wards ferry is pretty but...

Staying at the Aladdin on Mono Hwy. We brought our usual breakfast food but found out yesterday afternoon that there is a free breakfast from 5:30am until 10am. Non-waffle eaters had yummy belgian waffles with butter and syrup this morning. This is my first waffle in 5 or so years, and I ate it only because it was free. Planned on watching Boonen win 4 at E3 today. Pretty frustrating morning since I only saw a bit of it. Cycling.tv wouldn't come on. I panicked and shot a quick message to Flandria on the VB board, but she wasn't there. Probably getting ready for Brisbane. Finally, E3 did come on, but then I touched something and it went off...forever. I kept fiddling around with the settings but nothing got it to come back on. In the middle of all this, around 7:12am, the guy next door to our room starts doing the sex moaning...yuck. Maybe, I should have gone with marscat and raced. No cycling.tv and a moaning guy. At least, he didn't last too long. Now at 8:18am, I should get ready to ride over to Wards Ferry and see the racers on the course, but I found the live feed on letour.com. I am reading live coverage of the Crit Int'l should be finished shortly. What a darn bike nerd...

"and her name is Minnie"

I lied to little kids at Jr. Achievement Day in San Francisco.

I volunteered at this work function where employees go to an elementary school and teach a class of kids K thru 5. It was my first time, and I only helped out because they were in dire need of people. I picked a class where they had a seasoned and experienced volunteer, Jorge, who had done this Jr. Achievement program about 9 times or so. I also made sure that it was a K class. Kids 5 and under, and kids shorter that I.

I didn't really know what Jr. Achievement was until this morning about 20 minutes before the class started. The program is all about teaching kids about economics and business. The K kids are taught about economics and the individual. The older kids learn about ecomonics within their family, the community, and their city, blah blah.

A lot of what we did today was read to the kids and have them do little exercises to reinforce a theme. The first story was about trade and how a kid goes to a farm. Eventually, he trades eggs for butter which then gets made into bread. We did exercises with stickers of quarters and pennies and such.

We also did an activity where the kids had to draw their favorite animal. The activity starts out with the volunteer, me, drawing my favorite animal and telling why the animal is my favorite. I panicked a little. I can't draw, and I really hoped that what I drew would be recognizable. I was so darn happy when one of the little girls recognized that I had drawn a cat. But, then I lied. I told all about my favorite animal Minnie(don't tell Daisy) and how "she" was 16 years old. I didn't want to get in to the gender issues so that's why I lied.

The kids then got to draw their favorite animal. It was funnny, but they all picked cats. It was so cute. Ealier in the day, I realized that these small kids were little copy cats. We had asked them what their favorite part of school was and all of them replied "playing". So anyway, all these kids were drawing cats, and I was so touched. When we left, we got all kinds of sweet hugs. What a fun day.

And by the way, can you guess which cat was mine?

a long week

Some interesting things happened the week the DSL internet connection went down. It's still down but thank goodness for wifi cafes.

3/10
Minnie barfed on the modem. He barfs on everything, but this was the first time he barfed on something that was irreversibly damaged by barf. It is so much better when he barfs on stuff that is washable. Hopefully, the modem will arrive today since I am so impatient waiting on the dial-up.

3/12
Last weekend, my co-worker died. She left work early on Friday Mar 9 and then didn’t show up to work on Monday March 12. I didn’t show up for work that day either. That same Monday, I called in sick and was worried about getting some flack for it. All things considered, I was the least of their worries. When Barbara didn’t show up for work, some guys from our department went to her house to check on her. They found her dead in the backyard. What a weird thing. I wasn’t that close to this co-worker because she worked in a different office than I, but she was nice and the co-workers in her office are really sad.

3/15
I saw a new rheumatologist. He scared me by talking about how I would be prone to arteriosclerosis and osteoporosis. He said I need more MRIs on both wrists and elbows and a bone density test. He’s a runner, and he has a ridden a bike. Actually he is a better runner than cyclist. He did a marathon in 2hr44m while taking the same drug as I take. He rode a bike but he crashed and broke a lot of ribs, scapula, and clavicle. He knows a lot but he is sort of a downer, and he was one hour late for the appointment. Anyway, I don’t think I will see him again.

3/4
A few weeks ago, I raced Merco’s men’s 45+ field. I knew I would get shelled, but I also knew that I could finish this two lap race of 48 miles. At this point in my season, that’s all I really needed to do: enter a race and finish. Mucho hours after the pack finished, I finished and went by the officials and flashed them my number. Being a fellow official as well as a racer, I was certain that when Janice and Barry told me they would place me, they would. On Monday, the race results were posted. I promptly looked for any placing after 60. I was so disappointed that I didn’t show up. The 45s had the most racers listed than any other field. That they only went down to 68 or something wasn’t a bad thing, but I felt let down. Not that I really was proud of finishing 67 or actually 72nd, but I did finish and it was a big deal since I have been doing so crappy getting pulled from races, blah blah blah. Marscat had seen the results earlier and hadn’t told me that I wasn’t listed. I asked her why and she said she didn’t want me to feel hurt. How sweet… I thought that not being placed was probably ok since Marscat did the whole race and didn’t get dropped until the last 2k. It might make her result look less if I was there just a few below her. Without time splits, it might have looked like I did better than I actually did. Ok, no big deal.

3/18
Yesterday was the Zamora road race. One of our ex-teammates from Mako came up to me before the race. He congratulated me on doing so darn well at the Merco road race. I told him that must have been Erika. He said no, you were 27th a few spots ahead of me. I didn’t believe it so I looked it up this morning. And, there I was 27th in the master’s race. Well darn Janice, you did place me, a little transposing of numbers 72 to 27, but I got in.

3/18pm
Including the races this weekend, I finished two more races. Yea.

3/19
We got a cute little animal carrier for Marscat’s mom’s little hurt doggie. The dog had back surgery and is taking some time to get better. The carrier is cool since you can put the animal in the carrier and wheel them a long. I think Minnie likes it too.

Some promoters...

are worth their weight in Gold.



Years ago, when a bunch of us cat 4s were upgrading to cat 3, we were pretty anxious and not quite ready for prime time. But, we knew it was time to move on up. So we went to the NCNCA scheduling meeting. We asked Robert Leibold of Velo Promo and the other promoters if they could put on separate 3 fields. We were very happy that VP did start putting on separate 3 fields as well as keeping the separate 4 fields. A few years ago, the women cat 4 Snelling field was larger than the men cat 5. Those numbers are a pretty good indicator of how a successful promoter helps grow the sport.

Velo Promo also has been putting on Kern County for over 10 years now. Robert never complains about losing money on this event. He just keeps putting it on and letting the other races subsidize it.

And another thing, we are lucky to have Velo Promo because if we didn't, we wouldn't have nearly as many road races as we do. I've often heard that if it weren't for VP, we would have just a bunch of crits like Southern California. I've looked on the Southern Cal racing schedule and that's true. Mostly crits.