I'm never buying another house. Mostly so that I never have to sell another house.

On September 30th, 2014, Mike and I officially became ex-homeowners.  We ended up with a relatively decent-sized proceeds check, considering that we were only in the place for a little over five years, but when we did the math it appears that the house cost us about $700 per month, including property taxes.  This did not include utilities or repairs or improvements or the gas required to drive to Boulder for work five days a week, to say nothing of the intangible investment of our free time in said repairs and improvements and driving.  In conclusion, I don't know that I would do it over again if I had the option.  Going forward, I don't want to own another home until we can buy some property and build our own little shack with a great big garage/workshop and pens for the ducks and llamas to whom I will give endearingly nonsensical names, like Senor Cummerbund and Professor Appletini.  I suppose my greatest argument against conventional homeownership is neighbors: they have an annoying habit of, well, having annoying habits.  Of, for example, letting their dogs bark for hours on end and painting their houses purple.
I probably would have felt better about the whole situation if we could have gotten a little more capital from the house.  The market was booming for sellers all summer, since the inventory of available homes in a reasonable price range was especially low in the Denver area, but we didn't get our ducks in a row quickly enough to take full advantage of the legions of people wanting to close and move in before school started.  We finished moving almost all of our stuff out of the house by August 8th, and the listing went up that same afternoon.  Immediately, requests for showing times started pouring in, which was encouraging, but a week later we had no offers.  After another week, we discussed lowering the list price with our realtor, and the same day that we reduced the asking an offer came in.  The offer was for the asking price, with no seller concessions: perfect.  The inspection took place a few days later, but then the buyers took almost a week to send their inspection objections.  They asked for several things, mostly small repairs, but the largest and most cumbersome was a request for us to hire and pay a structural engineer to evaluate the integrity of the house's foundations, and then pay for any modifications recommended by the engineer.  This seemed somewhat odd, as the foundation slab of the house had settled in one piece and there was no evidence of any issues, but after some digging our realtor determined that the buyers were concerned about the fact that the driveway was pretty thoroughly cracked and uneven.  Well, every house in our neighborhood has a cracked driveway, and it has no effect on the structural integrity of the foundation.  So instead of dealing with their list, we just said we would take a couple grand off the asking price and they could deal with the issues on their own time (welcome to homeownership, jerks!).  Then their agent came back with their demand that we give them a price reduction of $10,000.  Holy crap.  What were they going to do, install one of those heated driveways that keeps you from having to shovel?  Concrete does not cost that much.  Discussions ensued, and after our suggestion that we keep the asking price the same but give them $5000 in seller concessions, which would give them cash to do repairs immediately, was turned down, it became clear that they were unable or  unwilling to pay anything more than $7500 under the price for which we had originally gone under contract.
Now, at this point we had had the house under contract and effectively off the market for two weeks, during which time it would not be unreasonable to expect we could have found another interested party.  But since we were in a bit of a time crunch, paying as we were both a mortgage in Denver and rent on our tiny house in Pocatello, we felt that we did not have the option of telling the buyers to go away and play their little game with somebody else.  This is apparently a new tactic that sellers' agents are seeing in the Denver market: buyers will put in a good offer, then drag out the inspection and ask for a price reduction when the sellers have already lost potential other buyers while under contract.  Unfortunately for us but luckily for them, their maneuver would pay off.  Frustrating, but oh well.  After the inspection resolution was completed with us giving them an absurdly good price in return for not having to deal with their laundry list, things moved smoothly on to closing.
We could have completed all of the paperwork electronically, but I wanted an excuse to come back to CO to visit friends and ride bikes, so I drove the nine hours back with the dogs and stayed with Mike's parents for a few days.  Closing was uneventful; the husband in the buyer couple seemed like a decent guy, but the girl gave off a high-maintenance air and I don't think we would get along as friends.  Their agent wore a pantsuit that was exactly the wrong shade of pink, right out of 1993.  I did a lot of sitting across the table being bored while the buyers signed their lives away, because the previous day my phone had decided to die, utterly and completely, for no apparent reason, taking with it my ability to peruse Facebook or NYT or play Plants vs. Zombies.  While the title company employee was out of the room making copies of the huge pile of documents, the buyers asked me some questions about what plants were in the garden, which of the neighbors should be avoided, etc.  I will miss some things about the house, like the sunflowers that grow six feet tall with no water or encouragement or work of any kind on my part, and the great big open space across the street, but all in all it was a giant pain in the butt.  Good riddance!
Afterward, I took Mike's parents to lunch to celebrate and thank them for all the help they've been through the whole process.  In the evening I took the dead iPhone to Verizon for diagnosis (fully and irrevocably dead, decided on a new Droid Mini because it was free), then met friends at a theater in Boulder to see the world premiere of this awesome all-female ski movie called Pretty Faces.  Watch the trailer here.
I don't generally get excited about snow sports because snow means little to no biking, but the movie got me super stoked for winter and the ski resort that's 20 minutes down the road from Pokey.  Part of the house proceeds will definitely be going toward an AT setup, now I just need someone to teach me how to shred the pow!
Then I stocked up on good Colorado beer (the selection here in Mormon country is a bit lacking) and drove back to Pokey.  I had a nasty headwind the whole way, which made everyone grumpy, but it's good to be back in my temporary home, all 570 square feet of it!

Gettin' Poked in Pokey!

So I'm still unemployed and enjoying sitting around all day far more than I have any right to.  I should be retired now, and then go work when I'm old and can't ride mountain bikes anymore.  That makes way more sense than the current system.
Anyway, while I'm not quite ready to go back to an actual job just yet, it's not a terrible idea to bring home some (very lean) bacon, so I rode my sweet new anniversary cruiser over to the Grifols Plasma Donation Center about a mile away to see if I'm a candidate for donating/selling my nice protein-rich blood.  It was a little anxiety-inducing because getting stuck with sharp things has in the past made me a little woozy--when I got my belly button pierced in 2003 I fainted dead away--but in my six years at a biotech company I gave blood a couple times and processed gallons of it, so I think I've toughened up sufficiently.  But when I walked into the facility I was put somewhat at ease by the friendly staff, the clean environs, the number of other potential donors and the distractingly terrible action movie on the TV in the waiting room.  (When the terrible action movie, featuring The Rock no less, ended, the staff put on the old pre-fully-homicidal and anti-Semitic Mel Gibson movie Maverick, which was so even more frighteningly terrible that I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.  What was Jodie Foster thinking?!)
After I proved my identity with driver's license, SS card and mail item showing my current address, I was taken into a very small room to have my weight and vitals recorded and my blood assessed for suitability.  The minimum weight requirement for donors is 110 pounds, and luckily I was allowed to keep my shoes on for the weighing because I came in at 115 exactly.  My pulse was 66 and my BP was 105/66, my temperature was 97.6F, all within the acceptable ranges.  Then I got my pinkie stuck so my blood hematocrit and plasma protein concentration could be measured; at 38 and 7.1, respectively, I am an excellent candidate for donation!  Go me.
Back to the waiting room for a few minutes of badly choreographed Wild West fistfighting, then into another, somewhat larger room for a brief physical examination and explanation of the procedure.  Apparently the center is about 4 days away from releasing an informational video that donors will watch, but in the meantime the poor guy who does the examinations had to read all the info to me from a binder, which he does about 20 times a day.  Then I had to take a quiz to test my understanding of the presentation, which I passed with flying colors (yay!), and after that I answered a battery of questions to identify any high-risk behaviors (basically, have you done heroin or had relations with a man who had relations since 1977 with another man who visited or lived in Africa).  Next was the physical examination, which turned up nothing unexpected, and a urine test that was negative for diabetes and proteins.  And presto: I was cleared for donating!
While the whole screening process was admittedly tedious, the guy who took me through it had a great sense of humor and we joked and had a good time, and I mentioned how I worked in biotech and am therefore familiar with hemotology etc.  He said that his job can get monotonous, but people like me make it better by joking and having some fun with the process, and that made me feel good :)
Back to the waiting room once again for a couple minutes of Maverick (Mel won a poker game on a ferry but then some other guy stole the money and bailed in a lifeboat, and then Mel and Jodie made out for a while), then onto the donor floor for the real business of the day.  The donor floor had a few dozen beds with plasma extraction machines paired to each one and three large flat-screen TVs on each wall so that we could all keep watching Mel's masterpiece.  The room was really cold (for me at least, in reality it was probably around 68 degrees) but the beds were quite comfortable, and I was concentrating on keeping myself relaxed.  Folks in white coats buzzed around constantly, checking donors' IVs and plasmapheresis machines, and the donors all looked thoroughly unconcerned with the process, watching the movie or reading books or playing with smartphones.  One other girl had a nice fluffy-looking blanket, and I made a mental note to bring one for myself next time.
Once I had settled myself on a bed in the corner, one of the techs came by and prodded the veins in my left elbow for a few moments, decided she wasn't up for the stick and called another guy over to give it a shot.  Usually my veins are pretty compliant, but the temperature of the room might have been playing a role.  The guy took careful aim and stuck me and got the vein, but then had to jiggle the needle around a bit before the blood would start flowing.  There was a cuff around my upper arm, and I was told that while I felt pressure from the cuff the blood was being pulled and I should squeeze my fist to help it move; when the pressure subsided the red blood cell fraction was being returned to my arm and I could stop squeezing.  The plasmapheresis machine continually pulls blood, spins out the plasma, and returns the red blood cells for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on body weight and hematocrit, and is a pretty neat technology.  However after a couple minutes of me squeezing my fist, a tech came over and saw that I wasn't producing as much as I should; apparently the stick hadn't been clean and I had blood leaking into the surrounding tissues instead of all going into the machine.  They switched to my other arm and brought one of the more veteran phlebotomists come over for the re-stick, and she got it on the first try.  The guy who missed the first one felt really bad about it; he apologized and said he hated missing, but I said it wasn't a big deal and I was sure he had done hundreds of successful sticks so he shouldn't dwell on this one.
Thankfully at this point Maverick was over, and next the staff put on an Adam Sandler comedy, The Longest Yard.  It was considerably less terrible than I had expected, though I was a bit flummoxed by Courtney Cox's boobs.  When did they get to be so enormous?

???

And I couldn't figure out what was going on with Tracy Morgan's character:

Are straight people allowed to be offended by the use of trans characters as comic relief?

In any case, it was sufficiently distracting that I didn't pass out or embarrass myself in any other way.
Right at the point in the movie where the ragtag band of convict football players meets the prison guard team in their first match, I started feeling a lot colder all of a sudden, and looked down to see the color of the IV going into my arm had changed from red to pink: the saline was flowing in to replace the volume of the plasma that had been removed, so it meant I was nearly done.  The saline must have been at a significantly lower temperature than my innards, because before long I was shivering hard and getting more jealous of the girl with the blanket by the second.  After a few minutes, though, equilibrium was restored and I was unhooked and sent to the payment window for my $40 debit card and instructions to eat some protein and drink plenty of fluids.  I pedaled sedately back to the house and was roundly chastised by the dogs for the inhumanity of leaving them alone for 3 hours.
Apart from some lingering discomfort in my left arm from the initial stick, the whole process was pretty painless, and I think I will be back again.  There are a couple risks to the process, as with anything in life (air embolism, allergic reaction to the anticoagulation reagent), but they are vanishingly rare, especially with the current technology and safeguards. After all, $40 for 3 hours is better than minimum wage, and all I had to do was sit there and watch bad movies!
Today, my activity will be to adorn my cruiser with stickers.  I hope I'll have enough time, what with all the napping I've got scheduled...

To Go Balls Out Or Not To Go Balls Out: That Is The Question

And on this particular occasion, the answer was: only go balls out to the extent that you get enough points to win the series overall.
First, we'll get the suspense out of the way with the race results:
4th place in Moab, 1st place overall!

I did not get the memo about wearing shorts.

The Moab stop in the Big Mountain Enduro series was supposed to take place on Saturday, August 23rd.  Ever since the race venues were announced in early January, participants were freaking out over the chosen date.  You see, Moab is in the desert, and daytime temperatures usually stay in the upper 90s and lower 100s well into September--not ideal riding conditions, especially for a race with a stage that's 17 miles long.

(The red line is 17.2 miles.  Ouch.)

Last year BME had the Moab final in late September, and it snowed heavily up in the mountains (at the start line) the night before the race, making it a nasty, dangerous sledding situation for the first stage, as well as tearing up the trail and making the Forest Service very grumpy.  So this year, to avoid another mudfest, they held it a month earlier, but that in turn would put people at risk for heat exhaustion.  There's just no easy way to race in Moab, and rumor has it that the venue will be dropped for next year.
So, despite Moab's typical weather forecast, the area experienced a whole mess of rain the day before the race was to be held, so the organizers pushed the start time back from 5:45am to 7:45 am for the pros and 10:00am for the amateurs.  This was perfectly fine for me because I can't eat breakfast early in the morning without feeling nauseous, so it would give me a chance to fill up properly before riding.  On Saturday we awoke to light rain, then heavier rain, then intermittent downpours followed by short periods of blue sky and then more rain.  At 8:00am the organizers canceled the race for the day and established a tentative start time of 7:45am on Sunday.  This ruffled lots of feathers, as some racers only budgeted enough time for Saturday and had to return from whence they came, and they received no refunds or adjustments; unfortunately that's the name of the game sometimes.  Those of us that stayed found ourselves suddenly with a lot of time on our hands and nothing particularly exciting to do; rain is perfectly pleasant when you're at home and can curl up under the covers with a book, but when personal space isn't available stir-craziness quickly sets in.  My crew convened at Wake and Bake, a coffee shop on the main drag with free wi-fi, and watched a replay of the Downhill World Championship race going on in Meribel, France:

Nothing was actually happening on the screen at the time, we just wanted to make the picture more dramatic.
Finally, the rain let up, and we loaded up the bikes and went to the one trail near town that doesn't go to complete crap during inclement weather: Captain Ahab!  Apparently everyone else had the exact same idea, because the trail was positively swarming with bikes bearing number plates.  I'm sure we looked like complete dorks to any locals unlucky enough to be stuck on the trail with us that day, but it's okay because we're enduro.
(If you don't know what enduro is, just watch this video)
After the ride we went to a barbecue put on by BME to mollify us about the race delay, then a Mexican restaurant, then back to camp for an early bedtime.  Fun fact about Utah: in some restaurant establishments, you can't just order an alcoholic beverage; you also have to order food, and eat it.  I don't know what happens if you order food and then don't eat it, but the server at the Mexican place was very adamant that this was the case.  Mormons may be polite, but they really want to make sure that no one will have fun if they're not having fun.
Sunday morning: word comes from Facebook that the race is on, but only a fraction of the second stage will now be run because the Forest Service and BLM are having a shit fit about the trail conditions.  This comes as great news to the majority of racers, because it cuts out the nasty, grueling, cross country-y part of the stage that is mostly likely to kill everyone.  However, it means that the first stage, starting from waaaay up in the La Sal mountains, will be wet and slippery and extra sketchy.
This is where the strategizing comes in.  I hadn't originally planned to race Moab because it's not really my jam: long, tiring, lots of pedaling; and my endurance was in the crapper because I'd been too busy working/packing/cleaning to train ride my bike a couple times a week in the entire month of August.  My forte is take-my-time climbs and fun gnarly descents, neither of which describes the original second stage of the Moab race.  But when my friend Megan broke her arm on a trip to Jackson at the end of August, I decided to help her out and buy her race entry so she wouldn't lose $175.  Then I looked at the BME standings and calculated that all I needed to win the series (i.e., earn the most points) was to get 6th place or better in Moab.  I wanted to win the series overall for two reasons: one, it would look good on a race resume if I want to try and get enough sponsors to go pro; and two, they give out good prizes to the series winners.
So, as stated before, I kept the balls in and played it safe during the race instead of blasting down the mountain like a crazy person, picking my lines and braking more than I would have normally.  Even so, my front tire slipped on a wet rock halfway down the first stage and I almost lost it. After the two timed stages, everyone still had to get all the way back to town, which was about 20 miles any way you sliced it, and my crew was in serious need of some beer when we arrived back at the sponsor village, which was generously provided by Oskar Blues Brewery.  Then I checked the printout of the standings, and got a bit of a surprise: the girl who won in my category had, in previous BME races, placed 8th, 8th, and 18th.  I was stoked for her--she's a really sweet girl, and a good rider, but I'm not entirely trusting that the timing was accurate at this venue.  Timing inconsistencies also happened at the BME race in Keystone (they erroneously put me in 5th place when I actually got 2nd place, 10 seconds back from 1st), but I decided not to contest it on this occasion.  I came in 4th, which was pretty much what I expected, and kept me in a comfortable lead in the overall by 110 points.  The prizes were pretty good, as I thought they would be: tires, Smith sunglasses (MSRP $159), wheels (MSRP $999), and a cool little CnCd metal trophy, which I like better than the medal I got last year.  I'm keeping the sunnies, though the fact that they cost the same as a month of Obamacare health insurance is a little galling, and I'm on the fence as to whether I should sell the wheels or put them on my bike.  They're bright yellow and very enduro.  After the awards were doled out, we drank some more beer and then the rest of my crew rolled out to their respective homes.  I had dinner at the brewery with one of the locals, slept in the van outside another friend's house, went for a quick easy ride in the morning and then headed back north to Pokey.  All in all, a good trip!
Next time: new-ish news from Pocatello.

The Pokey Dispatch: Days 1-4

I live in Idaho now!  Woo!  Here are my recollections of the first few days after the move, starting with the trip from Denver.
We picked up the 14ft truck from an auto service place in Broomfield at 8am on Friday, swung by our mostly empty house to pick up the last few things we needed to take with us, and then drove back to Mike's parents house, where all of the things that were going to Idaho were stacked in a neat corner of their garage: bed, dressers, futon, desk, bookshelf, a couple dozen boxes and five bikes.  Mike's dad, Tom, worked as a mover for a few summers in college, so he immediately took charge of the Tetris-ing of furniture and boxes.  He seemed to get quite a kick out of it, so Mike and I just took his directions, and I was relieved to not be leading the chaos.  Loading took about three hours, then I went and visited some friends for poolside drinks while Mike ran a few errands, and we reconvened back at Tom and Peggy's for dinner with them and Jeff's family.  Jeff's younger daughter, Ila, had previously been a pretty quiet and content baby, but on this occasion she was offended by nearly everything: her high chair, being held, not being held, pizza, juice, etc., and let us know this with high-pitched squeals.  Good thing she's cute.  Liv had on a 'Frozen'-themed dress with the blonde witch-type character gazing out in an entirely inappropriately provocative manner...are female characters from children's movies becoming more beguiling, or am I just getting old and cranky?  When it was time to go, I picked up Liv and told her the only three things she needs to know for life:  ride fast, take chances; rubber side down; and safety third.  I don't believe it sunk in at the time, but someday she'll think back and say 'Oh. That does make sense'.
That night we met friends at a Mexican restaurant that has good tequila and a DJ after 10pm.  It started out as just me, Mike, Megan and Stevezie, but in short order we had to pull 4 tables together and take over half of the dining area.  There was tequila, and dancing, and then good-byes; it was a great send-off.
The next morning we were in no hurry to get going, as the drive was nine hours and we didn't need to be there at any particular time.  I loaded the last few things into the van, put the bikes on the rack, and fired up some podcasts.  We rolled out just after 1pm and a light lunch.
The drive should have been nine hours, at least, but that's assuming you don't have a large heavy vehicle and a stiff headwind.  The fuel economy on the Uhaul dropped precipitously when the speedo went past 65mph, so we took it pretty easy, and eventually made it to our rental house in Pocatello just after midnight.  We opened some windows and fired up a couple box fans to air the place out overnight and slept in the van with the dogs.
Day one in Pokey!  Unloading the van only took two hours, but now, nearly two weeks later, some things are still in boxes.  We got rid of a lot of stuff, and rented a storage unit in CO, but it's still a bit of a squeeze living in this 576-square-foot house, especially since we have to keep all the bikes in the living room (they're worth more than all of our other belongings combined).

I hope nobody has claustrophobia.

Luckily the place also has a concrete basement, but the stairs are steep and it's full of spiderwebs.  I'm generally pro-spider and anti-most insects, but the sheer biomass of the basement spiders is a tad unnerving.  Unfortunately I have to go down there at least a couple times a day to retrieve things because there is only enough space upstairs for about half our stuff.  Oh well--it's only for a year, and the place is cheap and has a fenced yard for the dogs, so I can deal.

This is where the zombies will come from.

We worked on unpacking until 2pm, when we both got unbearably cranky from the lack of food, and I set out on my bike to find something to bring back.  Google said there was a Chinese place on Main Street a few blocks away, but when I got there it turned out to be closed.  In fact most places on Main were closed on Sundays, and the street was eerily empty of pedestrians, an odd change from Boulder where any Sunday with remotely nice weather is a circus.  But a block away there was a Thai restaurant that was open, albeit completely empty of customers, with two young girls behind the counter.  I looked at the menu, placed my order and was told it would be about ten minutes.  The older girl, maybe nine years old, walked back toward the kitchen and for a moment I thought she might also be cooking the food, but she gave the ticket to a woman and came back to the front to ring me up.  For the record: I wouldn't have thought to put pineapple, pine nuts and currants in fried rice, but the stuff I got was pretty tasty.
On my short pedal back to the house, I encountered another cyclist, a man wearing standard roadie gear except for a helmet with a green spiky mohawk on top  Odd, because the stretchy skintight shorts imply a concern with aerodynamics but the mohawk would likely prove dicey in crosswinds.
Later on, we walked the dogs to the river a few blocks over, then watched a movie while Mike built a new wheel for his Nomad.
Day two: first order of business was to acquire a washer and dryer because I am too old and intolerant of randos to ever go back to using a laundromat. Also we still had the Uhaul for another day, so might as well make full use of it.  Craigslist turned up a relatively new set a couple miles away for a few hundred bucks; some quick correspondence with the owner, and a couple hours later they were ours.  The setup was a tad hairy because the person who ran the lines for hookups did it in an incredibly inconvenient way, but eventually they were up and running smoothly.  Next order of business: a haircut for Mike, foodstuffs from Costco and housewares from Ross.  We got ourselves over to the shopping center with all three storefronts around 2pm, and to our surprise there was a 30 minute wait for the haircut and the checkout lines at the Costco were 4 or 5 deep.  At 2 on a Monday.  I guess regular business hours apply here less than in most places.  After the retail adventures, dinner, another walk for the pups, and the remaining bike wheel.
Day three: time for a bike ride!  There is a trailhead ten minutes from our house by bike, so we saddled up and pedaled over.  The trail system is City Creek, and the uphill-only bike trail that accesses the downhill trails winds its way along the creek, nicely shaded by leafy trees.  The trails are well maintained and feature some nicely built berms that we could hit with pretty good speed, slingshotting out the other side without losing traction.  There are supposed to be some really baller descents from higher up, but we haven't made it there yet since we've got so much else to do.
Day four: one of the students in Mike's program invited everyone over to his house for a barbecue in the evening, so I dumped some pita chips and artichoke dip on a plate and we headed over.  The host had requested that no one bring alcoholic beverages, and once we got there it turned out that he had six kids and there were Bible- and Jesus-related placards all over the house, so we're guessing Mormon.  Several other guests had brought their offspring as well: the first sight that greeted us upon entering was a mid-thirties couple with four boys, all of them with the exact same gelled-up fauxhawk as their dad. He joked that they were trying for a girl; funny because it's usually the other way around.  One wife of a student asked me if we had kids; I said no, just dogs, and she chuckled and said that animals were more her thing too, so I'm glad there's at least one other person with the same inclination.  She has a couple horses, so maybe if I'm lucky I'll get to go riding out here sometime!  Everyone was quite nice, and I got to talk bikes and trails with a guy who had grown up in Pokey, so it was a good time overall.
Day five: Mike went to orientation and I loaded up the van and headed the Moab for the Big Mountain Enduro race.  I hadn't originally planned on racing Moab, because it's not my favorite trail, but I was leading the series with points in my category and I only needed sixth place or better to win the overall, so I figured it was probably worth the time and money.  The six-hour trip was entirely uneventful, but in the evening Mike called to tell me about his exciting mountain bike ride he had gone on with some of his classmates.  First, most of the others in the group had shown up on pretty old bikes that probably weren't in fantastic condition, and one guy had even neglected to bring a helmet.  He was from Chicago; apparently news of this newfangled helmet technology hasn't reached the midwest yet.  It began storming soon after they set out, and, as Mike now knows, the dirt here turns to peanut butter when it gets wet, which means it sticks to tires and gums up stays and wreaks major havoc with rim brakes.  At one point the guy with no helmet came into a turn too hot, had no traction for braking, missed the bridge and fell into the creek.  Don't worry, he's okay.  But I'm not going to ride with him until he gets a helmet, because having to get someone with a head wound out of the backcountry is no picnic.  Not that a helmet will protect you from all harm, but it's still much better than nothing.  This has been a public service announcement from Bike Snob PID :)
Next time: race report from the BME series final!

Adventures in facial piercings

In college, I got my nose pierced because I wanted some kind of facial adornment and an eyebrow piercing seemed too scary.  The stud came out constantly, but I was usually able to recover it from my pillow, and when I couldn't I just stuck an earring in there to keep the hole from closing until I bought a new one.  Then, on a mountain bike ride in Fruita in 2009, I must have accidentally pulled the stud out while performing a Farmer John (it was cold), because afterwards it was nowhere to be found.  Not having ready access to a tattoo/piercing shop at the campsite, I figured that was that, and let the hole close up.
Or so I thought.
This summer, I've been racing a riding with a lot of other girls, and several of them have nose piercings of varying size and ostentatiousness, and all of them are around my age.  I still like the way nose studs look, so out of curiosity I tried sticking an earring through the depression still visible in my nose.  Lo and behold, it went right through, so the following week I rode my bike to a piercing parlor on the CU campus and checked out the goods.  The store offered basic little studs for $10 each in various colors, with an option to upgrade to free crystal replacements for $20.  I'd never had a crystal fall out of a stud before, so I got one 'installed' at the place and took another one home for backup.
About a month later, I woke up to find that the crystal had come out of my stud (damn!).  Unfortunately, I had had the guy at the piercing place corkscrew the post before putting it in so that it would be nearly impossible for it to get pulled out, and I didn't want to deal with it, so I just left the unbedazzled stud there for a while, figuring it didn't make that big a difference.
Then the other night, I decided enough was enough, and it was time to bring in the backup.  I tugged and swirled the stud for a while, to no avail, and then rummaged around in the tool box for some needlenose pliers.  Those also had no effect.  I returned the pliers to the tool box and extracted the coup de grace: wire cutters.  Drawn by the commotion and cursing, Mike came into the bathroom to find me bracing myself for the snip, and promptly offered his assistance.  I then had four hands in or around my nose, but after some nervous flinching and giggling, the post was extricated from my nostril with the requisite boogers in tow.  The new stud was inserted with much less ado, and voila, facial accessory accomplished.
The moral of the story is: 30 is not too old to have a nose piercing, and for heaven's sake just shell out for the more expensive stud.

ThingsTo Make You Smile And Laugh And Maybe Cry, But Only Because You're Laughing So Hard

This one's for you, Gmom!  We love you!

Slow Motion Puppies and Kittens

Pug Licks Its Face Every Time Toy Squeaks

Kitten + Lizards = Awesome

Cat vs Printer (sound necessary)

Cat vs Cat vs Printer

Otters!

Tired Baby Sea Lion

Dancing Walrus!

Sleepy Spudgy

Dog Doesn't Want To Take A Bath

Mike Birbiglia standup - animated!

Hope this helps :)

Hey look, I'm on the podium again!

So, last month I raced in the Big Mountain Enduro in Durango.  There were six other girls in my category, and I trounced them all to claim first place!

Well, that's not entirely true.  The girl who came in third, Alexandra, was hot on my heels on Stages 1 and 2, but she had a mechanical problem on Stage 3 that knocked her cumulative time back by a couple minutes.  (I know she had a mechanical because she was trying to fix it when I caught up to her right before a chunky uphill section.  I hopped off my bike to start shoving as she moved out of the trail, but I then tripped and fell onto her, which probably did not help her time either.)  The girl in second, Terah, was only a second behind me on Stage 2, but my lead on the other stages built up to give me the win.  Woo!

So, let's take a quick look at the evolution of my podium finishes.
Here we have: "I did not expect to be here and am still not entirely sure how this happened."

Next, we have: "I have been up here before, but I still do not know what I'm supposed to do exactly."

And finally: "I earned this one, dammit!  Booyah!"

In fact, I over-earned the last one, because immediately afterward I came down with a nasty cold that left me moaning and snuffling for a week.  I was pretty determined to put up a good showing, so much so that I went to Durango with a few friends on the Wednesday evening before the race in order to pre-ride the stages.  Day 1 was Kennebec Pass, which included two untimed 6 mile-ish climbs and two fast, occasionally terrifying singletrack descents.  Here's the first part of the trail:

Eeep.

 Day 2 was Raiders Ridge, just east of town, and a second, marginally technical trail, the name of which now escapes me.
Kennebec Pass was an absolute beast.  On Thursday, we paid to get shuttled to the trailhead in a lifted van instead of riding pushing our bikes up the rough 4WD road to the top of the pass, because we didn't want to get wrecked before the race even started.  We made our way to the rumored start line and assessed the situation:  nasty exposure, steep drop to the right, couple scree fields, waterbars that had to be taken slowly or we'd go flying off the mountainside, blind corners, overgrown trail...super.  Happily, our group had no incidents, but I had to go frustratingly slow for the first few hundred yards because I was unfamiliar with the trail.  Then we dropped into a drainage with lots of surprise switchbacks and stream crossings, and eventually came to the finish of Stage 1.  This meant that it was time to start climbing!  We were in no hurry, having literally nothing else to do that day but ride this trail, but even at an easy pace we were out of breath and hating the race organizers for being so cruel as to make us pedal our bikes uphill.  The bastards!

This is Matt. He is out of breath.

This is Eric.  He is also out of breath, but he has a dog named Kaia.

Eventually we made it to the start line for the second stage, and had a blast riding the flowy, jumpy downhill to the road back into Durango.  We had some beers, ate some dinner, and crashed early.

On Friday, a few of the local riders led us on a preview of Raider's Ridge, which is almost exactly like Dakota Ridge in Golden, Colorado, but longer and more difficult and with less shade.  The ridge undulates for a few miles in a general south-ish direction, and alternates between ledgy off-camber rock and ledgy cliff-exposure rock, plus some loose stuff here and there to keep it interesting.  It was awful.  I'm sure the locals can go and figure out the lines and piece everything together eventually, but for a race, it was a mess.

Carnage in 3, 2, 1...

 We decided that we would just pick up our bikes and run over the majority of the trail on race day.  Then, in the last few hundred yards of the stage, the race organizers had decided not to send us on a nice newly finished fast flowy section, but to instead make us ride down two super-steep sections that were covered with what Liz christened 'demon baby heads': loose rocks about 6 inches in diameter that really really wanted to slip under our tires and make us crash.
It was a fitting, final 'F YOU' from the trail, and we were not looking forward to racing it.
And then we did not pre-ride Stage 4.  Everyone told us that there was nothing to it, and we shouldn't bother.  Just fast and flowy downhill.  Right.  So we went to Tricia's house, waded in the nearby Las Animas river to ease the aching in our forearms and hamstrings, ate dinner, and went to bed.

For a while, at least.  Mike couldn't leave Denver until after work on Friday, so he rolled in to the campsite at 1:30 on Saturday morning.  Yay Labor Day weekend.

After Mike's arrival, I got a few more hours of fitful shut-eye (Ellie kept stepping on me), and then it was time to get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, drink coffee, and go to Tricia's house to meet the people with whom we'd be carpooling to the start of the Stage 1 climb.  Officially, the race organizers wanted all racers to meet in Durango and ride the shuttle buses to the start, but after the shitshow in Angel Fire (wherein the trailer carrying the bikes first broke and then went off the fire road into a ditch) we broke the rules and shuttled ourselves.  There was no advantage in terms of the distance we had to ride; we started the climb at the exact same spot as everyone else.  But since we began pedaling right as the first round of shuttles was heading back to town for the next load of people and bikes, we had the road to ourselves and thus felt free to go as slowly as was physically possible.  Before we set off, however, we did some yoga

Ellie is helping

and then we had a quick dance party to warm ourselves up, thanks to Liz's Jammy Pack:

If anyone cares, I would be happy to get one of these for my birthday or Christmas :)

Liz kept the Jammy Pack rocking for the entire 6-mile slog up the pass, which helped our spirits enormously, and Tricia decreed that in order to conserve energy, we should not be working so hard that we couldn't sing along to the music.  It was a good strategy, and we went slow enough that it took us two hours, but we were still a little beat at the top.  We refilled our water, stuffed some Clif energy shots in our pockets (do not try the vanilla flavor, it's horrifying), and queued up at the start line:

There was a group of 8 or so women, and we decided that we should all go at the same time to create a buffer between ourselves and the boys, who, by dint of being silly and competitive and reckless, are generally faster riders.  Liz went first, then Tricia, then me, then Leigh, who is faster than me but hadn't ridden the trail before.  A photographer got a shot of Leigh and her awesome socks after she went by:

As I expected to, I went painfully slowly on the first section, especially over the loose nasty scree

Please don't let my brakes fail.

 but once I dropped into the trees I opened up the throttle and caught Tricia on the first short uphill section.  Leigh caught me at the same spot, so she went in front and I chased her, with Tricia close behind.  We were having a super time, hootin and hollerin, until I came to a section that had given me trouble before: a blind corner with a stream crossing and a big rock that you have to manual over.  I almost made it, but I stalled and had to unclip my right foot to catch myself.  But instead of falling right, I fell left, and wasted a few seconds flailing around under my bike, trying to free myself.  I got going again and had no more issues, and crossed the finish very tired and out of breath.

Since it was quite hot, several of us all but submerged ourselves in the stream running along the trail and declared that we were too tired to ride bikes ever ever again, that riding bikes was in fact the dumbest thing a person could do, but then twenty minutes later we were up again and shoving our bikes towards the Stage 2 start line, 5 miles away.

Tricia rides a 29er because she's tall.

Stage 2 was uneventful, except I had to stop briefly and extricate the shattered remains of my chain guide from my drivetrain so that I could pedal again, which cost me a couple seconds.

fin

 

Liz's friend Arturo was not so lucky; he redlined in the last mile, crashed, and broke his helmet and one of his front teeth.  Supervan was called in to take him to the ER south of Durango, and Paddington helped by sitting on him during the ride.  He returned to Tricia's house a few hours later with a concussion, some painkillers and strict instructions not to not to race the second day.  Luckily, Arturo's dad is a dentist in Ecuador, so he'll get fixed up next time he goes to visit.

Upon returning to town, we waded in the river again, ate dinner again, and sat by a campfire for a while, consuming a perfectly reasonable amount of alcohol, before going to bed (again).

Day 2!  Up at 6, breakfast, drive to start of climb, dance party, pedaling.  It was really really very hot that day, so of course we had to race at 11am, because heatstroke really helps to narrow the field.
We stopped in the last bit of shade before the ridge began in earnest:

and had another quick dance party, then put on our armor and got in line to drop.

Not a single goddamn cloud in the sky.

Remember how our plan was to just pick up our bikes and sprint over the parts we couldn't ride?  Yeah, that didn't work out.  It was so hot, and I was so about to have a heart attack, that the best I could do was trudge along while resting my weight on my saddle and taking giant, scalding lungfuls of stupid Durango air.  I may or may not have been hallucinating by the end.

There was one section on the trail where you could either send a 3-ish foot drop, roll a middle line, or take a roundabout route that keeps your wheels on the ground.  I wanted to huck it (the landing was clean), but I did the smart thing and took the middle line:

And finally, after what felt like days of riding/hiking, I got to the demon baby heads.  My tires made it clear that they would buck me off if I dragged my brakes the way I wanted to, so I jumped off and ran down the sketchiest section, then hopped back on for the last hundred yards:

Not amused.

After everyone in our group came down, we sat under a tree and got rehydrated before tackling the climb to the last stage, which was, remember, supposed to be a piece of cake.  "All downhill," they said!  "Nothing to it."  Yeah, right.  It was like 90 percent pedaling, and I went so hard that I literally started dry heaving after crossing the finish line!

(barf)

Luckily the finish area was only a few minutes' walk from the ubiquitous Las Animas river, so we soaked ourselves and our nasty shammy until it was time to go to the park that BME was using as a staging area to look at our times.

There was beer

and dogs

and a man with a mohawk

The guy with the epic goatee is Gary, and the guy with the plugs is Joe, and they're both very cool.

and a podium!  Look, there's Leigh in first place for amateur women 30-39!

wow, the girl on the left is super ripped...

Her cumulative time was only 12 seconds ahead of mine, and she's pretending to be worried about the fact that we will be in the same category next year.  I think we should just practice getting the exact same time in races so that we can share the top spot.

So, that was my adventure in Durango, and if you want to see more pictures of people that aren't me, check out Mountain Flyer Magazine's coverage of the race.

(fin)