I don't know why I waste my time exercising while riding my bicycle. What I should really be doing is making a STEAM BIKE!!

Though absolutely crazy, it looks soooo cool.

I had a lovely weekend, particularly because I spent very little of it in study mode. While I feel that I'm complaining a lot, I would be remiss if I din't mention that this has been a helluva semester so far. Tests and papers are over for a while, but it's not long before they kick in again.

On better news, the house is coming along pretty well, Meghan came up for a weekend visit. Wheras last time she was in Philly, we stayed in almost the whole time due to a blizzard, this weekend we were out and about for much of it. We stopped by Valley Forge National Park, not super awesome fun, but it was nice to get out of Philly for a while. Sunday marked my second foray into Cyclocross racing, and it was a bit less successful than the first round. I entered into the B category, thinking that it'd probably be more fun if I was racing a little stiffer competition. It started off pretty well, and though I began at the back of the pack, I was moving up pretty steadily through the pack and then as I was cruising through a nice corner, I found the the only rock on the course, which washed out my front wheel, crashed, and broke my cool carbon fiber handlebars. Sure they were taken off of a crashed bike before, but they'd held up admirably since then. Fortunately there was a beer tent and all was not lost.

I'm now roaring into the first set of midterms that I've got. I must be learning something because I'm studing and reading and writing all the damn time. Its weird though, wheras in college I was constantly procrastinating and feeling a sort of reluctant guilt about not doing my work, I now find myself driven to do work, pretty much constantly. I often go to sleep thinking about school and then wake up the next morning thinking about the same. Yikes. I just wish I could ride my bike more often. I guess that my mental hypertrophy is accompanied by a reciprocal hypotrophy of my legs.

The nice thing about bike races is that you can enter different classes and you actually have a chance to do well, not just time-wise as in running, but you could conceivably cross the line first. This is a picture of me (no joke, those are really leg muscles you see there, if you look hard enough) at the inaugural Hillbilly Hustle Cyclocross Race. Cyclocross, to those of you who do not know, is my new favorite discipline as it combines the sights of cross country running with smallish steeplechase barriers and is conducted on a bicycle. PERFECT! And, it just so happens, I'm not too shabby at it. By virtue of a modicum of training, naturally long inseam and having entered the lowest class available, I won my race and am now the proud owner of an extra water bottle and some spiffy blue socks. God I love the Fall (aside from my occasional aneurism-inducing studythons).

In the joyous rush of schoolwork that has surrounded me these past few days, I've conspired to blow my mental circuits with long stints in the computer lab. It's a frickin' riot I assure you. I remember thinking while at Macalester that I liked the finals period in a certain sense because it afforded me a chance to commune with my fellow students, all of whom were stressed to a similar degree as me. Well, graduate school is affording the same communal feelings of stress, impending doom and hopefully catharsis, only here it's hitting pretty hard about 4 weeks in. I'm prepping for 3 tests, 2 papers, 1 mapping project and an undiminished reading load. Yikes. Thank god my department gives out free beer every Friday in its attempt to reduce the dropout rate and forge community bonds. I only have to drink approximately $350 worth of alchohol every Friday for my education to virtually pay for itself. My liver can't thank me enough.