chollaball.net

A little FB challenge came my way, pick 15 influential books in 15 minutes, without thinking about any one for more than about 15 seconds.  Interesting on so many levels… not giving it much thought, I found I drifted to the books I could easily see on my bookshelf or on my Recommendations page.  Having the book in mind definitely influenced my decisions.  I resisted the temptation to go with all classics or high school\college reads, which the having-in-mind inevitably steered me towards.  Rarely have I bought books since school.    I don’t read too many classics anymore, but a lot of good contemporary works, so I guess that means I am all caught up.  It seems kinda important to not growing old and ossified to strive to be influenced by things that are new beyond your formative years.

• Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
• X Men 2 - Chris Claremont
• The Decline and Fall of the Rman Empire - Edward Gibbon
• The Once and Future King - T.H. White
• The Patron Saint of Plauges - Barth Anderson
• The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
• Watership Down - Richard Adams
• One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey
• Parliment of Whores - P.J. O’Rourke
• Close Quarters - Larry Heinemann
• Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? - by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano,  Mason Tvert
• The Prince - Machiavelli
• Blackhawk Down - Mark Bowden
• The Art of Homebrewing - Charlie Papazian
• Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer

Man, I really miss lit classes.

top of Hobbit Forest: Ray, Rick, Alex, Al, James, Jason, Byron, Kevin

oh you know it was big when I’m busting out Roman numerals. biggest Rancho yet! Its now officially a 3-day event, and the ease with which it has become such testifies to what an awesome diverse riding spot Arizona is. It could be 4, 5, 10 days with us never going more than an hour from Alex’s pad in Williams.  My stop en route to ride Granite Basin last year provided the motivation for me, Alex, Byron and James to again tap Helimech for some Prescott action on the new technical Dells trails. He hooked us up with his friend Chris, a city employee who built the trail system, Zack, and mtbr friend Enel.  Our 6am meet time in East BF Mesa was quickly forgotten once we hit the dirt at 8:45 and got a taste for Arizona’s version of Gooseberry Mesa.

I see a riding and kayaking day in the future

Chris and Enel  invented most of the lines on this route, and the experts were happy to show them to us.  Grins abounded.  Trials were hit, rocks were dropped, rocks were crawled, we got our rock monkeys off!

and then we saw the Sheriff.  who had gotten an emergency beacon call from James’ Spot unit.  WTF? no seriously? what the fucking fuck?  the thing is closed and buried in his pack and his father in Flagstaff gets an emergency email and SAR is dispatched!  Ironic, as the week prior my neighbor across the street died of a heart attack while hiking Flatiron, and wasn’t found til 5 days later just 200 yards from the parking lot.  A Spot unit might be on the Xmas list.  We passed my neighbor’s widow grimly walking her dog as we drove out early that morning.  Everyone sincerely thanked the Deputy for his time.

James and I took the Prescott boys out to Indian buffet, which managed to kill any hope of an afternoon ride on Spruce Mtn or Granite Basin, as well as anything left alive in the car for the ride up to Williams. I thought the Indians were pacifists? We got to Rancho with plenty of daylight left to enjoy a new 9 hole disc golf course Alex and Ray drew up around Alex’s place.

Disc golf, generally speaking, bores me. The best course in the Valley is 2 blocks from my office, and I have yet to play it since we’ve moved in. I’ll occasionally play and drink some beers and have fun walking around on a beautiful afternoon, but fundamentally, disc golf bores the shit out of me just like ball golf. Loooooong uncontested drives with discs you can’t catch, long undramatic approach shots with discs you can’t catch, and awkward stationary putts into stationary baskets that can’t catch. What good is a disc if you can’t have a throw? What good is a receiver if they hold their arms at their sides and only catch with their teeth? I can put a disc into a 4×4x4 box any which way from 50 yards out, with a mark on me and D on my receiver, but from 5 yards away my putts bounce off the baskets’ chains over and over and over. The word disc being involved only aggravates how unlike Ultimate it actually is.

I had never before played a course designed by Ultimate players, and Alex’s course was the most fun I’ve ever had. The holes were about the length of a field, and the shots required more touch and judgment than power.  Breaks in the tree lines were lanes through the defense, shots over the roof were zone-breakers, the wood piles and furniture required throws to areas away from defenders.  And best of all, you just had to hit the target - discs are meant to fly into things, not limp up to them.

no-limit heckling

After a lackadaisical warm up round, I couldn’t help being disgusted by my sloppy throws, despite not having picked up a disc in about a year and allegedly not caring about Ultimate any more. Al, Byron and I threw while Alex freshened up our drinks, and within about 10 throws I could see my rhythm coming back as I started drilling the guys in the chest from 20 yards. Al and Byron’s throws got tighter too. You could just feel it…the buzz the discs were making coming in - the game was on!

My boredom with golf is usually why I lose focus, and suck, and enjoy it even less.   But these holes were a challenge, the competition exciting, and i found a focus i thought I was too drunk to hold on to.  I nailed the tire from 15 yards out to go 3 under after 3 holes.  Alex held a 1-stroke lead, Byron and Kevin were close behind, and Al hit a hole-in-one to get back into the pack.

can you believe this drive?  The hole is the tree right in front of the bridge.  Its hard work getting a 1-under.

#5 was an easy putt.  Kevin put it in the house just for style points

James was a good sport about being completely and totally out of his element, and we didn’t even make him fetch beers.

Us: I’ve been playing Ultimate for about 20 years
James: I tossed a disc around at a Phish concert once

he really did get his disc caught in a tree.

Dinner and drinks followed before I passed out.

Saturday the route was up Schultz->Little Gnarly->down Pickle->up the road to Red Onion->up Hobbit Forest->down Wasabi->down Rocky Ridge.  The sky was beautiful in all directions, except for a huge thundercloud hanging right over Mt. Elden.  We got lightly rained on for the hour-long climb to the Pickle TH.

The effort of the climb seemed harder wondering if our day would be cut short, or if we’d have to reroute.  Pickle is a double-black that none of us had ridden, and none of us wanted to encounter during a storm.  The rain misted but mostly let up, but Pickle’s steep quarter-mile opening climb gave us no comfort.  Once again, everyone looked at me and wondered where the fuck exactly I was leading them?  Pickle then became an extremely steep series of off-camber switchbacks and runouts, with 3 hard slots mixed in.  The first slot was a sharp  right turn off a boulder into a small chute that fell away down a drainage.  First try I got the turn, but got sucked into the drainage and layed down in the dirt.  Second time was much smoother, which gave me the confidence to dive into slot #2 - a long, steep set of teeth that bounced me round and had me in a short nose-wheelie.  I got through it, but decided to save #3 for another day.  It was steeper and denser with rocks, but seemed shorter and smoother and therefore easier than #2.  I really regret not hitting it, but it was the smart thing to do after getting shaken around on #2.

A mile of slow crawling back up Elden Lookout Rd led to a mile of slow but very soothing climbing up Red Onion, then a mile of boulders and hike-a-bike up Hobbit Forest.

We split up here, Alex and I opting for Wasabi while the other guys headed back the way we came up to meet us at the start of the descent down Rocky Ridge.  I have only ridden Wasabi once 2 yrs ago, and at the time it was probably the hardest thing I’d done.  The differences were remarkable this time.  There were still 2 near-vertical rock trials I could not get, but everything else was right in my comfort zone.  The rock trials and steep s-curves were just crazy fun.  The exit from Upper Wasabi is a 10-ft nearly vertical crack down a rockface.  Alex made it look easy.  I tried 4 times, nearly killed myself but managed to bail and suffer only a sprained thumb.  I was so rattled that I couldn’t subsequently even get the easier exit banking off the boulder that I got 2 years ago.

I got some redemption on the jumps on Lower Wasabi.  The sessions out at NRA paid huge dividends.  Once I nutted up and hit the first jump, they were smooth like butter.

Alex drew off my confidence, and had a good run down the jumps too.  The two of us have a great codependency going on - he’s a bit sharper on the rockfaces, me a bit better in the jumps and chunks, and we manage to bring out the best in each other.

I’m trying to not dwell on the stuff I couldn’t get, and it was very cool handling 90% of Wasabi with ease. The vertical faces are my ceiling right now, but the steepness of Pickle and Wasabi made me feel like I was easing into that skill and making some progress. Flag seems just enough less-rocky and jagged than some of the slots on Viejo or Holbert on Somo that I think riding it will help give me a little technique and courage to make the next step forward. The big boulders I could roll were easier than ever, I don’t feel out of sorts anymore getting back over the seat and letting the bike do the work on the 3, 4 and 5 footers.

All this rattled around in my mind while I was still pumping adrenaline from my fall and then the jumps. I turned briefly onto Lower Oldham where it parallels Elden road back down to our meetup with the other guys.  Its extremely chunky, but not very steep, and its challenges hardly registered and I plunged through it all.  Rocky Ridge was more of the same, I took the lead with Al on his new Yeti 575 right on my tail for the 2.5 miles of intermediate rocks back to the cars.

Back at Rancho, we got down to business.  Being the guy with access to excellent cheap tequila led to my vertical integration: supplier, distributor, and peer pressurer.  Ray did one better, bringing some fresh yellow-tail and bluefin he caught on a recent fishing trip.  Tequila and shashimi - perfect!

a skunk came by to scarf on all the scraps left on Alex’s porch.  We huddled inside, afraid to go out and shoo it away.  This pic was taken through a glass door.  The next day, I looked in my cooler and found a peach left there had been half-eaten, and a bagel in a plastic bag had gone missing.

Sunday we voted to go back to Elden.  Up Schultz->Onceler->Overlook->Secret->Supermoto.  Not as gnar as the day before, but plenty of log trials and chunk to keep things interesting.

While we waited at the top of Schultz, Sam and Jrock spun up, repeating much of the route we did yesterday.  We then heard that somehow Byron had trashed his deraileur and hanger on a random rock, and turned back with Rick for the cars.  The 6 of us remaining turned uphill to finish our hour-long climb.

Overlook

I knew it was going to be a good day when I got the rock trial right past the overlook on my first try, compared to 5 shots on it last year.  Everything just flowed from there.

Coming down Overlook, I was charging through the chunk about the best I’ve ever done.  Seeing the lines, moving my body and bike over them, and jumping adding the 3rd dimension to the lines I could choose.  One turn I popped off a large flat rock completely over and around the crud in the turn, holding my speed and my flow like the rocks were never there.  Onward to Secret, I came to a tight pile sure to grab your deraileur if you tried to go between the rocks, and instead went up onto the largest rock.  When it became too narrow, I dropped off it and over the remainder of the pile and never lost a stroke.  .  The rest of Secret and Supermoto flew by, nothing phased me, probably one of the tightest days on the bike I’ve ever had.  Great end to a great weekend.

G has a giant raspberry on her face from spilling on the treadmill.   I was disappointed at Beckie when she told me how it happened, I think it shouldn’t have.  Its not that G doesn’t pick up plenty of dings when she is with me, I just would not have let her on the treadmill to begin with.  Then again, I don’t use the treadmill, and maybe if I did she would be using it with me too and the same thing could have happened on my watch.  She does not wipe out on her bike with Beckie.  We’ve been shmearing it with neosporin, and G has surprisingly gotten pretty good about letting us put glue on her face.

The kids at school immediately began asking about it and she got very sad & defensive, falling back on the lines she uses around the house when she gets upset:  “Stop talking.  Don’t tell me“, along with a fair share of whining and grunting.   Her teacher did G a major solid and had her immediately explain to the whole class what happened while I was still there to support her.  It cleared the air and let G feel important, rather than like a freak.  I think she kinda enjoyed getting to tell everyone she uses a treadmill.

Hopefully the neosporin holds out, and she does not get the dysfunctional injury-pride mindset.  That’s cool up until about 2 years after your first surgery when you realize it still hurts.

i think I am getting stoopider as I spend more time with little girls and babies and talk littlegirlbabytalk.  Everything becomes cute and smiley and sunshiney, things are anthropomorphised and make happy squeals, bags are filled with unicorns and silliness and lullabies…conversations devolve, higher-brain functions cease, political alliances fade away, the shoulders of giants droop as they reach for soft blankies.  I become Lennie Small.

Naturally, this applies to Kila too.  For years she was “The Sweetest Dog“, which during busy times and hands full of children became “Sweetness“, which during busier times and hands fuller of children was abbreviated to “Swedish“.  It makes sense to me, and to Kila.  She knows when I say “hi Swedish” I’m really asking her if she is ready to go out for a run.  Or when I say “hi Fuzzy” and call her fuzzalicious cause it rhymes with swedish that we are singing our own nursery rhymes.

A few weeks ago, after riding past it for years, I spotted an unsecured hose and spigot in the grassy play area below the church at the end of our neighborhood.  Its been a boon to summer dog rides, enabling us to top off the dog after her first frantic mile of sprinting.  Water is everywhere in suburbia, if you look carefully, and trespass responsibly.  From there we’ll sometimes spin the bike trailer over to get G at her daycare, or more often ride into the desert behind the fire station.

Last night Kila spotted what I think was a harris hawk sitting on top of a No Parking sign at the pavement’s end.  She stared up at it, it stared down at her, she raised her hair, it raised its wings.  This lasted maybe 5 seconds, which was about 4 seconds longer than I’d have expected.  Even small raptors look pretty big when you are spitting distance from them.

We wandered and ambled about the desert while she nubby-nosed into all the things that needed nosing.  Rides home have of late offered a new adventure: I work on riding the curb of the sidewalk while holding the leash and usually a decent buzz.  Its hard on me to practice one handed and with a constant tug to the left or the right, its hard on Kila to set a cadence when my loss of balance leads to her getting yanked from the side.  But its been working for us, what better way to practice than under adverse conditions?  I think weighting forward onto the nose is the trick to recovering when I start to wobble.  It was working when I was riding the railroad ties at Rancho - no leash and pull to the side, but a good buzz and grassy volcanic rock made it about an even trade.

Runzeheunding always offers something new, something familiar, and something special.

My father was never one to teach me, he was one to stand back and let the scars of learning happen — Christopher Titus

I can’t seem to get up early during the week to save my life, a combination of not wanting to stick  everybody in daycare for more than a few hours at a time and dreading facing the toil of the day.  Redecorating the bedroom with wooden blinds has helped me achieve my goal!  Alana is down with my plan.  G, unfortunately, is not.  7:30 at the latest and she is up, even when she sleeps less than 8 hours.

Beckie has taken to making G breakfast and turning on a movie before she leaves for work, which has enabled my lethargy.  Its also given G free reign over the house for stretches each morning.  Sometimes this is quite funny - I wake to find stuffed animals organized by phylum, food stains arrayed in the style of Jackson Pollock, or G lording over toys long forgotten as her boredom leads her exploring into the darkest corners of her toyboxes.  Sometimes I wake to find her ready to burn the house down, sodomize the cat with a popsicle, or reboot the internet.

She is particularly fond of band-aids.  Sometimes she will paste 3 or 4 of them all over her legs.  Her loss ratio with band-aids is not good, and usually half a box is ruined in the process.  When I hear the clank clank clank of her rattling around in the medicine cabinet or climbing on the counters, I know she is up to no good.  I’ll roll over, tell her to go watch TV, and toss a pillow in her direction.  Then I hear thump thump thump thump thump thump as she sprints back to the other side of the house.

Yesterday the telltale noises intruded into my dreams, several times.  Once I cracked open an eye and saw her crawling across the bedroom floor and under a stool with a devilish smile on her face as she tried to sneak by me.   The band-aids were safe as she was busy playing with toothpaste.  I also have a tube of…ahem…steroid-based anti-inflammatory cream used to…ahem…ease some taintal-oriented saddle pain I was getting.  The tube is about an ounce, and looks like a container of kid-sized toothpastes.  Much of it was gone when I found it this morning, along with several white-streaked washcloths.  G asked me for a water bottle and said her mouth tasted funny.

I am confident in my methods of high-quality parenting.

my cousin got married, I stayed about a block from where we stayed during the marathon. PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPricey. But its a sweet location. How is it that I repeatedly hit the hotel gym, the pool, walk for about 8 hrs in 2 days, and still come home a fat sack of crap?  I was in the damn gym this morning when I’m pretty sure I was still legally drunk!!!  The Embassy Suites breakfast buffet is quite good, the wedding food was better. I’m so full I didn’t even eat the snack pack on SouthWest Airlines, but i gave it a good home in my backpack.  I’m very tired, and thinking about ordering pizza, and need a beer to cure my hangover.

I met a cool tri-girl at the lake who watched my stuff while I swam, and told me about the lake path that’s like 20 miles in either direction.  If Chicago gets the 2016 marathon, I will definitely go there to work and bring my road bike.  The lake front area totally kicks ass, a year’s worth of activities crammed into a few months of good weather.   There was simultaneously:  a Mexico festival, an Irish festival, a wine tasting, free entry to the Art Institute of Chicago, and a health care protest.  I could not figure out which side it was for - people need their slogans to not contain cryptic buzzwords if they want passersby to be influenced, and with as dumbed-down as Fox News makes it, I’m very surprised it wasn’t a hegemonic  army of  zombies.  But I thought zombies were what they were allegedly going to be turned into by Obama, so maybe they were actually fighting off their deterioration into the ranks of the undead, and I should have supported them??  *shrug* I went to the Art Museum.

The wedding was very well done and some beautiful places, and the reception was on the top floor of the shwanky lakefront “W” hotel that had a 360 view.  The ceremony was mercifully short.  My younger cousin has grown up right.  She’s a doctor now.  It was kinda weird seeing some of my family that I’ve only seen at weddings and funerals over the last 20 years, it was nice but awkward.  You gotta start somewhere.  my sister’s kids remember me and have turned out pretty good too.

Annoying travel note 1:  The Chicago Transit Authority subway card machines do not give change, and whoever designed their UI doesn’t know shit about usability.  So $15 in the hole, I talked 7 good people into giving me $2 each and letting me swipe them through.  When I finally went through, the thing didn’t read my card and I had to jump the gate, leaving me with an extra fare after all that.  On the return, a clearly not-well-to-do  guy saw me looking for the right way to Midway and offered me directions, and I gave him the still-valid card.  Karma is cool like that.

Annoying travel note 2:  it is still ass-hot in Phoenix.

G and I were at the zoo, going on 3 hrs, and she was getting tired and being willful playing behind a roped area she ought not have been playing behind, and giving me static about coming out.  I finally got her out of there and we were looking at the black bears.  Well, I was looking at the black bears, she was being difficult and kept whining and asking where are they ?? where are they?? I can’t see them?? I sorta snapped:  “they’re right in front of you dummy!“

I apologized.  She wouldn’t let it go.  That night she bemoaned to Beckie how I called her a dummy.  The next day she bemoaned how I called her a dummy.  Next week back at the same spot, she bemoaned that I should not call her a dummy again.  I apologized again, I reminded her that I apologized last week, and that I didn’t mean it but she was being difficult and we both made a mistake and both were sorry and we both apologized again.  Then we hugged, and she even joked about it as we watched the bears: “we’re both dummies! we’re both dummies!“

2 weeks later…2 fucking weeks later…she was upset and  tired and cranky and said intra-tantrum: “Daddy always calls me a dummy!”  Apparently this bell can not be unrung.

I always try to be careful with my words around her, to compliment her about what a smart little girl she is, what a wonderful little girl she is, yet here one deserved insult is carrying such disproportionate weight its making me sick with guilt and frustration.   Its not like she’s been sad non-stop, or we haven’t immediately and every day thereafter been sweet, or she doesn’t understand that people make mistakes, or doesn’t get testy with those around her.  Its a double standard and I have to deal with it.

All that psychobabble crap about to a child you are everything, mother is the word for god, strippers dance on poles cause daddy didn’t love them enough…they seem pretty true right now.

sure, snicker all you want.  just like people snickered when I said that I taught Beckie how to buff a stanchion.  Can’t an attractive fit woman learn intermediate bike maintenance without it turning into a dick joke?  If i got half as much action as chatter that comment generated, I’d never have the energy to ride my bike.  But I digress.  I always know Beckie has used the camelbak cause she hangs to the left.  I then spend the better part of the next ride nearly killing myself and\or choking trying to hydrate -  the left side feels so alien it just messes me up.  Its my problem, I’m seeking  a 12 step program for it.  The hose was the first bit of awkwardness on our Wed NR, it went downhill from there.

Inspired to work on my jumping and gnar, I bought a pair of flat pedal shoes - Five Ten Rennies - a quality set of clogs I snared on deep discount.  I was unsure about the high tops, and they felt weird and bulky walking around the house, but that’s probably since I haven’t worn anything but Tevas in about 4 months.

I really wanted to try em out, so put the flats on the Hei Hei.  The shoes accessorized splendidly.

Unfortunately, crappy flats are just not meant on a 29r xc bike on Hawes with a bald rear tire in sandy conditions going up Upper Mudflaps and Tower at night.  Its the perfect storm, and when I dabbed yet again going up Tower Trail, I let out a string of curses that would make jaded hookers blush.  The pedals made me pay. The blood accessorizing splendidly with the shoes and the bike was no consolation for hamburger shins.

We had a good group - me, Alex, Ray, James, Byron and a special guest appearance by Brian C.  Much heckling occurred about the 3 Pivot Mach5s.   Alex predicted Byron would break his chain.  Karma is such a bitch.

With 6 of us and several splits to hit trials, there was a fair amount of standing around, which is no biggie, except when you keep brushing you legs up against the large spinning meat tenderizers jutting out of your bike.  The starts were hard, the lack of attachment to the pedals most obvious when trying to gain momentum.  Its hard to hold completely wrong conditions against the shoes, though Alex tried, and I countered that as another admittedly-frugal individual, he should appreciate how shedding myself of any latent buyer’s remorse was worth my shins being bruised as bumpy as a baby’s spine.

I  forgot all about the high-tops 5 minutes into the ride, but know they will protect the ankles from the frequent knocks into the chainstays and cranks that come with this type of setup. The shoes felt big in the garage, but on the trail offered my feet lots of space and a stiff sole.  The grippy rubber and pattern of the sole really stayed hooked to the pedals descending.  Some things will take practice, like getting the balls of my feet equal with the spindles when pedaling, and not pedaling with my toes.  Climbing,  I think on the big power moves where I muscle my way over something I will miss my cleats, but the descents should compensate.  I’ll have to take them for a test ride up National on the Heckler to see how well they ascend.  The strangest sensation was how you can oversteer the bike with your feet since they are not clipped into one position.  When you are clipped in, you are riding the bike more in control and “traditionally”, from the feet on up.  With flats, you are throwing it around more and freeriding, but i’m pretty sure that is just the point:  to ride things that require embracing a lack of control, you kinda need footwork that can step outside narrow boundaries.  They will be a good pickup once I figure out their right kind of ride.

Leaves her stuff wherever she feels like it, parks her car in my spot, bogarts the music selections, complains about the thermostat, talks while I’m on the phone, does not pick up after herself, dresses wholly inappropriately, uses language not acceptable in the workplace, eats at my desk, and poos by the printer.