March Bike Rides

Today was the 8th day of March and so happened to be one of my days off. The next few days don't look to promising weather wise, so I figured I should take advantage of the weather and get out for a real ride. I've been doing an indoor workout on Saturday's with my team and feel as though I am way ahead of where I was, fitness wise, last year. Still some kinks to be worked out fit wise, but, new cleats are in the near future so no reason to try to readjust the cleats now. They aren't too far off anyway. There is nothing quite like riding outside. Riding on a trainer, and riding hard, is good, however, is nothing like riding on the road. Don't get me wrong it is way helpful because I feel quite strong, at least stronger than last year. My brother probably has the same strength I have in two legs in one of his, but, hey...he's a PRO!

So todays ride took me out to Pewaukee Lake. As you can see in this photo,

it is still quite frozen. There were a couple of people out on the lake and it appeared like one of them was driving. I don't think it was a car, but, could have been an ATV or snowmobile I suppose. Either way, I thought it was crazy. There was one guy literally in the middle of the lake. I was good being on solid ground.

I was representin', both Velo Trocadero and my blood lines on The SHACK!

After stopping to take those beauty shots (I was eating Jelly Belly Sport Beans) I ate a part of a Clif Bar and continued on the ride. My goal was originally to go around the lake, however, that plan changed when I noticed the wind was blowing hard out of the east, which happened to be my way home. Instead of going around the lake, I decided on some hill repeats on Glacier Road. They were decent. Again, riding inside is good, but nothing like actually being outside.

Once I felt I had humiliated myself enough, I decided to head home. The wind was for sure out of the east. I put in a little effort on Hwy M to get through Pewaukee and past the gun club. Overall it was decent, nothing superb, but decent.

When I was home, I treated myself to the recorded Paris-Nice Versus coverage. I had already watched the stage in the morning but can't pass up High Definition cycling coverage. Seriously, it is the most beautiful thing!

That's all!

Liberalism and Democracy

I didn't start this blog to be about politics. I'd rather it be about fun things, however, now seems to be a good time to give a little rant about politics.

I am tired of it quite frankly. In case you haven't seen the news, Wisconsin has had ongoing protests at the Capitol for an entire 14 days. Yes, 14 days. The controversy stirs over the collective bargaining "rights" for public employees. It also stirs about a proposed increase contribution by public employees, which include teachers, to 5.8% contribution to their own pension, and an increase to 12.6% toward their health insurance. All have been met with extreme outrage by, most notably teachers, and public employee unions. In Wisconsin, if you are a public employee you are required to contribute to your union. No choice, they take the money out of your paycheck without you having an option.

Wisconsin is a big union state. A majority, if not all, of the contributions to Democrat political campaigns is done by unions. The largest union in the state is the teacher's union, I believe, not entirely sure though. Either way, the unions are a big contributor to the Democrat party. If you know anything about me I can't stand the Democrat party. But, each month $36 is removed from my paycheck under the guise of "Union dues." I am smart enough to know this goes directly, well maybe indirectly, to some democrat somewhere. I'd like that to not happen.

Anyway, back to the controversy. The first 6 days of this protest was put on by the teachers. Literally, classes and schools were closed so teachers could go to Madison to protest. Seriously. They then claimed it was "all about the children." Yes, those all important children who are NOT IN SCHOOL LEARNING! Eventually this protest became a national story and so now all the big union bosses are encouraging those protests to continue. All the while, they claim to agree to the increase in contributions for the public employee. They don't agree about the collective bargaining. Oh, I should mention, they are still able to bargain about their wage, just not the health insurance or other benefits.

A vote on this measure, which the Governor says will help to close a budget deficit, was supposed to happen about 3 weeks ago, but couldn't because the Democrat state senators who don't agree with the bill, fled the state. Got up and left, went to Illinois and are refusing to come back to work. They too have said they agree with the contributions part of the bill, but, they apparently don't agree with something else and they aren't necessarily saying what. If you are any kind of smart, you can gather they don't agree with the collective bargaining part because: They are democrats, they get money from unions and if collective bargaining and mandatory union membership is ended, they won't get as much money from the union because people like me may choose to not be in the union.

Yes, a long story, however, there is something troubling about all of it. On November 2nd, 2010, the State of Wisconsin elected a Republican governor and gave a majority of control back to the Republicans in both houses of the State Congress. 14 democrats, who choose not to go to work, are nullifying the election because they don't agree with the bill and don't want it to be voted on because they know it will pass. Does this not seem ridiculous to anyone else? Democrats can do whatever they please, vote on controversial bills at 2am on a weekend so no one will notice, and Republicans were there, yet, when they no longer have power and don't agree they just run away? Is that democracy?

Teachers claiming they can't do their jobs well enough because they might not be able to collectively bargain about their insurance and sweet benefits? Really? Your ability to teach hinges on just that alone? Seems kind of weak if you ask me.

Democracy in American starts with elections. If you don't vote, you don't have a voice. Unfortunately with voting, the majority wins and obviously, not everyone likes the majority. However, if you don't allow the majority to do what they were elected to do, you are silencing the voices of those who voted for that majority.

The mind of a democrat is confusing. They don't seem to understand that tax money is money that comes from other people and not from the government at random. The "give me what I deserve" idea in this country is terrible and is clearly on display. When 10% of the wage-earners in the country pay 70% of the taxes, something is a little wrong, yet these people always go back to any kind of tax break being something to help the rich. Why not? They pay the most taxes!

I don't understand and never will, but, it would be nice if all these people would just go home and back to their jobs. I am guessing though, they don't have jobs and are probably collecting unemployment.

La Hacienda

Well, after a long wait, I finally was able to put up some pictures of my house for your viewing pleasure. Here is some explanation of the photos, I am sure you can probably figure them out for yourself though.

The first picture is the outside of the house. It is a nice place to be sure. I enjoy living here and the neighborhood is quite incredible. There are a lot of nice people, most of whom have families with smaller kids. I am sure there will be plenty of trick or treater's this Halloween. The next picture is a picture of the living room from the front door. The couch you see is the first purchase Amanda and I made together. Being the giving person she is, she felt she needed to get me something as a housewarming gift. We decided on that particular sectional after lots of sitting on a lot of different couches and furniture.

The next picture is another picture of the living room, looking toward the kitchen. The kitchen is nothing spectacular. It will eventually be renovated. The renovation project will consist of the removal of a few walls to open the kitchen and living room up. It is being postponed in order to get some insulation in the attic. The next picture is of the breezeway. I think this could be a pretty awesome spot with a few updates. Updates are simply a matter of will, imagination, money and time. So, for now it will remain as it is. As you are looking at the picture, the garage is to the left and the kitchen is to the right.

The picture after the breezeway is of the "office" or other bedroom. The couch has a pull out sleeper, so it can function as a guest room if need be. I don't anticipate having too many guests, but, if you are interested, there is a bed. The picture after that is my bedroom. It is considerably larger than what I had at my apartment. The best part of being in this house, is that I can lay on a couch that I have plenty of room on and my feet aren't in the kitchen while I am laying on the couch in the living room!

After the bedroom is the camping corner in the basement. Nothing too spectacular to talk about there. After that is the attic. It is pretty open as you can see, and there is zero insulation in there. Which could explain why the previous owners had a budget with WE Energies of $180/month. They also had three kids and a few dogs. Alright, the dogs probably didn't contribute to the high utility bill, but the kids probably did. This attic has definite potential. Depending on my career and future plans, this could become a "master suite" type deal. Time will tell. There is definite potential, this is for certain.

The last two pictures are back down in the basement in the area commonly known as "The Lab." I can't take credit for this term of the area where one keeps his bicycles, it comes from a teammate, the dentist. It really is just the area where I keep my bikes, helmets and shoes. There are a few clothing items, and once the front closet is gone (part of the kitchen renovation) there will probably be a few jackets and such down there, but for now, just bikes. I suppose I may also have to get a washer and dryer, but for now, I enjoy going to mom and dads.

Well, that is all, enjoy the pictures and hopefully you'll get to see it in person at some point in time.

Peace all!

AB

Fixes, fixes and more fixes

Since I last wrote to you, I have had several items I have needed to fix. Well, you can probably call them repairs essentially. Though, fix and repair is probably the same damn thing. I digress.

First, the garage. I returned from work one night last week, I think it was either Friday or Saturday, I don't remember for sure. I pulled into the garage and as usual, I closed the garage door from in my car using the remote. Suddenly I heard a very loud bang, similar to a gun shot. I was a little nervous as you could imagine. I got out of my car and noticed one of the side springs of my garage was missing. I thought it was a little odd, and sure enough, the spring had broke. The biggest part was resting nicely on the step up into the house. The other part was still attached to the cable. This would later turn into a bigger deal than I thought. As it was, the garage door was now sitting crooked in the opening. Thankfully they make replacement parts for things like garages, and I was able to get a couple new springs at Home Depot. They came with cables in them and I thought these were the safety cables, I would later find out I was wrong.

After trying to figure out how I was going to attach the old pulley to the new spring and coming to the realization it wouldn't work, I decided I would need to get replacement pulleys too. So, I went to Ace Hardware because apparently Home Depot doesn't carry such items. At least, I couldn't find them on the website and it was easier to go to Ace than to Home Depot on that particular day. And, Ace is the helpful hardware place.

Finally got the new pulleys and went home to try and finally install them. I was able to successfully get the pulleys on the cable and attach them to the new springs. The next hurdle was getting the spring onto the garage door frame so they could do their job. Unfortunately, the springs were about 4 inches short of attaching directly to the frame. Here is where I figured out the cables were a necessary part of the whole installation process. They were to be used to attach the spring to the garage door frame. After some careful installation the garage door finally worked again.

Now, the garage door was broken for about 3 days. During that time, I had gone out for a ride on the cross bike with my dad. I took him to this small park in Brookfield to help him with his mounting/dismounting and showed him some drills to work on that particular skill. After, we were planning on doing some riding in Greenfield park. I have a loop I made up myself to follow and it is fairly challenging, but nothing too serious. We were about halfway through a lap and going through some trees in a field when all of a sudden I heard this serious noise. It sounded like I had run over a stick and for some reason thought the stick was stuck in my chain. Definitely wasn't the case.

I looked down and my chain was literally in my rear wheel. No good. My derailluer hanger was torn in half and the derailluer was just hanging on the ground. Can't ride the bike like that. Thankfully my dad was with and he rode home and got the car and was nice enough to give me a ride back to the Hacienda. After realizing my derailluer was actually bent beyond repair and getting a new hanger and derailluer, the cross bike is back up in action.

All in all, it was a few days of spending a lot of money to get make some serious repairs. This home ownership thing is cool, but it seems like almost everyday something new goes wrong. Either way though, it is fun and I have a new couch to hang out on and write this awesome and highly entertaining posts...alright, so maybe not so awesome or entertaining, but, you did read all the way to this point, so it had to be slightly intriguing.

I swear, I will put pictures of the hacienda up...just not today. Sometime soon though, I promise.

CX or Cyclocross

As many well know, there is another form of bicycle racing. Well, there are several forms of bike racing in all reality; road, mountain, track, downhill, etc. The often forgot form is that of cyclocross. It is getting a lot of coverage this time of year on places like Cyclingnews.com and maybe even Velonews.com. I am not sure, haven't been to Velonews in some time.

Either way, I plan to rock the 'crosss racing this season. Lets not take that too far, I should clarify "rock." All I simply mean is I will be on my cyclocross bike and doing some of the racing. The "rock-ing" part will hopefully come with time, but, it remains to be seen.

Anyway, I rode two days in a row. Yesterday I went for a little warm-up/technique ride. I just practiced the art of dismounting and mounting the bike quickly. Much to my surprise, I remembered what I had learned and didn't completely suck or harm myself in the process of practicing. After a few loops in a local park doing my mounts/dismounts I went to Greenfield Park to do some laps.

I have no idea what my course was, I just made it up as I went. I tried to ride hard, and I think I accomplished that feat. I came home and went and had sushi with Amanda. I think I prefer salmon over tuna, but, depends on the dish.

Today, a teammate of mine, Mantel; aka The doctor; aka Nation; aka Chris, went to Washington Park. Home of homicides and the annual Velotrocadero Halloween Cyclocross Race. If you didn't figure it out, it is the race my team puts on. We essentially just went to start riding the course and putting in a rut. Overall, the course is bumpy as hell right now. To the point you feel like your teeth will fall out of your head.

Our ride was decent. We did a hot lap and I was full on red zone for the entire time. I would say I felt ok, not great, but not terrible. I managed to break my saddle right in half. I believe this happened on said hot lap, but not sure. Either way, I now need a new seat. I am not sure if it broke because I am grossly overweight (not likely) or because I have insane raw power (also not likely). The more likely explanation is that it just broke because it was it's time. After all, the seat is probably 4 or 5 years old.

Well, time to go to work. I've accomplished much today the 22nd day of September. The day is young however, I must go serve and protect.

AB