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Gopher-land was driving me insane yesterday. I was just sitting in my grey-walled cube… twitching. I had to get out. I had to escape. I rode the YZF into the office, so the obvious choice was to hit the hills instead of eating lunch.

I took Hwy 26 East and hooked up with Skyline at Sylvan. I traveled north, ridge riding, gliding through the curves and relaxing through the shaded straights. Eventually, I reached Rocky Point Rd where the pavement ends. I turned around and started wandering. Turning right on some unknown and unremembered road, I rolled through massive trees, clear cuts, and farm lands. Roadies were on every road. I couldn’t blame them and tried to give extra room. I simply cruised… no carving, staying close to the speed limit. I ventured down through Helvetia, then over to Rock Creek, back up to Skyline, Germantown Rd, Keiser, and Cornell.

Over 50 miles and 90 minutes later I was:

• back at the office.
• back in my cube.
• back to my beloved code.

Do you ever have those seemingly perfect weekends? I don’t mean a weekend when everything goes your way, just as you wanted. I mean a weekend when things don’t always go right and everything still works out without stress, drama, or lingering resentment.

Example: Friday night, the woman and I went to out to dinner. Everything started off fine, then somewhere around desert, the skills of the cooking and wait staff imploded. They were out of the desert I ordered (after telling me they had it), brought the substitute sans eating utensil, and failed to figure out how to server my girlfriend’s marrionberry cobbler desert in 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, she canceled her desert. We paid in cash to avoid having to wait any longer and made a b-line for the door. Let’s not mention the lack of drink refills (water & iced tea) or seating an elderly group at a reserved table, then asking then to get up and wait for another table to become available.

Very bad form. BTW: This all happened at Geraldi’s Rennaissance 334 Northeast 28th Avenue, Portland, OR 97232 Tell all of your friends.

Still, as we walked down the street I felt content, happy with to be spending time with ‘The Woman.’

Today, we rode for over 3 hours. It rained and it was very cold on the top of Bald Peak at the State Park. Still, she asked for more miles and more miles and more miles until hunger and the approaching night forced changes. We didn’t actually ride that far, but rolling through the mountains at the posted speed limit, cruising around Hagg Lake, and slicing our way down every back road I could find burned a lot of daylight without covering an enormous number of miles.

Yes. I had a perfect weekend.

PS: I ordered my new mountain bike on Thursday from Fat Tire Farm: Specialized S-Works Stumpjumper FSR Carbon. It will be customized with a full XTR drivetrain/shifters/levers, Chris King/DT/Mavic wheels, and 170mm XTR cranks. I am so looking forward to picking it up this coming week. Maybe this one will not get stolen. I do miss my Kestrel, but time passes and it is not going to return to my world. The Stumpy will serve me just as well I am sure.

Work, school, side-line projects, a certain female… and occasionally I sleep.

Today was Monday. I don’t know what else to say. I went to the office, stared at my monitor, wrote code that didn’t work, went to lunch, wrote more code that didn’t work, talked to my girlfriend, realized I wasn’t going to be any more (un)productive and then I went home. Yeah. It was a Monday.

I took the long-way home, so to speak. I stopped by Five Star Guitars to talk to Ken about the server work I had done for him a few weeks ago. REI was the next stop. I wandered around in a low-blood sugar haze. I picked up a few things, used my 20% discount and cashed in my divided from last year + a few bucks.

Home: Left-over’s: rice with fish & red/yellow peppers with asparagus on the side. ( The woman can and does cook for me too. ) three bites of ice cream (all that was left in the container) and here I am. More code on my main display, data scrolling by from a virus-infected system doing bulk copy / data backup on another screen/system and an XP Home system with a corrupted registry behind me. The two machines need to be dropped off before I go into the office tomorrow. And I have class tomorrow night, so it will be a very long day.

Tony mounted my tires for me. They are in the garage leaning against a stand. I started to clean the grime off my rear sprocket, but got distracted. Such is life. I would really like to go to bed right now but I have at least two more hours until I will have the virus infected machine is rebuilt. Midnight is approaching too quickly. The corrupted registry is a simple reinstall of the O/S. I have already tried to partially rebuild the registry but that failed, so a rebuild is the real option. Two rebuilds at the same time. That should be fun.

I am craving the weekend and it is only Monday…

Kid Rock and the Twisted Brown Trucker Band — ‘Live’ Trucker.

It’s OK. Fun. Short. Good. Not stellar, but good. Is it time for another BMG order? Nope it is time for another run to a local used shop. Time for something old, something new, and something black, heavy and metalized.

Some Judas Priest maybe?

A dirty air filter and bald tires… It is definitely time for new sneakers.

I pulled the wheels off the DL tonight after class. I need to drop them off at teh shop tomorrow, when I am on that side of town. The air filter photo was from a few weeks ago, when I installed a new steel-braided clutch line. Work is the same. I’m still super-busy and haven’t had much time for family or friends. The woman is the only one that actually sees me with any frequency. I applied for another Intel contract today. This one is doing project management on a Web development team. More of the same, but slightly different. My latest photos are below. Enjoy. Read more…