18 weeks!!

Been kickin' around the idea of doing the California International Marathon, even said out loud that I was gonna do it. So if I'm gonna, I need to get going on the training schedule. Jeff Galloway's program for running a 3:45 marathon has me starting at week 9...I'm not sure my running legs are really at week 9, but 3:45 is probably an utterly unrealistic time for me anyway so why not just pretend that the past 8 weeks have prepared me to jump in right where I am. Save all the disillusionment for the race itself, I always say. It's more dramatic that way.

ladies and gentlemen of the supposed jury

I have returned from the trial skills sweatlodge experience, where my skills were either forged or fired in a kiln. Can't decide on the right metaphor except that the building where we were all supposed to sleep and work felt like a big clay oven. The climate in that place is usually milder in the summer. But we need not discuss climate change at the moment.

The daily routine started at 8:00 am with breakfast in the Presentation Center cafeteria, located in a brand new and much cooler building. Some people didn't find the food to their liking but I thought it was A-OK in comparison to any quasi-institutional food I've ever consumed. Generally very fresh, if a little too obviously recycled and/or experimental at times but I've been known to cook that way too, so I felt at home. Breakfast was pretty standard though. Always some kind of hot mush, fruit salad, yogurt, muffins, and either pancakes or eggs, bacon, etc. Then at 9:00 we would start practicing the skill that had been demo'd by the trainers the night before until lunch at noon, then more practice from 1-4, then a break from 4:00 - 6:00, then dinner, then demonstrations of next day's skill, then at 9:30 pm or so we were free to start our homework.

The trainers were experienced attorneys both from within and without the "legal aid" world who completely volunteered their time during the 8 days and 7 nights we were all there. I include nights because no one got much sleep and the trainers made themselves available at practically all hours. I did pretty well the first two nights getting to bed by midnight, but it was downhill after that as the assignments and sense of pressure to perform got more intense. On Friday night before our big mock jury trial, the culminating event, I was up until 3:00 am with my "co-counsel" trying to get prepared. The previous night I had stayed up until 3:00 a.m. writing an opening statement. All this for a pretend client. Our trials were held at the San Jose courthouse. Our judge happened to be a real judge (or court commissioner) from another county. After the trial the judge, the "jury," our "clients," and our "witnesses" gave us feedback. We were videotaped as well. Apparently I got away with all kinds of objectionable leading questions in my direct exam of our client. Cross-exam was a lot easier; I guess it's easier to poke holes in something than to build it right in the first place. The other side was not so lucky because my co-counsel was definitely the bad cop. I like objecting when I'm sure there is something to which I should object but I don't think I've got the killer instinct.

A couple days before the big trial we were practicing our closing arguments. Mine was praised for its content but word on the street is that the words are only about 20% of the communication. Apparently a Buddha-like stillness is not the affect the trainers thought most effective with a jury. It happens to be more or less my default position, especially when I'm nervous. One of the trainers asked me to try a few lines from my argument again, "this time, go completely over the top!" I said, "that WAS over the top!" However, I think with some practice I could learn to change my affect at will, as needed to persuade, entertain, or just communicate, and I think it might be fun to expand the repertoire. I remember as a teenager being afraid of yelling in a crowd of other people yelling, and I remember being afraid of singing if anyone else was in the room with me. For someone who secretly (or not) craves attention the way I do, being so reserved and internal can be frustrating. I still fear any real or perceived threats to my dignity, so whatever spontaneous act I perform will have to be carefully thought out first.

I almost didn't go to this training. I was feeling deeply resistant to it and I would have let it slip by if the director of the Benchmark Institute hadn't personally called our office and asked me if I was going to sign up. In my mind this was a very scary thing to do, sort of like going to a training to prepare you to jump out of airplanes. However, when I was interviewed for my job I answered the question "do you see yourself doing a lot of litigation?" with "no, but I would like it (litigation) to be tool I can use when it's needed" so I went down to the trial skills slowcooker to follow through on that idea.

Glad it's done and I'm home again. I missed Ce terribly, along with highspeed internet access, my cats and my bicycle, roughly in that order. It's bloody hot in Chico right now but at least there is such a thing as air conditioning in these parts.

Speaking of parts, I need to find a makeshift bearing cup press to install my headset. The guy at the bikeshop said he would loan me one he used before he became a bike shop owner, made from a long threaded bolt, some big washers, and nuts to tighten the whole thing down and push the bearing cups into the head tube. I told him I had used a PVC pipe to seat the crown race onto the steer tube and he was impressed by the amount of banging this obviously had required. I guess plastic is not the way it's usually done. I had wondered that myself while I banged away at the top of the plastic pipe with the flat side of the hammer.

wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'

A big box arrived today containing wheels and tires I ordered for the new bike. 34-spoke Rhyno Lite / Deore, dubbed the "Brutal Beast" by the folks at Harris Cyclery and reportedly resilliant against small arms fire (I probably won't try to test that claim, hopefully no one else will either). Perfect. The rubber is Conti TravelContact. Should be just the thing for when I suddenly run out of pavement. The inventory of parts to date is the frame & fork, wheelset, tires, rear cassette (9 spd 11-34), and silver Cane Creek S3 headset. Tubes, a headlight and a couple rolls of handlebar tape I've had on hand awhile. Coming soon are the Sugino crank & triple chainrings (24/36/48, or something like that), a Soma threadless stem, and an IRD bottom bracket.

Still need: chain, derailleurs (front & back), bar-end shifters, handlebars (drops), brakes & brake levers, pedals--I'm thinking of a nice big flat touring pedal with Power Grips instead of SPDs or other clipless...I find my feet get really uncomfortable on the roadbike after 2 or three hours of being trapped in the same position, in bike shoes. This bike aims to be an equal shoe opportunity bike. Waterbottle cages. A low-end bike computer to tell me how far I've gone, maybe an inclinometer to tell me the % grade of the climb or descent. Fenders--the fat SKS ones. A Yosemite Sam "BackOff" mudflap (if you see one of these, please tell me, otherwise I'll have to make it myself). Long pump because I have a peg for it on my frame. A seatpost, a saddle. Debating on whether to try a Brooks or just stick with the saddle I know and love on my roadbike. A handlebar bag with a mapcase. Eventually a rear rack that is more touring-sturdy, though the current Topeak rack I've had on my road bike hath borne heavy loads upon its slender shoulders. I brought all my Barbri Bar Exam review books home on it one day in the Spring of '04...a good 40 lbs at least.

sisters of the presentation

On Sunday morning I'm off to the Presentation Center in the Santa Cruz mountains for an intensive week of trial skills training. Since starting work at Legal Services I've been to a couple trainings / retreats there. I'm feeling way behind at work and anxious about being gone for eight days, like the mass on my desk might go critical while I'm gone.

On the other hand, I think the Sisters might have fixed the swimming pool since the last time I was there, and the end result of this training will likely be that I'm freshly pumped up about the whole idea of being a lawyer. We will have a mock jury trial at the end of the week. I didn't do moot court or trial advocacy in law school so this will be really good for me and some of my feelings of fear and reluctance about doing some of the things lawyers traditionally do.

new civilizations

This sign was indeed a welcome sight on Saturday when I rode up to the little community of Cohasset, an elevation gain of about 1800 feet over a 10 mile stretch northeast of Chico. I felt welcome at the "Cohasset Country Store," gas station / grocery store / video rental shop where they offered for sale my favorite sports drink "Recharge," sweetened with fruit juice and made by local beverage company Knudsen (note that the K is not silent). They had a nice bench in front of the store on which to sit and drink my Recharge as well.

penny a point, ain't no one keeping score

I recently played cards with an old man in the Amtrak club (aka lounge) car, and in lieu of passing the paper bag that holds the bottle we split a can of Mountain Dew. He taught me how to play Gin Rummy somewhere on the stretch between Winnemucca and Elko. I seemed to take to the game pretty well because I kept beating him, though when I made dumb mistakes he insisted that I take my cards back and do it right, so I can't take a lot of credit for my victories. He was more interested in teaching than winning. Crazy old guy.

I feel that I received a valuable skill in exchange for willingness to hear his stories of fortunes and loves found and lost. He said he deeply regretted letting other people talk him out of a great idea he had for a human cloning business. I decided not to probe into how he had worked out the legal and bioethical issues. When I grew too tired to play cards or converse, I loaned him my iPod for awhile and he enjoyed some tunes until the battery died. I could tell that he was listening to "Only the Good Die Young" at one point because he sang along with the earphones.

He said he didn't know why he chose his current appearance, long wild white hair and beard, biker-style skullcap...he said this wasn't really him, and he knew it invited others' judgment, but it also allowed him to pass through the rougher parts of towns unmolested. He said he thought it was part of his mission to help other people practice their religion, or in my case, their card-playing skills. To every thing there is a season. Maybe he was one of the Three Nephites.

where it began...I can't begin to knowin'...

For the second time in 2 years I made it out to the park by 6:00 pm for the takeoff of the "Fast 50" ride (a name that doesn't necessarily apply to the ride I did in speed or distance, but so it's called). Even though everyone is dressed weirdly at these events it was exciting to ride through town in a group that was about a block long and a lane wide. It was a lycra parade. I really like the clicking sounds of all those shoes detaching from all those clipless pedals at the stoplights.

No doubt I've made some kind of cycling progress since I did this ride last year...heck, last year I didn't even have clipless pedals. I sure feel like I'm faster. But everybody else must have felt that way too. I was dropped in pretty much the same place as last time, shortly after we got out into the orchards. The "péloton" moved ever farther away, then around the next bend and out of sight until I had turned back onto the River Road and saw a bunch of the Tri Group women showing solidarity for a sister with a flat. At least it looked like somebody was fixing a flat and everyone else was standing around. So I felt free to pass by on the other side and they didn't catch me again until we were back in town.

The high point of this ride, and other rides I've been on in these parts lately, is the smell of the fields and orchards in summer when there are sprinklers going or as today, it was threatening rain off and on during the ride and the air was muggy. Muggy but about 10 degrees cooler than the past couple days (only 94 instead of 104--felt like heaven). It's a smell that seems natural and cultivated at the same time. It's almost a food smell--which makes sense--sort of the primeval food smell. Here and there are undertones of fermentation, decay and manure which add complexity. It's also a homey smell. This is what a place with open fields and irrigation smells like in the summer, and my hometown smelled something like that in its pre-stripmall & subdivision days. I think most of these really good smells have since retreated north to Idaho, perhaps with a few remaining outposts south of the border. I never expected to find myself in Chico, and I never expected to be so pleased by the landscapes and smells...orchards, fields and a river to the east with an outline of the Coast Range in the distance; rolling buttes and Sierra / Cascade mountains to the west. While the heat isn't easy to handle, it brings out some of these good smells. Slow-cooks 'em.

Along the route there is one stretch however that is a bit too complex in fragrance. The water treatment site. It's almost completely hidden behind big flowering hedges but it smells like shit, and not in a happy California cow sort of way. Well, when it happens, it has to go somewhere.

strange dilemmas of our time

We saw Al Gore's film today and I am just about ready to move to the Arctic to build rescue rafts for the polar bears. It's one thing for humans to screw up our own existence but we have to make other species suffer with us. We are incredibly lousy stewards of this planet. To use a metaphor from the dominant paradigm, if the planet were a business God set us up with, we have been "running" it with all savvy and sensitivity of, say, G.W. Bush. No wonder he's our president.

It's weird...it's not like much of the information in the film was news to me, but perhaps the presentation and the visuals gave it more impact. I was / am so upset that after the movie when I rode my bike to the Co-op, to post an agenda for our next board meeting and buy a few things, I picked up a hand of bananas and put them down again because the sticker on them announced they had come from far, far, away.

So here's a dilemma: these bananas are certified fair trade and organic. These particular bananas were from Peru. After all the damage U.S. foreign policy has done to South America in the last several decades, does the good I can do by supporting fair-trade organic agriculture in those places outweigh the bad pollution generated by shipping bananas from Peru to Chico, California? Coffee poses a similar problem. As far as I know, the nearest coffee plantations are in southern Mexico. I can get "Triple Certified" coffee which is 1) organically grown 2) shade grown, so as not to ravage the rainforests and leave the songbirds homeless, and 3) fair-trade so that the farmers get a decent price for their beans and hopefully can support themselves and their families. I feel like this is the least I can do if I'm going to drink the stuff. BUT, the shipping! There's the rub.

At the Co-op I also purchased a package of spicy veggie dogs (on sale) only to read the fine print after I got home and learn they came from Canada. Closer than Peru, but not exactly local. I just don't know what level of emission-conscious orthodoxy I can maintain. If I abstain from bananas and coffee on ecological grounds, it would be a personal ethical statement as opposed to an action likely to have any measurable impact, and I like the idea of my American dollars supporting organic farming in other lands. I also really like bananas and coffee, and no doubt countless other things that have been shipped halfway 'round the world. However I am also lucky to live in California where in theory we could feed ourselves pretty well without crossing oceans or continents. If I wanted to, I could be well nourished on things that came from within 100 miles of Chico. (20 miles, if I switch to a diet of rice and almonds.) I could even have decent cheese and some of the best ice cream on earth if I extended that to 200 miles or so.

What to do. Maybe I should start with the things that seem easier. I can ensure, at least, that the final stage of the journey of my food and drink is not gasoline-powered. Eventually when I get a trailer for my bike I will never really need to drive to buy groceries again; as it is now, only the 20-lb bags of cat litter and occasional large water jugs are an obstacle. We can buy more food from the farmers' market. And I'm on the Co-op board, so I can try to give the "buy local" campaign more of a push. Our patio / yard in the current location isn't gardenable; maybe I could borrow a piece of someone else's yard until we have our own. Anything to absorb a little more of the CO2 I create. Anything to help the polar bears hang on a little longer, and the local farmers while we're at it.

On a related topic: in a recent post I mentioned that our emergency roadside assistance company is not AAA. Here's why.

don't take no cutoffs, part II

After my last posting I went out for a bike ride, thinking I'd like to ride somewhere new with maybe a little hill climbing to make it interesting. I looked at the map and decided to ride down to Durham and then out to Butte College. Which I did, though I hadn't really established my return route. I ended up riding from the college to Lime Saddle Rec Area on Lake Oroville. While I was refilling my water bottles at a drinking fountain I overheard some boaters say they were going to drive 5 miles up the road to Paradise. I thought, well now that's not so far, I've already dragged myself up this great big hill to the lake, might as well make a loop of it.

About that time I started nibbling on the Clif "Nectar" Bar I brought along, noting that it didn't seem to be sitting well as I ate it, but I needed something with carbs. Also when I left Chico at around 5:00, the temperature was somewhere low-90's. I shoulda put some gatorade in my bottles.

When I got to Paradise I called C, secretly tempted to ask her to come and get me. Since I'd been gone almost 3 hours by then, I thought at least a check-in was due. All I had to do from that location was point my bike downhill (but for the tendency to shift into those really high gears you can only pedal when you're going downhill). Half an hour later I rolled up to the door, reflecting that the only parts of me free from pain were my earlobes and nose. I way overdid it. I lost the Clif Bar soon after I got home. While this may not be good timing in this post to recommend a food product, the nectar bars are actually really good. Made of dried fruits and nuts.

46 miles in 3.5 hours. Feeling much better now, thanks, except for being a little too wide awake in the middle of the night. I need a snack.

don't take no cutoffs

We just returned from two nights at Donner Memorial State Park, a spot selected less for its quiet mountain solitude than for its accessibility from Sacramento (some of C's family met us there) and the fact that the Legal Services picnic was in Auburn on Friday, not to mention Donner Lake, where I was eager to test the waters. We had a good campsite though...plenty of open space around us, so we weren't aware most of the time that we were up there with the masses.

Naturally a visit to this area invites many tired references to the lore of the ill-fated-you-know-who, and of course we had to squeeze the limbs of C's nephew and tell him how tasty he looked. We toured the little museum and watched the 1970's-era 20-minute "documentary" (closeups of paintings of pioneers trudging in the snow with a maudlin soundtrack). Even so, the story provoked some reflection. The will to survive is as powerful a force of nature as any. Whenever a story comes along with a really bad ending, people try to make it into a morality play so that they can detach themselves from it: they were in a hurry to get to California and get rich, they took bad advice, they weren't prepared, they left too late, they fought with each other on the way...and look what happened!

By no means am I suggesting that we can't learn from other's mistakes...sometimes a less painful way to learn than from ones own. My beef (or boiled oxhide, or...other protein source) is that more emphasis is not given to the fact that despite the bad planning, bad luck, disaster and death, quite a number of men, women and children in the Donner party actually survived. That is the only part of the story that captures my imagination at this point.

The nearest brush with disaster we had on our camping trip was when I locked my keys in the truck--with that evening's cache of marshmallows trapped inside! I called our roadside assistance (NOT AAA, but that's a story for another post) and a man in a big towtruck came and plied his ingenious devices to the door, eventually unlocking it and freeing our imprisioned supplies.

Donner Lake and Donner Pass is an historically rich area in ways not related to the Donners. See this from Anthropology.net

lost in mapland

I may have mentioned this before...but I love maps. I LOVE them. I have spent the last two hours or so researching the Bartlett Springs road. I am fascinated by the Mendocino National Forest because rumor has it that there are no paved roads that cross it; our camping excursion to Anthony Peak in October 2004 supported that theory. I was hoping maybe Bartlett Springs Rd was paved because the squiggly red line was slightly darker than some of the other squiggly red lines on one of my maps. However you can see in this quadrangle (click on it and it will be easier to see) that the road (roughly in the center) looks suspiciously rustic. I couldn't find the legend to go with these maps on the website but I think it's just slightly better than a ========= jeep trail. The reason for the interest in Bartlett Springs is that it looked like it might be a way to avoid the scarier, fast-cars-no-shoulder stretches of Hwy 20. You ride from Colusa through Williams, see, and then just before 20 heads into the hills, you branch off to the right and head for Indian Valley Reservoir (reputed as a bass fishing paradise). Eventually you're on Bartlett Springs Rd and it lands you in Lucerne, aka the "Switzerland of America." I wonder if Lucerne has copyrighted that nickname, or if I could start randomly applying it to other places that bear equally no resemblance whatsoever to Switzerland.

When my touring bike is built, it will not require pavement due to its suitably fat tires. I will ride it to the Switzerland of America and beyond.

la paleta mas fina

Little did I know that my favorite paletas are the subject of an intellectual property controversy. Since the arrival of warmer weather, an ice cream truck playing "Music Box Dancer" drives past my office almost every afternoon. The driver's name is Kyle; he is a poet as well as an ambulatory dealer in fine frozen treats. I discovered La Michoacana paletas de coco a couple months ago. Since then, the only time I have picked a different ice cream was when I was a four-bits short of the $1.25. Two-tones (orange and vanilla) are seventy-five cents so all was not lost.

To summarize the controversy, the California company that makes these delights helped itself to the name and perhaps the logo of the Mexican paleteria that started it all. This is apparently O.K. under US law, though the article above is a year old and I haven't been able to find out what has developed since then. Not sure how to feel about this...perhaps my normal sense of fairness is benumbed by "milk, cream, sugar, skim milk, corn syrup, coconut, stabilizers, and natural & artificial flavors."

brrrrrrrr!

The Sycamore Pool is open for the summer so I'm back to my Friday "open water" swims. The water temperature isn't quite "summer" just yet. I lowered myself down the ladder and spent the next few minutes gasping and doing the dogpaddle. It was achy-cold. After about eight minutes I felt acclimatized enough that I could put my face in the water without having the gasp reflex. I swam about twenty minutes by which time I was starting to feel like a small iceberg drifting around in the North Atlantic. Unless we have a heatwave this week and the pool gets a solar charge, I think it may be a great opportunity to practice with the wetsuit.

'snew?

I was not brought up to preach in sports metaphors but I have to say that now and then my derailleur needs adjusting; from time to time I feel that I am stuck between gears or not quite centered. Climbing up a hill on Hwy 1 this week I thought I would be very clever and try to shift my front and back derailleurs simultaneously. Maybe if a bike is adjusted right, this should work. No harm done, just a brief pause to verify whether the chain had fallen off.

In the spirit of welcoming shifting attitudes, paradigms, North American and other assorted plates, fortunes, and whatever else tends to move with or without our wanting it to, whether the shifting be smooth or not so, I have selected a new template for this blog. I'm not used to it yet but in a few weeks we'll all scarcely remember how it was different.

Who put the ham in hamartia, part I

I have been asked before about the meaning of the title of my blog. It arose in the context of that group bike ride I went on last summer in which I was immediately "dropped," or in other words, left to enjoy the solitude of the open road, with time to contemplate how physical / athletic endeavors have periodically served as a fine antidote for my hubris. And as every literary geek knows, "hubris" is one of the classic types of "hamartia." Of course nowadays you don't have to be a literary geek at all to know this; you can read it in 30 seconds on Wikipedia. However you still can't read *Oedipus Rex,* *Antigone,* *King Lear,* Tony Morrison's *Beloved,* or even watch the film version of Edith Wharton's *The House of Mirth* in 30 seconds to get a more complete idea of how a tragic flaw can really ruin your whole day. When they talk about a "tragic flaw" in the literary canon it is usually writ quite large, something that results in the hero eventually getting vaporized in his / her own personal mushroom cloud.

I don't view my sometime delusions of Olympic grandeur on quite so dramatic a scale. But I can't resist a pun, especially one with some bite to it.

However, I've also been interested in the broader interpretation of hamartia as suggested in the Wikipedia reference: missing the mark, error, or sin. Seems less grandiose than some overriding tragic flaw. A tragic flaw can also be the underbelly of a redeeming virtue. It is such a miracle to be human, and such a mess. So many opportunities for juicy paradox.

In the Bible, Jesus' discussion of motes and beams seems basically an illustration of hamartia / hubris though I haven't done any research to verify if this is linguistically supported by the Greek text. Maybe it isn't. But it makes sense that the "beam" is a big ol' dollop of "overweening pride" that warps one's vision of self and others. Jesus says cast the beam out of your own eye first, then you can see clearly to remove the mote in your brother's eye; but this is one of those easier said than done things. Seems that the phenomenon of seeing the motes could itself be symptomatic of having a beam in your eye. Maybe there is a secret in the analogy, that once you can actually see "clearly" the only "motes" worth worrying about are your own.

With this in mind, I can't claim to view or judge so-called "Christian" Dominionist politicians with any particular clarity or enlightenment. However I sure as hell don't trust them to extend me the same courtesy, because they are a bunch of flaming hypocritical nazi wannabes. And then there are the "Christian Reconstructionists." Not to point fingers but these people are straight out of Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale." They are the Taliban. It's true, I heard it on NPR!

A tragic flaw of liberals is their desire to be fair-minded even when they are enraged to the point of irrationality. One of those paradoxes I was talking about.

photojacking

The watermarks on these photos indicate that they were not exactly purchased. Having spent $50 to enter the race I don't feel like spending another $60 for two JPG files. However the company offers a dazzling assortment of products you can purchase yourself if you simply must have that mug, keyring or mousepad featuring me and my lycra.

One of the things I just realized I really like about triathlon is that each stage has its own hat.

just keep swimming

Overall results from last Saturday's event. I have been telling anyone who asks that it was all fine except the swim. I'm already getting tired of hearing myself tell the story about how once the swim started, I felt that nothing worked, I couldn't get my breath, and I thought about bagging the whole thing. But part of the story that I haven't told is that, while having a small panic attack 50 yards from the shore, I also thought, Well, you're giving yourself a good scare here, aren't ya. I thought about the trial my co-worker had a couple weeks ago, an eviction case featuring this bloated bully lawyer on the other side who objected to every question she asked and yelled at her witnesses on cross-ex, all the sort of thing that was NOT one of the reasons I wanted to be a lawyer but which I will likely get to experience now that I am; I thought about a hearing I have coming up with the Housing Authority; I thought about a presentation I had to put together for this week; I thought about all the opportunities for a good scare that were coming up, and none of them seemed all that scary compared to what was happening right then.

After a couple minutes I had enough composure to start feeling self-conscious about looking like I apparently had never learned to swim, or had never practiced until that day. After several more minutes, after rounding the second buoy (the swim course was triangle-shaped), things were a lot smoother but I just never felt like my position was right. I wore the wetsuit after all, so in a way it was true that I had never practiced until that day. My swim training was like practicing for a walk on the moon by walking back and forth to the mailbox over and over again. Did not translate well. I was toasty warm though.

The bike and run quenched my hill-climbing appetite. I had to walk my bike a few steps on one of the last hills. The start of the run course--all on a singletrack dirt trail, my ideal running environment--was uphill for about half a mile. A 48-year-old woman (all participants have their ages written in magic marker on the back of their leg) was walking up the hill ahead of me and although I was trying to jog, I was unable to catch her until we got to the top. The advantage of getting so far behind in the swim is that I was able to spend the bike and run catching people.

If I had been in the age 60-99 division, my finishing time would have put me in second place. Well. No sense getting ahead of myself.

Bits & pieces

I stopped by Lake Oroville to check out the race site on Wednesday. I didn't take this picture but I think it is of the boat launch we will take off from (except the boats won't be there tomorrow).

I wanted to take a picture of all my gear laid out for the big event in the morning, to post here, and have spent the last hour or so wandering room to room, rummaging through every tote bag and suitcase I've used in the past couple weeks, looking for my digital camera, and found it not.

My keys were missing for four days this week. On Tuesday I thought I had put them in the bag I take to work every day, but at the end of the day I couldn't find them. Twice, I completely emptied the bag (so I thought) looking for them. I called the coffee shop and the Co-op, searched under the seats in the truck, lifted up every stack of papers on my desk at work and at home, and no keys. Today while running down the sidewalk in the town of Red Bluff trying to get to the clerk's desk to file some papers before the courthouse closed, my keys suddenly FLEW out of my bag (or else dropped from the sky, I'm not sure) and landed with a melodious jingle on the pavement. I am grateful to have them back.

So the things that would be in the picture, if I could find my camera, are:

1. Wetsuit (doubtful that I'm going to wear it, the weather's been hot and Lake Oroville is warmer than expected)
2. Swimcap
3. Goggles
4. Tri-suit (basically biking shorts with less padding so you can swim and run in them, a special overpriced sports bra, and a sleeveless top with a zipper and back pocket that I'll wear for the bike and run)
5. "Bodyglide" anti-blister / chafing stuff for feet, armpits, etc. Supposed to be good for wetsuit removing too.
6. Bike shoes
7. Socks
8. Helmet
9. Sunglasses
10. 2 towels--one for sitting & laying stuff out in the transition area, one for drying
11. Sunscreen
12. Running shoes
13. Running hat
14. 2 water bottles
15. 2-3 pkgs of carbo goo (I prefer Clif Shot but I'm trying another brand as well)
16. Bike gloves
17. Flipflops for afterwards + something comfortable and not sweat encrusted to change into.
18. 2 Clif Bars
19. Bike (added it even though it wasn't going to be in the picture, just so no one would worry that I was forgetting it)

Forgot to acquire: banana and bagel, my preferred breakfast for race mornings. Maybe can get them on the way out tomorrow.

Last minute repair: I overhauled the front wheel hub with new grease, now it feels a lot less like a pepper mill when I rotate the axle.

Main creative visualization of the past couple days (other than trying to visualize where my keys were): Walking calmly down the boat launch, swimming calmly for half a mile in soothing, not too cold green water, goggles fitting perfectly, the swim only lasts a little over twenty minutes no matter how far away the course buoys look...

Wave departure from the boat launch: 8:10 AM

Next trick: falling asleep tonight

Spicy extruded snacks banned in Pasadena!

Well, not the whole town of Pasadena, just one elementary school. You've got to listen to this clip from yesterday's NPR archive to believe it.

Even stranger was my discovery, in googling "flamin hot cheetos," that someone in Arkansas is selling them on eBay, two bags at a time--BuyItNow for only $7.00! The seller describes them as follows: UP FOR AUCTION IS 2 9 1/2 OZ BAGS OF FLAMIN HOT CRUNCHY CHEETOS WITH 0 GRAMS OF TRANS FAT A VERY HOT CHEESE FLAVORED SNACK BRAND NEW NEVER HAS BEEN OPENED AND VERY RARE 7.00 PLUS 6.50 FOR SHIPPING.

Ergo, it is possible, if one is willing to pay and wait for the shipping from AR, to have cheetos delivered to your door.

An obit to aspire to

This isn't quite "new" news, due to the unfortunate 2-3 month lagtime in my reading of the San Francisco Daily Journal (a newspaper for Northern California legal folk). But my effort to reduce the stack of papers paid off today. I found this awesome tribute to Tanya Neiman, who I think I met (or at least saw) at a public interest job fair in SF at some point, without knowing that she was a superstar of legal aid. The message to me is that either I need to hope for a much, much longer life than she had, or I need to make more of the time at hand (meaning NOW--so back to work!).