Can you dance like a 1st grader?

This kid is made of rubber!

Reach the Beach! The beginning....

Christopher and I have picked the worst spring ever to take up the challenge of Reach the Beach!

May 17th we have the crazy notion that we are going to ride our bicycles 100 miles - from Portland to the beach! And until then we'll continue subjecting ourselves to training in the wind and the rain and the sleet and the snow (yes SNOW at the end of April - ugh!)

A fund-raiser for the American Lung Association (of Oregon), it is my hope that a few of you would like to "sponsor" me in my ride. Not to twist arms or anything, but it certainly would make all this miserable training a little bit better....

If you can't, already sponsored someone, already made decisions about your yearly giving, are helping out in other ways, or just don't want to (!), not to worry.

If you would like to help support the American Lung Association (even a $5 donation would be fantastic & awesome & appreciated), you can visit my mini-fund-raising site.

Caloric healing

I didn’t just wake up on the wrong side of the bed Wednesday. I was so miserable and grumpy that I had to have been on the wrong side of something way bigger. The universe maybe? I slept terribly, had terrible dreams, was woken by a pup faking distress at 1:30 am, and then again at 5:45 am (at which point I locked him in the garage), finally got up with a crick in my neck (not that again!), a headache and the foulest mood I’ve had in quite a while.

Things weren’t much better at work (I’ll spare the tedious details) and when I skipped out for an hour to watch the wedding invites get made (hand-made letter press!), things weren’t going well at the studio either. Our envelopes came in different than what we ordered, necessitating cutting the plate (used for imprinting the design and words) and an on the fly redesign. Also, the plate for the invites was all warped and screwed up, wasting a morning of our letter-press lady’s time and requiring ordering a new plate, thus pushing back the printing of the invites.

Finally we gave up, went to lunch and I found divine healing. Divine healing came in the form of cheese. (When doesn’t divine healing involve cheese?) Mozzarella cheese to be specific. Mozzarella partnered with sliced pear, walnuts & honey – all sandwiched between two slices of crusty bread and grilled to melt-y perfection.

Sooooooooo good. I can’t say the day turned around at the point really (it didn’t), but I felt so much better that afternoon. I thoroughly plan to incorporate this into my culinary repertoire.

Good-bye to a dear friend

I sold a friend Monday night.

Lucy, my plucky red rocket bicycle, has gone to a new home.

The guys at the bike shop were desperate for me to get rid of that “old thing,” but I was quite fond of her. A fancy, new all-carbon frame she is not, but that didn’t make her a bad bike. She is a great commuter and a comfy, solid ride for someone just getting into riding. And that is basically what I used her for when I first got her. Since then, however, I’ve taken up things like week-long rides that go for hundreds of miles. So it did kinda make sense for me to upgrade. Then there was also the little issue of Lucy being entirely too large for me (hence back problems, neck problems, hard to handle the bike itself, hard to look back, poor power transfer, etc.)

Even though we have way too many bikes in the garage, she was too big for me and I needed the cash, it was still quite hard to sell her. I have so many memories associated with her and she seemed to have her own character. Makes me think of the blog post, Do Bikes Have Souls?

But I did the right thing. It wasn’t fair for me to keep her locked up in a garage with no chance to ever play outside. So she has gone to a new home and I wish her and Barbara (I think that was the woman’s name), the best of luck!

Bikes a plenty

We’ve managed to collect a fleet of bicycles.

I got a Giant mountain bike for my 16^th birthday and used that for riding around town, getting to tennis practice, exercise and even did a triathlon on it. I left the bike in my parents’ garage when I migrated east. Post-college (still living back east) I got into road riding and bought an old steel frame Centurion that I used for commuting, road rides, triathlons and even used it for a 425 mile week-long ride and a century ride (100 miles in a day.) After an insane period of work I used the overtime and bonus to get a fabulous new road bike. The other two bikes had made their way back to me so I find myself with three.

The fabulous new bike is for sure a keeper. The old road bike was a candidate for a commuter bike, but it really just doesn’t fit and gives me a a neck ache, so that one is destined for the auction block. The mountain bike, though graced with the speed and agility of a tank, currently holds the position of “commuter” and I have no intentions of upgrading.

Now Christopher ALSO has three bicycles - his fancy new road bike (not as fancy or as new as my road bike though!), a mountain bike of good quality and an almost new official commuter bike. Christopher does not like his commuter bike and doesn’t regard his mountain bike as a good commuter for him. So the current plan o’ action is to sell the mountain bike (and possibly the commuter bike as well) either in exchange for a suitable bike for commuting or for cash to use to buy a suitable bike for commuting.

However, the recent availability on Craig’s List of exactly what he is looking for seems to imply that he will be buying the new commuter before off-loading some of the existing bikes. I think if this happens we will have reached a ludicrous number of bicycles. Four between the two of us is sort of pushing it, but can be reasonably explained. Six is a little harder and only acceptable when you realize that we are attempting to sell some of them. Seven, however, just smacks of compulsive, crazy bike hording! Who on earth has a handful (a HANDFUL) of extra bikes?

We have a garage and have joined the ranks of Americans with too much crap stored in their garage to fit a car inside. Except in our case our crap consists of a bit of dog food, a garbage can, one case of beer and SEVEN BICYCLES! Two are hanging from the ceiling.

Know anyone who wants to buy a bicycle?