James Pearl Thinks Blogging is Dead

Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
As you can imagine, it was hard to come by time to write much yesterday. I did wake up early and write chapter 34. Then today I woke up early and did 35, then knocked out 36 through the day on & off. I have the end all laid out now. So I can just sit down and write whenever I have some free time. The end is near, I think I have 3 chapters to do. The final crux of things has come & gone and we are wrapping up. It's pretty cool, exciting. Looking forward to making it tighter now in the weeks to come. Essentially wrapping up 2 projects in a few days.

I did also ride yesterday, went to the field at the school at the bottom of the road. It's less than a half mile from the house so it's quick to get to. I just don't want to make it a habit because I don't know how well the field will take repeated tire passes on it. I did 21 minutes of microbursts then finished it with 10 minutes of tempo at exactly 300w. This is my pro tip for those of you who want to get the most out of training. Doing tempo work after intervals is how you train your body to work at race pace while recovering. Having said that, it's hard work.

Ok so then yesterday we got married.

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As many of you know, @seanrunnette and I have become even better friends this year and I was extremely happy that he agreed without even thinking about it (a decision he may have later second guessed himself on) to get himself certified or ordained in NJ to perform the ceremony. I absolutely love the pants he chose. In hindsight, it would have been outstanding had I worn the same.

Sean did a knockout job and after the ceremony someone immediately came up to me and said, "That was by far the best wedding I've ever been to." Obviously, statements like this make me super happy. And they hadn't even had any of the food yet. As the night went on, several people told me everything was great. So all the work we put into this turned out really well. I wasn't too worried about things. But since we were rolling this on our own, I had a little more pressure to get Sean something that he could work with. Luckily, he's an actor so he was able to take the script and make it come alive. Top notch job. Absolutely top notch. I think the script was the thing I was most nervous for.

We didn't do a typical wedding so we didn't have a lot of the structure, though we did have a first dance. We never really discussed a first song before about 1:00 yesterday. When someone asked about us "having a song" I said, "Well, probably playing Summertime Rolls is not a great idea." In the end we let @capedoc choose it, and he picked a great choice by Clapton. Capers did all the playlists, 3 of them. Nailed it. Totally nailed them.

Also thanks to @jmanic for delivering on the OH beer supply. I was trying to keep that as quiet as I could but I figured you guys would find out. Anyway, even though I don't drink I am not so obtuse to ask people to come to a dry wedding. How boring is that? Also thanks to @Kirt for delivering it to the patio yesterday late morning. Also want to thank Mrs. Kirt for the assist in the marriage certificate. It was actually touching how happy they both were for the 2 of us. While we're on the Mrs's, Mrs. @jmanic nailed the arrangements. Absolutely beautiful.

I had a toast speech written, and at some point I will post it here but I want to share it with some other people first. But we really didn't have a script to give @Mitch - he just did his thing on the mic, and as always, did a great job. And as always, he makes it fun.

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Many thanks to many of you guys for coming out. I don't have the time nor energy to list out everyone who means something to us. We both just appreciate all the support through the years. Looking forward to many more gatherings with many of you.
 

Mitch

Well-Known Member
Team MTBNJ Halter's
It was a GREAT wedding. Nice to see 2 people so much in love ,in synch and so mellow. I had a great time and the whole vibe was just so chill. Best wedding ever, and I've been to a few of them in my time. Peace and live to you both from table 3.
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Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
I woke up to an alarm today, too early, 6:00 to be exact. I have to admit that I wasn't entirely ready to wake up at this point in the day. But I got up anyway, because instead of writing, Phillippe and I had planned to go for a ride at CR this morning before they set sail for he rapidly declining temperatures north of the border. I was sort of hoping that he would sleep in, and when I came downstairs and found nobody was there, I was secretly happy. But then he came in from outside, fully dressed to ride, and I had to wake myself up faster than I anticipated. This was a 2 espresso morning. I'll have a lot of these in the days to come. We got a lot of coffee on Saturday. I'm good with that.

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We parked at Newmans and rode for just under an hour. Conditions were slick as snot, like the watery kind, not the dry crusty kind. But I had the Mongo bike and it was mostly fine. The mist slowly got heavier and by the end we were riding in a saturated cloud ready to dump it's payload on us. We were limited on time and had to get home because I had a call and they had to get ready to go. Later in the morning, they set sail for the Great White North and I got back to work. Back to reality.

Speaking of reality, the work suck of Monday morning was Large Marge today. I feel like I am in a post Final Exam lull (I aced the exam, btw). I think I deserve a week off, or at least a day. Maybe this is what a Honeymoon really is. Time to go and relax from the chaos that were the weeks leading into the event. On that note, I'm really happy to read that people had a great time Saturday. If anyone has pics from the day, send them to me or @Dominique so we can add them to our collection.

After lunch the tent started to disappear. The rental company showed up, mid saturated cloud, and pulled it apart. One step closer to being back to normal.

With the basement totally bare and clean, I have decided to revamp my Zwiffer area. First, I bought a new fan because I need 2 real fans, at least. I'm also going to put the setup in a better place to allow for the space to be used better. I need to figure out what bike I'm going to put on it. It will most likely be the road bike. Since I'm bringing both cross bikes to the races (one for warmup, one to race), that leaves me with just 1. Given the prevalence of rain, I think this means the road bike is the obvious answer. I still have slicks on the warmup cross bike so I can take that outside if needed. Incidentally, today was the 9th straight ride I have done outside. My Kickr misses me.


Registered for Hippo, plus a tent space. Looking forward to the weekend, of which Hippo will be the 2nd of 3 things. Friday night is Disenchanted at the Chester Theater. Saturday is a full day at Hippo. Then Sunday we plan to head to Mohunk to hike the lemon juice maker thing. Whatever it's called. We will probably eat food in there also. On that note, that leads me to this thought on training.

I moved my 3-day block to Mon-Tue-Wed this week. Since we only rode an hour today I was going to jump out for another quick session to do some leg burning stuff, maybe more KOM raids. But the rain never let up and my right knee was bugging me today. I decided to be happy with the hour and get back at it tomorrow, starting it up fresh. I may hit up the L5 stuff again tomorrow depending on the weather. I guess I could go to Bubble practice but man, I'm tired of jamming 10 pounds of sausage in my daily 5 pound casing. The day after would be threshold stuff again, maybe followed up by tempo work to get some volume in. Since the race is Saturday I'll go easy Thursday. Then Friday warm-it-up somehow, like Kris Kross.

Through the day I finished up chapter 37, which turned out to be a more productive endeavor than I had imagined. Again, things came out of the brain that I wasn't really expecting. Just 2 to go now, which I expect to knock out tomorrow and Wednesday. Then phase 2 commences. I need to come up with a title for the book. It'll come to me, once my brain vomits it out. I am already lining up ideas for my next writing project. I know, I am getting ahead of myself. See what dropping your phone in a river in Canada does for you?

Going to try to go back to front-loading my week with hours so I can take some/most of Fridays off. With a race this Saturday I won't be knocking out big hours on Friday but maybe I'll do something like sit on the couch and stare at the wall, or edit my project, or learn to juggle 4 balls, or whatever. I have all sorts of projects around the house I want to do now. Maybe I'm nesting. Oh shit, that's it. Maybe I'll build a nest in the basement with an espresso machine.

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Last family dinner tonight with D's parents & the boys. They're heading south to Florida tomorrow morning, and the boys went to their dad's house tonight. Tomorrow we'll be back to normal for a day, then back to the circus on Wednesday when the kids go back to school after having Monday & Tuesday off.

Last thing I did tonight in my Nesting Phase was to put together the 2018 race binder where I put my race number and recap together in a single collection. When I was on a business trip last year, D organized all my race numbers into binders. This made me think how cool would be to have them all with the recap printouts. But that would be an insane amount of work, and frankly all those old recaps end up having the pics stripped out because every image hosting site on the Internet has a half-life of like 3 months. Still there's no reason not to start now. Plus being only 3 races deep this year, it was a fairly quick effort.

I'm still really tired. No alarm tomorrow.
 
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jmanic

JORBA Board Member/Chapter Leader
Staff member
JORBA.ORG
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Okay, I'm a news cycle late here, but I'll chime in to echo what everyone said-
Just an awesome wedding.
Truly a perfect tribute to you two.
The garden party hit on all the notes.
Fantastic crowd, great ministerial duties by @TallGuy, Capers rocking the mike!
The photographer was a little creeper, but what can you do?

The company and food were fantastic,
you guys really knocked it out of the park.
Thanks for having us join the celebration!
 

Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
The soul-sucking reality of normalcy descends upon us today. I don't really mean that. It's a little hard to come off the excitement of the last few weeks and be faced with nothing but work. Work, where nobody gives 2 shits about you and how tired you are. I'm not going to talk about work today. At least not any more than that.

I was up early again today, before 6am. Got to work on chapter 38 and did a little philosophical mopping up. Just 1 to go to land the initial flight. If this journey is an airplane flight across the country, I'm about to finish up the first leg. What I don't know yet is this. How many hops is this flight? And how far was this hop? I expect to wrap this up tomorrow morning before I get to work. I should be at about 90k words. Then phase 2 begins.

Oma & Opa left after breakfast and D was right behind them to go to the DMV to get the Subaru inspected. They would eventually make it to their stop, which is one of the Directional Carolinas. And D would get a passing grade at the DMV. With that, as they all drove away, we are back to normalcy. And oh hey, look at that, it's miserable weather again today. Like I said, normalcy.

So with the rain coming down, I am reconstructing the ZwiftArena, of Zwiftopia, or whatever I call it. When we cleaned up the house, we deconstructed the setup so the caterer could use it to stage the food. We talked about it this weekend and decided I would reposition the setup to better use the space. The bike is now sitting in an area that was previously full of junk. And the faux-kitchen area you see to the right is open to use. This is in the basement, where the previous owner setup a wet bar using some old cabinets. I'm waiting on the other fan to come because the black one here is not really adding much.

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I ended up doing 2 hours, climbing the original Watopia hill both ways. First pass was CW, which I beat my PR by 2 minutes. Old time 31:26, new time 29:25. Last time I did this workout it took 59 minutes in total. Today, 57 minutes. Didn't feel amazing but this is progress. The setup above is without towel. I sweat so much, it's hard to believe. I have to wash the towel every time I ride now. In the winter, when it's colder down here, it should be better. But right now the air is so saturated it's like riding in a sauna.

Today's power curve, nice & flat:

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I watched Fahrenheit 451 on the ride today. Do yourself a favor and skip it. Here is my review: Dystopian Mediocrity.

My right knee has been bothering me a hair the last few days. Will need to keep an eye on this.

The Podcast with @seanrunnette has been penciled in for Thursday morning. This is what I'll do with my spare hours this week as opposed to staring at the wall or learning to juggle 4 balls. I'm sure we'll talk about training, cross, weddings, Hippo, and the like. Hopefully we'll be entertaining.

@Glenn Rides After 4 PM CST came over to try to figure out the electrical problem we're having. There's a segment of the house that's out of power, and we can't figure out why. We spent 3 hours Sunday and an hour tonight, with no luck. Paging @fidodie for ideas on this one. It would almost appear that there is an auxiliary breaker buried somewhere that we can't find. Update: @I Ride Bikes got back to me and said it's common for a loose connection to cause this.

Tonight, we spent the evening sitting on the couch watching TV. One day of total and complete uneventfulness before we launch into the cycle again.

Random wedding gift:

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Patrick

Overthinking the draft from the basement already
Staff member
The soul-sucking reality of normalcy descends upon us today. I don't really mean that. It's a little hard to come off the excitement of the last few weeks and be faced with nothing but work. Work, where nobody gives 2 shits about you and how tired you are. I'm not going to talk about work today. At least not any more than that.

I was up early again today, before 6am. Got to work on chapter 38 and did a little philosophical mopping up. Just 1 to go to land the initial flight. If this journey is an airplane flight across the country, I'm about to finish up the first leg. What I don't know yet is this. How many hops is this flight? And how far was this hop? I expect to wrap this up tomorrow morning before I get to work. I should be at about 90k words. Then phase 2 begins.

Oma & Opa left after breakfast and D was right behind them to go to the DMV to get the Subaru inspected. They would eventually make it to their stop, which is one of the Directional Carolinas. And D would get a passing grade at the DMV. With that, as they all drove away, we are back to normalcy. And oh hey, look at that, it's miserable weather again today. Like I said, normalcy.

So with the rain coming down, I am reconstructing the ZwiftArena, of Zwiftopia, or whatever I call it. When we cleaned up the house, we deconstructed the setup so the caterer could use it to stage the food. We talked about it this weekend and decided I would reposition the setup to better use the space. The bike is now sitting in an area that was previously full of junk. And the faux-kitchen area you see to the right is open to use. This is in the basement, where the previous owner setup a wet bar using some old cabinets. I'm waiting on the other fan to come because the black one here is not really adding much.


I ended up doing 2 hours, climbing the original Watopia hill both ways. First pass was CW, which I beat my PR by 2 minutes. Old time 31:26, new time 29:25. Last time I did this workout it took 59 minutes in total. Today, 57 minutes. Didn't feel amazing but this is progress. The setup above is without towel. I sweat so much, it's hard to believe. I have to wash the towel every time I ride now. In the winter, when it's colder down here, it should be better. But right now the air is so saturated it's like riding in a sauna.

Today's power curve, nice & flat:


I watched Fahrenheit 451 on the ride today. Do yourself a favor and skip it. Here is my review: Dystopian Mediocrity.

My right knee has been bothering me a hair the last few days. Will need to keep an eye on this.

The Podcast with @seanrunnette has been penciled in for Thursday morning. This is what I'll do with my spare hours this week as opposed to staring at the wall or learning to juggle 4 balls. I'm sure we'll talk about training, cross, weddings, Hippo, and the like. Hopefully we'll be entertaining.

@Glenn Rides After 4 PM CST came over to try to figure out the electrical problem we're having. There's a segment of the house that's out of power, and we can't figure out why. We spent 3 hours Sunday and an hour tonight, with no luck. Paging @fidodie for ideas on this one. It would almost appear that there is an auxiliary breaker buried somewhere that we can't find. Update: @I Ride Bikes got back to me and said it's common for a loose connection to cause this.

Tonight, we spent the evening sitting on the couch watching TV. One day of total and complete uneventfulness before we launch into the cycle again.

Random wedding gift:


there is a tripped GFI outlet somewhere....maybe the basement, maybe outside, maybe a powder room?
i can bring the podiums over and look around next week. we can use them to stand on instead of a ladder.

Anyway, even though I don't drink I

I did not miss this statement in your wedding (w)rap. :like: better than the day count.
 

pooriggy

Well-Known Member
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Update: @I Ride Bikes got back to me and said it's common for a loose connection to cause this.
Yeah, could be a concealed junction box with a loose/bad connection, which is why junction boxes should never be concealed.
Hopefully the bad connection is in an outlet or light switch that you can find.

It rained yesterday?
 
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