w00T!

As in..... w00T I'm riding my bike again!!!! 8 weeks laid up with whatever the hell the infection was that I developed after returning from MiX and an ensuing knee surgery was interminable. It's a time span that I have never come close to in terms of a layoff from exercise. When I was a kid I'd chase pretty much any kind of ball (although mostly the leather ones with the pentagons and hexagons) and from there it was mountain biking and then the anything goes circus of AR. My favorite mind altering substance is back and probably just in time. Baby Momma might have kicked me to the curb if I spent another evening moping about my inability to run or bike.

My playground is new. I've traded my mountain bike trails in NJ for the Schuykill River section of Fairmount Park in center city Philly. And the net result is my inner Hugo (Walker) is emerging. Bigtime. As I spin along peacefully on my mtb I notice myself drawn to road bike wheels like a fat kid to a free cake. The groups that are passing me are like double chocolate cake. The ones I'm passing are more like some nasty pineapple and coconut flavor. The objective with the fast ones: hang on until the lactic acid starts to pile up. I rescued my cyclocross bike today to even the odds a bit but I was laughing the other night recalling stories of Hugo chasing down packs of Central Parks cyclists on his mountain bike. I may lose any off-road skills but I've found a new game to play in my new urban digs.

Up for air

A couple e-mails have rolled in to ask "what gives with the no posts"?

It's kind of hard to admit this. But my non-racing-life seems to have put racing-life completely and totally on the back burner for now. What's going on? New job, new house, new state and the pending new addition to my personal family tree. If you haven't heard I started a new job at a Pharmaceutical company outside Philadelphia. I've moved out of my dirtbag bachelor quarters (aka The Chicken Coop) seen in the photo above and into real grown up living space in center city Philly. The soon to be mother of my child (aka Baby Momma) somehow managed to convince me that her place would represent a better living situation for the child. She didn't buy my argument that lead paint chips and poor insulation build a stronger constitution. Something about being a pediatrician makes her think she knows better.

Adding a degree of difficulty to the mix were a few small items: a car accident, knee surgery and a weekend road trip to Pittsburgh featuring weddings and more weddings. My last day of work at good ole Ma Bell started the way many workdays begin in Northern New Jersey. Calling my boss to tell him I'd be late after a large truck full of lawn care machinery slammed into the back of my formerly shiny new Honda. Nobody was injured but moving sucks when your car trunk is held shut by a c-clamp and a zip-tie. Handy stuff I fished out of the AR gear pile! Follow that up with knee surgery. Again, nothing major, just a clean up of the torn meniscus in my right knee discovered during my June Hospital stay. That stay was to identify why my one leg was suddenly twice the size of the other leg. The eventual answer to which was "we don't know but the antibiotics seemed to have worked". How's that for a warm and fuzzy?

Immediately post-surgery might have been a good time for me to post something. The afternoon of Percocet provided me with enough pain relief that baby momma even managed to sucker me into a baby furniture store. Where I had to help approve the purchase of some sort of super chair capable of rocking-gliding-pivoting and anything else necessary to quiet a howling infant short of sedation. Speaking of which, I didn't need the whole Percocet prescription to manage the pain hmmmm.... Just kidding. Like most things baby related my opinion, relevant or not, was duly noted. However, this time it was whole-hearted approval. I can't wait to steal the thing for NFL football after getting off the spin-trainer this fall.

So, now the big question. How well will I recover after 6 weeks of antibiotics, surgery and not a lick of exercise? Well enough to regain form for a few fall races? Or will I be devoured by the new job, birth and a huge slope of lost fitness to climb back up? Only time will tell.

I hope to be racing but I may get stuck trolling the AR message boards for the saucier stuff like this rabid exchange on the Trailblazers board. If I get really bored I might start hurling some mud myself. Not at any of those folks though, I have my own bones to pick. But I'd have to be seriously bored.

iPhone Woes

So, I'm a bit of a geek. I purchased an iPhone on Friday.

For the record, I did not wait on line for four days and nights through driving rains. I drove to a nearby Apple store around 6:40pm on Friday, walked in, purchased two 8gb models (one for me and one for a friend who agreed to scope a different location) and walked out at 6:45pm. Nobody stabbed me in the parking lot either ala the PS3 launch. So maybe we can drop all the nonsense about iPhone being "THE most anticipated consumer electronic devise in 20 years". Yes, it sold well, and for the most part it works beautifully and has an innovative interface.

However, the iPhone, it's keyboard software or the Safari web browser (I don't know who is "guilty" I just know it doesn't work the way you would want it to) doesn't seem to recognize forms all the time while browsing the web. Most notably I tried to create a test post from my iPhone right here on this blog but couldn't. I could enter a title but I couldn't get the keyboard to pop up when I clicked into the text body editor.

Generally speaking, when you click into a box that requires text to be entered the keyboard pops up on the screen and you type away happily. But if it doesn't think the form you've clicked into wants text to be entered then you are shit outta luck. The keyboard won't come up and there's no readily apparent way around it. You can't "summon it". There isn't a text editor or clipboard so that one might be able to write something elsewhere and just cut and paste around the problem. If it doesn't like it, you're hosed. Maybe it's my phone. Maybe somebody more clever than me (and that's a large set) has figured out how to make it work. But I couldn't. It's a shame too because if it did I could post from remote race locations etc... as long as I could find some WiFi access without having to drag around a laptop.