Thursday, TT day...

TT day for the Southern Mass/RI folks at least.

I'm hoping to head over to Bob's Bikeworks TT in Rehoboth tonight. Hoping to. A perfect storm of timing has to happen for me to get there I think. Ideally I should be able to ride up there getting a nice 12-13 mile warm up in before the race. Suboptimaly I will be racing up fighting traffic and get there frantically park and unload the bike and race to the start line with a 2-3 mile warm up. I'm really hoping for the first option. The final one is just to bag it all together and stay home and make dinner. Actually I'm hoping to get dinner made before I have to jump on the bike and ride to the TT.

Somehow I managed to lose half of the bolts holding my wheel cover on. Such an idiot. I installed it and started riding and forgot to periodically check to see if they were tight. I heard something tink tink tink followed by excessive noise coming from the rear wheel. Hmm wtf. Pull up to work, look down, hmm loose bolt - oh - shit - what the fuck? where'd the rest of them go? Fashion some clips over lunch to hopefully make it all work tonight. If I make it.

This morning was the first ride to camp. The girls are at summer camp now. Just day camp. I suppose they could call it summer day care with more activities, it is at the Y just down the bike path from the house. In the rain, well the rain with a trail-a-bike just sucks, for me? I love it. I don't want to subject them to it w/o getting much better fenders for my bike an the trail-a-bike (TAB) and my oldest's new bike. Loaded their bags into my big ancient oldschool timbuk2, i didn't think they'd fit but they did, barely.

This was the first ride on the TAB for the youngest. She's got more miles riding in a trailer in her life than Most Fred/Gumbies get in the same time span, so following her dad's bike isn't much different. This time though she got to sit up and hold on and keep her feet on the pedals. Only two back pedal shin waps, ya know what I mean if you've had a kid on a TAB behind ya. But she was having fun. Jumped off when we got there and as I started to lock K's bike up to the rack there a friend in her group walked past and L burst out with obvious pride and excitement that "I just rode my bike to camp, well not MY bike, the TRAIL-A-BIKE behind my DADDY'S bike." Yes with the emphasis in her voice. It was cute. K had a good ride too. Damn thing stops on a dime. I nearly rear-ended her coming up on road crossings a couple times.

Headed back and swapped bikes and TT'd in. Not pushing to fast I still managed to get here in right around 20 minutes. Couldn't really get here much faster in the car with the assumption that i could find parking. Not that I have a car at home that I could have chosen to drive. The Passat got whacked in the right front fender (I've always called it a quarter panel but the body shop guys call em fenders *shrug*) and hopefully it comes back tomorrow and I can start working on the head gasket/leaking coolant issue. I really need to get the cat cut off and replaced with a section of pipe, wishing i had a stick/wire welder. Car doesn't need it, no emissions, already pre-cat has as near to zero CO (carbon monoxide) as you can get, plus the fact that it is being driven on generally at least 50% biodiesel. So the emissions profile is very different than one of those big scary diesels that the lung people want you to worry about. A bunch of projects need to get done on it. Just have to find the weekend time. So yeah. We've been a single car family this week and it really actually has worked out fine. There are enough times that we really do actually need two cars that it makes more sense to keep them both so ditching one isn't really an option. Anyway. Getting more into the gewilli groove of writing again i guess? Maybe not such a bad thing... I always wonder if when I fill it up with more words do people read less? I guess maybe we don't need them both but it makes it possible to be more efficient and get things done and get people to different places when that time arises without excessively complicated schemes, it also means I can go to more CX races, and well ya know, that's really all the justifcation needed to keep one old wagon and a sweet Golf.

Oh this just in. Farrah Fawcett has died. Fucking cancer taking all the great people. Fuck you Cancer. Fuck you.

Thinking of old school, the Five minute talk with Sean Yates is pretty damn good. Sort of helps to take the mind off those who've died.

I've got to figure out if I'm going to try a nice flat twilight crit on saturday. Maybe that's something my fat ass won't suck too terribly at, first I'm going to try and not to suck to much at the TT tonight (assuming i make it there). Yes I get a bit obsessive about things. Oh well.

The debate in my head of when to (even sometimes if at all) transcribe the writings from vacation week is going on. So far this is the most coherent bit of time I've had in front of the screen and keyboard since coming back. Having a dead laptop doesn't give me the time to do it at home either. Kind of stuck. I should really get a new on, but then fix car, pay for summer camp, and buy groceries all rank higher than a new computer at this point. 4th grade probably will make it a necessity, but until then the priority has shifted replacing the old Dell to the bottom.

And with the word bottom, I think I've finally maybe come to the bottom of my thought bucket for the day. At least without looking back and re-reading and remembering all the tangents that always pop in my head as I'm writing, and while I do get a lot of tangents written there are whole bunch more that either spin off into nothingness or wind up as posts of their own later.

One thing from the writings over vacation: the Journal Gastronomica is AWESOME. Picked up a copy of it at the bookstore in Maine and read the whole thing cover to cover. Talk about a super high word/dollar value. Best damn money spent on a "magazine" ever. Granted CXMag is in a different category. It is the best money spent on a Subscription ever. Speaking of which - if you don't already sign up. Issue 6 was waiting for me when I got back. Awesome interview in there with Vos, that correspondent they have there stationed in Belgium is a wicked awesome writer. I've been saving Stephanie Chase's history article for last. Can't wait to read it.

Okay -

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