blabber

I have been sick pretty much the entire week. No rides, runs, swims, or anything much. But I was able to somehow lose a 1/4 pound this week despite the lack of exercise and the lack of an especially good diet plan. I am grateful for this at least. The lungs full of goop--not so much.

I am not too into this years Tour de France. I just don't especially care right now. It is not a anti-doper thing, or an anti-French thing. It is more of an I just don't care for some reason thing. Can't explain, it just is.

Today I worked at the shop. All I did was build bikes in the back. I enjoyed it. The most expensive bike was one that we sell for about $800, most were around $300 to $400. And it was fun to sit on the rolling stool and just focus on making these bikes work well. I had a few interruptions with phone calls and miscellaneous things, but for the most part it was a non-customer day, which is a great thing. I have come to feel the anonymous customer that I am not familiar with is one with which I would rather not be bothered. For some reason if you got in before I soured on working retail recently--which was as of about a month or so ago--I am still happy to talk to you. Weird, but true. Someone came in for a tune up on a bike that I sold to her about 4 or 5 months ago and for some reason I stopped what I was doing to do it right there on the spot. I found that I was surprised at myself even. About halfway through, I realized that I wasn't even bitter about being interrupted. I was happy at that fact.

I also worked on DTP's Fisher 293. This is a very nice bike. Or rather it was. Everything had been upgraded to XTR (by me before I sold it to him a couple or three years ago) and it has a nice pair of wheels on it that makes it probably one of the lighter full suspension 29er out there. But what use is a nice bike when it is horribly maintained? Not much, as evidenced on our last ride. The cables and housing are in horrible shape. The shift housing's inner wires have worked their way past the housing caps in every instance which has caused the shifting to hardly work at all. The last ride we went on he only had two or three gears. The bike still has a handmade crappy foam watch mount for a Suunto GPS watch that he hasn't had for probably 2 years. The bike looks like hammered. Oh well, I don't have to ride it. And, even though I did start working on it near close I didn't finish it because there was more to do than he said. He thought I was only going to have to replace one piece of housing. He asked that I try to save the cables...freaking cheapskate. That ain't going to happen. Oh well, at least when it gets done he will have one less excuse for why he can't ride up a hill faster than some old guy can walk it.

Anyway, I am hoping that next week is a return to normality. Also, I hope that next week will be the end of my time in purgatory with the law firm downtown. It has been around a month since I interviewed and still no word, despite a couple of calls on my part for a status check. I know that hiring process at a firm can be lengthy, but when patience is not one of my virtue, it is taxing on me. And on my wife for that matter. She says it is even worse for her since she has absolutely no control and she is just the passenger here in this search. She can try to keep me positive, and she puts on a good front, but inside she is ready for this ordeal to end, and to end in a positive manner. She craves normality, a husband who has a normal job, and the funds to start doing normal things again. Being pregnant does not help matter either.

Well, back to bed.