Big Decisions

I haven't felt much like posting the last few days. Sometimes you can spend too much time on the computer doing other things and the last thing you want to do is type more stuff for a blog. And trying to remember what you did that day can be harder than you think it should be. I have a habit of dismissing things and events that I've concluded are of no consequence to me...which means I forget the important things and remember the mundane things. Shouldn't that be the other way around?

Today I decided to change out the bike I'm going to use for the time trial championships in September. I was going to use my steel-framed Bradley which was already set up as a TT bike but when I was doing the Tuesday Night Worlds I had this revelation that I should use my aluminum/carbon-framed K2 instead. Amazing what your brain thinks of when it's oxygen starved! The K2 is at least a couple of pounds lighter first off, and I could switch out the complete aerobar setup to replace the road bars on the K2. Since I have no plans to do another road race this year, I can ride the K2 in its new time trial setup...tune in the seating position over the next couple of weeks...and I would have a faster bike for the TT. Plus the K2 has aero tubing. I should have the changeover done by Friday. I'm also looking at getting an aero rear wheel from Blackwell shortly and then I'm mostly ready. I still have to train however!

Jonnene and I have started our demo of the kitchen to bring it a little up to date and to make the house a bit easier to sell in the coming months. I tore down a cabinet and removed all the old wood paneling in the room (yes, REAL paneling...probably 30 years old) while she took off the half-wall of fake brick which had to be a real chore. There's still more fake brick to remove and that'll be my job. Now I have to get an electrician over here to quote some work we need done on a potentially overloaded circuit in the kitchen. We need a couple more outlets and that'll call for a rewiring, totally outta my league. Later we'll get new counter tops, some other carpentry work done, and a new floor. Then we'll want to enjoy the new version of the kitchen before we sell the house!

It's hot around here, too. The Tuesday ride was a sweat-fest and most of us turned around at Frierson, skipping the Linwood Route. The pace was still fiesty but muted with the temps at 104 when we started out! Some dummy on the Weather Channel was talking about the current heat wave and making a slight claim that global warming was responsible. Yeah, and it might be that it's AUGUST, too! I think in my 52 years that I recall a great number of August months being unbearably hot. NASA has recently admitted that it made a huge mistake in its listing of the hottest years on record, a big miscalculation. Previously it said that 1998 was the hottest year on record, which many global warming fans pinned their arguments on. With the proper corrections in the calculations it is now established that 1934 was the hottest year on record. In fact, with the corrections we now know that six of the hottest ten years happened in the 1920's and 1930's! What were those humans doing back then to cause it, and why didn't it stick to the present day? There are newspaper articles in 1922 warning of the coming warming of the earth. Then we have the articles in 1975 warning of the cooling of the earth. Who would you believe? It's all cyclical and the earth is doing just fine, thank you.

Work is picking up in that some existing jobs are finally progressing. The Blackwell catalog is almost a done deal though there's more that'll have to achieved in the final printing. The main thing is to get out a limited printed run for a bike show up in Chicago next week and I'm pretty sure we can make that. Then we'll do a final "real" printed run for Interbike in Las Vegas and for 2008 year distribution. The layout looks really good if I do say so my-own-self.

Back on August 5th, my bride took 15th place out of 67 in her age group at the River Cities Triathlon. She was worried beforehand that she'd be lucky to be in the top twenty with so many ladies competing. I did she did just fine! The swim seemed to be a little longer but her bike was faster than she predicted and the run turned out well - her knee didn't give her any problems until the last kilometer or so, and that's a good thing. She also got to use her new Blackwell wheels in competition for the first time and she was pleased with them.