Singlespeed=Vomit

March is doing me right around here. Two 45+ degree weeks have cleared a few miles of mud-free single track on Jumbo. I got a single speed 29er during Thanksgiving but never got to ride it because of the 2 feet of snow on the ground...this weekend I dusted it off, adjusted the seat post height, obsessed over stem spacers, and proceeded to ride into a relationship with suffering. My orthopedic surgeon would be cringing if he knew this. It's hard folks. I didn't actually vomit...but I could taste what I had for breakfast that morning...and for dinner the night before. There is something wholely satisfying about the experience though. I won't get too far into describing it because I don't want to turn into a cliche. It's very simple and fluid. Instead of thinking about shifting I'm thinking about inertia, momentum, flow, and breathing. It's surprising what you can ride up on one of those things. And it doesn't matter what kind of bike you're on when your pasty white arms are free of their winter coverings, the sun is shining, and there is a ribbon of red dirt framed in sage.

Another thought on riding in the North Fork...bicycle commuting is pretty amazing. It's great puncation for the day. My employer even pays us $1 each way for doing it. It's a good way to rack up some lunch money; but tonight is the first and last time I will ever commute by the light of a cell phone. It is dark here. Blackness. I have a light that you can roast hot dogs over. But I left it at home, hence the "resourcefullness" of the cell phone backlight.

J&C drove over from Crested Butte Saturday. It was so fun to have friends here. I felt like my grandma showing them around (she'd drive us around her tiny town showing us her 80 years of history...they named the elementary school after her). They have 7 feet of snow in their yard, so the greenish grass and shoots of tulips impressed and relieved them. I wonder if they think that winter is this year-round thing.

2 weeks to the next China trip. Interesting stuff going on there. I hear talk of countries boycotting the Olympics. Hmmm. We'll boycott the Olympics but we won't bocyott cheap labor. I don't want you to think that I'm China-Bashing. I'm more like China-Bashing bashing. Before I think about boycotting the Olympics I flip through my closet turning the labels, and then really take a look at the big picture. I heard an amazing show on Alternative Radio about globalization and localization. Check out Michael Shuman and www.smallmart.org. This guy has some amazing research about localizing business; and not just retail. Retail is only 11% of our total economy. This guy has some amazing information - both theories and examples - of how localization can work and how it can be cheaper for everyone. He used the example of shopping at a local bookstore vs. Borders and explained how so much more of the money stays in the community when shopping local...duh, I thought, until he explained how local businesses use local attorneys, CPA's, and advertising. He spoke about a community in a rural town in Wyoming (are there any towns that aren't rural in WY?) and how their general store shutdown. People didn't want to drive an hour to shop at the big boxes so they got together and sold local stock and raised 750,000 dollars to open a general store...it's not a co-op, it's a publically owned store. Cool. There will always be cases where it's too difficult of a decision - like how I went to Radio Shack here in P-towne (you can't get groceries after 8pm, but we have a radio shack) to buy batteries for my cycling computer and they were $5 each. I know REI in Grand Junction sells them for less than $2. I put off the purchase until my next trip to the Geej. I of all people most of all have to be very cautious about all of this. I'm in the most danger of hypocrisy.

Easter was good. Someone today told me that there are a lot of options for churches in town. I responded by saying there aren't a lot of options, just a lot of choices. I picked one based on what time it started. It was as expected. If you're a vegetarian and you go to a chicken shack you're most likely going to go away hungry.

Power to the Peacful

I just checked out my buddy M's wife's blog. They got back from China a few weeks ago with their new little girl. She's cute. I'm massively impressed by people like them. It costs a lot of money to do something like that and it comes out of their own pocket. While many people around them are tripping over themselves to over-extend on sunrooms and Touregs, J&M are using their own money to give life and love to an abandoned little girl....accepting all the what if's, attachment issues, and cultural land-mines. We need more people like them in this world.

A lot has happened since the last blog. I had an intense trip to the front range last weekend. I felt like I got very real with myself and real with my parents. I don't think I've been a mess in front of my parents in about 10 years. It actually felt good. Sometimes you just have to let yourself be an irrational, emotional train wreck.

The 100 shoe sized jelly beans are down to about 85 right now. Hopefully when I walk into work tomorrow it will be down to 50. This is the stage where we have to think about taking away as much as adding things in. Less is more. Of course, I'm excited to see less colors, less styles...Sometimes it's a selfish desire to lessen the project load, but really it's about being focused, about letting the funnel work. It will be a few more months before I can put pics up. I feel like I spend the majority of my time managing the flow of information and obsession over details that I forget (or don't have bandwidth) to be creative or to innovate. I'm not sure how to deal with that. I think I have to start blowing things off. I have to be willing to risk dissapointing some people at work so that I can have the time and energy to do what I came here to do...change the game.

I said that I was going to write about my conversation with the Copes, but a month later it's all fuzzy. It was about not gaining your sense of self or relevance from your work; how people create their own drama in order to feel important; how work can be self medicating; how we're replacing relationship with God and others with work and busyness. I've had some significant conversations about this in the past month. My friend and former housemate D cared enough to sit me down to read the riot act on my work habits. He said that if I want to spend my life being stressed out, giving the best of myself, and working a bizzilion hours, then not to wast it on mid-priced consumer goods for rich westerners...to take that energy and make the life and death decisions and work to change lives on a direct, practical level....or alternatively, if I am to stay in the business world, then take it easy...it's not life or death decisions I'm making. You have to realize that this is coming from a person who actually does put life, limb, health, and everything else at risk to bring aid to refugees, to feed the poor. He's been working as a logistics/ops manager for an NGO in Darfur and Iraq. He has the credibility to tell someone something like that. The conversation radically altered how I look at work.

"Training" for the Enduro is going well. I put training in quotation marks because I don't really train for anything. If it's not fun then it's not going to work for me. So, I've been having fun suffering on the bike. This was the first week of intervals and attempts at being fast. I have so far to go; but a big, ridiculous goal is really the only way that I can get up off my ass...I actually have thoughts like "it's 9pm, I don't need any more food", "I don't feel like riding, but on July 29 I'll be glad that I did", or "chocolate isn't as important as it used to be". These may sound like repressive terrible thoughts, but they are actually coming out of some weird place inside me and they are good and sound.

This hasn't been so much about the western slope and transition into small town life...at least not in a direct way. But it all ties in. To me anyway. There are lots of things going on in P-town. I found a lady that sells plants out of her sunroom. It's totally back alley but the plants are healthy, cheap, and potted. I love the low maintainence for me, but really the love she puts in to them. I volunteered at a fund raiser for a local non-profit last night. It was fun and I met a lot of people. This valley is full of some very weird folks, but some cool people too. I met Ed and it felt like meeting a celeb. He was the editor of a very pominent publication based in town and is running for county commisioner. He's not your typical guy; he's...dignified or something. Can't explain. He's different and even though we were just talking about people we know or how the town has changed he gave me hope. I saw D and he's off to Patagonia in a few weeks to work with a school down there. Days have been spent freezing on the bike but I get some good glimpses of pheasants, hawks, a ferret, and the first Robin of Spring perched on the chain link fence. Winged hope.

Happy Holy Week.

Habtiuating, Scavengers, Spring, and Shoe Sized Jelly Beans

So much to write about and so little time. I'm internetless at home since moving into a new apartment. Life has changed a bit since moving into town. The place is still fairly empty, but is slowly being populated by random furniture pieces.

Today was pretty amazing. I've been on the road bike fairly consistently now that it's warming up. Today took me out Back River Road to Hotchkiss (the basic spine of various lunch loops) then to Crawford, then Crawford Road back to home. I think I saw about 1 car per mile. Crawford is a trip. A rough around the edges true west kind of place. I saw a little bit of green grass; the irrigation ditches are running full; I saw buds on two cottonwoods. I know we have a bit of a ride before spring truly settles in, but bugs in the teeth, green grass, new calves in the fields, and a short sleeve jersey will make a man feel hope, promise, and freedom. It's supposed to start snowing at midnight, but I think the end is in sight. It's very uncharacteristic for me to be wishing an early death to winter, but this has been a tough one. I still have a hut trip and some 4 pack tickets to burn before it's all said and done, but I'm ready to get on the bike and not look back.

I signed up for the Laramie Enduro. It's July 29. Training started this week. Base miles at a low heart rate, to-go boxes containing half of my dinners, no sweets in the house. Today was my sixth day on the bike since signing up and I finally felt that rush...golden moments of speed and centrifugal force.

I saw a bald eagle today. My first in a while. The most magnificient bullying scavenger/forager around.

On the work front, we got color samples this week. 100 colorways! They look like shoe-sized jelly beans. I love it. I thought I was going to get hyper-tension getting them here on time. The factory had power outages and was 40% staffed because the storms prevented everyone from getting back from Chinese New Year on time. They pulled through though. Usually quality is inversly porportional to speed, but somehow they managed to do both.

So much to say about the transition, books read, furniture shopping, the conversation with the copes, new friends and old, the global economy, rolling 100,000 miles on the Suby, etc. More later. I wanted to get some blog time in before I fall completely out of the habit.