Thankful

We got back Saturday from another trip to Ames on another thanksgiving.  This time it was me, Jennifer, Leah and Guy at home.  The weather was unseasonably warm, which made cooking outdoors extremely pleasant.  While I miss the hustle and bustle of having everyone home at the same time, it was nice to turn down the intensity a little bit and spend time with Leah. 

She's always been really fun to pick on because she reacts so intensely to any and every provocation.  That said, going in to a conversation where you expect someone to flip out can wear pretty thin.  I've been making an extra effort to just be nice and not be the jerk older brother that I was when I was 17.  It seems like it's paying off.

Miami is weird

I'm in Miami Beach for a NABSA board retreat this week and Jennifer came down with me a day early to take in the sights and check out the richest city in the country.  One of the other board members runs CitiBike Miami, and also has some fairly deep connections with the hospitality industry here. We are getting, what I can only assume must be, a steep discount to stay at the Mondrian South Beach.  It's kind of insane here.  Like $42 brunch buffet, yoga-class-bikini-babe insane. That and the air has been pumped full of some sort of weird perfume that smells a bit like powder-puff and a bit like gauche aspiration.

Our room overlooks th street, but you can also see the Atlantic as well as Biscayne Bay.  It is bigger than our first apartment together in Philly. Also it has a giant orange mirror on the wall, just because.

We spent the morning exploring Miami Beach a bit, then rode over the Venetian Causeway to Miami proper to check out the Wynnewood area.  The whole city is chock full of touristy shit and people wearing a lot less clothing than is the custom where I come from.  I would need to really hit the gym hard, and get a lot more regular grooming regimin if I were to move here.  Fortunately, that is unlikely to happen. Miami; probably not the place for me. 

Sleepy peepy

I went to bed at 9:30 last night. I've rarely been that exhausted when I haven't been actually sick or jet-lagged. I woke up feeling somewhat refreshed but wow. 

Perhaps it was the two bottle Tuesday where Jennifer and I did one of our wine-down dance parties catching up to me, or maybe it's the residual effects of daylight saving time.

Philly Bike Expo

Last weekend was a bike-ful weekend for me.  This is generally a good thing, as I really like bikes. I did to longer, harder rides than I've done in the three or four months.  I'm whupped again, but in a different way, in a good sort of way that ends up with solid slumber.

Yesterday was the, maybe 8th or 9th Philly Bike Expo.  I've gone to all but one of the prior editions, and it's always cool to talk with the folks at the various booths from companies big and small.   The highlight of the show for me was seeing the incredible paint from Velo Color out of Toronto. It is absolutely the most incredible paint I've ever seen. I've done a bit of painting in the basement on my various bike projects, and having done so makes stuff like this seem as though it's done by magical robots. Check out their work on this Bishop which won best in show at the expo.

Whupped

I seem to end many weeks like this--feeling as though there is not enough sleep in the world to re-energize my heavy head.  It probably doesn't help that I sleep like shit many nights.  It's probably stress, but it generally feels like an itchy back, or a full bladder, or some goddamned noise outside. Last year it tended to keep me up and awake for hours, but of late it just seems as though I'm waking up 3-5 times over the night.  I can live with that.

I remember reading something about the evolutionary cost of humans developing big brains.  Apparently consciousness burns a lot of calories, but despite all of my consciousness and thinking and ruminating and stressing, I am not getting any skinnier.  It's generally been the opposite.  Probably it's the not exercising part along with the 'chronological upgrade points' that are doing that.

Potato Pal

We didn't have any pumpkins to carve, but Jennifer did manage to get a great deal on 20 pounds of sweet potatoes.  They're organic, and the biggest goddamn sweet potatoes that I've ever seen.  I can only imagine how much manure went into the fertilizing of these beasts.  This grapefruit sized specimen is by no means the biggest in our larder.

Now to get Barbara's Sweet Potato Pie recipe!

Regularity

I was reflecting back on how I really like looking through my blog archives for perspective on the past 14 years.  It's a sporadic record at best, but I think that a regular check in here would do me well as a marker of time.

These days I find myself working hard to work smart.  I always got the heebie jeebies at the thought of business school or anything like that.  Right now I wish I had some of that training; cash flow analysis, strategic planning, SWOT analysis have all become pretty crucial to making Indego a success, or even keeping the whole thing from falling apart. Becoming more comfortable with being confused is a skill that I'm working on, and I hope that it will lead to good, or at least not bad, decision-making without enough information.

On the good side, I'm actually feeling like a muthafuckin' boss from time to time.  Having gone through 7 bosses over the last two years and lost all of the original team that built Indego has been a gut punch, a rollercoaster, and a mental mire. I'm finally getting the feeling that this shit is MY shit, and have some great people to work with and to work for who are keeping that in perspective.  Having Waffiyyah and Patrick has made a big difference.  Getting a raise didn't hurt, and getting a sense of what my actual pecking order in the office is. Now to get a room with a desk and a door on it.

Onsen Buddy

I'm in Montreal for the NABSA conference this year. It's an absolutely fantastic city; full of all of the life that I love in Philadelphia, but done in a slightly European, progressive way. The important thing however, is that I was able to reconnect with Shane Smith, human being par excellance, and onsen buddy of yours truly. Jennifer and I were a bit shell shocked when he and Lara broke up years ago, and honestly we ended up gravitating more towards her, as she'd kept in better contact over the years. Shane is a man of the moment though, and we missed him a lot.  I last saw Sumisu-san when we visited during Canadian Thanksgiving in 2005. We went rock climbing, and hung out with Lara's parents a bit.

Tonight, Shane picked me up at my hotel, and we headed back to his place to catch up a bit and have a couple of beers. I can hardly express how great it was to see him again. He's doing well, working intermittently as a camera man on a number of TV shoots and some commercials. Most recently he was filming life on the Jersey Shore for the Évasion show on Quebec's Travel Channel. He probably knows more now about the 'downna shore culture than I do.

What was great about seeing Shane again was the almost audible click of connecting with a friend from long ago. It'd been twelve years since we last saw each other, and yet it was so obvious that we were still friends that it's a bit painful to write this. He's a good man, who cares about people in an intuitive way, and who collects good people to himself.  In a lot of ways, we're not that similar; he's eager and polite, I'm pessimistic and inconsistently considerate.  What we do share is a sort of human compatibility where I can know and understand this differences between us, and accept them and love them all the same.

After he insisted on treating me to ramen and heading to Dieu du Ciel, the mold-making microbrewery of Monteral, I had the pleasure of meeting his girlfriend, Frances. She is great, in the same sort of natural way that Shane is great, and that Lara is great.  Let me write it here, and keep the promise to myself that we will meet up again sooner than later. That's the right way to keep a friendship going.

Get the lead in

A little lead solder and a bit of luck saved me five hundred bucks. About three weeks ago my 2011 vintage Power Tap hub started to freak out following a routine battery change. After fiddling​ around with everything I could think of, I was ready to purchase a new one, but decided to give it one extra new set of batteries to check. As I did, I noticed that there was a small wire that had come loose from the battery unit.

Thanks to my sister, I had a handy soldering iron and some electrical wire and made the repair this evening. The hub even works like it should now.

While I admit that there is often something obnoxious about my insistence on making things my own way, it is really satisfying to use what I've fixed or made in my own.

Snack vortex

I picked off a whole nest of tent caterpillar babies with the idea of giving the fish an all-natural snack.  As it turns out, guppy mouths are even smaller than baby tent caterpillars, so the remaining hundred or so got to hang out for a couple of days.

One reason to ride in the evening

In some ways, I really don't like weekends​. I spend so much time during the working week thinking about what I will do with my free time, that when I finally have a whole two days to myself, I kind of freak out. I can't decide which of the million awesome things I will do next and it is painful to sort through. Mostly I just flit between several options unsuccessfully, and then kick myself for indecision and incomplete projects all Sunday night.

Today was just such a day. I had in my head that I was going to do a bike race, but then realized that I had spent all Saturday cleaning out the basement, and had not spent any time with Jennifer. I chose the latter, but was so annoyed that I couldn't do both, that I in turn annoyed the shit out of Jennifer.  Neither of us enjoyed the day.

Fail.

I finally dragged myself down to the Navy Yard for a bike workout, and was ultimately rewarded with this sunset. A nice way to remind myself that every day comes to a close, and every morning is a new chance to start it over.

Tilford

Steve Tilford, the first real, honest to god, bike racer dude I ever met, died last night in a car crash in Colorado. I remember seeing him hanging out on the couches in the back of Michael's Cyclery, holding court about some bike race deed or other with the guys. He raced for a number of years for Michael in the 80s, and knew my dad well from the scene at the shop. There was always a sort of manic energy about him, like sitting still was a waste of his time. He was a compelling character in the way that many such driven people are, like a little crackle of electricity arcing through the room as he ambled in. There was a newspaper article in the back break area of the shop with a picture of Steve, arm in a sling spinning along on his rollers. The headline said, "Steve Tilford Wants to Race His Bike Badly." Underneath, someone had written And He Does in neat block print.

The last time I saw Steve, he was fuming after some jerk kid from United Health Care chopped his line in a corner of the nighttime crit in the Sands Casino Hotel parking lot at Interbike in 2009. He was talking with my dad, and was obviously still coming down off of an adrenaline rush from what would have been his thousandth crash in a race. My dad always insisted that Steve was likely immortal, because scar tissue doesn't die.

Even if you've never heard of the guy, I'd recommend reading this blog post, which paints a compelling picture of a fairly crazy dude. I'm sure you've seen shades of this guy in the people we know around Philly or in your scene, whatever it is.

https://truebs.com/some-of-my-writing/short-nonfiction/steve-tilford-is-why-we-ride/

Thank God the montage is over

While there is still a little extra bump on my collarbone, things look a lot better than this now. I can even sort of do pushups.