Family time

After one night with my mom and sister in town.

Innovations in office wear

Just the thing I needed for a long and dangerous conference call.

What I did with my summer vacation

I'm locally famous as "Director of Abandoned Bicycle Removal Program".  My boss says that if I can get 2 interns to work on the project next year, he'll promote me to "Executive Director"

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/component/flexicontent/item/42331-23pcbikes?Itemid=1

MCMAKENS HAVE LANDED

Harry and Jean are visiting for a few days this week. Fortunately, Jennifer's hell of dissertation proposal madness has mostly passed. She meets her committee on Thursday to go over the details and get the final OK on her proposal. Hopefully that will be a huge load of stress off of her plate. The REAL news though is that we're going to Alaska next week. Crazy to think about, but we're headed to Anchorage and then points beyond on to try our mettle in the Alaskan wilderness. Probably every place in Alaska is going to be more spectacular than any place I've been since Vancouver, so it should be a good trip. I'll be sure to take a heap of pictures of awesome nature.

As I posted earlier, it's been a crap year on (well, mostly off) the bike for me and that's caused me to do a lot of thinking about why I love this sport. I ended up happening to ride along MLK at about 7:15 last night when a fast moving group of skinny people on expensive bikes simultaneously overtook me and damned if I didn't feel the need to hop onto the back of the group. I was 'testing' my latest bamboo creation, and more importantly testing my knee to see if it is indeed back on the mend after 7+ months of mild but debilitating pain. Within seconds of settling into a teammaate's slipstream at the back of the group, I remembered exactly what I'd been missing all this time; the sense of heightened living that comes from going as fast as you can under your own power. The ebb and flow of the pack around you, the extra senses that you seem to develop to tell you exactly how far you need to be, how much gap you need to make up. All of that. It is that 'extra gear' that competition and heavy exertion put onto your consciousness that makes this effort worthwhile. Winning is great, it gives a bit of external validation to what we do, however brief and fleeting. It can't be the sum goal though, because if it is, you're totally missing the point. I don't think I'm missing the point, but I have been missing cycling. Welcome back, little by little.

Favorite sentence of the week: - The plural of 'anectdote' is not 'data', it's anecdotes. -

Camouflage

For the last 6 years, Jennifer has bemoaned the ugliness of the front of our house. This summer we finally got around to doing something about it. Some fake lintels and some tastefully-chosen paints are all that it took to make an ugly house into a passably unobtrusive one.

The lower half went easily enough but we waited nearly a month to find a ladder on Craigslist that would reach the roofline. A 40' ladder was ours for $75, but we had to help get it off of the seller's roof. This turned out to be an endeavor since getting a ladder off of a roof with someone else's know-it-all father is even worse than getting it off the roof with one's own--at least you can yell back at your own dad.

Rekindling and old flame

My knee is having none of this bike riding crap, so I've decided to spend some time with an old flame; rock climbing is back.  Now I just need to find some places with a bit less broken glass and a bit more serentiy and I'm all set.

The city, smplified

This is a quick diagram of how the cities'civil service hiring process works.

I'm out.

For the first time since 2005, I'll have hairy legs in June.  Today is the 6 month mark on my non-recovery from chronic knee pain.   Since exactly the 31st of December 2011, my right knee has been basically incompatible with riding a bicycle hard.  The doctors and physical therapists call it patella-femoral pain syndrome, which is Latin for "your knee hurts".  I've still been able to commute to work, and have managed a couple of 15 to even 40 milers in the interim, but all at a snails pace and all but a few solo.  Off and on I've felt that my condition has been on the mend and that things are improving, but each time that has evaporated due to random circumstance or something I did or didn't do correctly.  I spent 8 weeks doing physical therapy, and I was actually pretty consistent with the exercises for most of that time.  It helped, at least with my balance and stability, but my knee remains as it has been--f'ed.  For the past while, I've been a bit jaded by the whole process and have fallen off the horse a bit.  I hope and plan to rekindle my mojo and get back with the therapy a bit, if only to give myself something to focus on.

I was feeling good and seemingly on the mend once in March, and once a week and a half ago, I'd completed a couple of decent rides and felt a bit better than I had.  Then last Monday I went in for my most recent consultation with the doctor who, upon my endorsement, injected me with about 5 cc of cortisone.  Turns out, it made things worse. My knee hurts, almost as badly as it ever has and simply rejects the idea that it was ever suited for pedaling a bicycle.  I get a small throbbing pain on the inside of my right knee that reminds me that things aren't right.  When I feel it, my heart sinks and my thoughts turn black. "If only I hadn't... if only I had.... if only."

I'm writing this here for myself to remind me that I've made a decision not to worry about that any more.  The fates are not with me this year and I've decided to formally pull the plug on any hope of racing in 2012.  It would take at least 6 weeks of solid training to even want to bother entering a race, and I simply won't be able to perform as I would want in the time remaining in the racing season.  If my knee is back on track by mid-July, I might consider gearing up for a more full season of cyclocross racing, but that's still well on the back burner at this time.

Needless to say, I'm gutted.  I've dedicated at least 10 hours per week for the past 6 years to riding, training and racing bikes.  My best friends here in Philly are all bike people, and I'm the president of my bike racing club.  It's not been easy to see all that flow away and be isolated from the most important activity in my life here.  It kills me every time I see my teammates out on rides or read race reports about what I wish I were doing.  Last time I was this long away from the sport I loved was in 1999 when achilles tendinitis sidelined me for 9 months and caused me to miss my junior year of cross country at Macalester.  That sucked, probably more than this injury, since the loss of one of my 4 seasons of cross country was so hard to bear.

I'll likely get better, just don't know when.  A friend of mine from the shop has volunteered to hunt down some alternative therapies for me; Active Release Therapy is on schedule for some time in the near future, we'll see if that does the trick.

Elevator Musings

Me: Thanks
Big guy: No problem, I tried to hold it open, but it didn't want to.
Me: Yeah, well the elevators kind of have a mind of their own.
Big Guy: Oh Jeez.  I hope not.  If they have a mind of their own it means that they'd be like the rest of people here, dumb, angry and mean.
Me:  Hah, I like that analogy.
Big Guy:  Analogy, buddy that ain't no analogy, that's the TRUTH.

Holy virgin egg

Left a hard boiled egg in my pickled beet jar (delicious!) and found the holy virgin Mary inside.  Now I'm thinking that maybe with some tiny pinholes and some entrepreneurial spirit, we could make some pretty awesome novelty eggs.

McGet

Ode to a Tailgater
-McGettigan

http://trophybiking.com/2011/04/25/ode-to-a-tailgater/

Dad always knows

Dad always knows exactly what type of awesome bike related goodies will trip my fancy. This year he included a couple of choice items: grandma's cinnamon candy and a wool bike seat cover that is probably as old as I am.

Birthday for me

The trip to Vancouver was capped off with some super sake from a store called Nomi. It's one of the few places anywhere on the continent that actually sells a variety of good imported stuff. I honestly don't know a whole lot about sake when it comes down to it, I just know that I like it a lot.  The cheap stuff like Gekkeikan or Shirayuki is kind of like the Miller High Life or Franzia of sake, good when I want a warm slug of something. After being spoiled by some of the good stuff that Vinod has plied me with over the past year, it's been increasingly difficult to go back to my budget sake though. The high test stuff is amazingly different, much smoother and cleaner in flavor. Come on over and have a glass with me some time.

Khakis anyone?

Last fall I was approached by an advertising agency representing Life Khakis.  They wanted to make a video of people doing interesting jobs and also wearing khaki pants.  I apparently fit the bill nicely.  We spent one afternoon and then a Sunday morning filming me out riding the bike I built and then got some shots of me in the basement working on a bamboo bike.  The end result looks pretty cool.

http://lifekhaki.com/#!/video/drive

Vancouver

God bless junkets. Jennifer had a paper accepted for the American Educational Research Association conference held in Vancouver BC. A more spectacularly situated city I have yet to see.  Downtown is a mass of aqua colored glass sky scrapers set against some remarkably beautiful mountains and the sea. It also seems to have the best network of parks of anyplace I've ever been. Stanley Park is great and there are dozens of cool little squares and the like all around the city. That said, the city also has this totally surreal vibe of a place whose main product seems to be livability, almost all of the construction is new residential high rises that are going up literally wherever you look. Our hotel is right by three different sites where they are building condos. Nobody really seems to work here, at least not like the other really rich cities that I've been to like New York or London. There every one seems to be rushing off some where, but in Vancouver it's like they are all just chilling. I speculate that there is just an enormous amount of second home ownership that occurs here. You make your money doing whatever in Tokyo or China and then you move to Vancouver for the prestige of it or the parks or the nearby mountains or the Marina or the friendly Canadians. Don't get me wrong, it's great, just weird.

Gardening

Sawzalls on a bamboo rod with some good old fashioned duct tape makes a decent pole saw. This wasn't exactly what Jennifer had in mind when she said, "Let's go to the garden and get it ready for spring planting." But it kept me occupied and out of trouble.

You put that on your pizza?

Yup, cracked an egg on the pizza right before we threw it in the oven.pretty awesome despite my initial misgivings.