Me: Let’s get dressed so we can go to school and get donuts for your teachers. G: Genevieves don’t like donuts Me:
Me: WTF??
apparently there was some confusion over what a donut was, cause as soon as we saw the bright shiny colors of Dunkin Donuts, G got very excited. She wanted to stand with me in line, she wanted to see over the counter, she became enraptured with the smell of coffee. the nice donut lady gave G 2 powdered munchkins, and she wanted to sit at a table and eat. There is hope for the restaurants of East Mesa yet!
She was taken aback by all the powder, I cant actually say she likes the munchkins cause she took a tinyBite and then held on to her munchkins for about the next 20 minutes, clutching them in her little wax paper napkin. Perhaps chocalate glaze would have gone over better. In the car, out of the car, into school, terrified to take a picture with Mr. Tony aka Santa…she never let go of the munchkins. Just like Daddy falling off his bike.
Bakers need not fear for G’s patronage, by the end of this xmas season she shall be a junkie.
I underwent an innner struggle whether to classify this post under Biking or under Adventures, how nerdy** is that? Probably about as nerdy as this post itself. But I need to know.
2003-4: 5 – 5 Sunrise 2004-5: 10 – 1 Sierra-at-Tahoe, 1 Mt. Rose, 4 Steamboat, 2 Flag, 2 Sunrise 2005-6: 3 – 1 Northstar, 1 Squaw, 1 Mt. Rose 2006-7: 10 – 3 Wolf Creek, 3 Park City, 1 Canyons, 1Loveland, 2 Eldora 2007-8: 7 – 3 Wolf Creek, 1 Squaw, 1 Alpine Meadows, 1 Mt Rose, 1 Flag
Not that I think this is very impressive or I’m any damn good as a boarder, but it is cool to see what I’ve done each year and how much I have progressed in a relatively few number of days. Each year seems to have its own theme and major new skill set: not killing myself; riding with Beckie, and handling ice and flats; trees; tight lines, steeps, hikes, and going places with G; and deep deeps and new conditions in spring, evening, drunk, and different gear.
I am such a geek , but not much else to do while I’m on a long conference call waiting for Byron to come pick me up en route to Pagosa Springs.
Leaving your empty soda can next to the overfilling recycle bin is not an act of conservationism. Think globally, act locally means crush your can and your neighbor’s and put it in bin. It would be better to throw your can in the regular garbage because you would not be littering. In reality, this is just a complex argument to veil my basic revulsion at having to graze on leftover meeting food with so much trash around.
I am going boarding. Don’t call, don’t write, don’t care.
This note kinda reminds me of when Scarface quit his job in Half-Baked.
Another day at the park, making every night this week we hung out together. There was a long trek down to the church to look at the lights, and an even longer trek back to the car with G insisting on me carrying her uphill on my shoulders.
All that carrying works up a thirst, and apparently so does attempted vandalism of the neighborhood Xmas decorations. G wanted to share my beer, so we sat down in the sand of the volleyball court with the beer between us. “We’ll share Daddy. I’ll put it right here.” And exchanged swigs.
Stop looking at me like that, I’m teaching her about sharing!
She was playing with her baby parrot, and since we were having such a great father-daughter bonding moment, I asked her: “do you remember Jo?”
“yes,” she said quietly, G-speak for being uncomfortable with the topic. Then she rambled a little while about how “Jo was green. jo was loud. jo hurt our ears.”
i asked “was jo your friend?”
a slow shake of the head
“Was Jo scary?”
“yeah.”
“Do you miss Jo?”
silence.
Then we played a very animated game of hide and seek, and she hid in the bushes better than she ever has. I actually had trouble finding her at first, but she always comes out if i wait long enough and go “hmmmm, I can’t find Genevieve anywhere?!?!” A little buzz might have been aiding her creativity. thats cool, in high school she will be the cool girl who likes beer. And since she’ll have learned to hold her liquor, maybe it will keep her from getting date raped, or least let her be popular. And maybe she’ll thank me for one more thing that will not pop the balloon.
Trips to the park are becoming genuinely interesting, and fun. Thank gawd…they friggin take long enough! Half an attempt to tire her out, half an attempt to keep her from sitting on her ass watching TV, its almost a given on the days i pick her up.
Monday: Pink Park -> Tues: Green Park -> Wed: it was time for Kila’s Park, and the first time ever she spotted this:
She saw Kila, she saw Daddy, she said “where’s Genevieve?”
The next night, scissors in hand, i told her i had a surprise, and back we went to remedy the situation.
The infield became ice skating. This video sucks, i beat on it for almost an hour trying to make it look better…if you follow the narrative and the blinky blink shoes, its kinda funny.
She needed pom poms, so i broke off some branches for her. She used them to skate on. I think we do not see eye-to-eye on what a pompom is. Then she got trapped in the Net House (soccer goals) and crawled through a hole in the net for a secret passage. She likes to dig for treasure in the sand, flailing her hands doglike as she digs and imitates Dora. She wants to swing from a vine, and suddenly i am Daddy Monkey, and then after explicitly requesting to be hung from a mesquite limb, whines about how it chafes her tinyPalms. *sigh* – i tried to warn her.
Its been almost 2 years since I’ve done this ride, which to those who do not live out here seems shocking. The problem with this ride is that whichever bike you are on, its the wrong one. The Heckler is a slow, gas-guzzling Hummer on Hawes. And like most Hummers anywhere near a 4WD road, totally underutilized. This afternoon i rode the Blur with Alex and with confidence on the gnarliest Hawes has to offer: up Mine trail in reverse, up the cliff, up all the rock lines including the new one at the base of Upper Mudflaps, up Upper Mudflaps, to Alex’s new line called The Elevator down into a granite face near the Las Sendas fence, then down the Las Sendas straircase. Conversely, I’ve ridden the Heckler exclusively on the last 10 Pass Mountain rides. It makes Pass Mountain a fun ride where bleeding has become an exception to the rule, something I never said the 50 times I’d ridden Pass Mountain on the Blur. When you ride both trails all the time, on the right bike close to home, combining them seems just plain stupid.
But a few enduro pals were planning on the big epic for Saturday, and the logistics of my weekend were lining that up to be my only chance for a big ride. Everyone else bailed, so I did laundry and dishes and a few household chores and set off with a clear conscience at 11 by myself to enjoy the prime of the day at my own pace and get some headspace, after a stressful week presenting my new product idea to our CEO among many other heavy end-of-year work meetings.
Going solo let me dictate the route, and skipping National this week left me craving gnar. So it was going to be the Heckler, with a stop in NRA for some jumps, and the return down the Tower trail dropin. Other than 5 or so miles of pure XC on Hawes, the route favored the strengths of the Heckler. Except for the flats in the beginning. And the climb out of the pit and up the wash to Pass Mountain. And the road climb to the Tower dropin. And the flats to get home. Come to think of it, i was still on the wrong bike for half the ride, and strapping and shedding my pads along with raising and lowering my seat left me craving a Gravity Dropper.
I moved steadily, and finished in 5 hrs. My mind wandered and relaxed. Few revelations came from the ride, but a soothing aeration prevailed. One project during the ride was to create a route to tack on Bulldog Canyon and make this a truly huge day, as well as decide if that would be a Heckler or Blur ride. I was blown at 4.5 hours, the epic would be about 7: advantage -Blur. 4 hours of the ride would be the chunk of Pass Mountain and Bulldog: advantage Heckler. I drank a lot of Jack two nights before, and didn’t really prepare my body, which was worth at least an hour of fatigue. I think it will be a Heckler ride – going slow beats bleeding.
Another memorable stretch of the ride came leaving the NRA pit and heading up the brand new connector trail to the road. It gets you about another mile up the road, and its nothing special, much like Big Rock and Wildhorse. But it was so new, with only flags and a few tracks to mark it, i immensely enjoyed the natural and holistic way the trail unfolded for me over the terrain. It was indeed well-plotted. How awesome to grab that experience before it is gone!!!
Pass Mountain, the road climb rolled off me solid and steady. The Tower dropin still felt scary and new, and i got all that i did before and chickened out on the one slot that i did before. Its all good, now i know there is only one thing to fear, and hopefully next time i will approach it with more enough poise to hit it.
At first glance, The Little Tikes is a beautiful ride featuring bright colors, graceful lines, and the safety of training wheels and tread-rich tires. The basket is an outstanding complement, holding tools, stuffed animals, snacks, or whatever else suits your t.Human’s fancy. The geometry has a steep head angle for an upright ride, enhanced by the long cockpit that encourages a forward, aggressive position. Unfortunately, this puts pressure on the front end, leading to sluggish steering and slippage of the headset. The geometry seems to fight the rider’s pedalstroke, driving the power down onto the wheel instead of into it. While the Little Tikes comes with offroad tires, our test riders found they lacked balance or bite, and offered too much rolling resistance. Each time we would expect the wheels to hook up, they slid out in disappointing fashion. Coupled with the steep geometry, the ride was imprecise and unforgiving. The construction was also disappointing, with bolt-on hubs that always felt too tight or too noodly. As much as we wanted to, our test riders just could not like Little Trikes
The Performance Trike offers a totally different ride, with a slack but highly stable geometry. Coupled with a smaller cockpit, this led to much better power transfer to the pedals. The bike leaped under our tester, and the thin, low-tread urethane wheels accentuated the bike’s acceleration. It may look like a cruiser, but it spun like a race car. Performance’s design team again surprised us with the wider but shorter wheelbase, offering a balanced ride with true steering. Where the Little Tike’s training wheels failed to provide balance, the Performance Trike simply designs away from that flaw. Elegant lines, cool gender-neutrual electric blue powdercoat, and a scooter step make this steed the clear winner.
The saying “Childhood is over when you know you will die” has haunted me since i first watched The Crow. Its a dark violent goth movie, easy death and cheap life comingled, where the real hero is a young girl trying to find hope.
Ideas like this are surely put forth through the lens of adulthood and the daily doses of mortality it brings. Friends come and go, and we realize how very easy it is to move on. People I used to talk to daily now sit 2 rows away in our new building, and have become virtual strangers to me, with little sense of loss. I realize how many people I know who have died. Sell your car, sell your stuff, sell your house and all the memories that come with them – its just part of the process of managing your life’s portfolio. T-shirts that were treasured eventually are used to clean my bike, the events they commemorated covered in grime like the rags they become. You are supposed to stop being sentimental and melodramatic as you mature – by definition – and what you do not willfully ignore in the name of business and expediency, you wall up and make yourself hard in the name of perseverance under the burden of surviving.
If this all seems hackneyed, its probably because as adults we are accustomed to the insensitivity required for suffering life’s deaths. Familiarity breeds contempt. We forget the potent impact of a loss on a little girl, who knows only of happiness and kindness, sweet fuzzy shiny things that make cute noises and tickle, the worst problem being a cuddly fox who isn’t really bad just misunderstood.
I wonder – partly out of fear for her innocence, partly out of morbid curiosity – if one day a dark cloud will pass over G’s visage and she will never be the same?
She has forgotten Slim, though she never really cared for her. Jo is also a distant memory, but only of a novelty and not held with real affection. She got very upset when I had Gladiator on the TV during the sword fight between Maximus and the Emperor; crying just as Joaquin Phoenix was about to be stuck “I don’t like this show! I don’t like this show!” She understands pain, and violence. But does she understand death?
Up until recently, G seemed either unaware, unaffected, or immune to bereavement. She got a balloon at the gym, i tied my keys to it so it would keep her happy in the grocery store, but took them off for the drive home. As we got in the house, I knew i needed a new weight, but before I got a chance to attach one, G followed Beckie outside to unload the car. I leapt across the hood of the car and just missed the ribbon as the balloon floated slowly out of reach.
G was about the most upset I’ve seen her, watching in anguish as her blue balloon drifted into the sky. Serious, significant bawling occurred. She moped and cried for what seemed a very long time. I had never seen her so hurt for so long. Sam came over to babysit and the first thing G did was talk about her balloon. I really thought she was scarred by the experience, but then it passed.
Several days later, we walked out of the grocery store with another balloon (unbeknown to G, filled with regular old air) and she clutched it tightly, visibly scared of losing it, but otherwise surviving.
I guess the lesson is that there will (we hope) be no come-to-Jesus moment for G on this topic, but a series of painful experiences that each will gnaw away at her innocence until one day she is a jaded adult. I’m saddened by the fatalism, but relieved that in all likelihood no one incident will ever kill her effervescent spirit. It takes a lot of pressure off me to protect her from the one needle that could pop the balloon. And if her path towards cynicism takes many steps, then there is hope it can be delayed, tempered, rerouted, and countered by good experiences, if she can always find cause for optimism and reasons for joy.
Many days i think she is my reason, so i try to be hers. It can’t rain all the time.
The most pretentious of all Pink Floyd albums. Pretentious because it just went hellbent for the money, at least their other bombastic full-of-themselves albums made an attempt at a genuine artistic statement. But this is what I have been hearing the last few nights — not Roger Waters wailing about his lost relevance and band, or another obligatory David Gilmour guitar solo (making me dust off the signature riffs from “Time” and “Comfortably Numb“) — but G snoring, sneezing, hacking, and other inexplicable blurtations rising up from the blonde mop on the pillow.
How does such a cute little girl sound like a chronic smoker uttering his death rattle as he finally succumbs to emphysema? How do the noises from a 32lb tinyHuman evoke images of a hippopotamus in heat?
Its creepy, its scary, there are stalactites evolving on her nostrils overnight, and exorcist-worthy demons living in her lungs. I wake up screaming, looking for the Mongol hordes and the creatures of the deep coming to eat me and my daughter. I had to actually reach over and make sure she was still alive her breathe sounded so muddy, inspiring an earth-shaking snotabelchelation for my efforts.
The daylight drives out the evil spirits, leaving only a pair of blue eyes peeking above the covers asking me for breakfast.
, but not much else to do while I’m on a long conference call waiting for Byron to come pick me up en route to Pagosa Springs. 
