All I want for Christmas...

I paid my visit to the dentist today and it looks like somebody's getting quite the Christmas present this year... Nothing quite says holiday cheer like spending family's Christmas money on getting daddy a root canal! Not fun. I've already had a root canal before and while the procedure itself does suck pretty bad, I'm sure it's not the same at all when I know it's comming out of my pocket.

Also, I noticed that picture I posted previously of my tooth was unacceptibly sub-par so here goes attempt #2 at selfdentalphotography:

Work'n, Play'n, Work'n and a Little Tooth Decay'n

Times is kinda busy but mostly very good these days. The job is still going good, I'm slowly becoming the rock collector guy at work. No, that dosn't mean I'm the one who they make go collect rocks for everyone else. A "rock collector" is a machine and since the engineer I replaced was the previous specialest on the matter I've been tasked with becoming the new go-to-guy.

Susie is getting to be more and more fun to play with. She walks all over now and every day when I come home for lunch or after work she gets totaly amped to see me (that feels nice).

The house is shaping up nicely, aside from the few days last week we went without hot water and I found a big puddle in the basement that wasn't even related to the fritzed water heater. (all is well now though)

Tomorrow morning I've got my first dentist appointment in I think 8 years. With as bad of teeth as I've had my whole life it was pretty dumb of me not to be going regularly and even now it took alot to make me go back. I've had a bottom molar that hasn't been in good shape for a while, then a few months ago it broke a bit and left a big hole on the back of it. But since it didn't really hurt I was dumb enough to just ignore it (except for when large amounts of food would get stuck in it). In the last couple weeks its started hurting quite a bit so I finaly broke down and set up an appointment to get it taken care of.

For as bad as my tooth hurts, I'm dissapointed it dosn't show up better in a pic. But blow up the pic and check out the second tooth from the back on my left.

To Pro or not to Pro?

Here's a question I tought was answered a few years ago with a huge NO..... but thanks to some new rule changes and certain things in the past falling just right I kinda have to make a new decision on this. To fully understand this whole question I think we need to rewind a few yesrs....

When I first started liking bikes I was all about the mountain bike. According to all the bike magazines I was reading at the time, road bikes were for sissy whinners and I was too cool for them, however they did aknowledge that you could get into realy good shape for MTB racing by riding a road bike. So one day I took the money I had been saving up to buy a special edition Shawn Palmer suspension fork and used it to buy a road bike. From there the road bike prety much took over untill I eventualy found myself riding on a pretty awsome team of road racers.

While I was in the midst of road racing most every week I kept up a bit on the MTB and entered a few of those races whenever I could. My first MTB race I skipped over "beginner" class and won the "sport" class so I decided to upgrade right away to "expert". Through the rest of the season I got destoyed by the expert class racers but thanks to the series points counting attendance more than actual results I wound up as state champion just by showing up more than anyone else. The following year I raced expert again but was actualy winning or finising on the podium every race. When it came time for the last race of they year I got the short end of the same stick that gave me the state title the year before and even though I probably should have won the overall, I missed a race and was out of competion for it. Since winning an expert race rewarded the victor with a water bottle or similar bike gear and placing in the top 5 of the "Pro/Semi-pro" class paid cold hard cash I talied up my results over the previous year and upgraded to Semi-pro.

Since I upgraded I've only done 3 races I can think of right now. The first had some very tough competition and I was ridding great to take top 5 until a flat that turned into a 15min trailside disaster, the second I should have had 3rd but squandered a huge lead and got nipped to end up in 4th. And the third race which I did just last year was a total disgrace to the sport as I was putting in lap times that were more on par for the beginner class (I know I would have lost the sport class and maybe wouldn't have even made the podium with the beginners!).

For a couple years I've been toying with the idea of doing a bunch of MTB racing with my semi-pro license and have a goal of eventualy earning my Pro upgrade. The different license wouldn't make any diference for any local races since they all race the semi-pros and Pros together, but it would leave open the opportunity to travel to some national level race and get to toe the line with the real Pros. Not expecting awsome results but more just to be able to someday tell my kids I kinda was cool once.

Now, here we are at the current question.....USAcycling decided to change up the catagories for MTB racing from: beginner, sport, expert, semi-pro, Pro to: 3, 2, 1, Pro. With most catagories being automaticly converted into the new system except for semi-pros being given the choice of being cat 1 or Pro. So I guess the question kind of is: if you set a goal to accomplish something cool and before you do any real work towards the goal, someone offers to just hand out the reward to you, do you take it?

Here's why I'm thinking I shouldn't:

If I show up to some big race as a "Pro" but I ride slower than the weekend warriors on borrowed bikes I'd be totaly disrespecting the guys who really did earn their way to the top.

I might be missing out on alot of satisfaction of working for it and earning the upgrade.

My time is limited these days and I'm already commited to race alot on the road in '09 and if I put off my big MTB race to another year I'd still have to buy my new license next year to get the automatic upgrade and Pro liceses are very expensive to buy and not use.

Here's why I'm thinking I should:

You don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

If I raced a big Pro race I'd still only do it if I trained a ton for it and was totaly ready to make a good showing.

I might not ever have the time to earn the license outright, so this may very well be my only chance.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory wouldn't have been a very good story if when Charlie Bucket found the golden ticket for his factory tour and lifetime supply of chocolate he said "nah, we should give this to a fat kid who could realy make the most of all that chocolate."

Any thoughts?

Roughing it in my own house

The last few weeks have been super crazy, possibly even krazy enough to spell it with a "k"! But fortunatly all this krazyness has been for a good cause, getting our house buoght, modified and moved into (plus for some strange reason my new job gets a bit nuts durring potato harvest which is right now).

To recap on some of the most recent adventures:

Closed on our house sometime around the 15thish of September (I really can't remember now) and we got a good deal on a good place. It was way cheaper than anything good we could have gotten in Boise or even Poky for that matter, we stayed well within our budget and the place is awsome. Sofar AF is quite nice too.

The house was in great shape and had alot of brand new remodeling already done (new wiring, plumbing, insulation, most windows) but it needed a couple changes to make it fit our family just right. What would become Susie's room was joined with the main floor bathroom so we decided to build a wall with a door to split things up. And I needed to do some wiring to make way for an eventual dishwasher and to convert a built-in book case into a nice spot for my new TV.

The wiring went mostly smooth, took forever to fish the wires to where I needed them and I only got juiced once.

The wall was quite the ordeal of its own. Kayla's dad was in town when I started so he was a huge help it getting it framed and most of the dry wall up. From there I still had the finishing and hanging the door to do after work and on one weekend when Kayla was in Boise for the Women's Fitness Celebration. That Sunday night I decided to do a bunch of work and just stay the night at the house on our air matress..... When I showed up I realized I forgot my pillow (I'm very picky about my pillows) so I was a bit worried but not too bad. Then I worked my tail off untill about midnight and decided to go get the air matress ready. Only then did I discover that the air matress was missing the drain plug. So I suddenly realized I had no pillow, no matress, the whole house has hard-wood floors and I was way too tired to safley make the drive back to my bed in Poky.... I ended up dragging a roll of carpet pad up from the basement to go with a nasty set of cusions off the lawn funiture the seller left us (where she would sit to drink and smoke). I slept like crap and between then and now has been one long string of working at my job, working on the house, fighting off being sick and not having time to sleep.

But in the end... we're loving our house and all the projects seem to have turned out nicely.

Since all posts are better with a pic, here's a random shot of me and my wall.

Time to buy some gas

I've mowed my fair share of lawns in my day, back home we had a fairly big one I mowed all growing up and now at my duplex I mow the lawn alot of the time. But the thing about it all is that with all the grass I've cut I've never once paid for the gas to go into the mowers. Simple reason is that even though it may have been my responsibility to do the labor, I didn't own the grass I was cutting, so if there was no gas I just didn't mow cuz it wasn't my problem. But comming up oh so soon all that will change.

Kayla and I just got an offer accepted on a house in American Falls. A nice little place on a corner lot nestled between a school and a golf course. Not just any golf couse either I'll have you know. I drove around it a bit a few days ago on my lunch break and half the golfers I saw looked just like Lyle from Nepoleon Dynamite, we're talking work boots, Wranglers, mesh backed John Deere hat all coupled with a putter.









In other goings ons, here's a couple pics of our most recent excitements:

Susie and I admiring the award winning preserved fruits at the Bannock County fair. The competition was very intense as I'm sure you can all tell.

A nice shot from our most recent trip to the park. This is what happens when Mamma and Daddy are paying more attention to taking pictures than to what Susie is actualy doing in the pictures.

Human After All

You know what is missing from movies these days? Music montages! I'm not talking about just any old montage either, but the awesome ones from '80s films that went one step farther by setting the montage to the tune of a song written about what's going on in the movie right then. That's what its all about! In honor of this I'm temporarily putting music back on my blog just because it's a song to go along with this post.

This last weekend I Finlay made it back to a race I've been meaning to do for a second time for several years: Mt. Harrison hill climb. About 4 years ago I won the first ever running of this race over a small but very talented field. Since then I've always had something come up to keep me from going back to try and repeat. This year I finally had my chance. I knew my fitness was somewhat sub-optimal but in classic me style, deep down I hoped that there would be some mysitic connection between me and the mountain that would help me and my slacker training schedule beat a field that included a national level pro mountain biker and a former world champion.

view from the bottom:

Soon after the start the true big guns of the day dropped me without even noticing. As the gaps became established I took my count of guys up the road to see I was in 10th place. I tried to set a rhythm for myself and noticed something kinda weird. I had been listening to Daft Punk on the drive over and now my exhaled breaths sounded like and matched up exactly with the last half of the song "Human After All" (the one playing on the blog if you havn't turned it off). It's a little depressing when you're alone on the mountain and still being taunted the whole way up!

By the end two different guys had caught me but I managed to re-drop them both. It was pretty demoralizing when one of them was talking to me and assumed I was a cat 4/5 racer, there's no way to sound cool when you reply that you're actualy a cat2........

view from the top:

When I finaly hit the top, I kept my 10th place but managed to drop a few notches on my ego-meter. On the bright side the only time I noticed the altitude (finish was at about 9400' per the GPS in my phone) the aching in my chest actualy felt really good.

Have to end with a flashback to when I was actualy cool:

Idaho Superweek wrap-up

I just got home from Idaho Falls and now is my time to elaborate. Every racer knows about a sad little secret in racing: after the race everybody wants to tell tell their own play-by-play of the race but nobody cares enough to want to listen, I think we've all been on both ends of that one. Enter the blog! Now I get to do all the telling I want and don't have to wory about seeing anybody roll their eyes at me and try to change the subject, I'm in contol here.

7/26-Allan Butler Criterium, Idaho Falls--I rolled into IF with the pre-race techno thump'n hard and spirits high. Durring warm up I felt like crap but over the years I've learned not to be worried about that because some times the worse I feel before the race the better I fell in the race (weird huh?). While rolling around my spirits dropped a bit when I saw how many teammates Sam K. had with him, all guys that are as tough or way tougher than me and nobody else had showed up with any sort of structured team to be able to put up a fight.

When the race started Sam's team (Park City Jeep) worked their advantage to perfection by launching attack after attack, every time a break didn't work out they had a handfull of other fresh dudes to counter. After racing for a few laps I satarted feeling ok, I had good legs and good hands to keep me in the action. But unfortunately in some cases my crit skills were a little too sharpened. Every time I tried to take a hard pull at the front to reel in the break, I'd rail through the corners a little to fast and open gaps behind me. The Park City guys would then cover me like I was attempting to break away and all the sudden I'd be off the front and out numbered. Mid-race after pulling for a lap and a half I tried to be Superman and attack off the front for a $50 prime and was barely nipped at the line for it, that blew me so bad I ended up getting dropped off the back of the pack for a while on a couple of occasions (thanks Rob and Justin for saving me both times).

By the end Sam and one teammate had lapped the field leaving us to fight for 3rd place. I was feeling good again and positioned myself pretty well. Sam's teammate that lapped us won the sprint and I came in near enough the front to earn myself 5th place overall. You know what that means?... Homeboy got paieeeeedd! It's been a while since I've done good enough in a paying race to walk away with a profit after counting entry fees and gas money, lets just say the last time it happend the $$ went to buying textbooks.

Now I just need to find me a few more crits while I'm feel'n the flow and before the snow starts flying here in Pokey. (unfortunately I think the only one I have left is the last of the Holt crits here in town)