Phew

A month?! I can't quite believe a month has passed, so much that I just used one of the three exclamation points one is alotted per calendar year. I won't flatter myself by apologizing, just castigate for being lazy.


That said, a lot's been going on: I decided not to come back to Putney next year, since I've lived in the NE for 28 years and it's time for something new (also, Vermont looks like Hoth right now, with the snowdrifts reaching my office windows, and the wind howling, (if you need to go look up Hoth, well, there's not much more we can talk about)), so I'm back in the good old Carney and Sandoe meat-pool, getting referred to schools that I never knew existed.


Two cool things to check out, out there in Blogoland: Sprinter Della Casa, a blog run by Aki Saito, who runs the Bethel Spring Series, a six-race series that kicks off, every year, the first weekend in March. It's the series in which I first raced a road bike, snapping a chain and borrowing a way too small Giant OCR; I also had more fun on a bike than I'd ever had, up to that point. I stumbled across Aki's site and liked it, especially this post, on shaving your legs. He makes a reference to Breaking Away, so of course I'm a sucker. Right now Aki is out in California, crowing about 80 degree days and seven hour rides. Yesterday I geeked out on my trainer, watching the 2002 Tour of Flanders and trying to average 240 watts for two hours. Somebody, please...

Also, check out Swimplan if you're into the whole horizontal-in-the-water game. You enter some information about how much you want to swim, and upon what you'd like to improve, and it spits out good, not-boring workouts. Workouts that go by quickly, even in the three-lane motel pool at which I spend too many hours of the week (read: >0 would be too many).

Finally, my new road bike is built. It's a Cannondale (probably the last one I'll buy, now that it's been bought by a company that owns (insert vomit sounds here) GT, Mongoose, and Schwinn; you can probably kiss that nice "Made in the U.S.A." decal goodbye), of course, just like my last one, but I scored a Six13 frame pretty cheap, with the sweet new cranks, and finally decided that I needed a bike with Dura Ace components on it. In truth, I built my dream bike, and I'll toss some pictures up here tomorrow.

That's it for now; get some rest, people: the Groundhog saw (didn't see? Whichever) his shadow, and we're gonna be shoveling for another six weeks.