Trendy facial hair for bicycles

I have got to get one of these mustache head badges for my bike. You can too from tangerinetreehouse's Etsy store.

Sometimes, few words are required

General update

I suppose I should jot down a general news update while I'm sitting here, since I haven't posted much lately. First off, Christine and I went to Bar Harbor Maine for our anniversary last weekend. Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park are beautiful and we had a great time. We over-ate at every meal and spent a whole bunch of money. We did some really great hikes in the park and saw some really beautiful vistas. A couple of tips for Bar Harbor: Don't go there in the summer if you can help it. The place is jammed with people like you can only imagine. We were there at the slow period between summer vacation and Fall foliage and the place was still incredibly busy. We had to get reservations for every dinner and there was one breakfast spot that we couldn't get into for three days. I fear that you might starve if you were there in August and hadn't made all of your arrangements months before. Also, I was a little disappointed in the amount of vehicular traffic in Acadia. The paved roads are about as busy as highways in Vermont. It was anticlimactic, to say the least, when we spent three hours hiking up to the summit of Cadillac Mountain (the first place to see the sunrise in North America) only to find hundreds of cars and all kinds of people in Eddie Bauer v-neck sweaters with iphones strapped to their waist bands milling around. It was so absurd I could only laugh. You might want to stay away from there. The neighboring peak, Dorr Mountain, was much quieter and a better hike. I also has no road to the summit. Acadia is touted as a great place to see from a bicycle, and while there are miles of carriage roads to ride on, you definitely want to stay off the paved roads. Which is sort of depressing to me. It's great, I guess, that you can see so much of the park without ever getting out of your air conditioned Escalade, but what about those of us who don't have an Escalade to protect us. Believe me, if you are incapable of locomotion, I want you to still be able to see the grandeur of our National Parks. I do. However, if you are not incapable of locomotion, I do not want you to run over me while I'm trying to experience the grandeur of our National Parks. Where is the egalitarianism in that? I have not seen any of the big parks out west, although that is one of the things I really want to do in the next couple of years. I'm hoping that they are big enough that you can get away from the masses in their vehicles. Acadia is not that big.

What else? Well, one of my ongoing projects is decluttering. Or uncluttering. Or getting rid of the clutter. There are a number of reasons for this that I might get into at another time but I don't want to get sidetracked right now (imagine that) so just know that this is one of my projects. In that vein, I have been working my way through a giant pile of mostly bicycle racing detritus all summer. Selling what I can on ebay or craigslist and throwing or giving away the rest. One of my chief complaints about bike racing is that in order to compete at a high level these days, you need a ton of stuff. And now, five years after I stopped racing I'm still surrounded by the stuff. But I'm making progress. I've gotten rid of two bicycles this week that were not really that practical and I'm replacing only one, with a truly practical bike that will also help matters by using some of the spare parts that are laying around in my basement. I sold my beloved Orbea cyclocross bike to a gentleman in Austin Texas. When I put that bike together it was one of the finest bikes that money could buy. But a race bike like that is absolutely useless to someone who doesn't race, or someone who isn't an elite racer. So, reluctantly, I let her go. I also got rid of my K2 cyclocross bike that has been my trusty commuter and grocery getter the last few years. That bike was somewhat more practical, but still not really ideal for my purposes. I handed it down the line to a friend who has a minor interest in cyclocross and it will allow him an inexpensive way to try it out. It also, again, gets a bunch of old cyclocross stuff out of my basement. Now, I admit that I still have a soft spot in my heart for cyclocross, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of jumping into a local race or two at some point, because cyclocross is the people's bike racing, so to speak. I cannot, however, justify having a dedicated cyclocross race bike (or two) that sit(s) in my basement 362 days a year. So I've found what I like to think of as a "gentleman's cyclocross bike" from these folks that I can put fenders and racks on for most of the year and dress up for cross when the time is right. And best of all, I'm still at a net gain, cash-wise, after selling the other two bikes and using leftover parts. Smart right? That's not all though, I've been decluttering my office and bed room as well. Christine was away for the weekend a couple of weeks ago and when she came home and saw the progress I'd made she asked "you're not moving out, are you?" I'm ruthlessly simplifying, finally letting go of a lot of junk that I tend to hold onto forever. I took a tip from the Sweetpea Cycles blog and took digital photos of a bunch of memorabilia and stuff, which I then filed in a folder called "stuff I used to own," and threw the crap away. I also started a huge pile of clothing that I never wear and books that I have either read and have no intention of reading again or didn't read and can no longer kid myself that I'm ever going to read. That hard cover volume of Edgar Rice Burroughs collected work that I got for Christmas in the fifth grade? Gone. Ditto The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes. The Ticket stub from when I saw Snoop Dogg at the Pickle Barrel? digitized. I've also been making strides toward going paperless. I'm getting most of my bills and bank statements electronically now and I bought a new shredder to get rid of a lot of old records. Paper clutter is one of the biggest problems in my office, so if no paper comes in, no clutter, right? Now if I could just get Fidelity Investments to stop sending me about a telephone book worth of unintelligible financial bullshit every week, I'd be all set. I'm sure that information is important to someone, but not anyone that lives at my house. I've been inspired by a number of different blogs whose authors have undertaken "the 100 thing challenge." I don't actually dream of getting down to 100 personal belongings, but it is a thought provoking concept. Although I was born and bred to consume, I have always had an interest in minimalism.

I just finished, as in this morning, a 5k trail running race. And no, I haven't been running. The local recreation department puts on this duathlon, running and mountain biking, and a friend of mine asked me to do the run leg for her because her runner backed out. Of course I said yes and it turned out to be a pretty fun race, at least after the fact. 5k is not really my distance but, interestingly, I ran about as fast a 5k as I ever have, despite the fact that I really don't run anymore. It makes me think that training is for suckers. Tomorrow I probably won't be able to walk, but today I'm a runner.

Finally, I mentioned in a previous post that I had just finished a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. book and one of the things that I took away from that book was a story about Mr. Vonnegut's uncle, a Harvard educated insurance salesman who was somewhat unlucky in his life, who had a habit of saying, whenever some everyday occurrence struck him as particularly nice, "well if this isn't nice, I don't know what is." It could be anything, sitting under a shade tree on a hot day drinking lemonade, for instance, but it struck me as a super way to acknowledge the everyday things that make life worth living, things that we sometimes take for granted. So I've been trying to do that myself. If you hear me say "well if this isn't nice, I don't know what is," you'll know what I'm up to. That's about it for today, thanks for reading.

Writing, writing, writing

Geez, I've been so busy that I've totally neglected newsfromoutthere, sorry. The thing is, it's going to be harder for me to keep up with this blog as the Winter season progresses. Not that it's winter yet, but the preparations are nearly in full swing. I've also got thewildslide to think about as people start getting excited about skiing around here and the project that has really been demanding a lot of my attention is trying to launch a Basin Sports blog which is here, tentatively. With the departure of Intern Steve from the Basin, most of our marketing and social media stuff has fallen on my plate. I'm kind of glad to have it, honestly, but the problem is that Intern Steve was educated as a web marketing guy and I'm a... carpenter. So that's sort of interesting. The good part is that one of the most important things you can do to increase your business' presence on the web is develop interesting content (that's a marketing term) and if there's one thing I like to do, it's write content. Whether it's interesting or not remains to be seen. I'm trying to put all of the pieces together right now and I'm reading The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. Turns out I've been doing everything wrong, but what else is new. Anyway, I've got a lot of stuff to write now. In addition to my own facebook, twitter, and two blogs (actually more, but two active ones,) I've now got Basin Sport's twitter, facebook, blog, weekly newsletter, and soon daily snow report. I am also the chief photographer and videographer for Basin Sports, which are two things for which I have no natural aptitude at all. What this means is that I won't have time to do a lot of the fun exciting office work I did last year at the Basin. Shucks! Let me just remind you that I'm a carpenter and that precludes having access to a computer and even a phone most of each day at this time of the year. So many challenges. Another consideration that I'm becoming aware of is that you have to tread carefully in the digital world because once your mistakes become entrenched, they are very difficult to fix. As an example, Basin Sports has had a daily ski report at basinski.com for probably 12 or 13 years and that site gets an unbelievable number of hits every day in the winter. However, the site itself is a dinosaur turd and absolutely useless for e-commerce, so we now have basinshopping.com. But, now we need to migrate all of those people who have had basinski bookmarked forever over to basinshopping in order to boost our search ratings. And although this seems straightforward to me (as a carpenter) several web professionals have told us that they don't exactly know what will happen if we try to do that. Evidently there are mysteries of the interwebs that even professionals don't understand. So I don't want to mess anything up. Then, there is the matter of the ski report. Lots of people read it, as I've said, but the format doesn't work all that great from a marketing perspective. Because the content is replaced everyday, rather than just moved down the line and eventually archived, it doesn't lend itself to being linked to. And that precludes any chance of viral activity (more marketing speak.) So something has to be done about that. And all of this stuff costs money because we do not have anyone on staff that has even a remote idea of how to actually create a web page. Money that I don't really have any access to. I could tell you stories of the colorful characters we have enlisted locally to do our web work, but it would only reflect badly on us for associating with such people. All of this begs the question: is it worth it? Probably not to me. You see, I know it's in my best interest to sell a lot of ski stuff but, strangely, I don't really care. The only thing I hope to get out of it is a job for six or seven months of the year. I like the scale of my life right about where it is. I don't want to be any busier and I don't really want to make any more money either. So as long as my marketing efforts don't cause a decrease in business, I win. But some of these other people that I work with want more and I don't really want to let them down. I guess we'll see how it goes.

Sometimes reality is unpleasant

I'm so glad to see that the President's health care program is finally gaining some traction. There are some problems with the plan, of course, as many of the President's detractors have pointed out, but with something as big as universal health care there are bound to be some issues that need ironing out. We all know, deep down, that something must be done about this awful health care system we've got here. And of course no one wants to think about topics like "death panels" and "forced euthanasia" because these topics are, well, unpleasant. But sometimes we just have to accept that there is unpleasantness in this world that we live in and move on. I mean, sure, even I was disappointed to learn that the President is a left wing fascist, particularly because this fact only recently came to light but, let's not forget, we did elect him and now we owe him some respect. He's our left wing fascist illegitimate illegal immigrant Muslim president and that's what we do in this country, we respect the president even if we don't agree with some of his ideology. If you think about it, killing off our elderly citizens (at the discretion of the fascist government, of course) just makes good economic sense. Socializing health care is going to be expensive - how could we possibly manage to finance the socialized health care of all kinds of medically unsound hangers-on and all of the president's beloved illegal immigrants? We should be happy to bring those illegals under our socialist umbrella anyway. After all, illegals are more economically viable than old folks. Do you go down to the assisted living center looking for help when you need some holes dug in your yard? Hell no, you pick up a couple of Dominican day laborers on the street corner. Again, it all makes perfect economic sense once you get past the squeamishness. You can't fault the President for having a soft spot in his heart for illegals - evidently, he is one. Do we really want a man in the oval office who's unwilling to lend a hand to his own people? That's not what this country is about. And that's why I think it's important that we all band together and help this President pass his health care plan. We've all got to do our part and do what's right for this country, even, unfortunately, if that means being euthanized.

If I get on the roof am I closer to Buddha?

I love roofing because I hate roofing. Does that make sense? It does to me. Anyone in their proper mind would hate the task of putting an asphalt shingle roof on a building. It's dangerous, brutish, dirty, and painfully tiring. Add in the reality that my knees and lower back aren't what they used to be and that I'm afraid of heights, and you can see why it's not my favorite thing to do. And yet, in a way, I love it because it demands that I pay attention. Roofing demands that I immerse myself in the task at hand. People pay money for that you know. It's truly a zen endeavor because it is at once mindless and mindful. The act of putting shingles on a roof is, for the most part, numbingly mindless. Once the pattern is set, any moron can run wild putting up the courses. Seriously, any moron. Stop by a roofing job and talk to the boys sometime if you don't believe me. And yet, if that moron isn't mindful of the fact that he or she is, somewhat precariously, perched on an elevated, slanted, and sometimes slippery surface, said moron will be collecting workman's compensation in no time. Or worse. It's not like that for everyone though. The people that make it a career tend to be people that can run around on a roof with no regard for the consequences of a slip. And they probably aren't as clumsy as I am either. Go ahead, get up on your roof right now and become one with the universe. Ohhhmmm.

Why do I do it?

There's no denying that penning these pointless posts is therapeutic for me. The question is why writing nothing for no one to read would be therapeutic. I don't exactly have the answer. I might guess that it has something to do with the physical sensation of typing, or banging away at the keyboard, as the case may be. I certainly don't get anything out of writing with pen or pencil on paper, although, of the two, I much prefer the pencil. The lack of friction the ball point pen presents leaves me feeling disconnected and adrift. At any rate, I like to type. It might have to do with my continual amazement that I can type, albeit with many, many errors. In high school I barely passed typing class and the fact that I did pass had nothing to do with my actually having learned to type. I could not, in fact, type a single word at the conclusion of that class. I passed, with a solid D, only because I took pity on poor, frail Mrs. Darwin, my teacher. My classmates harassed her mercilessly for being, I fear, in the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's. I did not, and so she returned the favor by giving me an undeserved passing grade. Or maybe she didn't have the slightest idea who I was or whether I could type or not, who knows. I didn't attend enough of my classes when I was briefly enrolled in community college to need to type anything, so it wasn't until much later that I gave typing any further thought. When I did eventually decide to learn to type I did it with a computer program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I got it for $9.95 in the bargain bin at Staples and it may well have been the best $9.95 I've ever spent. It wasn't even my $9.95, I submitted it as an office expense to my employer. Mavis Beacon accomplished what poor Mrs. Darwin could not, she taught me to type. And so I do.

Maybe the therapeutic effect has nothing to do with typing. Maybe it's simply that the act of writing anything requires one to be fully engaged in the task at hand. You cannot write, even something as inane as one of my blog posts, and do anything else at the same time. I can't anyway. I'm trying to do it right now and it certainly seems impossible. I just finished reading a book by Kurt Vonnegut, one of my all time favorite authors. In this book he says that the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout (actually Trout is Vonnegut's alter ego and a vehicle for Vonnegut to present some of his wackier ideas) enjoyed writing because "he could tune out the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head down, with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad." Trout tends to be a little succinct. Anyway, writing is a bit like yoga done correctly or meditation in that way. It pulls you into the moment. Most people, myself included, have nothing to write these days other than perhaps a blog post. In the old days I used to occasionally write letters to friends when the mood struck me. You can't do that anymore though, Al Gore put a stop to letter writing when he invented the internet. I don't think the Postal Service delivers letters anymore. They've shifted their business to delivering the glossy catalogs that we use to fill up our recycling bin and also to delivering all of the small items that we purchase on the interweb that we never knew we even needed before we had the interweb. I suppose some people write in a journal, and I wish I could, believe me, but it doesn't work for me. For one thing, no one, not even yours truly, can read my handwriting. So that leaves me here, tapping away at this machine. Sometimes I swear the machine tells lies. But that's okay because I don't really care what I write, it's the writing that I like. And if you think the stuff that you're reading is a little, you know, incoherent, you should see the stuff that's too far out there for me to even post. Wheeee!

Another way that technology makes life better

Say there was a girl I barely knew in high school (despite the fact that my class had less than 100 students) and I wanted to know A) if there was a test that could determine which character from the movie Grease this girl's personality most resembled and B) which character that might be, where would I look? Or, what if there was another girl from high school I barely knew (I never was very socially able) and I really had to know what kind of weird online games involving farm animals she played all day, every day. Or, what if I wanted to know how an acquaintance of mine handled the walking of his dogs this morning, or the poor service he got at his local coffee shop, or how unhappy he was about recent weather trends, or what he was planning on having for dinner, or some other mundane and totally trivial bit of information about him? What if what I really wanted was to start a virtual food fight with someone I know, or maybe don't really even know, and, you know, hit this person with a cyber hot dog? What if there was one place I could look to for all of these pressing needs? Oh wait, there is, it's called facebook. Wheee!