations are participants in the space station and there should be redundant vehicles."

But definitely something of a different approach to getting it pointed at the sky by assembling it horizontal and then lifting it into position. We'll never really know which is a better launch procedure - Buran's shuttle only flew once. It apparently was capable of totally unmanned flight, including landing, and it seems they were even almost finished building the second one, but the program was discontinued, and what's left belongs to Kazakhstan.

And in the free-association that goes on in the wee hours of the night/morning, the two things that come to mind when I hear Kazakhstan? Borat and Vino. The former made me feel sorry for the people mocked in the movie. The latter, not as much - I can't decide whether it's the continuing variety of doping cases or the stupidity of his particular one that's making me feel numb to it.

Le Hooch

Though it's become quite popular and all the kids are doing it these days, I don't presume to have the patience or attention span to brew beer at home. Not to mention that there's tons of breweries out there doing a fine job and I can get a variety of their products at lots of local places.

But what I can't get my hands on, that I do so enjoy? Mead. Yeah, like what the Vikings and other such hearty folk be drinkin' while they be pillagin'. There's the Redstone Meadery that I almost went to when I was out in Boulder last summer. And of course, there's probably lots of meading going on among those SCA people, but I just don't go that way. The thing is, my true motivation is essentially financial. Redstone's meads are about $20/bottle. That's ridiculous. Especially when it goes down really smooth and eaaasy.

So I went out and bought 12 lbs of honey, some yeast, a carboy (big glass jar), a big stock pot, some stoppers and whatnot, and off I go. The mix has been bubbling away fermenting their little yeasty hearts out on the counter for a couple days now. The unexpected discoveries? Damn if it doesn't take a long time (hours and hours) for 3 gallons of almost-boiling liquid to cool off (I'll have to get me a must/wort chiller). Oh yeah, and holy crap... talk about luscious sweet floral scents - when you have steaming honey/water mix, all these remarkable scents come off it. At one point when cooling, it was even "buttery". I kid you not. Like sweet, but luscious... butter.

Along the way, one thing I don't get riled up about much: interstate commerce laws applying to internet wine sales. But I gotta say, whoever is drawing the mascot over at Free The Grapes? Splendid work.

Shackles The Bondage Grape. How many mixed messages are there in there? Who cares. I just love the little hands, and fighting stance, and grumpy frown, and chin but no nose. He's like Hoffa, on the town square, fighting for freedom and a living wage. But he doesn't have a megaphone.

And he's a grape.

Crapola. Haven't been too bike-thusiatic the past week or so, until this weekend. Went for a couple hours of ridin' in the dirt out at the Poto yesterday, and was all ready to be pavement-ey this morning. But it looks like it's gonna rain all damn day. Fricken-frack.

It's what I can't have that I want the most right now - dry pavement.

aren't they just the *cutest*?

Seen today while at a stoplight - the UPS truck that comes around the corner, to encounter the Fedex truck also doing rounds in the same neighborhood... the tap-of-the-horn-tip-o'-the-cap, the bleep of the hey-howya-doin'...

It's like a real-world version of Sam the Sheepdog and Ralph the Wolf punching in (or out) for the day.

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.

Dexter Crit race

Well, a big old lukewarm is what I've got for you, dear readers.

Felt ok-ish, stayed in it near the front, didn't crash, didn't crash anyone out, but didn't bring the cheese home, either.

No great mysteries either - the crux of the biscuit was in the last lap, halfway through the lap, going up the hill before the downhill S-curve and straightaway finish. Fairly obvious spot to put on the oomph for the finish, and I even thought about it during the warmup laps. I knew it, but blew it. I'm the kind of guy that doesn't have a whole lot of "pop" - it takes me a while to wind up to full speed. So since there's not a lot of passing in the S-curve, and the straightaway is pretty short, I probably should've started pushing earlier up the hill instead of responding to other people making moves and watching them from behind.

Aaaaanyway... mid-pack finish for me on a field of 20-25 dudes - and now I know now - I need to remember to go early, go often. (er.... ok, maybe just early).

All in all, it was fun. Me likey.

There ain't nothin' going on in MI for a while until the Ada Crit... might have to go to Ohio for racey-poo. (or, maybe I should go see what that track thing is all about) Then again, there's Death Ride in a few weeks... maybe instead of working on fast, I should work on putting on distance and that up-the-mountain thing. Bah. Whatever. The wheels-on-the-bike-go-round-and-round...