Badum-bum!

Yes folks, Ike’s back in action. After giving her a spot of TLC – installed new rockers bumping the travel up to 4″, replaced the shifting cables, bled the brakes, (finally dremelled out the cable stops for the rear hydro hose!), cleaned her up, and popped on a new front derailleur – I hit the trails with JB, and learned some interesting things:

I’m fat and out of shape. Seriously. But not as fat and out of shape as I thought. Yes, I had to walk a couple times on the switchback climb (in my defense, it’s a 600ft climb over 2 miles, which may not be REALLY bad, it’s more than I’m ever did in DC… which was what… 300ft over 3 miles – on road?) but I pedalled up for the most part. And when we got to the top, I felt pretty good – not bent over and puking like the last time I tried it. (Which, granted, involved a lukewarm triple espresso on an empty stomach beforehand, but I was also 20lbs lighter!)

JB’s a really good rider. The few times I was able to stay on his back wheel through the descents, I was really impressed. He takes awesome lines, and is a graceful rider to say the least (as opposed to his head down and hoof it approach playing footy). And – this really surprised me – he was more than content to ride at his own pace, and was surprisingly supportive to the fat Mick huffing and puffing along with him.

China Camp SP is a feckin’ AWESOME place to ride. It’s always busy, especially on weekends and right around quittin’ time in the evenings. It also doesn’t help that it’s one of the few legal trails in Marin. But feck me – it was a blast once the climb was done. 2 miles of switchback climbing (which took almost a half hour), followed by 3 miles of pedal free downhill (which took about 5 minutes), followed by 6-7 miles of beautiful swoopy singletrack that reminded me a lot of Rosaryville back in DC.

Turns out I’m not a very good wrench. I know what I’m doing. I took classes. I bought the books. I even read the instructions!! But apparently I have NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING. My brakes were bled, and felt good. But as I was popping Ike on the roof of the Subie, I noticed my front brake no longer worked – it felt like there was absolutely ZERO fluid in there. Luckily, I was able to pop the bleed syringes on, and shoot fluid through to get it working again in time to ride. Add to that, my cable install was piss poor, with my rear derailleur slipping all over the place. Thankfully there was enough give on the barrell adjuster to tighten it enough to get me through the ride. (Stupid cable stretching!!) Looks like I’m either going to have to get back to work on it, or drop the cash to take it in for service – but there’s always funny looks doing that. Along the lines of “Dude, you have a Turner – and you don’t know how to do simple shit like bleed your brakes or change your cables!?”

But mechanical issues, and my flabby arse aside, ’twas a great ride. An absolute blast that got the blood pumping, and the urge to get back out there flowing. Minor clicky!

Oh, and for those keeping score, I’m down another 3 lbs this week. 15 total. Booyah!

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Now playing: Clutch – Sea Of Destruction
via FoxyTunes

The main reason I tend to be a fat b’stard is because I eat when I get stressed.

I’m not talking about stress levels when you have a deadline at work, or are engrossed in a football match. No, I mean stress as in SERIOUS situations. Life changing situations.

For example, it’s no coincidence that I chubbed up three times in my life. First, when my parents died. Second, when I moved to America. And third, when T and me decided we’d get married, find new jobs, move cross-country, and buy a house in Marin County. In the space of a year. Both times before, I cut the weight as soon as I dealt with the issues at hand – and now that we’re here and things have settled down, I’m dealing with the third “chubbening”. But now that this crap’s started at work, I’m noticing I’m slipping. A weekend down in Santa Cruz with Professor Mike saw me crack open one too many beers. And by one too many, I’m talking about a dozen over the course of this past weekend. Plus a bottle or so of wine. (Holy shit, I drank a lot this past weekend!) And add to that, the focus I’ve had the past three weeks slid around like Stephen Hawking on ice (without snow tires). It seems that the weekends are my downfall, especially when I’m not at home. That’ll be remedied this weekend, when I plan on staying the feck home for the first time in a month.

So am sure that when I sidle up to the scale this week, I’ll be suitably annoyed. I’m kinda hoping that venting about it here will help.

Work’s still on tenterhooks. We had a conference call yesterday to address the “situation”, mostly in the words of El Presidente “To calm folks down”. Of course that worked well when he said that even though he was “pretty sure” that the worst was behind us, in terms of cutting staff, he couldn’t rule out that it might happen again. And since yours truly was the one closest to the old heave-ho without getting it, I’m feeling AWESOME about that! There’s talk about changing our retirement plan from the absolutely free, ludicrously extravagant version to something a bit more normal – which shocks me. In my eyes, that should have been the first thing that went. Don’t get me wrong – love me my bennies, but I’d rather pay the mortgage, thanks very much. But alas, our office is made up primarily of folks who are dancing around retirement age, so of course it makes more sense for them to prefer to boot people out the door into this economy, than give up an ounce of the good stuff. That’s another pet peeve of mine – there’s so many folks who are at, or beyond, retirement age at work. And yet they continue to work, raking in their salaries, ridiculous retirement, and fattening social security, milking every last drop possible – while the younger folks in the office work for far less money, struggle with mortgages like yours truly, or now find themselves unemployed.

Awesome.

Aaaaanyhoo. In other news, the Premiership’s over for another season. Not officially, but it is for Liverpool – with United clinching their 18th league title, and 11th in the past 20 years. Us Liverpool fans are understandably miffed about it, and many absolutely refuse to give any credit whatsoever to our mortal enemies, citing that the best team most certainly didn’t win. Of course, my opinion is that the league table never lies, and that we left it too late to show the sort of form we’re capable of. But it’s in the past now, and all we can do is look forward to a Summer of silliness and irritation – where we begin by being linked to the likes of Carlos Tevez and David Silva, but will probably end up with Gareth Barry, an elderly Spanish former international, and some kid who nobody’s ever heard of, but honestly, he’ll be the next big thing (before disappearing into the reserves, and being sold on in two years, hopefully more or less breaking even…)

Off to ride today with JB. First time on the Turner in almost a year. I’m both looking forward to it, and dreading it. As I’ve said in the past, JB’s not only an expert rider, but is fit as all feck when it comes to riding (funnily enough, I can run him into the ground at footy, even though I’m lugging around 30lbs of chubb!) which means that the reminders I’ve given him about “Look man, bear in mind I’m fat, I’m NOT fit, this is my first time on the bike in a LONG time so I’ll be rusty as fuck, so for the LOVE OF GOD take it EASY!!” will last about five minutes. Ah well, only thing I can do is get back in the saddle, and it’ll come back.

Speaking of which, better get some work done before I disappear for it…

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Now playing: Oasis – To Be Where There’s Life
via FoxyTunes

Ahh, Mick McCarthy, the former manager of the Irish football team, uttered that immortal phrase describing him being close to losing his job. Well, today I found out mine’s in there too, ready to be razored into streaky back.

An email was sent out by the head honcho last week, announcing that our budget for the upcoming fiscal year was short. Waaaaay short. And that we, as an Association, needed to come together, and find out ways to make cuts, so the last resort doesn’t happen – staff layoffs.

Well, turned out it took less than a week for the last resort to rear it’s ugly head. I flipped on the mac this morning to find an ominous email from my boss. It read simply “Call me. We need to talk.”

A phone call to some folks back in the office later had me shitting bricks. More like cinder blocks, actually. Nobody knew of anything going down, but less than a minute later, my phone lit up like a Christmas tree going for a smoke break. Firings on a scale we hadn’t seen before – 20% of the folks in the office were told they were being let go. (That’s the sound of more bricks dropping behind me…)

Finally I got in touch with el bossette. Seems I was indeed destined to be one of the unlucky ones, but she lobbied on my behalf. Pointed out that letting me go would cost us more than we saved, since we’d need to pay an outside agency to do what I do. Fine, then we cut him to part-time. Nope, he does too much, we’d still need to either hire him on for additional hours, or hire an agency to pick up the slack. Okay, fine he stays, but you need to find a way to have him save $30,000. Which we can do, it just happens to be what we pay an outside agency to do our quarterly magazine (which I’ve suggested be brought in-house time and time again, since it NEVER made sense to me to farm it out when yours truly can do it.)

So, the upshot is that I still have a job, but by balls came ->this<- close to the bandsaw today.

I'm still hyperventilating.

In other news, I'm now down 12lbs total. Which is nice. 30 more to go. Headed up to the cabin for work weekend, got a lot done, but also indulged a little too much in food I shouldn't have. But I suppose that was somewhat offset by being outside working all day. Still, annoyed at my lapse in willpower. I'm gonna have to do some extra running at footy today as penance. Supposed to be going riding tomorrow with JB, but he needs to do it a little earlier - given the events of today, the last thing I need to be doing is bunking off early to go ride. So maybe I'll have to postpone that, or just ride solo later in the day...

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Now playing: Nirvana – Negative Creep
via FoxyTunes