Changes At HQ

Mrs. Guitar Ted scored this palatial desk unit for the HQ.

The weekend here didn't turn out quite the way that I had planned. Friday we had some doozies for thunderstorms and we got torrential rain most of the night. That made me take pause for riding gravel right away in the morning, so the son needed his hair cut and we headed out to have breakfast together first. That was about the only thing I planned all day that went down according to plan.

So, after breakfast we headed to Butler & Son's Barber Shop, (HIGHLY recommended if you're ever in the area), and they were, not surprisingly, VERY busy. So I bailed on that plan and we went back home.

It was super humid and I, not using my brain, decided it was time to trim the sidewalk edges. I figured it would be great "heat training" for upcoming rides. In this time I also got the Ergon saddle I reviewed recently swapped over to Mrs. Guitar Ted's bike. Well, one of her two bikes. She has a Kona "Africa" single speed rig. That's where that saddle now resides. Well, she wanted to go check it out and took off for a ride. She'd been gone quite some time when I got a text message with a picture of a desk. She asked what I thought of it, the thinking being it would replace my crumbling computer desk I've been bashing out words on for over a decade. Probably since 2005.

Well, suffice it to say that it (obviously) came home. Talk about changing plans! No more yard work! On to the switcheroo. Now, it sounds simple enough. We were just going to switch desks out. But........yeah, right! You may as well have dropped a bomb in the house. First off, this new desk is HUGE! It is easily twice as big as my old thing here. That meant we had to do some measuring and some hard decisions were made. Two crummy book shelves filled with books and.......well, whatever landed on them for the last 15 years or so, had to be emptied, gone through, and cleared off. We were getting rid of them. The stuff on them had to be sorted through, and a lot of that was binned. Good riddance!

My 2010 DK200 receipt for the event's 200 miler.

Another thing that happens when you sift through a decade plus of detritus is that you may find little gems from the past. One thing I came across was my receipt for my race entry in the 2010 DK 200. Yep, you're seeing that right, fifty measly bucks got you in. Now granted, it was an entirely different experience back then than it is now. Completely different in almost every way, in fact. Back then it was still a small event. Only 160 started the 200 miler. So, yeah, fifty bones to ride seems like a good deal but the DK was a much smaller and easier to manage race back then.

And I sucked that year! Too hot and windy and I didn't have a clue what to do about it. Now I would have used an ice pack on my back and I likely would have gotten past CP#1, but after two years of getting kicked in the teeth down there I never went back but once more in 2015. That year I missed the second and last checkpoint by two measly minutes with less than 50 miles to go. It's ironic, but by then, a mere five years later, the DK200 was pretty much what you might know it to be now. Crazy how that event grew so fast! 

My unused 1997 NORBA license.

Then I came across another gem. An unused 1997 NORBA license. This was back when I was serious about cross country racing. There were big changes in my life in the time between 1995 and 1999. I won't get into all of that here now, but suffice it to say that just about everything I knew changed in those four years.

I had high hopes for 1997 and racing. I had been getting better at XC racing and had been doing some things in a more disciplined manner as far as training and what not. But when my first bike shop job dried up in February of '97 I had to find something else for employment and fast. I had a house payment to make every month and bills to pay. I was single at that time, and I didn't have anyone to turn to for help. I found a job as a car mechanic, which was a 60 hour a week job, and extremely physically draining. I think I tried going to one race that year, a non-Norba deal down in Illinois, and things just went pear shaped in a big hurry. I remember riding home in a teammate's car that time and deciding I was done. The whole idea of driving more hours than a race took, taking up an entire day, paying for it, and not having fun at all was, in my opinion, just plain stupidity. That was the end of mountain bike racing for me for ten years.

Anyway, I had no clue I'd even bought a license, and when I found it, I was floored. Weird stuff gets squirreled away in odd places, I guess. I've no idea why this license made it the last 20 plus years! But, it is evidence that I once was an XC mtb racer. So, there's that, I guess.

The process of switching over to the new desk is ongoing. I will likely be upgrading to a new computer as well, so by the time we finish this process I will have revolutionized my "nerve center" for the blog here. But you probably, hopefully, won't notice a thing. I still will be banging out text here with the same two fingers I've been using to do this with since 2005.