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.