General Jackassery

I don’t know why this is such a big deal, but it is. How much time does a motorist lose by having to pass a cyclist? 10 secs? 30 secs? Can that time be made up? Is that time essentially negated because you’re going to get stopped at the light anyway?

People are in such a hurry to do everything these days that they are the ones that put people at risk, they are the ones that endanger cyclists, runners, walkers anyone on the side of the road trying to improve their health.

On the other side of the coin, why must cyclists antagonize the already upset motorist? People that ride two abreast on a 2-lane road are giving cyclist a bad name. They’re doing it in the name of sharing the road, but is that really sharing the road.

Don’t be in such a hurry and be considerate of others. Why is that so hard?

Well, here’s what’s going on.

Spending my last week ever in Pasadena. Unless I have to come out here for an actual design review meeting, I don’t see me ever coming back out here. There will be someone in this position for 120 days starting next week and then the permanent guy will be out here after that. Too bad I could be paid what they’re paying him. This position is a GS-14 position. To give you an idea, I’m a GS-12 currently and there is about $10k per year per grade difference. In other words I should have been making some extra coin while I was out here. Alas, I just take home per diem. That said I’m using that per diem to make my life a little less boring while I’m waiting to leave tonight. (Opie, this one’s for you. I’ll explain later.) Anyway, I bought a ticket to go watch the L.A. Kings play the Dallas Stars tonight. Since my plane doesn’t leave until 11:55, I’ve already checked out of the hotel and I have to (Oh I’ll be so sad to leave this office) leave the office at 5:00 I needed something to do to kill time. I could have gone to a nice restaurant and had dinner, but for the cost of a nice meal I got a ticket to tonights game. A little extra, well maybe a lot extra, and I’ll have a couple of hot dogs and watch the Stars pound the Kings. That said while I’m enjoying eating my dogs and watching the Stars pound the Kings, I’ll have to keep my trap shut since I’ll be cheering against the home team. Should be fun and a nice waste of time.

So, why is it that my plane leaves at 11:55 P.M.? Well, there’s this Red Headed Opie Looking MF with Facial Hair (RHOLMFw/FH) who’s getting married to his Red Headed Opie’s Wife Looking Woman (RHOWLW) this weekend. Since I was honored by being asked to be in the wedding between the RHOLMFw/FH and the RHOWLW I am required to be at the wedding rehearsal to be held Friday evening. When I was asked to travel to L.A. for the week, I knew that I would be able to fly home on Friday and I knew there was a flight that left LAX at 6:00 A.M. and would get me back to Huntsvegas at about 3:00 leaving me plenty of time to pick up the tux and head towards lovely Corner, AL (Yes! You read that right. Corner, AL) for the rehearsal. However, since the Project Manager waited until the last minute to ask me to go and then waited even longer to get the orders process, all the flights were sold out. The only flight they could get me on was one that put me back in Huntsville at 9:00 P.M. on Friday. While I’m sure the RHOLMFw/FH would totally understand this problem, I’m thinking that the RHOWLW would take serious offense to be not being at the rehearsal. So in an effort to not have my nuts in a sling (beware the wrath of a red headed woman) I decided to take the red-eye. I may not look so hot in the pictures, but atleast I won’t screw anything up!

And now on to the more embarrasing side of my life:

So, as I’ve said before I’m training for several triathlon and cycling events. The first of which is in May the week before Sarah and my first wedding anniversary. It’s a 100+ mile bike ride that goes through three states and over three mountains. While this would be an awesome accomplishment, I’ve got my heart set on completing an olympic distance triathlon in July. Since I’m away from my bike and I need to keep excercising I decided to bring my running shows with me to lovely warm CA.

Time to back track a little. Last week, I started getting back into the full swing of things. I swam over a mile and a half, I jogged about 5 miles and I rode my bike a total of 61 miles. One unfortunate side effect of being back outside jogging and Riding is the fact that my chest (the skin on my chest) is not used to having the wind blowing my wet shirt around. This causes chaffing. So after all that excercise my nipples ( yes, I said it, my nipples) were rather raw. Sarah suggests that I start wearing band-aids over my nipples to keep from chaffing, but I’m a man, how dumb does it look to have band-aids covering your nipples.

Fast forward, Monday I took off to run for about 30 minutes or so. It’s been very cold by SoCal standards and what happens to nipples when they’re cold? Well, I didn’t really think anything about it because they didn’t hurt. However, there was some chaffing that I wasn’t really aware of.

Last night I decided it was time for another jog. This time the jog would be much longer. I jogged 2.9 miles on Monday, on Wednesday I jogged 4.8 miles. About 3 miles in I notice that my chest is getting sore. What am I going to do, if I stop I’ll get cold (by now my shirt is soaked and it’s in the 50’s) so I keep jogging. When I got back to the hotel I looked in the mirror and noticed two little red spots on my shirt where my nipples are supposed to be. I take off that shirt to reveal my undershirt that has two 2″ diameter red circles on it. I think to myself, I’ve chaffed my nipples off. O-F-F off!

Actually they’re still there, but today, I’m wearing band-aids. Go ahead! Laugh, you know you want to!

It’s amazing how isolated one can feel sitting in the middle of 15 million people. As I look out the window at the palm trees and the incessant traffic on the freeways I realize just how glad I am to be a resident of the Huntsville Metropolitan area (pop. piddley squat). L.A. has its upside, the weather is nice the terrain is beautiful but the more I come here the more I want to live in the country, away from everything and everyone. That feeling could also be related to some of my frustrations with work, but I keep thinking it would be nice to live in the woods somewhere on the side of a mountain.

This started off as more of joke than any kind of reality, but I’m starting to feel more and more that I want to be involved in politics.

I know the last post was long, but if you read it, it very briefly described a gap that is developing in the ambition/motivation of American people vs. the rest of the world. I think there are a lot of drivers to this, but fundamentally this one is squezing us from both sides. Our parents have told us that we can do whatever we want to do. They’ve told us that they’ve worked really hard so we wouldn’t have to. As a result of this we don’t feel like we have to work anymore we’re already there and no-one seems to realize that you have to work to stay at the top. Actually you have to work harder to stay at the top than you do to get there.

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Several months ago the ASCE at UAH had an alumnus come in and talk about his years as a member of the ASCE and also the company that he started after working for NASA for several years. One of the things that has stuck with me from his talk was the statement he made about other schools and their dislike for UAH. He said something along the lines of, “Other schools hate UAH because we’re so much better than them. They can’t figure out why we keep beating them. They think it’s all given to us but they just don’t get it! They’ll never know why we beat them, they don’t get it!” The reason UAH was so dominant in the past is not because we were any smart or any better. The reason is because we decided that we wanted to win and we out WORKED everyone! If they were sleeping we were working. If it was raining and cold and they didn’t want to practice, we did! The reason we won is because we worked when other schools wouldn’t!

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So, we went to North Carolina to celebrate my Dad’s birthday with him and on Saturday we drove up to The Great Smokey Mountains National Park. Sarah liked this picture.

Sarah was reading an article on newsweek the other evening and she said she had to look at the author to make sure that it wasn’t me. Apparently someone had written an article in which they stated that someone had asked them what their foreign policy would be. Their answer was that their foreign policy would be something that didn’t seem like foreign policy at all. They would implement an energy plan that emphasized the use of alternative forms of clean energy that reduced dependance on foreign sources of oil. The reason being is that eleminating our countries dependance on the rest of the world would be the single most empowering thing an administration could do for our country.

Think about how many hundreds of millions of dollars we send to the middle east each year for oil. Think about what our current trade deficit is. Simply eliminating oil consumption would wipe out our trade deficit.

Just a thought. I’m not saying that you need to sell your car and ride your bike every day, but I am saying that we should ALL start doing something to reduce the amount of energy we consume.

Really annoyed the last two days. We don’t seem to know how to make small sacrifice’s in this country. Think about it, if everyone would drive slower and make an effort to reduce the mileage they drive by planning their trips a little better we could probably reduce the demand for gasoline by 10% easy! It wouldn’t take that much if I drive 70 instead of 85 I get a 4% increase in gas mileage, so all I have to do is reduce the number of miles I drive by 6%. A 10% reduction in demand would equate to a much larger reduction in cost.

So, yesterday I’m on my way home from the gym and I decided to drive by Sam’s on the way home, just to see what all the hub-ub is about. People are freaking out because they might have to pay more for gas. So what do they do? The rush to the gas station and increase the demand for gasoline 10 times, thereby driving the cost of gasoline up and CREATING the price hike that they were so afraid of. Whatever floats your boat. Me, the Camry staid in the garage today. I’m tired of complaining about the price of gas and I’m tired of hearing people complain about the price of gas. I’m riding my bike. I figure I can ride the bike to work and that will save me 125 miles/week of gas and give me 125 miles/week of additional training. It’s a win/win situation.

I’ve also come up with the newest cycling advocacy program. T-shirts that say, “I’m saving you money! Ask me how!” I figure that by riding my bike, I’m reducing the demand for gas, decreased demand means decreased prices. I’m keeping my car off the road which reduces the wear and tear on the road leading to less need for maintanence and less tax money spent on road repair. I’m getting in better shape which leads to improved health, fewer doctor visits and fewer medical bills in general. I’m reducing traffic on the road, while people may have to slow down to pass me, I take up much less space on the road on my bike than I do in my car. You can fit six bikes in the space of one car. This reduces the need for huge parking lots and increased overhead for companies which reduces the cost of goods. Removing cars from the road makes more room for truck transportation, fewer traffic jams and in general would speed up shipping times, reducing shipping costs and reducing prices. Reducing gasoline consumption would decrease the trade deficit, increasing the value of the dollar and making it cheaper to travel to foreign countries. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point, it may not equate to a measurable amount that I save you, but I AM saving you money and you could save me money by riding your bike! Even if it was just one day per week it would be a vast improvement!

I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but I’ve never done a triathlon. Yesterday, I competed in my first ever mini-triathlon. The Rocketman Triathlon at Redstone Arsenal. I decided that I would do it less than a month ago. It was one of this, “just do it!” kind of things and I figured that I would never do one if I didn’t sign up for one now.

I really had fun, despite the pain! I had very low expectations for what I would do. My only two goals were 1) Finish and 2) not be dead last. My third goal was to finish in less than two hours. Now for anyone who is an athlete, taking two hours to swin a half a mile, bike 13 miles and run 3.2 miles doesn’t sound like that difficult a feat. Put all of those together back to back and add 85+ heat and very little shade on the course and you have a tough little race. Even more so if you’ve never done one of these and barely trained for this one.

So, I’m happy to say that I more than accomplished both goals and I’ll be doing another one of these as soon as I get the opportunity. What was my time?

0.5 Mile Swim: 20:05 Swim Rank 14/17
13 Mile Bike: 43:35 Bike Rank 10/17
3.2 Mile Run: 37:37 Run Rank 13/17 (The run really killed me.)

Total time elapsed 1:41:17

Overall I was ranked 203 out of about 241 competitors.

The bike time included the transition area times to change from swim attire to cycling, and cycling to running. I think I could have easily cut 2 to 3 minutes off of that time. I think with some training I can cut up to five minutes off of my swim time. And I think with training I could cut atleast 5 minutes off the run. So, if I was able to cut a total of 13 minutes off of my time I would have ranked5th of 17 overall instead of 13th of 17 in my Clydesdale division. Overall that would have moved me up into the 150’s probably. My goal next year is to finish in under 1:20:00 total time. So the goals will be 15:00 Swim, 38:00 Bike, 27:00 Run. I’ll let you know what happens this time next year!

I got back in from a ride about an hour ago and I’m still trying to cool off. This with my fan sitting on my desk, aimed at my head and on full blast!

So I just checked the weather channel and the heat index is 104 degrees here in lovely Huntsville, Alabama. I sincerely feel sorry for anyone that lives where it’s even hotter. Fortunately the weather peeps are calling for a cool down and by this weekend the highs should be back in the 80’s. Much more bearable.

Anyway, the riding is going well. I met Sarah at the Aldridge Creek Greenway on Saturday morning and we rode down it and back. That’s 10 miles total for Sarah. I know you’re thinking it’s wierd for me to say that I met Sarah there, but that’s because I rode and she drove. I left an hour before her and rode the 26 miles to the trail head. So 36 miles for me is now the longest ride of the year.

I’m looking forward to getting back in better shape because the local cycling club has several group rides ever week that I would enjoy. I’m just not quite there yet. Their average speeds are much faster than what I can do right now.

Other than that, life is pretty much the same as always.

So that’s my update for today.

Later.