It’s all about the ‘cross right now.  This is a fun event that was started and run by my friend Steve Westover when we both worked at K2 Bike years ago.  I don’t know if he still promotes or represents it, but it has turned into a national-level race and is a complete blast to attend.  The beer garden, the banked corner in the velodrome, the huge crowds and a chance to get to see many friends in the cycling industry that I don’t see on a regular basis.  Oh yeah, and it’s fun to photograph as well, which I’ll be doing this Saturday.  Anyway, here’s some outside press and the poster for you.

Here’s the official website

And here’s an article from VeloNews

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I don’t know what the deal is, but the past 9-12 months have not been happy ones for Chewy’s ribcage.  Let me elaborate…

To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m going to be starting with Incident #1 or #2, but sometime in November of ’08, I did something to crack a rib.  It’s been a while now, and I don’t remember the specific incident, but I don’t think it happened due to a bike crash.  In fact I think I tripped on something in the dark here in my room, and hit the deck, my chest-cavity bouncing off of something on the way down.  The point here being that when I went up to AK for the month of December, I clearly remember having some decent rib pains for the first week or so.  I’ve cracked ribs before, so I know what it’s like and I also know that they don’t really do anything about it…you just have to hope you don’t cough, sneeze or hiccup until it heals.  So that was my Winter ’09 Juneau trip.  Kinda…

The last night that I was up there, Zeno and Aaron and I tore it up pretty good.  When we got here to my place, I realized that I’d done something awesome to some ribs in a different spot.  Imagine how excited I was to know that it would a couple more weeks of hoping I wouldn’t cough, sneeze or hiccup while a different rib, or ribs, healed up in its/their own sweet time.

Fast forward to the past!  Specifically, in fact, one week ago, roughly.  Thursday evening.  Not last Thursday, but a week prior.  WHATEVER!!!  RECENTLY…I had reason to be riding my bike home from a buddy’s house.  I’d decided to take a different route to get there and so I was returning along the same route, as it took me through more residential neighborhoods, and less along motor vehicle arterials.  In other words, I deemed it to be a safer route.  Along the way I came into a cul-de-sac that had recently been re-surfaced with chip-seal.  As I turned into the cul-de-sac from the sidewalk, I was leaned into the corner, and having been freshly-applied, the surface was not unlike a basketball court covered with marbles.  Marbles that turned into jacks once I went horizontal and hit the deck full-force on my side.  Normally when you hit the deck on pavement, you slide.  That sliding action actually deflects some of the impact of hitting the deck.  I didn’t slide very far.  And it hurt when I went down.  Okay, so there’s that.  Now I have a bruise on my side and scabs on my leg, and my forearm looks like I tried to pick a fight with Wolverine.  My upper arm, however, looks kinda cool.  All the little pebbles scratched me up in multiple deep, short slashes that look like I got a tattoo of a meteor shower.  YIPPEE!!!

But the point of this long-winded post is that guess what?  Yep, the ribs on the right side have been on a slow burn ever since then.  And guess what else?  Yep, I sneezed today.  But this wasn’t just a normal sneeze, this one was one of those ones where the entire system was sealed up airtight, so my lungs, and therefore my chest (i.e., my ribs) took the full force of the blast.

DAMMIT, that hurt!

I’ll just end by saying that injuring your ribs sucks.

Toodles!

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Day 5 consisted of a picnic, which was the final event of the 20th Reunion.  Zeno and I rode bikes to the event, which was about 15 or so miles and of course we were thirsty when we got there, so we got into more beer, and as it turns out, I’d found a full bottle of whiskey in my bag that I’d forgotten about.  Apparently we bought that along with the 2nd bottle of gin the night of the 3rd.  Oh boy….well, let’s get into that too, I suppose.  The picnic was a lot of fun as we got to catch up with all the old classmates in a more relaxed setting.  One consistent problem that everybody was having was that in the previous activities, alcohol was very much involved, and so I was having many of the exact same conversations with the exact same people because I couldn’t remember what we’d talked about before.  No problem…it’s kinda like this joke:  What’s the best thing about Alzheimers?  You get to meet so many new people.  Afterward, Zeno and I met up with Amie Hickok and her husband.  Amie and I shared a locker our senior year and she is a crack up.  Afterward, we took off and rode to Zeno’s house to crash out, which we did.

Waking up the next morning, I noticed that Lucy, Zeno’s cat, had been nice enough to leave her kill right by where I was sleeping on the couch.  The little blue birdie had been cute in its lifetime that’s for sure and it was a tiny little thing.  In addition to that, there were feathers from a different and MUCH larger bird strewn all about the house.  If the blue birdie was about 4 or 5 inches in overall length, the black feathers were themselves 4 or 5 inches long.  Zeno was walking around the house that morning, crooning to his kitty, “My little sweet sweetie is a killing machine.”  Even better though was when I looked over and saw that she was eating something.  She had it in her paws and was gnawing on it, the same way that a dog will go at a big soup bone.  Upon closer inspection, I could see that she was snacking on a dragonfly.  DAMN!  You go girl!

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You know how, when you’re young, you think that “one day I’ll grow up and…”?  And if you’re past a certain age, you realize that “oh shit!  I may have grown up!”?  It’s like the song ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd:

“…no-one told you when to run

you’ve missed the starting gun.”

The point here is that I had reason to go the website for Cascade Bicycle Studio just now, and OH MY!, it’s beautiful!  Zac Daab, the owner, is a friend of mine (and is the guy in the first two pics in the Ballard Crit gallery), and damn if he hasn’t done some good action for himself.

As the Aussies say, “Good on ya, mate.”

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I almost forgot.  I put a couple new images in the gallery.  The Ballard Crit was this weekend, and I managed to get a couple decent shots.  That’s all.

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Yesterday, Dave and Anna and I went out on their boat for some sun and water and generally just to complain about the sunny weather, and how terrible life is, and why would we even hang out together if we clearly don’t get along, you know what I mean?

The plan was to go out on the boat, and when it was time, they’d drop me off at the dock and I’d ride home from there.  Good plan.  Dave and Anna live east of my place and there’s both Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish between us as the crow flies.  The Burke-Gilman bike trail gets me out there in a safe fashion, away from cars, and so I usually go to/from their place that way, which is north around the lakes.  However, since the dock was on the south end of Lake Sammamish, I thought I’d try a new, more direct route home.  This one would take me along I-90 and pretty much directly west over Mercer Island and into downtown Seattle, where I’d take a right and head north to home.  Good plan.

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And of course, you’re expecting to hear all the gossip about what the hell was Danilo Di Luca thinking not using a TT bike on the final stage…how Denis Menchov ate crap with less than 1k to go and still won both the time trial AND the Giro overall….but no. Not today.

Tonight I was over at Brent and Kate’s, and we were watching the final stage when their beautiful daughter, Ruby, was able to show us her knowledge of Giro lore.

I apologize that the volume isn’t that high, since I recorded this with my cell phone, but you can hear her say ‘maglia rosa’ quite clearly.

I also apologize that the video isn’t embedded like videos from YouTube. I’ll work on that. Click to enjoy.

maglia_rosa

Editor’s note:  Menchov DID NOT win the TT.  And I knew that too.  Couldn’t tell you why I wrote that, but I did.  Eat it!

- Chewy

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Extra special awesome happy funtime thanks to Dudeman for going 100 miles out of his way to deliver the Nutter Butter Beater to me yesterday. I tuned it up this morning, and…oh my goodness. I know it’s only a $10 bike, but I’m such a bike snob that I’m going to be required to purchase the following items to get it to Satisfactory Condition: new brake calipers, as the ones on the bike are so utterly worthless that it feels as though you actually SPEED UP when you grab a handfull of brakes (yeah – not so much to my liking) and a new pair of shifters – these ones are the Hi-Tech Thumb-Breaking models and require so much torque to shift gears that I may not be able to hitch-hike ever again. After that, if I feel particularly uppity, I might replace the BB/cranks, and possibly the seatpost/saddle combo, but those aren’t necessary for Living The Good Life, as I intend to do on this sweet ride.

The only thing left is to give it a good name. No, I’m not going to give it a human name like stupid people are prone to giving their cars/trucks (sorry to everybody I know, since EVERYBODY I know gives STUPID human names to their vehicles)… No, I mean some kind of play on the Nutter Butter theme. Some possible names include: Nutter Butter Blaster, Nutter Butter Beater, Nabisco Speeder, The Smoothie…you get the idea. If you feel like commenting and leaving possible names for me, please do so. In the meantime, bask in the glory that is The Nutter Butter Piece of Crap!

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I believe I did.  My good buddy Dudeman was at out of town on my birthday. After getting back to town, he recently was at a swapmeet, when he noticed this thing and decided that it would be the perfect gift. I agree. Let’s just say that it’s the perfect grocery-getter, or the perfect barley-blaster, or the perfect festival-finder, or even the perfect parade-pedaler.  Read ‘em and weep…

I’d go ahead and say something silly like, “My shoes for the other bike are more expensive than this bike.”, but let’s face it…pretty much any of the supplemental gear that I use for the main bike is going to be more expensive than Mr Nutter Butter. Even brand new it might have been $50. Dudeman paid $15.

That’s one pair of socks.

After rebuilding it from the ground up, I’m going to see about putting ONE really expensive item on the bike so that those who know will see that it’s a serious ride seriously stupid ride, as far as beater, swap-meet bikes go.  I can’t tell from the picture (I haven’t actually taken delivery of it yet) some of the specifics of the various parts, so I’m not certain if it will take 9/16 or 1/2 pedals, but if I can’t get a $200 pair of pedals I might have to look into a $100 saddle or a carbon seatpost or something.

I’m psyched!

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I was perusing DrunkCyclist.com when I found a link to this post.  Okay, this person is misinformed, hateful and narrow-minded.  Fine.  But then I looked a little further into her site and found her blacklist of people who are/were hated by god.  ??? WTF?  If I’m correct about the bible, god doesn’t hate anyone, right?  In fact, if you repent your sins, or even if you don’t, god forgives you right?  Isn’t that what they say?  So needless to say, I was quite amused when I read through the list of people, places and things that were hated by god.  In the music category, I saw that Slipknot was on the list, but Slayer wasn’t.  WHHHAAAAATTT?  If ANY band is to be on that list, Slayer had BETTER be there, ya know?  I mean, I have all their albums and like their music, but for reals?  They HAVE to be on that list if they have album names like God Hates Us All, South of Heaven, Hell Awaits and Christ Illusion.  Oh well.   Here’s the link, check it out for yourself.  Hours of laughter if you think the site is a fake…

http://shelleytherepublican.com/blacklist

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