Here I Am!

Where to start?

I am in the land of the living, I've just not had a lot of time on my hands of late.

First of all, I am now employed (temporarily) for another radio station (country and western!!) in town. This may or may not be permanent. I can't get into details at the moment, but suffice to say, it was like getting on the bike again. It all came back to me fairly quickly.

Secondly, I had two falls from my bike, 3 weeks apart, same body part injured both times. Of course it was when I was at a complete stop and couldn't get out of my clips fast enough, so the damage done was minimal (my pride suffered a greater bruising than my knee - though there was blood; the little kid watching me clean up the scrape asked me to show him my other boo boos). I took the bike in for servicing and had them loosen and grease the pedal clips and lo and behold a week later, I came to a sudden stop when my derailleur caught my spokes, and I was able to easily hop off the bike. So back to the shop it went for fixing and that meant I had a couple of days more where I wasn't training.

In between all this falling, scraping, and working, I was trying to do some last minute fund raising for the bike tour. I finally hit the $3000 mark (and change) and our team, the Cycledelics was third runner up for team total and individual average. I also was in charge of securing a sponsor for our shirts and I called on my philanthropist friend, Mickey MacDonald, of Micco Corp or Inc or Ltd (I'm not sure which it is). He's a former firefighter and our theme was firefighting, so......Anyway, his company made up our shirts and we took home the Best Dressed Award. We even had a real fireman on our team and he brought a hose to he tour that we dragged to the banquet for our grand entrance. We all had little fire helmets on, too. Pics are coming.

Day one of the bike tour was pretty good, though by 11:30, it was 30 degrees(Celsius, for my American friends) and with only 6 kilometres left to bike I had to pack it in. A shower and a short nap later and I was wandering around in my jammies until the banquet when we all changed into our firefighting gear again.

Day two was bad. I woke feeling like I'd been hit by a truck and my eyes were so puffy I looked like I had been crying all night. I got on the bike to ride it from the storage area to the cafeteria for breakfast and I knew after one bump I wouldn't get one kilometre on the thing, my inner thighs and but were sooooooooooooooooooooooo sore. I made the executive decision to skip riding on the second day, so loaded my bike into someone's van and got a ride to the halfway point to meet up with the team. There were support vehicles going up and down the road constantly so I had no fear of being left somewhere to fend for myself. I eventually got a ride back to the end where I cheered on folks arriving by bike as they crossed the finish line. The heavens had opened up and the wind had picked up so everyone was soaked and frozen. Just as well I wasn't riding. Between the wind and rain and the butt spasms, I might have just curled up on the side of the road waiting for the end to come. Everyone else on the team managed to do both days, but there were a few other folks like me who bowed out of riding on the second day. Over 400 riders, about 75 volunteers, and $330,000 raised. I'd say it was a success.

In the past 6 weeks there have been a couple of more news stories about CCSVI. I will not comment right now, but will in a future post.

The bug hunting has continued, though not as regularly as before, and I do have pics. I'm working on another CSI: Bugs episode, too. Those pics are coming, too.

And in between all this stuff is the building I'm managing....

That's all I have time for right now. I'll be back to regular posting real soon. I promise.

S.