Moon Shadows are Evil

if there is snow on the ground i have zero interest in riding any kind of bike. i am in the works to come up with a new website.

XCSKINJ.com
I think the first thread's will involve; winter gloves, carbon skis and favorite beers.
 
pooriggy said:
if there is snow on the ground i have zero interest in riding any kind of bike. i am in the works to come up with a new website.

XCSKINJ.com
I think the first thread's will involve; winter gloves, carbon skis and favorite beers.
Click to expand...

Sweet! I'm hoping someone writes up a review on fatskis too. You know, overweight Pollacks!
 
pearl said:
i see a beef between fat bikers and XC skiers, is this true?
Click to expand...

xc skiers don't like anyone who messes up their grooming. I try to avoid the tracks when i can but someone it is impossible. On one of my snow rides this year, a skier wrote this in the snow with a pole:

FUCK YOU WALKERS AND BIKERS FOR MESSING UP MY TRACKS AND I HAD TO DO THAT STUPID SIDE STEP THING TO GET AROUND

There was also a trail of blood nearby leading from this point to the parking lot, so not sure what that was about.

rlb said:
They should call it a bacon. Beef sounds too weird.
Click to expand...

bacon would assume they like each other because apprently BACON BACON BACON
 
I have no beef with any bikes on trials that i xc ski on. To me, tire traffic does not pose a major inconvenience while xc skiing(classic). I am not expecting a groomed trail in a multi use park. Anyone skier complaining about bikes/walkers ruining there ski tracks is fighting a losing battle.

Places where I pay to use xc ski trails, I do not expect to see tire ruts on. Skate skiing through tire ruts would suck.
 
6c5acbd090f801311009005056a9545d
 
So I was going to start another thread but decided that Moon Shadows still applies and I am lazy and give the Super Moon buzz this week, it still seemed appropriate.

While I have largely stepped out of the look at me phase with the blogs and felt that I don’t have much worth blogging about, I did intend to post a bunch of things I have done this year since some out it was outside the ordinary one-hour bangers. So here is a bit of a recap:

Rode in Hotlanta in February, it was all of 50 degrees, but better than the icy depths that were NJ this year. The peeps at the shop I rented the bike from thought I was crazy for riding when it was this cold. Atlanta is kinda ghetto outside the city. It was ok, I sang Outkast songs the whole time.


The Friday after HOH, I hit another deer. Well, more like the deer ran my ass over in downtown Pennington but it resulted in a lower back spasm, a few weeks of muscle relaxers and 6 weeks of physical therapy. I was back on the bike within days but it took a while to loosen up my hips, which were twisted from muscles constricted from the crash. Physical therapy was an eye opening experience of how weak I am anywhere outside of bike muscles and the exercise specialist regularly made be their bitch, which often made me laugh at my own 12-year old core strength. It also introduced me to the muscle roller of death, which is actually helpful.

In May rode in VT. It was tits. Really nothing more to say. Climbing is where it is at.
Green Mountain Stage Race Mountain Top Finish


Rode in South Jersey for a week. Flat is not where it is at but makes for good sun rises.


Rode in Chicago and rode to Indiana. Flat is not where it is at. But nuts is. specially all over clark

This was my least favorite destination riding this year and I will not wish to ride here for a long time.

But good sun rises there too


At beginning of July ate shit on a bunch of stones at 20+mph in Hopewell Boro, that were never there before or after said crash. Knee swelled like a mf’er and got meaty pawl, a nice raspberry on my hip and this:

Consolation prize was a KOM on the fast section into Hopewell. This ride was one of those days on the bike, right up until the time I ate-it.

Since then I have been in ride as much as you can BECAUSE BABIES COMING mode and was planning one last hurrah on the bike. A few things didn’t work out and decided to just take a day off while I can. Last Thursday was the day and I really could not have wanted for a better day in August weather-wise.



Pain was on the menu to climb some of the area’s nastier climbs, Uhlerstown, Ademic, 579 out of Bloomsbury, Iron Bridge.


Pain was had with a healthy dose of self-reflection to the tune of 7.5 hours and 130 solo miles of which I could not have asked for more. Well, except for strava / GC to give me the satisfaction of 10k climbing, but such is life. Also had the bonus of free salt for dinner:


So now in full on baby waiting mode. It’s going to be a helluva (note, that is actually a word) change, but a change that should be good. It will bring changes of the mind and bike lyff, of which I will write about from time-to-time here…..
 
Last edited:
stb222 said:
So now in full on baby waiting mode. It’s going to be a helluva (note, that is actually a word) change, but a change that should be good. It will bring changes of the mind and bike lyff, of which I will write about from time-to-time here…..
Click to expand...

Baby Shit Bomb
So I posted this on August 11th, the due date was September 21st and the docs would not let my wife go past 38 weeks, so babies would come on September 7th. That was the plan but kids and babies especially, like to take plans and give them the middle finger, actually they can’t really get it together for the middle figure, so they just shit all over them. And that is exactly what they did.

On August 13th, my wife called around 3:15 PM and said I think you need to come home. She is pretty chill with all the medical stuff she has been through but she wasn’t so chill, so I boogied home. For our son, she was induced, so the normal labor stuff happened in the hospital, so she wasn’t sure about the water break and crap like that so the doc said come in. We had to go to St Peters in New Brunswick and it was rush hour but summer rush hour isn’t that bad. Around North Brunswick, she is starting to have major contractions, WTF, hit the gas! Get to the hospital around 4:45, they spin me like a top and boom, babies here 6:55 PM and 6:56 PM via c-section.

Hannah and Hadley: Healthy, just small. Note, this isn’t right out of the oven, maybe 4 or 5 days after


So being that my wife always like to go the extra mile with medical stuff (always that 1% of people get this…), she has x number of complications that result in my staying up for the better part of 36 hours. In the end she was fine but ICU, not seeing the babies for 4 days, a week in the hospital and 10 units of blood (yes, that is the amount of blood you have in your body) were not in the plan.

The other thing that wasn’t in the plan was coming home on Friday evening for the first time and walk in to running water. Ugh. Walk into my family room (which is a converted one car garage) and step in a pool of water. Lovely. Luckily it was the line from between the shut off and the faucet in the power room that burst, so I could still shut it off. I really couldn’t deal with the clean-up, so I just let it sit that night.

So fast forward, babies were 34.5 weeks and in the NICU for 3 weeks, so that was a lot of back and forth to NB but again, luckily it was still the summer and traffic wasn’t too bad.

On top of that, the floor in said converted garage was not leveled by the previous owner and had a decent slope to it. We lived with it like that for 10 years and it was always on the list. While this was not the time to do it, if it wasn’t done now, it wasn’t getting done. My dad and I were going to put a sub-floor in but the only weekend it would have worked was just too much for me to squeeze in. So for the first time in my house, I hired someone, a friend of friend and they banged the sub floor out in 4 hours (note the midget helper they had and yes, he likes the village people). The contractor was cool and paid my son 20 dollars for a days work.



So from there started putting the pieces back together. I thought of Norm’s reference to the boulders, rocks, pebbles, sand, whatever the reference was, it applied here. I am not sure where work falls on the list, I guess a boulder BECAUSE money, but damn if work is the last place I wanted to be. But the pieces starting falling back, the babies came home and something of a routine was in place. A routine that shifts by minutes/hours each day, but such is the baby life.
Pink, Oh So Much Pink


Roll Me
So I have a theory that me purchasing rollers put a rift in the time space continuum that resulted in the babies coming early. I ordered used rollers from ebay and they were scheduled to be delivered on August 13th. Turns out UPS lost the package and such (the irony was not lost on my either) and they eventually arrived. My first ride on them was stupidly humid and lasted about 12 min. Second was the same and the next day and since then, they have sat for the last 7.5 weeks. I am not done with them, but damn if it just seems dumb to me.

The New Normal with Riding
With the babies in the NICU, I was still able to ride in the AM and I knew it would be short lived, so I was riding hard. Only notable thing was abest time on Lindbergh in the sourslands on the day before the girls came home. The new normal is a constantly changing schedule but has me riding a few times a week. One hour is about the max but I have found I am rested and fresh for these rides and have banged out some spirited loops. Somewhat of a good time for this as I can maintain something that resembles form from the riding I did up until August 13th. One thing that is lacking is consistency of when I ride. Morning can sometimes still happen depending on schedule but today I fed the girls between 3:30 and 4:30, set alarm for 5:30 to catch some moon lite miles and woke up at 6:50, meh. Lunchtime is often an option but limited to an hour and ends up being 1:15-1:20 of time between getting changed and showering and stuff, so the comes with some dirty looks and a ding against me in the office politics arena, but f-em, I may be an office monkey but I am fucking free at lunch, free! Also, good loops from my work are limited I have created a few new ones that I normally would not have ridden because they go near my house and I used to ride those roads often.

So I had intentions of writing this post at least 30 of the last 60 days, but such is the baby life.

Hi De Ho from Twinsville
 
Those are some mighty cute babies! Glad to hear mom and babies are healthy, safe, and happy. I like to joke that I want twins because I'd rather just pop 'em out and kill two birds with one stone. But double everything at once? Crazy pants.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom