Squamish

GO GO GO

Sweeeet

Italy Pics To Come

TBD

Goodbye MS

My contract ended yesterday. I am officially unemployed again. That's good since I plan on taking the entire month of July off. We leave in 2 hours. Excellent!

I busted my back

Long story short, on Saturday I fell while climbing. Brian carried me out. Compound fracture of the L2 vertebrea. Totally my fault and I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing.

Since I walked up to the emergency room, I guess I wasn't an emergency, therefore I got to wait 3+ hours before I saw a doctor. Better yet, we were there a total of 8.5 hours. I can't wait to see what the bill is.

For the first couple of days, I've been in some pretty good pain. How to you spell relief? P-E-R-C-O-C-E-T!!

It's healing fine, thank you.

Boxes

Boxes full of wonderful goodies have begun arriving @ my door step.

JUICY!!!

8,420

In 2008 Melanoma will be diagnosed in 62,480 Americans and will kill 8,420, according to the American Cancer Society.

6/10/2004 = 4 Years Ago.

SKINNY!

So, before I started actually tracking my weight via a spreadsheet, I blogged that I was @ 182. Today, I'm @ 165. 17 lbs..... http://midlife-dirtbagging.blogspot.com/2008/04/im-fat-for-me.html

So on Sunday I decide to go for a ride. As I take off up Market street, I cannot believe the difference in how much lighter I feel. I don't feel super strong, but I certainly do notice the difference in weight. In just over 7 weeks, I've lost 17 lbs and now am at 8.5% body fat in the morning (worst time to measure) and about 6.5% in the evening. Crazy.

For comparison....

• When racing cross, that was 5 years ago, I weighed about 168.
• When I started working a year ago, I was @ 170 ish.
• In college I weighed 160.
• When I finished chemo, in October of 2004, I was @ 159.

I read this recently and was completely blown away.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24670307/

Roughly 15 percent to 19 percent were eating at least five servings of fruit and vegetables daily, the researchers found, while 30 percent to 47 percent were getting the recommended amount of exercise. From 83 percent to 92 percent had quit smoking.

Overall, 5 percent were meeting all three requirements, while 12.5 percent were meeting none. Fewer than 10 percent of survivors of any of the six cancer types were meeting two or more recommendations.

Among breast, prostate, colorectal, bladder, uterine and melanoma survivors — all of the cancer types the researchers looked at — health-related quality of life rose steadily with the number of lifestyle recommendations met.

I need to do the best job I can to take care of myself. Shouldn't you?

Mercury is no longer in retrograde, I think.

6/7 - Stereo guy came and worked on my truck. Fixed.
6/6 - Get invited for a informal interview. Good.
6/5 - Swap road Dura Ace cranks and put in a 118 BB. Solid.
6/1 - Geek Dudes replace hard drive and get Vista Ultimate installed. OK.

I lost my weight tracking spreasheet on my failed laptop hard drive. So I took a two day break and started again.

6 weeks later

Wow.

I'm 13 lbs lighter....Body fat @ 9.5% in the morning, 6.6% in the evening.

Reservations are Made

Climbing @ the end of the summer in July!!

• http://www.squamishrockguides.com/
• I sent an email and got a response from Marc, the owner.
• We talked for a while and then I made the reservations.
• Colin Moorhead is gonna be our guide.
• I can barely wait...2+ weeks in Italy.
• Then a little break, then 4 days on the rock with a professional instructor!

Amazing Man....Amazing

WikiLeaks

The Wikimedia Foundation has received a copyright infringement claim from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church or LDS Church. The infringement claim is in reference to a URL used as a source in a Wikinews article about Mormon Church documents leaked to the website Wikileaks, titled "Copy of handbook for leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints obtained by Wikinews". The URL was originally cited as a link in the sources subsection of the article. The Wikimedia Foundation is a donor-supported non-profit organization which runs Wikipedia and Wikinews. This is the first time that the Wikimedia Foundation has received a copyright infringement claim regarding an article published by Wikinews.

The Mo's bring the heat.

How much?

So on 4/26, I started tracking everything I ate, with the goal of losing 10 lbs by the end of the month. For example an egg is 74 calories. A large avacado, 300, a tablespoon of my favorite salsa, 20. Non fat milk, 110, a cup of museli, 440.

Here is what I learned:

1. If you track everything you eat, and write it down each and every day, you really begin to pay attention to each and every thing you put in your nasty little mouth.

2. Calculation your basal rate is kinda hard because it's how much it takes you to be alive, plus some extra wild ass guessing factor. I originally estimated I burned 2250 calories a day. Three weeks in, my weight loss was much more than my calorie loss, so somewhere my calc was screwed up. So, I now think my basal rate is more like 2500 a day.

3. If I ate well (no ice cream or cookies or stuff like that) I was pretty easy to stay below 2500. I averaged a net 900 calorie difference.

4. On big exercize days, I allowed myself another 300-500 calories. Big days were in excess of 2500 calorie burn days.

5. I averaged 400 calories @ each meal and another 400 calories in snacks.

When I started working again a year ago, I was 172 ish. A month ago, I was more than 180. Today, I weighed 167.7, with less than 10% body fat.

In another month I plan on being below 160.

Italy - 1 Month

Day 1 Rome
Days 2-3 Florence
Days 4-6 Lucca and Pisa
Days 7-8 Cinque Terre
Days 9-10 Piedmont
Days 11-12 Milan and Italian Lakes
Days 13-15 Venice

OK enough.

5/24 - XM radio in truck stops working. Bummer
5/25 - Cranks fail on Bianchi bike. Bummer
5/26 - Hard drive fails on laptop computer. Bummer.
5/26 - Bail on 7 Hills of Kirkland. Bummer.
5/27 - Get told they probably won't renew my contract. I gotta look for a job. Bummer.

Mrs Dirtbagger sends me this.


General influence of Mercury retrograde

Mercury rules over the mind's processes, studying, communication, businesses, travels and the like. When Mercury reverses its direction, all these areas are affected as well.

This is an excellent time to work on old projects that never got to be finished. So, think about the things you started and never finalized.

Next, you might wish to prevent any bad things to happen to you: so double-check your agenda, call your business partners to confirm that everything goes as planned, have everything ready before the deadline and leave some extra time for unexpected events. Make copies of your important files and documents, save your work more often.

The other solution is to go on vacation or at least slow down the pace of your projects. You will find that going slowly during the Mercury retrograde period will spare you many efforts of redoing the same action that wasn't performed right the first time.

7 Hills of Kirkland

So I've wanted to ride this damned thing on my singlespeed so bad. Last year I couldn't because of my stupid ritchey cranks kept giving me problems. Read that is the damned left crank arm kept falling off. Fucking thing.

So Fabien helped me a ton by getting it replaced on warranty and Ritchey sent me a brand new pair. Excellent. We got the bike in his shop and we install the 2nd set of cranks 9 months or so ago.

All was just fine and dandy until about 6 weeks ago. I had gone off on a 5+ hour ride on the single speed. Left foot felt squirrely. Hmmm...Cleat? Pedal? Nope left crank arm.

So I have Mrs Dirtbagger come get me in the super Toyota. The 7 hills is only a couple of weeks away. I've ridden a little so I can do the 62 easy. If I take it slow I'm sure I can do the 100.

I take the bike over to Sammamish Valley Cycle. They will do a good job. I've got a week to go.

Work was busy as hell and I didn't get to ride the bike at all. Saturday comes, the 7 is in 2 days. I get on the bike and it sounds like the bottom bracket is gonna totally explode. SHIT.

I blast over to Samm Cycles. Alvin was there and super helpful....We talked about options, and he was willing to fix the bike right there. I eventually decided to by the tools and tear apart my litespeed 9 speed dura ace and use that crank since I knew it was bomber.

I get the Ritchey off the Bianchi, and get Dura Ace off the Litespeed. Oh guess what, the first generation of bearings on the Dura Ace is a round bearing and a needle bearing. Take them apart and bearings go everywhere. Great, guess I'll be using the Shimano Bianchi bottom bracket, since the Dura Ace one just became toast. One of the mechanics said "Oh they don't make that bottom bracket for that crank any longer." Now I sure as fuck know why.

So i proced to use Saturday and most of Sunday trying to get the bike together. When all is said and done, I'm not happy. I destroyed one crank arm to put together another and in the end wasn't even confident about it. So that night, the bike was together and I asked myself? Was this worth all that? Isn't this trying to tell you something? What do you need to learn here? I could easily imagine being in Carnation or MONroe or some craphole like that and having the Crank arm spin off, wondering how many hours it would take the sag wagon to get to me. Shit.

So what did I do? I bailed big time. 7 Hills got my 70 bucks. Oh well.

So 2 years in a row, 2 missed 7 Hills for 2 Ritchey Cranksets is just 2 fucking much.

Next year, I'm gonna ride 7 Hills on a Unicycle.

Hmmm

I see a new bike in my future.


This one is quite nice. I dig the blue.


This one is super nice. Neuvo-retro. Very cool...

62

Rode the singlespeed 62 miles...

Happy Birthday Bunny

I'm Fat (for me...)

182 Damn. 10.2% Body Fat.

Goals
5-31 170
6-30 165