I did this last week. Out to Osceola on Tuesday night after working for eight hours fixing bikes, back to Mipples on Thursday night after my annual "let's go out into rural Wisconsin and talk about stuff" work retreat. For a real sense of the fun check out the elevation profile.
And yes, by the way, that WAS a totally shameless plug for my shop.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
celebrity parties here i come!
Despite my lackluster performance at the no name alleycat last sunday there is a silver lining. Apparently my bike is now an internet celebrity and I'll just bet I can "Kato Kaelin" my way to notoriety as my bike gets a-listed and becomes the hit of the blogosphere and the talk of the internet.I promise I'll try to "keep it real" though and not let the scintillating stars, wild parties and rampant drug use of the internet cycling community change me.
one of many reasons that john cleese is inspiring
I'm not likely to do this very often but this is a video that I ran across that I had to re-post here. Enjoy.
Monday, October 13, 2008
no name, no win, no problem...
I ran my first alleycat in over a year last night and sucked it up like I tend to do. There's a thousand lame excuses I could throw out; my flat bars kept me from really digging in, I had worked all day, I was dehydrated and hungry, bottom line is that I couldn't pull it out. DFL. 28 minutes behind first place, 14 behind second, third and fourth and 4 minutes behind fifth. I "beat" the two DNFs and one guy who was far enough behind me that his finish was at the bar we went to afterward.
I can't say that I'm not bummed out about it but I did make a few DUMB mistakes including messing up the furthest stop from where I needed to drop manifest #1 which caused me to have to go back and do that whole stop over again and then misreading manifest#2 and looking for the wrong building, both of these together probably cost me at least 20 minutes and by the time I dropped manifest #2 and had to sprint to my former JJ delivery job or a to-go menu I was fucking cooked and just didn't have the legs to sprint 30 or so blocks, 7 of it uphill.
So, lessons learned;
-bring water dumbass (I usually do, but I forgot my water bottle on the bench at work)
-make sure I have the right address (I pulled a classic "right number, wrong street")
-having the "Doctor Who" theme stuck in your head makes racing surreal
Oh well, maybe next time
I can't say that I'm not bummed out about it but I did make a few DUMB mistakes including messing up the furthest stop from where I needed to drop manifest #1 which caused me to have to go back and do that whole stop over again and then misreading manifest#2 and looking for the wrong building, both of these together probably cost me at least 20 minutes and by the time I dropped manifest #2 and had to sprint to my former JJ delivery job or a to-go menu I was fucking cooked and just didn't have the legs to sprint 30 or so blocks, 7 of it uphill.
So, lessons learned;
-bring water dumbass (I usually do, but I forgot my water bottle on the bench at work)
-make sure I have the right address (I pulled a classic "right number, wrong street")
-having the "Doctor Who" theme stuck in your head makes racing surreal
Oh well, maybe next time
Thursday, October 9, 2008
...and if you like this you'll love...
This pertains to the ten or so of you that have actually read this so if you don't read my random brain-spurts feel free to go back to your macrame or World of Warcraft. For anyone who actually reads this stuff I am going to be a regular contributor to the Hub Bike Coop's blog, most of this stuff will probably have to with cycling and the care and feeding of the bicycle so if that's not your thing it's cool, i'll get over it.
Monday, October 6, 2008
quickly nigel, to the ancillarium!
Born august 11th 1879 in Budapest to Vladislaw and Erzebet Kaltenfuss, Sebastien was an unusual child almost from birth, as the weeks preceding had been filled with strange occurrences and portents of the oddest sort.
A city wide night-soil haulers strike, coinciding with the distribution of a particularly bad shipment of Venetian tea cakes set the stage for a hygienic crisis of epic proportions. An incremental, or perhaps excremental, increase in methane resulted in a thermal inversion blanketing the region in a miasmic fog which, in turn, caused a remarkable spike in frog and toad population transforming the district into a cacophony of croaking and chirping from sundown to sunup bringing about the world's only recorded epidemic of insomnia.
Driven half-mad by sleep deprivation Erzebet took to the study of Icelandic runes, Scottish music and Chinese topiary to calm her nerves. Understandably Vladislaw was at a loss to rectify these new found pastimes with his provincial upbringing and sought to provide a wholesome environment for his firstborn by embarking on a woodworking binge of the sort that has only been seen since in the nightmares of amphetamine-addled beavers.
Sebastien's early childhood is a sticky morass of half-truths, unsubstantiated allegations and outright fabrication but what is known is that at age 9 he was sold to a consortium of Finnish merchants in the employ of a shadowy Persian financier known only as the "Mahdi al Muhqti Muhq" who, in turn, sent him to be raised in a Prussian military academy with the intention to have him lead a division of Pashtun Zouaves against the British Raj in a bizarre plot to destabilize the world's tea market and supplant the Russian royal family with a cabal of Viennese coffee house intellectuals. Ironically this was almost literally what came to pass 29 years later without any help whatsoever from the Mahdi.
Upon graduation from the Gemmutlischen-Fahrrad Akademy in 1897 Sebastien once again disappeared from public view, though reports place him in Tibet in 1904, the Yukon in 1909, Patagonia in 1913, and with a traveling preacher in the American south in 1925. Less reliable, though compelling, accounts place him in the company of Hindu mystics, Australian aboriginal shamans, the "practical occultists" of the English midlands and a mysterious Kabbalist of Trans-Jordanian extraction alleged to be an alchemical "secret master" from the Middle Ages.
Reappearing in Berlin in 1929 Kaltenfuss made a small name for himself as the manager of an all-hermaphrodite cabaret and attempted a career as a jazz bassoonist but soon found that the mournful, nasal tone of the instrument was particularly ill-suited to his chosen medium. He soon abandoned the hedonism of the Weimar Republic for a 17 year contemplative hermitage among the fishermen of Fiji during which he spoke only 9 words, none of them in Fijian, much to the confusion of the neighboring villagers who had taken to watching the strange European who dwelt silently on their island.
After completely ignoring worldwide strife, excluding a possibly apocryphal incident where he single-handedly defeated a platoon of Chindits in a brawl over a plate of mohinga in a bar in Myitkyina in 1944, Sebastien moved to Gatineau, Quebec to join the Canadian merchant marine after briefly experimenting with free-verse poetry in New York's East Village beat coffeehouses. No less a personage than Allen Ginsberg was alleged to have called him "a hack, a total failure of art, so square that you can almost cut yourself on the corners" though in later years both men denied the incident ever having occurred.
Following an uneventful career as a deckhand on a taconite freighter Sebastien joined a Mossad-led mission into Argentina to hunt for fugitive Nazis having been selected for the unlikely combination of his fluency in German, ropeworking skills and knowledge of the Fijian sovreignity movement, making him the perfect infiltration agent in the eyes of his handlers. Espionage seemed to be a promising field for Kaltenfuss until his superiors transferred him from Beunos Aires to a small village on the Pampas after a confidential source claimed knowledge of an ODESSA-run cattle rustling operation. The information was proven to be false after the source was discovered to have been compromised by a Soviet "honey pot" agent working under diplomatic cover in the East German consulate making Sebastien's posting totally irrelevant to the operation. He was discharged at the rank of corporal.
Once again as the world was gripped by warfare and civil unrest Mr. Kaltenfuss seems to drop off the face of the planet though confidential sources speaking only on condition of anonymity place him in Paris in 1968, Madrid and Prague in 1969, Berlin in 1970, and Northern Ireland and South Dakota in 1973 despite strenuous objections on Kaltenfuss' part as to any alleged involvement in social or political radicalism.
Resurfacing in Rhodesia in 1978 in an ill-timed bid to become a safari outfitter Sebastien attempted to join the ZIPRA but was turned away due to a violation of Ndebele cultural taboos which neither party has spoken of to this day except to agree that it "wasn't a big deal but we couldn't just let it go". Leaving central Africa Sebastien moved steadily eastwards across the Arabian peninsula into south Asia where he worked for number of years as a Phat-A-Phat driver in Mumbai and as a curry chef in a respectable, but by no means luxurious hotel in Dhaka.
1989 saw unprecedented success for Kaltenfuss in the financial markets of Hong Kong with an unnamed financial backer described by rivals as a "Middle Eastern muckity-muck". Despite the lucrative business arrangement between them Sebastien claimed to have no idea who his backer was and had, in fact, never met him in a telephone interview given to the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1997, just before his fortune and credibility as a financial guru were erased simultaneously after he heavily invested in the Thai, Indonesian, and South Korean money markets that June.
With both his personal and business finances in smoking ruin Sebastien once again turned to the sea, working primarily as a pearl diver in Palawan and a paua fisherman in New Zealand though proving a surprisingly adept emu rancher during a brief sojourn in Alice Springs, Australia and a gifted though regrettably briefly appointed Minister of Tourism in Vanatu.
Sebastien Kaltenfuss' current whereabouts and activities are unknown though sources place him variously in Tadjikstan as a smuggler, Ireland as a hurling coach, Hokkaido as a zen monk and as a barkeep in Elephant and Castle, UK.
-Leftenant Archibald Ponceybonce, Royal Highland Fusileers, Ret.
A city wide night-soil haulers strike, coinciding with the distribution of a particularly bad shipment of Venetian tea cakes set the stage for a hygienic crisis of epic proportions. An incremental, or perhaps excremental, increase in methane resulted in a thermal inversion blanketing the region in a miasmic fog which, in turn, caused a remarkable spike in frog and toad population transforming the district into a cacophony of croaking and chirping from sundown to sunup bringing about the world's only recorded epidemic of insomnia.
Driven half-mad by sleep deprivation Erzebet took to the study of Icelandic runes, Scottish music and Chinese topiary to calm her nerves. Understandably Vladislaw was at a loss to rectify these new found pastimes with his provincial upbringing and sought to provide a wholesome environment for his firstborn by embarking on a woodworking binge of the sort that has only been seen since in the nightmares of amphetamine-addled beavers.
Sebastien's early childhood is a sticky morass of half-truths, unsubstantiated allegations and outright fabrication but what is known is that at age 9 he was sold to a consortium of Finnish merchants in the employ of a shadowy Persian financier known only as the "Mahdi al Muhqti Muhq" who, in turn, sent him to be raised in a Prussian military academy with the intention to have him lead a division of Pashtun Zouaves against the British Raj in a bizarre plot to destabilize the world's tea market and supplant the Russian royal family with a cabal of Viennese coffee house intellectuals. Ironically this was almost literally what came to pass 29 years later without any help whatsoever from the Mahdi.
Upon graduation from the Gemmutlischen-Fahrrad Akademy in 1897 Sebastien once again disappeared from public view, though reports place him in Tibet in 1904, the Yukon in 1909, Patagonia in 1913, and with a traveling preacher in the American south in 1925. Less reliable, though compelling, accounts place him in the company of Hindu mystics, Australian aboriginal shamans, the "practical occultists" of the English midlands and a mysterious Kabbalist of Trans-Jordanian extraction alleged to be an alchemical "secret master" from the Middle Ages.
Reappearing in Berlin in 1929 Kaltenfuss made a small name for himself as the manager of an all-hermaphrodite cabaret and attempted a career as a jazz bassoonist but soon found that the mournful, nasal tone of the instrument was particularly ill-suited to his chosen medium. He soon abandoned the hedonism of the Weimar Republic for a 17 year contemplative hermitage among the fishermen of Fiji during which he spoke only 9 words, none of them in Fijian, much to the confusion of the neighboring villagers who had taken to watching the strange European who dwelt silently on their island.
After completely ignoring worldwide strife, excluding a possibly apocryphal incident where he single-handedly defeated a platoon of Chindits in a brawl over a plate of mohinga in a bar in Myitkyina in 1944, Sebastien moved to Gatineau, Quebec to join the Canadian merchant marine after briefly experimenting with free-verse poetry in New York's East Village beat coffeehouses. No less a personage than Allen Ginsberg was alleged to have called him "a hack, a total failure of art, so square that you can almost cut yourself on the corners" though in later years both men denied the incident ever having occurred.
Following an uneventful career as a deckhand on a taconite freighter Sebastien joined a Mossad-led mission into Argentina to hunt for fugitive Nazis having been selected for the unlikely combination of his fluency in German, ropeworking skills and knowledge of the Fijian sovreignity movement, making him the perfect infiltration agent in the eyes of his handlers. Espionage seemed to be a promising field for Kaltenfuss until his superiors transferred him from Beunos Aires to a small village on the Pampas after a confidential source claimed knowledge of an ODESSA-run cattle rustling operation. The information was proven to be false after the source was discovered to have been compromised by a Soviet "honey pot" agent working under diplomatic cover in the East German consulate making Sebastien's posting totally irrelevant to the operation. He was discharged at the rank of corporal.
Once again as the world was gripped by warfare and civil unrest Mr. Kaltenfuss seems to drop off the face of the planet though confidential sources speaking only on condition of anonymity place him in Paris in 1968, Madrid and Prague in 1969, Berlin in 1970, and Northern Ireland and South Dakota in 1973 despite strenuous objections on Kaltenfuss' part as to any alleged involvement in social or political radicalism.
Resurfacing in Rhodesia in 1978 in an ill-timed bid to become a safari outfitter Sebastien attempted to join the ZIPRA but was turned away due to a violation of Ndebele cultural taboos which neither party has spoken of to this day except to agree that it "wasn't a big deal but we couldn't just let it go". Leaving central Africa Sebastien moved steadily eastwards across the Arabian peninsula into south Asia where he worked for number of years as a Phat-A-Phat driver in Mumbai and as a curry chef in a respectable, but by no means luxurious hotel in Dhaka.
1989 saw unprecedented success for Kaltenfuss in the financial markets of Hong Kong with an unnamed financial backer described by rivals as a "Middle Eastern muckity-muck". Despite the lucrative business arrangement between them Sebastien claimed to have no idea who his backer was and had, in fact, never met him in a telephone interview given to the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1997, just before his fortune and credibility as a financial guru were erased simultaneously after he heavily invested in the Thai, Indonesian, and South Korean money markets that June.
With both his personal and business finances in smoking ruin Sebastien once again turned to the sea, working primarily as a pearl diver in Palawan and a paua fisherman in New Zealand though proving a surprisingly adept emu rancher during a brief sojourn in Alice Springs, Australia and a gifted though regrettably briefly appointed Minister of Tourism in Vanatu.
Sebastien Kaltenfuss' current whereabouts and activities are unknown though sources place him variously in Tadjikstan as a smuggler, Ireland as a hurling coach, Hokkaido as a zen monk and as a barkeep in Elephant and Castle, UK.
-Leftenant Archibald Ponceybonce, Royal Highland Fusileers, Ret.
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