Posts from — October 2005

Ride faster! Ride Faster!

Yes folks, the cycling bug has bitten hard since arriving in Boulder. Eight or so years of no bike riding has made Robby a frustrated boy. Since moving to Boulder, I have had Scott Moninger ride his bike in front of my car while waiting to make a left turn, bought a cyclocross bike which I use as a daily commuter bike, and attended a giant bicycle swap meet in Denver, but things are really getting out of hand now.

I bid on, and won, another bike on an online auction. But here’s the thing: it’s a mountain bike. I decided I wanted to get something with fatter tires for the coming winter snow, and holding to the principle that has sustained me throughout my cycling life — never ride shitty bikes — I looked to eBay for a quality bike that I could still afford. I found fat tire bliss in a Dean titanium mountain bike that I was surprised to win. It should arrive on Thursday. Being primarily a road bike fan, and a steel fan to boot, this is quite the switch. But I think it could be fun to finally ride Ti (always wanted to, and besides, my wedding band is made of the stuff (by Boone Technologies, I know I’m dating myself here)), and I’m certainly in the right place to finally give mountain biking a fair shake.

Lastly, as evidence that it is impossible to NOT get back into cycling while living in Boulder — regardless of how pathetically far you have let yourself get out of shape, and how eroded your right kneecap has become — I submit: my neighbor.

I met my neighbor across the street just last night. As I rolled up to my garage door, I saw him — watching a friend test ride a rather fancy time trial bike up the street — and nodded hello.

“Nice bike”, he says.

Now, I had suspected that this guy was a serious bike guy, because I always see nice bikes parked in front of his house, and I once saw him in his garage at night and noted that he has a full-on shop in there, with a nice stand and wheels hanging from the ceiling and all. So when he said “nice bike”, I of course rolled on over to continue the discussion.

Turns out, my neighbor is the Chief Mechanic for the Trek Mountain Bike Team. (!) We chatted for a few minutes, and he’s a really nice guy, even offering his extensive garage-shop for my use if I need it. His friend? Just getting ready for Nationals next month, getting his bike dialed-in and all. Sheesh, fifteen years ago, I used to read cycling magazines and read about these places, places where the great cyclists lived and trained and rode, and wish I was there. Now I’m here, but as an out-of-shape, beer drinking, computer hack. It’s funny how life works.

But hopefully there’s time to get back in the saddle, and get back into the air as well. For now, cycling celebrity sightings, watching the glider tow planes dive back to Boulder Airport as the glider that just released heads for the front range, riding nice bikes (slowly) to work, and the occasional nighttime bike path jaunt under a starry sky for a loaf of bread (as I did on Sunday) will have to do, and honestly, that’s doing just fine.

Today I attended VeloSwap, an annual event in the Denver area that attracts thousands of people to the Place Next to the Denver Colliseum That I Can’t Rember the Name of.

You go in, you pay your eight bucks, and you collect your free copy of VeloNews. Then you walk past a sea of people walking out with rims and tires hanging from their shoulders, mountain bike forks three in each hand.

You got there late.

I was toying with the idea of attending this event all week and at the last minute decided to shoot down to Denver to check it out. After making a wrong turn off I-25 and touring north Denver’s interstate trucking infrastructure, I arrived at Veloswap around 3PM, after the Madness of Opening Hours had ended. I still had a good time.

There were the bike shops, with their formal booths, of course. And there was New Belgium Brewery, with their stands selling overpriced Fat Tire Pale Ale. But soon after all that bullshit, you got to the back, where there were still probably hundreds of private individuals with booths selling off all their accumulated veloshit that was taking up too much space in their garage.

I felt vindicated when I saw an Independent Fabrications Planet X cyclocross bike (the same bike I bought on an eBay auction last month) for two grand, when I got mine for less than half that. Of course that bike was still for sale at that price, but I digress.

The entire joint was crawling with the cycling subculture. You had the skinny, CliffBar-eating freaks, the bolt-through-the-ear-downhill-mountain-bike-freakazoids, the shorts-and-long-sleeve-shirt+ski-cap-wearing-nut-eating-nuts, the recumbent-bike-riders and the bike sluts all assembled under one roof, and it was a fun show.

OK, it’s official: Brenda, Emma and I are Boulder residents.

I moved out here in July, flying out with two suitcases and initially living in a hotel. Eventually I moved to a corporate apartment. Later on Brenda drove out here with Emma and good friend Joe providing companionship and books on tape, and then we looked for a house. We found one, and then Brenda went back to New Jersey to work a freelance gig. She came back to close on the new place, and the movers came and dumped off 217 boxes of crap, and the next day Brenda went back to New Jersey.

Well, that gig is completed (and we have a very cool autographed cast photo from Brenda’s latest production, including signatures from John Amos and Phylicia Rashad to prove it), and she arrived back in Boulder this past Friday. This weekend was the first weekend that me, Brenda and Emma were all together in Boulder in our new house, and even though with the great weather we had this weekend we should have been climbing a mountain or doing a four-hour yoga session in a tree someplace, we spent most of it right here at home, unpacking and settling in.

Today, I made a pot of soup and the fish & potatoes dish today, so the place finally smells like someone lives here.

We need patio furniture and a grill. I need to figure out why in the hell our DVD player only shows a black and white picture. Brenda’s costume shop needs to be set up. I no longer have a filing cabinet for my stuff (but now I have a couple of tupperware hanging file boxes and a labelmaker, so someday, someday by god, I will be an organized motherfucker).

We got a phone line last Thursday, and so today I set up the TiVo. It’s truly horrifying how much I love that device, and how much I missed it. I’ve since set up the wireless connection for it, so now our little TiVo can connect to the service over our wireless LAN, and if need be I can display photos from my PowerBook’s iPhoto library or play music from its iTunes library over the WLAN. The inability to do this for the last several months bothered me, even though I rarely take advantage of it. Now that I can do it again, I once again feel fully dorkonomious.

I got a bike, and am trolling eBay for more. I need parts. I need tools. I am once again addicted to bikes.

I watch the glider towplanes do their cool spiral dives back to pattern altitude from my kitchen window. Soon, after the financial dust settles from the whole move, I plan to look into either glider flying, mountain (powered) flying, or both.

We’re here. We live in Boulder, and it’s great.

Crack dealers usually give out the first taste for free, since they know they’ll be back for more. And now Apple has released iTunes 6.0, which includes the ability to buy TV episodes (through the iTunes Music Store), which means my monthly ITMS bill is going to skyrocket. Next thing you know, I’ll be fencing hot VCRs to feed my craving for downloadable media. At the moment, it appears that you can only grab a few shows (current stuff like Desperate Housewives, Lost, etc), but you know that’s gonna change. If they add the entire Sanford and Son catalogue to the list of downloadable tracks, I’m sunk.

Bap-bap-ba na, bap-bap-ba na na na na, nat-nat-na na na, ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ne-new, ne-ne-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-nerw…. (wah-ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-werrrr…..) BA-BADA, da-da-da-da-na… NER, naNER.. na na na NA NA NA NA, NA NA NANER…. (Well, you get the idea. Hey, the theme to that show is my ring tone on my phone, for chrissakes. It’s just a funny song. But I digress.)

Anyhoo, iTunes just keeps getting better. The last version integrated podcast downloads & subscriptions, now the new major release includes TV shows. If you don’t already have iTunes, you should. You don’t need an iPod to enjoy it (I don’t have one), and it’s easily the best media manager out there.

Just got off the phone with Xcel Energy, the local power utility here in Boulder. I signed us up for wind power, baby! That’s right, every watt we consume is now being generated by a wind turbine farm in Colorado or Wyoming. Oh sure, it all goes into the same grid, right alongside the coal-produced electricity, but by participating in Xcel’s Windsource program, we’re supporting the renewable energy infrastructure — and it only costs about a buck per hundred kilowatt hours to do so.

I’m still a long ways away from hugging trees, but I guess working for a sustainable design assistance consultant has definitely changed my thinking a bit.

Time for another long-overdue update. Let’s go in reverse order, with regard to the title of this post.

I’ve got a cold. It sucks. (ah-choo!)

Been traveling more than usual, both for work and play. I was in Chicago this Wednesday for a meeting, and I guess I’d better get used to the idea of buisness travel again. I knew this was one of the downsides of taking this new job — the attendant increase in travel and meeting requirements. I guess you take the good with the bad. Before Chicago, I was in Princeton, NJ visiting Brenda who has been there for a couple of weeks running the costume shop for a show at the McCarter Theatre. Brenda has been in NJ more than she’s been in CO these last several months, and it’s been hard for all of us. But she has some freelance work lined up at the Denver Center for October, which will make the month she spends in NJ in November easier, I guess. It looks like December will be the first month that Brenda, Emma and I will finally be a family in Colorado. (Speaking of Emma, she’s better than ever, and is currently blinking at me from the chair across the living room.)

The move-in went well, as well as it could possibly go. In fact, the whole experience was a live demo of You Get What You Pay For. We bit the bullet and paid for real movers this time, and they came and packed our stuff, placed it in storage until we bought a place out here, and then showed up when they said they would and unloaded it into our new place, for the most part unscathed (and the stuff that was busted we can claim for reimbursement).

Meanwhile, Brenda has gone back to NJ and I have been surrounded by boxes. Many have been unpacked, but many (marked “misc”) remain scattered around the house. Emma & I live in a state of semi-settled-ness. We need a new couch.

I got me a new bike, an Independent Fabrications cyclocross bike. It’s way more bike than I need for riding to and from work, but it is a very cool bike and I hope to explore some trails with it. It was one of those eBay deals you can’t refuse; I expect I’ll get another low-end bike that I can really abuse and leave locked up in front of bars and stuff.

I have been less involved with baseball than I have been in in years, but seeing the stupid Red Sox get swept was nothing short of glorious. Those bums in Boston got what they deserved, and the world now knows that they are truly a bunch of losers, and anyone with a Red Sox shirt, or hat, or underpants, can go scratch themselves. BOSTON SUCKS! YEAH!!!

Today’s eighteen inning extravaganza in Houston was a slim second-best to the defeat of the lesser sox, but today’s downing of the perennial losers, the atlanta braves, was another wonderful affirmation that all is right with the world, and that the braves and the red sox SUCK. The Yankees won today, and have to face the embarrasment of a game five against the Angels, but I don’t care; the red sox and the braves have already proven themselves as the losers that they are, and I will sleep well all winter knowing that the natural order of the universe has been restored.

BOSTON SUCKS!
ATLANTA SUCKS!

Sorry for the sophomoric ending, but hey, it’s true.