Ride, Cowboy, Ride

Now I’ve got a goal to train for and can’t wait another day to start.  I’ll be meeting up with my old coworkers at a nice organized ride in SoCal in two weeks and I don’t want to be the weak link in our chain (like on our Ventura ride in January…).  So Yesterday my roommate and I rode to South Mountain Park and climbed the summit road to the top.  First to the lookout and then to the TV Towers.  (I actually went all the way back to the guard towers at the bottom in between because I was really seeking climbing miles for my training and oh the second climb hurt way more!).  There was an awesome view south of the mountain so we took a picture and then watched in amazement as some adventurous parasailers climbed through the thermals after launching just in front of us.  I felt great on the ride back, but was absolutely wiped out after lunch.  Apparently it takes some energy to ride 49 miles whilst climbing South Mountain twice (3,500 calories of energy according to my Polar Heart rate monitor).  That’s 49 miles through absolutely perfect weather and great scenery!  If only all training could be this fun.

Great Weekend!

Friday night:  Suns vs. Nuggets preseason game with my brother (and Suns got whipped with Billups and Anthony sitting the whole game but we won’t talk about that).

Saturday morning:  Courtside seats for Suns scrimmage at US Airways with my brother.

Saturday afternoon:  Nap!

Saturday evening:  Dinner with old family friends (serving up some filet mignon!).

Sunday afternoon:  Hike South Mountain with friends and go out for Sushi afterwards (6.2mi and 1300 calories burned; not sure how many of those were replaced by sushi).

Sunday evening:  Drop by my sister’s and play with my niece.  She can nearly say “Uncle Adam” now and is recognizing me again after my long absence in Europe.

I say you can’t go wrong with family and friends and enough sleep.  Speaking of sleep…

I’m HOME!!!

OK, sorry for such a delay/lag in posting.  I didn’t finish my Switzerland blog posts before I made it to Munich for Oktoberfest.  Then Brussels was a whirlwind of packing my scattered stuff into two bags and figuring out what to leave behind since I was not about to pay 200 Euro to take a 3rd bag.  Then I wrote a couple entries while waiting in the airport in Brussels to go home, but still haven’t caught up.  I got home over two weeks ago now, it’s hard to believe.  But the luxury at home is I can pretty much do whatever I want whenever I want, and initially that was meeting up with people (especially since my girlfriend was back here on vacation for a week) and getting my poor neglected house back in order (actually my roommates took pretty good care of it, but there’s always something you know). 

Also I bought a laptop (literally walked in to Fry’s Electronics the first day I was back in Tempe and left within 45 minutes with a new laptop).  I’d been nursing mine along with minor upgrades since I bought it in 2005 and could no longer convince myself that it was worth the frustration.  Oh, and I suppose I’m a PC (a Dell Inspiron 15R had the right combination of features and value for me to save a week of online research and just do it-though I spent an hour at home afterwards searching to convince myself it was a good deal before opening the box).  I quit my job a year ago so I can’t afford to be a Mac.  If you were going to buy a bunch of extra software anyhow then the Mac would be a good deal because they come with a lot of nice programs out of the box; but I pretty much already had the software I’d be using and couldn’t justify spending double for it.

So the new laptop is my biggest excuse for not updating the blog sooner.  Anytime I sat down at the computer I was either setting up new programs/preferences or just enjoying the bliss of being able to go online pretty much whenever I wanted and on my own computer.  Plus switching computers did complicate being able to post good pictures (trying to remember if they were on the other computer or still on a memory card or on my external hard drive) with my blog entries and I really feel like blogging about a bike trip through Switzerland or being at Oktoberfest in München necessitates pictures.  Blogging about procrastinating my blog does not require pictures.  So I have just blogged while simultaneously procrastinating blogging.  Or something like that.