google isn't so smart

these google guys have some algorithm to figure out what kinds of adds to put on. so wrong. when i last checked it was lake sammamish real estate and some christ mosaic church. could they be more wrong? as one person (me) put it: "i cannot be deciphered by any mortal algorithm."

what's up with blog spam? or spam in general. spam existed long before the internet. telemarketers? spam. direct mailings? spam. and so now they spam my blog. frank wrote me a nice comment about working from home. who do they think they're kidding? obviously SOME people must click their links and buy their shit 'cause otherwise they'd give up. right? i mean, it's an obvious market/evolution thing. but maybe the barrier to entry is so low that they can afford to fail 99% of the time. i want that kind of job. i can fail 99% of the time and still make money. then, all i'd have to do is figure out the key to that 1% success and i'd have it. work smarter, not harder. here's a guy who's working smarter (well at least not too hard).

so, what are my plans for today? well,i should unpack more. after dropping michelle at the bus stop, i brought more stuff back. so i'll go through all that. almost done moving my stuff in. that's the easy part, really. the a/c adapter for my computer should arrive today. yeah, dell. i ordered a new battery and a/c adapter but instead of an adapter, they sent me a mouse. right on. when i ordered a computer for my brother, they sent the computer to some guy in las vegas. no idea how that happened. in fact, every order i've made from dell has been screwed up in some way.

what's a guy to listen to when it is cloudy, windy and rainy? thelonious monk. better git it in your soul. actually, that's charles mingus.

got a recipe for you folks. this is a little ditty i made up after perusing a few at www.epicurious.com. steak salad with scallions. get a steak, i don't know what kind (i don't know anything about steak). salt and pepper the steak and cook it in a pan with some oil. take the steak out and make a tent over it with foil. reduce the heat on the pan and add lots of finely sliced (not diced) scallions. caramelize those babys. when they're good and sweet, add about a quarter to a half cup of wine (i used merlot, it seems to be the choice, but any dry red wine ought to work). simmer that until is is reduced by half. add 3/4 cup beef stock and reduce that by half. while all that is going on, slice your steak and arrange it over a generous bed of arugula or other green. when sauce is done, pour over your salad. drink what is left of your wine. i'm a cat3 cook. if you want recipes from a cat1 cook, check out phatduck.blogspot.com. her blog is really a lot more interesting than mine. huh.

sold out

nun a yous guys is payin' me, so i decided to try the ad thing. i'll probably make like $.05. i sold out, i guess. i think i get paid for clicks. i don't know. really, i don't know anything about it. they won't even tell me how much i get paid for clicks. they say "wait and see". aight.

shut up, it IS hard work

busy busy busy.

michelle drove to work today, so i tagged along and rode home. from MS took west lake sammamish to may valley and came back across MI. nice three or so hour ride. damn cold to start.

went and picked up our new couch. ah yeah, buying furniture together.

carl decker is coming to town. from vegas. will he win star crossed again? or maybe a new dark horse? dan neyens?

had sushi for lunch with cousin will. cousin will and i are a few months apart age wise. lived next door for the first two years of college. tight. close. i'll dig up a pic when my computer comes back online (more about that later). musashi's is the prefered sushi joint. good and generous portions. michelle and i have gotten out of there satiated on $20. we didn't quite make that today. but i also could have gone for about half the sushi that i got. after sushi we played frisbee. and now i'm tired. i want to take a nap, but i should probably start making dinner. i have some black tea going. no sugar though. i can't find it. it's packed away! half my stuff is still at the storage unit. that's rough.

seems to be some confusion about my new cell phone voicemail message. i specify that the caller should leave any information they consider pertinent. you see, i'm just not going to tell people what kind of a message to leave. some people like to specify that the caller should leave the time they called, full name, phone number, etc. typically, the phone tells me who's calling, their phone number and the time they called and what not, so it's irrelevant if the caller does that. i'll let the caller decide. it becomes a somewhat market driven thing. if they want a call back, then they'll leave the right sort of information. if they don't, they risk not getting a call back. evolution. market. it works. and then there's the difference between "pertinent information" and "good advice". my mom left me some good advice (dance naked and shake your butt). not really pertinent, per se, but excellent advice, really.

got a good desert recipe from pyatt. peach flambé. it has a lot of alcohol in it. figures.

apartment pictures:

damn, the photo hosting place really compressed them. damn. no more of that!

stealin' boxes

moving weekend. god moving sucks. actually, moved out a month ago. but now i'm moving in. but i moved michelle as well. of course, as i mentioned, she wasn't packed a bit. worked out well though. pretty much everything is out of her place and in here, including all the big stuff. its all in disarray though. we lucked into a bunch of boxes. our new land lady had a bunch of boxes from her move. the person at the store didn't charge her properly and she got 30 boxes for $3 or something. is that stealing? are we now accomplices?

went on the team ride on saturday. haven't been on a team ride in a while. big group. even jeff pyatt showed up. pyatt and terry on the same ride? craaaazy! i was supposed to meet some of the guys who've applied to be on the team, but none of them talked to me. hmm....maybe i'm kinda scary. ha! the 30 or so of us rode by a woman and she yelled out "boy there are sure are a lot of you guys!" ha ha. you betcha lady. you betcha.

new place is in the joa. just off aurora. now i'm cool like seth. the woman who owns the place and lives upstairs has four cats and two dogs. two year old boxers. they're pretty funny. marley and georgie. i came home and they'd pushed the door open and were running around with my water bottles. the cats are all of one breed, burmese (i think). they all pretty much lay around with eachother all day and then get all crazy go nuts at night. they're adorable. i'm a cat and dog guy. shocking.

friday was on tv on friday night. classic. pure classic.

moving in is a big step. even bigger? sharing our change jars. yeah, unified change jar. can't get out of that one so easily!

life is too short to clean your own house. really? that's pretty out there. how much time does cleaning our house really take? i guess that depends on how anal you are. shit, if you have kids just make them do it! builds character, you know. i think that life is too short to work.

its a cruel cruel world

feeling sick today. yeah, totally lame. actually, i've had some sinus thing for a good 6 sweeks. i've managed it so that it didn't totally lay me up on the east coast, but its been there, bugging me and affecting my energy for some time. anyway, today it was bad. might be getting better. i still can't breath properly. boo hoo.

anybody read about the exploding bus in texas? the worst part? "The oxygen canisters ignited causing multiple explosions and making it too hot to get anyone else off at that point," said Don Peritz, a spokesman for the sheriff. didn't see that one coming. anybody remember the exploding bus we saw on the way to nationals? maybe this is a common thing.

did some touch up painting on the new apartment. we're moving in tomorrow. or maybe sunday. borrowing a truck on sunday.

it's turning out to be a nice day. too bad i am inside. i should be looking for a job. damn. reality, huh? problem now is that i'm not training, so my day is wide open, but i don't have many unemployed friends. maybe i'll hand out with andy fischer a lot more.

when did they make firefox for OSX? actually, i guess its always been there as mozilla and firefox only came after as a windows thing.

tony says my blog is too wordy. i don't know about that. maybe he has a short attention span. he multiplied his running miles and added them to his riding miles and figured that he's ridded the same number of miles as me.

good music. a loungy redo of guns of brixton by the clash. haunting.

blogger is ok. i get to do more html myself, but i can't figure out the encoding on the template. i don't know where this pink theme came from. i tried customizing the colors but can't get it to work. hmm....

beer season is upon us

left my ac adapter on the plane. and then the company declared bankruptcy. i'll bet they sold it. jerks. how can they be bankrupt? they got $500 out of us just to get our bikes and racks home. it was $200 on the way out. i think the woman and her manager had personal motivation to "charge us properly".

got a cell phone. first cell phone. isn't it great? nobody calls me on it.

so, i arrived home on monday. spent most of this week getting reaquainted with my lovely girlfriend (and roommate to be). that's nice. also been packing up her stuff. aparently dreaming of my return while i was gone took up more of her time and energy than expected and she didn't pack anything.

SNDK is trading on high volume today. hmmmm.......

this blogger thing isn't working too well on the mac that i'm using. it doesn't work in either safari or explorer. damn you, google. oh, drama!

went on two nice rides this week. its fall for sure. went out in a long sleeve jersey and a sock guy undershirt (we need broadmark versions of this next year) and i was still cold! even in the sun! did the nice bgt to marymoor to ms to kirkland loop. go to northend or southend as desired. lets see if i can put some pictures up here. hmm....where is my camera!

i'm having sausage and cereal for breakfast. some whole foods hippie cheerios somewhat akin to cardboard (which i prefer to normal cheerios) and isernios lean breakfast sausages. they're good and good for you!

grilled peaches rock. grilled peaches with whipped cream and caramel are to die for!

i don't know if i ever talked about the univest crit. well, it was annoying. there was this whole omnium competition for the weekend. but no money in it. for fun, i guess. a few teams went home rather than stick around for the crit. the crit was 50 miles. 55 laps on a longish course. it took about 1:45. it wasn't super fast, but fast enough. there were speed bumps too. not really harsh, but big enough to jolt me off my bike if i wasn't watching for them. the race went mostly through a nice old neighborhood with lots of folks throwing parties on their front lawn. after the race we were invited to one. the beer really sucked. nice folks though. anyway, the race wasn't too fast, but fast enough to be really annoying. i wasn't quite on the rivet, but i sure didn't think i could go a lot faster. in the last 10 laps the pace really heated up and i was on the rivet for sure. but then with two to go the pace slackened and i got near the front. going into the second to last corner i was able to get close, but we went into it some 6 abreast and the guys on the outside chopped us hard. i blasted past like 10 guys out of the final corner with some serious hyperdrive action, but that was good enough for 24th. i really should have used that hyper drive in the beginning to get better position. i spent a lot of time in the back. i was told that i was near solomon. that's rare! (no offense meant, solomon). if i'd just have better position in the first place i could sprint with the winners. instead i'm sprinting for 20th. tom finished 17th. my 24th is suspicious as i'm certain that i was only a few places from tom. oh well.

put it into hyperdrive

earlier this summer, on the bgt i heard a guy tell his girlfriend to "put it into hyperdrive". i'm pretty sure he was talking about her bike. i'm not sure. well today in the road stage of univest, i needed hyperdrive. i can't remember where i left it. fast race. really fast. it was pretty much as i expected. the beginning was a mad dash out of town with everybody sprinting from corner to corner. it was strung out. early attacks formed a group off the front pretty quick. they stayed away for a while, but i have no idea how. they must have put it into hyperdrive, 'cause we were killin' it in the field. first kom was ok. i hit it in decent position and was able to carry a lot of speed up it and dart through some holes. my strategy for the race was to bury myself on the climbs to stay up in the front group(s) and then recover. well, i managed the first part, but the second part eluded me. the first climb wasn't so tough, only 500 meters or so. but the false flats after killed me. i got over just off of a group but couldn't find that hyperdrive to get me there. i let a number of guys come past and i was finally able to kick it onto somebody's wheel. we were all strung out trying to catch the main group. for the next 10 or so minutes i was breathing raspy and rough. that isn't good. cho cho breathing is what terry calls it. the race just didn't relent. we hit the second climb after a really heavy false flat run-up. teams were drilling it on the front and we were pretty strung out when we hit it. man that kicked. 20%, at least. maybe i did find hyperdrive, i don't know. i wasn't so much trying to ride to the top but rather trying not to fall over. i could just barely turn the pedals over. guys were swerving, falling and walking. the weaker among us were begging to be pushed. my eyes rolled back and i got dizzy. made it over the top though with even my t-rex arms full of lactic acid. i was in an ok group and we were just off the front group. luckily on this one it tips straight down. the descent was curvy, dark and wet. i'd liked to have railed the corners but we couldn't see what was on the other side. a camera moto came by us and screwed our lines up. i locked it up going into one corner. troy would slide sideways and ride into the ditch on that corner. we got down and were 20 seconds behind the group. guys were pulling through, sort of, and we got back on. never got to the front after that. there was a brief slow down and it was pegged again. i hit the feed zone on the back and fell off fiddling with my musette bag. somebody had the field strung out in front of me. i got back on when they slowed down. i was hurtin'. i was so beyond myself i could hardly see. we rolled a long a while and i check our average speed. 28 mph. yeah. that's a crit pace at home. a fast crit at that. i was working my way up and we hit a rise. i tried to stand up to get over it and there was nothing. i slid backwards but came over just on the back. i clung on for dear life as it was strung out again. it gets rough back there, guys opening gaps, and blowing up. shortly after we hit another rise and i was cooked. i couldn't hang on. i slid backwards and struggled up the 6% rise like it was a 20% rise. finally i got off my bike and sat in the ditch for a while until i felt better. a good sized group caught me and i rode in with the guy who'd won the first two sprints and alejandro acton, from agentina. won a couple of stages at the tour of argentina. guy's legs are bigger around than terry's torso. he won the GMSR crit. doped?

univest is a hard race. you gotta bring your a game. tom brought his a game. he found his hyperdrive and finished 12th or 3th (or 14th). he's having dinner with jonathan vaughters tonight.

russell has a noodly appendage

troy and i busted it out to our other host housing. our gamble paid off. we're with a nice professional couple who has one high school aged son in the house and two other children off at college. they also have a wireless network and have better things to do than attend to us. that's great. i hate hosts that hover. we're in harleysville. not too far from the other place. when we arrived, they had a peach crisp that was made with some awesome local peaches. they have ripe pears for me to gorge on. its the good life.

we rode the course yesterday. the most convoluted twisty race i've ever seen. check out the map and directions. there are few roads we stay on for more than a mile. solomon drove the van while dan navigated and gave troy and i the heads up via the radios. pretty sweet deal. troy and i motor paced. tom did something else. as usual. motor pacing is a great way to prepare for a race because it gets the legs moving and you can ride at race pace (25-30 mph) but it doesn't take so much out of the muscles. the heart rate gets up but the legs don't get as tired. we got lost a couple of times, but that was ok. i'm glad i saw the course. there are some crazy obstacles. one lane bridges that you enter on an off camber turn after an 18% downhill; wooden bridges that drop out from under you. the caravan cars will get air on that one. between the twisting and the steep hills, this race will be hard. very hard. the front is going to roll quite fast while the rest of the pack clogs. and that's just getting to the circuit. the circuit is 4 miles long and we do it 13 times. there's a grinding hill in there that takes it out of a rider. that took several hours. came back home for a nice chicken curry with vegetables from the garden. apple-rhubarb crisp was for dinner. not bad.

the "mess that is the english language". even the nerds don't know what to do with it. "Who's to say that the "nominative-ablative-dative-accusative-verb" syntactical ordering is either correct or ideal?" yeah, i was going to ask that too. i'll bet tom (not peterson) knows the answer.

gotta get a new razor.

things i've forgotten to include in other entries. tom brought 5 pounds of oatmeal. he cooked pasta in a tea kettle in the room at the mad river barn. he used to eat a lot of tuna but then found out about all the mercury and so now he eats a lot of canned chicken. tom likes salad. he's constantly making a salad with either tuna or chicken on it. he eats a lot. tuna or chicken on just about anything is a meal for tom. tom also snores. its loud. dan can sleep some 12 hours a day. he wears ear plugs to ensure that he's able to continue sleeping until noon when everybody else is up and about.

i don't know why tom wears his helmet and gloves while he rides the trainer. i'll ask.

another group joins the fray over teaching evolution in school. see flying spaghetti monster alternative to intelligent design. they have about the same scientific merit (intelligent design and flying spaghetti monster, that is.) did anybody know that there are still 17 pirates in the world? arr, matey, arr.

climb slow, descend fast

start with yesterday's race. 70-something mile race. there was a hill in it, but it was a pretty easy grade. for a lot of guys, it was a big ringer. i little ringed it cause i like the chain-line better. i can spin it better. anyway, it couldn't break the pack up much. if the prologue was an insane fight for position, it was only worse at this race. like i said before, 130 riders is way too many to put in one lane. especially when everyone of them thinks he can win. guys were again riding blatantly over the yellow line. there were huge cracks and holes in the pavement as well, so guys trying to avoid those holes would nearly crash guys. it was insane. i've never been so on edge in a race for so long. we were packed in tight. dan took the first kom. they worked the other riders in brilliant fashion. on the second kom solomon and tory set a good tempo but dan went a tad early and was aced out. ah well. in the first sprint (where we didn't have full road) i was boxed in. way boxed in. i just couldn't get any where. again, riders were riding on the left side of the road--for long periods of time. if you wanted in on the sprint, you just had to. there were a lot of attacks, but the field just wouldn't let anything go. guys chased their teammates down. it was ridiculous. sean and i got into one promising break, but again, they just wouldn't let it go. for the final sprint we figured on leading me out with tom and sean on my wheel. that way we could get a good result and those guys could get more points for their overall standings. it was a pretty strange sprint. at about 15 km to go, the pack just shut down. but because it was so tight, nobody could move up to do anything. physical blocking. what can you do? it was super dodgy. we all came so incredibly close to crashing so many times. insane. as things were ramping up, troy got me near the front, but we were on the right.. we were in an ok position, but then at 1 km a group came way over the yellow line and led out and we were suddenly screwed. i jumped and got what i figure was a top ten. tom was on my wheel and a few places back. however, because all the yellow line violations for the intermediate sprint and the final sprint were so blatant, they nullified those. damn. the whole thing was pretty stupid. nobody ramped it up because nobody could get to the front to do it. it was just impossible.
before today's stage there was a rider protest. we didn't start when they wanted to start us. some well spoken blokes chatted with the organizer. they basically told him that it was ridiculous and since he'd taken in some $15,000 in entry fees, he could at least get more than one moto to enforce the yellow line rule (since it wasn't enforced on saturday but was draconianly punished). the outcome was that riders that were relegated were reinstated but point penalties stood.
so today. dan is high in the KOM competition. there's a sprint at 18.5 miles. again, lots of attacks. nobody would let any go (suprising). but then one went. and they let it go. i was right there, but totally pinned in. i figured it would get chased down, so i didn't take the risks to get it. i'll bet it was the same for everybody else. they built up their lead and we worked on the front and held the gap steady until the first climb. i went backwards pretty fast, as did troy. up the climb the break was caught just after the KOM. damn. i got over the top with a group and promptly dropped them on the descent. i've never see a bunch of guys with such big asses descend so slow. it was ridiculous. we caught the pack pretty quickly, but man it was frustrating. weak. they were so weak. i got back to the front but we didn't have to work too much. there were a lot of attacks and a few guys got off the front. nothing that could really stick too long. dan wasn't feeling hot so he set tempo to keep the attacks down. eventually i got the race leader's team (target training) to do some work with us. lots of the teams were pretty content to let the break keep going. when the gap finally got to 2:30 they went to the front. middle climb wasn't too long but it was damned steep. probably 12-15%. and then it kicked at the end. kicked hard. solomon broke his chain, which was too bad. i was counting on him being up with tom and sean on the final climb to help a bit. ah well. what are you going to do? dan popped hard on the climb. the descent from there was super duper fast. i hit 62 mph. that's a new record for me. i also nearly went into the ditch cause a i didn't set up for a long sweeper quite right. ha! screw you noah! the break was still off and so i went to the front with fior di fruta and worked to bring them back. we brought back the target training guy that had been dangling, so they had to go to the front to protect their guy. finally! well, there were a few steep pitches that really socked me after working. and then the couple miles of hard pack dirt and gravel. we finally hit the final climb and i put my anchor down. yep, i was wasted. cooked. blown. i did the last 10 miles alone. damn that finish climb, only a two miles or so, killed me. the final 500 meters was 18%. i was seeing stars. i barely barely barely made it. a race official had to push my broken carcass off the road because i couldn't pedal any more. tom finished 4th and sean was in the top ten too. good finishes. some teams gave us crap about using all of our guys up, but i think we played things about right. losing solomon to a chain break was unfortunate, but what are you going to do. not like i was going to be any good on that final climb.
everybody finished though. that's good. that's guts. damn, if i'd fallen off on the first climb, i'd have turned around and gone home!

angry salmon

yesterday was the prologue. a different format. 2 mile neutral rollout to the bottom of a climb. the first 2-3 miles were pretty gradual, 2-3% with a strong wind. the last 3-4 miles however, were super steep, a reasonable format for the abilities of our guys. no full road at this race, so with 130 riders, you can bet it will be a mad fight for the front. our strategy then was to keep tom, dan and sean safe. if the pace wasn't high enough then we'd set it and keep our guys out of trouble. it was a crazy fight and guys were pushing and swerving and taking all sorts of chances to get up. a few guys were relegated for blatant yellow line violations. i felt that the whole thing was totally unsafe. i can't believe the whole weekend will be like that.
anyway, the pack started splitting as soon as we hit the climb, which really started with a 10% or greater pitch. the front group stayed essentially intact. i slid back a bit but was still in that group. on the next pitch however, i wasn't paying very good attention (and i was hurtin') and i was split off. i was at my steady tempo, so riding across the gap wasn't going to happen. in the front sean put in an attack with a few km to go to try and draw out some other guys and soften things up for tom. i don't know what happened after that but tom got second. tom doesn't really know what happened either. i asked him. he isn't sure.
dan decided at some point that this trek up the hill was much like the salmon running up the streams of the northwest. salmon never give up, so he couldn't give up was his logical next step. in his mind, he was a salmon all the way up. dan the salmon.
this morning we're getting ready to drive to the circuit race. it's 1015 and it is shocking that dan is awake., i'm not sure if salmon sleep 12 hours a night, but dan does.
the mad river barn inn turned our hot water on. that was nice. tom likes long cold showers. me? not so much. maybe that's why tom is so bitter.

the town is named "sugarbush"

transcontinental flight. seattle to cincinatti to burlington. rent the van. drive to sugarbush. yeah, sugarbush. that's one sweet bush. smugglers notch isn't too far away.

crazy times getting ready. move the last of my stuff out, do some last minute cleaning and pack. most everything was packed. i got back to the house and my ride was already there. i packed my bike in record time. that tube with two strikes? it's a slow leaker. damn.

totally uneventful flight. without adam on the flight, we were all able to sit with a seat between us. much more comfortable. the flight from cincinatti to burlington was on a smaller plane. the flight attendant brought beverages through and then spent the rest of the flight reading. cush job. where do i get one?

the flight went straight east over washington, idaho, montana and so on. such amazing views over those mountains. i'll have to look back on google earth to see where it all was. check out this: lat=44.7084928166, lon=-100.629940268. i think this is the river i have pictured.

i had all sorts of funny things to write when i was on the plane. i can't remember them now. this entry sucks.