LET IT SNOW!

What a day. I woke up to about two inches of snow and it is still (I just confirmed from my window) snowing. So what's a snow-lover to do? Options:

(1) Ski (downhill) all afternoon.

(2) Ski (cross-country) all afternoon.

(3) Rip tracks all over town on the mountain bike.

(4) Rip tracks in the hills on the mountain bike.

(5) Load either (a) tele gear or (b) cross country gear on the pack, ride the mtb up in the hills, ditch the bike, ski.

(6) Go night skiing.

(7) Some combination of 3 & 4.

(8) Some combination of 4 & 5.

(9) Some combination of either 3, 4, or 5 and 6.

A parenthetical thought:

How would you write that last bit formally? Like this?

((3 or 4 or 5) and 6)

Can you make the "U" sign and the arched, upside-down "U" in html? Maybe it can be written like this:

((3 ^ 4 ^ 5) U 6)

Hmm... That looks pretty lame.

The choices... It's almost too much to bear!

...

Bringing the girls into school today, and then again at the office, I've had to listen to every variation of moan and groan about the snow. And here I am, just about bursting with glee. The same environment experienced with such radical difference. Come to think of it, that reminds me of a conversation (it was barely a conversation--they're masters of dodge and evade) on politics with my parents Sunday.

Anyway...

Don't let the soggy-bottomed boo-hooers get you down. It's snowing, man. Get outside and play!

mtb - pics!

Ok, Marky. I've finally got some pics for you.

Played a little bike-fix-it today. New wheels. So I (finally) installed a rear disc brake! But, more importantly, getting that mangled old rear wheel off the bike means that I have rear brakes. This is a good thing.

I also got creative (not really) and hacked off a centimeter of handlebar from both ends. (I found I wasn't using it...so why have it?) Also, wrapped my bars with new tape. (I don't understand why mountain bikers don't use handlebar tape. So comfy. Bar grips just seem so...I don't know...fourth grade?)

The other day I got three flats, each less than a couple of miles after the last. I thought the culprit was my dinged up rim. Rather, I discovered today, one of my super-cool green tires was ripping apart at the seems. I'm so sad.

So now I'm sporting the super-ghetto two-tire, two-color look. I suppose I could have completed the look with rubber bar grips (har, har).


Seriously, though, since I don't know where I can buy these tires anymore, I'm very, very disappointed. I guess it's back to boring ole black.

Now to find a file tread 26" mtb tire with aggressive cornering knobs. Any ideas?

that pesky collarbone - pic

I was cleaning my desk and found the CD they gave me at the hospital, back in October, when I broke my collarbone.


The break is clear enough, but what's interesting to me is that it looks like it broke on the edge of the healed portion from the previous break. You can sort of see how, from the first break, it didn't heal straight, but with a big lumpy ball of bone...and in this picture that big lumpy ball of bone is just hanging out, there, in the great void of flesh that is my shoulder.

Funky.

...

I watched Obama's inauguration address yesterday. I liked it...yet couldn't help but notice that a lot of the tough-talk rhetoric seemed straight out of Bush's playbook. Last night I caught the first bit of The Daily Show and apparently they picked up on the same thing.

Still, there's no doubt that it felt different coming from the Prophet of Hope than it has coming from the Master of Disaster. Proof, I suppose, that who you hear a message from and how you hear it are just as much a part of the text of the message as the words themselves. Context is everything.

My favorite part of the hoopla, hands down, was this bit near the tail end of Rev. Lowery's benediction:

....help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.

I am also fond of the triple "amen" conclusion...how the enthusiasm of the crowd built with each sucessive amen.

Black preacher, as an oratorical style, has a corner on delivery effectiveness (a conclusion I first reached after hearing Cornel West speak at Vandy).

Good stuff.

You can watch the whole prayer here.

slackline

I set up a slackline for the boy scouts on a campout last week. We're not yet this good:

easy carelessness

I ran into these two short films from Jeff Scher:

You Won't Remember This (2:21)

You Won't Remember This Either (1:45)

I like the second one best. A fuzzy little vision into the not-so-distant future.

I also like this, from Scher's introduction of the second film:

When toddlers are first walking, their every step is filled with suspense, and the exercise soon degenerates into a vaudeville act worthy of a Borscht Belt drum roll.... Toddlers toddling in their never-ending battle with gravity is a comic ballet...

Yes.

Though I'm also moved by the observation that 50 percent of the behaviors caricatured in that second film I associate with "boy." The easy carelessness. The oblivious disregard of consequence in every muscle movement. These are attitudes of which I am unaccustomed with my girls.

Sometimes I worry I won't much like my small male human.

lemond: the good ole days

I love this photo. What an awesome bike racer.

assorted 2008 photos

Not really the year in review, but the best you'll get from this blog. Miscellaneous pictures from the year that (almost) was.

The Tour of Pennsylvania...shots from the front porch:


Also Tour of PA, but not from my porch:


What Shippensburg looks like the rest of the year:


Broken mountain bike crap:


Father's day present (yes, it's a wallet made from a bicycle tube...and it's awesome):


The three natural-born goats (before there were four) on a ride through campus...Marian's taking the picture from her trailer:


Assorted shots of me, with others, engaged in my third favorite pass time...at home:


...at the hospital:

...camping:


...and with the new kid:


A shot of Mare and I with a lamb in the yard (yes, the lamb is wearing a pull-up):


The autumn rake-up (I'm not kneeling):


The lovely and ever-accommodating:

this nasty shoulder

All y'all remember that I broke my collarbone (again) in early October. Last Wednesday, Christmas Eve, I was headed out to deliver cookies to a few friends and fell on the ice.

My shoulder today:


(The bump, where it looks like my clavicle just ends, is from the first break. It's the bruising I want to highlight.)

I should have known better. It had been raining all night, the rain began to freeze, and upon closer inspection there was about a 1/4 inch of ice on my back steps. I should have known better, but apparently I don't. First step down--I didn't stand a chance--first step down and I was on my back.

Well... Not directly on my back. I saved the cookies in my right hand. Broke my fall with the left forearm. In retrospect, I would have been better off on my back, because what happened left my collarbone hurting like a mother.

After I determined I hadn't broken the bone again (at least not clean through, I'm not convinced that I didn't somehow crack it but probably just strained the new growth, the bone "patch"), muttered half a dozen words I didn't learn from my mother, repeated dozens of times, I grit my teeth, put on a plastic smile and made the deliveries. Once home, I took two oxycodone and went to bed.

But it can't be hurt that bad. That was Wednesday, and on Friday I rode 80 minutes on the trainer, learned to ride a Ripstik, and tried for about a half hour to ride a unicycle. Saturday I got 56 miles in on the road.

Collarbones... Definitely a human skeletal design flaw.

a few pics...

A couple of teaser shots for Mark of the new rig (and my unattractive basement ceiling) after a wet night ride:



And a shot of the fool who loves to go out and ride in the dark:


Actually, that ride just finished in the dark. From a couple of Saturdays ago. About three and half hours of Michaux's finest.

weather here = craptastic

(Valerie has told me that "craptastic" is my new favorite word. Might as well embrace it...)

Yesterday, while hurriedly finishing my grading, I watched the snow accumulate on the grassy lawn that my office window overlooks. I was getting so excited. I made plans to ski today--if not at a resort, then cross country atop the mountain. And I was getting antsy to get my ride on. I love me some fresh (mtb) tracks.

But it was a busy day, and I didn't get out until 9:30pm. And by then it was raining.

Yes. Raining. After snowing all day, the snow turns to rain a few hours after nightfall. Unbelievable.

So it was a wet, not-really-that-fun ride. I could only manage about 40 minutes.

This morning: more rain.

"whoa"...cleaned up a bit

Kris cleaned up my photo a bit. Thanks, man.

whoa

Goat, circa 1991:

reminiscence

Growing up, my dial was tuned to the Boise classic rock* station KJOT, J105, "Idaho's Best Rock"--which, I was surprised to learn, is still on the air, playing, it would seem, more or less the same tunes it did 20 years ago.

Every Monday morning at 6am, about five minutes after I was supposed to get up to deliver the paper, the morning show would kick off with this little ditty from Fleetwood Mac.



Before today, I'm not sure I'd heard this song since I was a teenager. But for some reason (odd...it's not even Monday) the song popped in my head today.


* Born in the early 70s and coming to a popular music awareness in the 80s the moniker "classic rock" made sense to me as that really great era of popular music that immediately, and only coincidentally, predated my interest in music. But now, more than two decades later, it seems odd that a certain kind of popular music recorded in the 60s and 70s would qualify as "classic rock" and everything since...something else. Which leads me to wonder, who coined the term "classic rock" in the first place?

There's so much power in definitions...

...

I got a flat yesterday...riding the trainer. Isn't having to ride a trainer crappy enough without having to worry about flat tires? Insult to injury...

notes from the trail

(1) Rifle season is over. Hallelujah.

(2) I've said it before: Pennsylvania winters suck rocks. It is a "crappy dark-cloudy-northern-dreary-craptastic-cold-funk of a winter." I'd forgive the cold and windy and constant overcast-dreary if we could get a decent snow cover. But here in south-central pee-aay, even though it's been crazy cold for the past several days, we won't get precipitation again until it warms up.

It's become a predictable pattern.

(3) On Saturday's ride I looked down to notice that drips of sweat had frozen in a slick little sweat-spattered pattern on the flat black paint of my top tube. Cold.

(4) I bought winter riding shoes. From Wiggle. Some stuff is way cheaper bought in Europe, especially with free shipping deals.

(5) My new mtb tires, Michelin Wildgripper Sprints, are awesome.
I have the green ones (on my monitor, this picture makes them look teal, but they're more green than teal). Why are they awesome? One, green...and they look awesome on my otherwise black mtb. Two, prefect tread pattern for how and what I ride. Three, they do that cool optical illusion thing where it looks like the wheel is rotating the other direction. I'm exceptionally pleased with this.

Look, act quickly and you can get your own. Other than that, I suppose your best bet at finding a pair would be to clean out the inner recesses of your local bike shop's dusty back closet. That's where I found mine.

(6) I heard more gunfire in the mountains two Saturdays ago (two days before rifle season) than I did this last Saturday (the last day of rifle season). Damn poachers.

(7) Self-imposed moratorium on cycling-related spending until Feb 1 (with the exception of a rear mtb wheel I already have on order). Think I can make it?

saturday's happy sunshine of a mtb ride

I need to get a picture of the new ride up here soon. I feel guilty...and I'm not even accountable--in any meaningful way--to anyone reading this blog. (Guilt...I loath you!)

Anyway, I'm really liking the new hardtail. Saturday, Big E and Andy guided me on some south Michaux singletrack I hadn't ridden before. Three and half hours of it. I liked the trails. I liked my bike on the trails. And that earlier comment about having a hard time keeping the rear wheel on the ground with the new ride? I had forgotten that I rode that day with over-inflated tires (I was initially planning to stick just to the fire roads). Saturday, with my tires properly inflated, I was much more satisfied with my bike's handling.

But as much as I liked the trails and my bike on the trails, I mostly just loved the weather and being outside in it. Saturday saw a few clouds, but mostly sunshine. Temperatures probably got up to 41 or 42 degrees. And when it's been so cold and dreary, even if just for a few weeks, temps in the low 40s with sunshine can feel wonderful.

Rainy today, but looks to be clear tomorrow. Hoping to take advantage of the girls' day off and get Audrey and a friend or two out for hike... In this crappy dark-cloudy-northern-dreary-craptastic-cold-funk of a winter season I gotta get outside in the sun as much as possible. It's like I'm really, really sick and sunshine is the cure.