General Jackassery

It’s been an interesting week since we got back from regionals. I got home on Monday night to find that Nanook had a raging skin infection, we’re talking VERY bad. I don’t really know what caused it, but it was bad enough that when I stepped out on the back porch I was like “jeeze what is that smell!” I noticed that the birds had been on the back porch eating the dog food because there was a ton of bird poo back, so I thought that maybe that was causing it. Finally Nanook sat down and started to scratch and I saw the hair was gone and blood and ooze where running down his chest, as I got closer I realized it was he that smelled and I finally figured out what it smelled like! Rancid meat, it’s a smell I’d only encountered one other time. When I came back from Sewannee after being gone all summer, the power had been shut off and we had left meat in the refrigerator, when I opened the door to the fridge it almost knocked me over. Anyway, that’s what Nanook smelled like, the flesh was literally rotting off. I took him to the vet and he’s going to be okay, but I can’t help but feel sorry for him. He’s had a pretty rough go of it the last couple of months. He’s an AWESOME dog though, he seems to take it all in stride and the only thing that’s important to him is that you love on him a little! I’ve made a promise to the dogs and myself to start spending more time with them. I’m away from home WAY too much.

Anyway, that same evening Sarah calls and says that she’s found a stray cat and she wants to bring it home. She ask me if she should! What can I say I love animals, I told her that if she didn’t think it had a home and if she thought it wouldn’t be able to take care of itself then bring it home if she wanted to! So she did and I took it to the Vet yesterday and the new Cat is doing wondefully. She’s staying at my house until Sarah get’s back in town, she’s already litter trained herself and she doesn’t seem to scratch at anything. She just seems so happy to have a home, a dry, warm place to sleep, and food. I’m trying to talk Sarah into naming her Lilo, I think that would be cute since I have a cat named Stich!

Okay, so things seem to be settling down, there’s a lot of work to do to get the team ready for nationals and there’s a lot of work for me to do to get ready for my bike ride in May, but atleast the burden and the stress of trying to win the regional competition is off our backs and we’re back in the game at the National level. I guess I should say “They.”

Well, that’s all I have for now. Hope all my readers are doing well. Life is good!

Todder, Out!

Well, after two years in the doldrums of second place we finally pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and won regionals this year! I don’t know of the last time a UAH canoe team went two years in a row without winning regionals but we did it. This year we swept all of the technical aspects of the competition and didn’t fair too poorly in the water, but we could have done a lot better! Oh well, hopefully the paddlers will hoist themselves and actually be ready for nationals when they come around in two and a half months.

Anybody else want to go to Washington D.C. for a couple of days and cheer on the team?

You know it really stinks when you have to turn your computer over to the Information Management people and they decided to keep it until the get good and ready to do something productive with it. They’re supposed to be changing out the operating system on it and updating the software because the government has this irritating policy where they test new software to death before they decided to actually implement it. By they time they upgrade to that software they’re already behind and the newest software has come out. So, they’re “working” on loading XP Pro on my machine and have been working on it since Thursday afternoon. It doesn’t take THAT long to load software on a machine!

Oh well, we leave for Tampa on Wednesday evening. Mo and I went and picked up the boat from Maaco this morning and there’s some relatively minor work that needs to be done on the interior of the boat before it can be called finished also so clear coating to do where the boat was resting on the stands when it was clear coated. I’ll be posting pictures of my cross-section sometime soon, I’ve had help building it, but the concept and the majority of the labor in construction goes to me, I’m pretty proud of it. We currently have to finish building the boat stands and the base for the cross-section, fill and sand the inside of the cross-section and the boat and have Tidwell put the vinyl lettering on the outside of the boat and the trailer and we’ll be ready to head to Tampa!

I would really like for some of these guys to get a chance to see Nationals and have that experience, but the other half of me would really like for this season to be over and us all to get our lives back. It was really nice to have the summers off and I’m kind of looking forward to working on my house and my garden and yard and bidding fair well to the concrete canoe!

You know, I’m not a quitter by any means and I don’t have a lot of respect for people who are. However, there is one particular group of people that I really wish would quit the ASCE, simply walk away, because they are the ones that are pointing fingers and causing all of the problems that they percieve exist. They think there’s an “us and them” mentality in the club. That’s funny becuase I don’t see them working everynight that I’m there, how can you say that WE are the ones that cause the “us and them” mentality when YOU are the one that’s not showing up to work?

I really wish that people would learn that “He who is without sin cast the first stone!”

It really is the simple things in life that are the coolest. I’m currently sitting in my new cubicle at work, it’s a little bit smaller than my other cube, but it is far more private. If you want to see what I’m doing you have to either be tall enough to see over the 6′ cubicle wall, or you have to make a point to turn down the little isle that I’m on. So in light of the fact that it’s Friday afternoon, the Chief of my Branch is gone for the weekend, the Chief of my Division is gone for the weekend, Thad is gone for the weekend and just about everyone else is gone for the weekend I’m sitting with my feet propped on my desk, leaning back in my chair, a nice cool breeze blowing on me from my fan, music coming through my headphones (Puffy, “I’ll be missing you.” ), my new wireless keyboard in my lap just chillin’ dawg! It’s been a pretty good day, quite the opposite of my favorite person in the world, I have been completely useless all day (well not completely). I got up this morning and played hockey, came to work, did my training CD’s, got on my bike rode 16 miles (not bad considering I was alone in the wind and rain.) Took a shower when I got back and went to McAllisters and had lunch with my favorite person in the whole wide world. This afternoon I’ve been farting around with the new Line of Sight software that we’ve been working on and I was told that next week I will start developing spreedsheets to help us with the designs that we do. That really means that I’ve got to get one of the old computers set up to share with mine so I can use it as a server for me and Thad, then I have to learn Excel in a little deeper more personal way because these spreadsheets will require “If/then” statements and things like that. But, developing these spreadsheets should help me study for the PE. I’ll be taking that in about a year and a half, but there’s not time like the present to start learning the things that I never learned in college.

See, I was a structural engineering major in school and no my job is more like that of a transportation engineer. So, I have to learn some new things that I didn’t know. InRoads (the design software that we use) has all of that stuff in there and it computes it for you, but I need to know how it really works. The idea is to start designing roads based on a design speed instead of setting the design speed based on the alignment of the road. (Probably greek to most, but it’s cool to me.)

Anyway, it’s been a pretty good day. Hope everyone else’s is good too!

Today I got on my bike and hit the road with a group of guys from the IM branch (same guys I started riding with last summer) it’s the third time I’ve ridden my bike this week. I’ve also played hockey and run twice for a total of about 2 miles. I’ve started running while the girls are practicing in the mornings becuase I truly believe there is NOTHING on this planet that will make your heart and lungs stronger any faster than running. Anyway, I’ve started pushing pretty hard again to get ready for the ride that I talked about in my last post. So William and I were flying, by the time we hit the neighborhood that we usually ride through we were already at an average speed of over 18 mph. (Normally we would just be approaching 16 mph at that point.) But, alas we had to slow down and wait on Mabry because he just isn’t strong enough to ride at that speed and he refuses to push himself.

There’s the difference: I’m not really strong enough to ride at that speed either, but I’m not going to just let someone ride away from me. Anyway, William and I ended up turning around and waiting on Mabry several times. We added about a mile and half to the distance that we would have ridden because we would turn back and pick Mabry back up. Finally when we were about 4 miles out, we dropped Mabry and William and I were both just too tired to go back and get him. (Funny you drop someone and you’re the one that’s too tired to go back and get him.) Anyway, I guess riding into a 15 mph headwind for 8 to 10 miles will wear you down, especially when you’ve been climbing (we decided to ride the rolling course). By the time all was said and done William and I rode about 21 miles at an average of 17 mph. We should have been closer to about 18 mph but we lost a lot of speed turning around to pick up Mabry.

When we all got back and in the locker room, Mabry said, “You guys are already at speeds that we were riding last summer, I can’t hang with you and I’ll never be able to catch you because I just can’t get enough time on the bike.” That made me feel pretty good. I’ve been away from riding seriously for about 3 months now and within two weeks of riding again I’m already back close to where I was. Today for the first time in a long time I cruised up the little incline on Plummer Rd. at over 20 mph. It’s not a big hill but I had been slowing down to about 13-15 going up it. So I’m starting to get my power back and my endurance is coming back too. Unfortunately the majority of the climbing that I’ll do on the Cheaha Challenge will be in a 25 mile segment. There is a 3.8 mile climb that is an average grade of 8%, that’s after you’ve already ridden 40+ miles and then you get to turn around and go back.

So to make a long story short, I was glad to hear Mabry concede that I’m WAY better than he is right now and he’ll probably never catch me. However, I was saddened by the realization that I can’t use him to help me get stronger. See William and I are the competitive sorts, he know’s that I’m not going to let him ride away from me, and if I do, he know’s that I’ll never let him get too far out that I can’t real him back in when I want to. (Today I let him get out about 150 meters, closed the gap and blew by him within a mile of the finish. ) So the two of us kind of feed off each other, if one of us is feeling a little froggy, the other is going to sit on his wheel and make him work for it. Unfortunately I can’t even Mabry to sit on my wheel. I was telling William today, “You know, I can understand if you can’t stay with me on the hills, but anybody on just about any type of bike should be able to tuck in my slipstream and ride nearly effortlessly at any speed I’m going.” William agreed, although he has said that when I get in a rythm on the flats, I’m very hard to pass. He said that last summer after I pulled him all the way down Jordan LN at over 25 Mph into a 15 mph head wind. He was feeling froggy and decided that he was going to try to pass me and take off. When he broke out of my draft the wind slapped in the face and he literally couldn’t pull hard enough to get around me.

Oh well, I just thought that last little bit was a funny story, I’m really not trying to pat myself on the back. Although it is good to build yourself up a little bit every now and again. Put me next to Rodney and the 50 year old man would smoke me and never look back!

It’s going to be an interesting summer, my goal is to finish the Cheaha Challenge, survive Rodney’s trip to the mountains and Qualify for RAAM (stands for the Race Across America)

GRUELING! Today, I registered for this ride! It is perhaps going to be the most physically demanding thing I’ve ever done! And then after that, sometime in June, Rodney told me that he’s putting a group of riders together to go to the Blueridge Parkway to ride for 4 days. That goes from Grueling to Brutal, since Rodney was talking about 95 miles a day AND riding up and over Mt. Mitchell two days in a row. For those who don’t know Mt. Mitchell is one of/if not the highest Mountain in North Carolina. Anyway, it’s shaping up to be an intersting summer and if I do all of this stuff I should be in the best shape of my life when it’s all over. Honestly, it should be a pretty good launch pad for me to the the 24 hour time trial up in Iowa in September. SO, you’re now asking yourself, why?

The answer to the question is a belief that I have. I don’t believe that anyone can ever attain perfection, but that said I do beleive that everyone should continously be trying to improve themselves. The reason that professors give tests when they teach classes is to see where their students stand and how well they’ve done their jobs to that point. The cycling events that I plan on doing are a test of physical as well as mental strength and they are designed so that I can see what I’m made out of. Should I fail miserably it will be back to the drawing boards and I’ll continue to work hard to better myself. In this case there’s no one but me telling me how good or bad I’m doing. However, you can rest assured that I will not be telling myself that just because I’m on the bike that’s good enough. I’ll be pushing myself to go beyond what I think I’m capable of because that’s what it’s going to take to ride 300+ miles in 4 days over the blueridge mountains.

This brings me to what’s really eating me of late.

There are a lot of Student Organizations that are formed around the idea of getting students together and just having fun. Unfortunately the ASCE is not one of them. The ASCE has been built around the idea that we could win if we worked hard enough. Of late there have been people in the club that are not willing to put forth the effort that it takes to win and because of that there is a small cluster of people that have fought to carry the load of those people who aren’t carrying their own weight. Now there’s one officer who has it in her head that we should not be trying to win, that we should be encouraging everyone for whatever they submit as their part and accept that as good enough. I couldn’t disagree more. You’ll never know how good you CAN be if you don’t have someone pushing you to do it better! And to be honest, no one ever submits their best work on the first try. It’s not necessarily because they didn’t try hard, it’s because they need an outside perspective to help them make it better. If it’s your work you miss things because you know the intent and you might think it’s good enough. However, when someone else looks at it, they are able to see what you missed because they DON’T know the intent. Anyway, to me it doesn’t do any justice to the person doing the work to tell them that something is good when it’s not, for the plain and simple reason that you are fostering bad habits and in the future those habits will harm them. Part of the club’s mission is not just to have fun, not just to win the competition, but to help students develop skills that will help them in their professional careers.

To make a long story short you can help someone more by pushing them to do things they wouldn’t necessarily do on their own, 99% of people are not self motivated!

Oh well, I’m too old for this stuff anyway!