happy 2006!

Well, happy New Year, y'all. Hope it's treating you well so far. I eschewed the parties this year in favor of sledding -- yeah, midnight sledding. It rocked. At the last minute, running out the door, I swiped the bottle of champagne out of the fridge and popped the cork at midnight at the top of the sledding hill. The five of us passed it around, stuck the bottle into a snowbank, and then furtively ran to take a swig between runs until it was gone. Five people, two functioning sleds, but that didn't stop us from sliding down on whatever scraps of other people's broken sleds we found. It was hilarious.

Then today Nate and I put the first cold, snowy miles of 2006 on the bikes. Yesterday we turned the living room into a bike shop for about an hour so that he could resurrect his old mountain bike and so that I could scrounge up enough parts to get the yellow bike rideable again. I bought it some new tires, 28mm and with some tread on 'em -- a far cry from those Nokians, but I couldn't fit anything better in there. Tim, you almost got your bloody knuckles just from the tire changing process. My regular racing tires are as stretchy as rubber bands compared to those things. My thumb still hurts.


And it was all for naught, I think, since as soon as I hit snow I slipped around just as much as if I'd still had racing tires on. Fortunately there weren't too many snowy patches and we were able to cobble together a decent 30-miler out of the clear roads. Nate had 'celebrated' a bit more than I had last night, so he didn't feel like eating this morning and still hadn't eaten when we left, so, natch, he bonked hard, which is how I wound up sitting on the sidewalk outside the Dodd Road Holiday station, shivering until my back cramped and stuffing my face with Fig Newtons (in solidarity) for 20 minutes. (Fig Newtons are God's gift to cyclists, by the way. If I was starting a cycling team I'd ask Fig Newtons to sponsor me. And no stupid red Nabisco triangle, either, just Fig Newtons. With a bright-ass yellow jersey.) I never did quite warm back up after that. At least not until we got home and I fell asleep in the bathtub.

I had a really dorky commemorative cell-phone photo of me and my ugly bike and my uglier red mushroom-looking helmet (rationale being that if I fell on some ice and broke it, it'd be a lot cheaper to replace than the Sweep), but Blogger is demonstrating the age-old truth of "ya gets what ya pays for" by telling me that my photo has been uploaded when, in fact, it has not. So no photo for you. I'll try and edit it back in later. Update: the photo has (obviously) been edited in. Worth the wait? Prob'ly not.

So happy New Year, folks. Get out and ride.