Well, I re-learned another important life lesson the other day - wet pavement and bike tires have, at best, a tenuous relationship. This lesson was hammered home on Tuesday at the Portage Lakes State Park when I had a Tour de France-esque skid off the bike. One moment everything was fine and I was carving through the parking lot, and the next moment I was sliding across the ground watching my bike spin away.

Oh, I’m fine. Bruised, sore, and lacerated, but fine - with the possible exception of my pride. The minute I started to turn over at the park I knew I was in for a world of hurt - and in the 20 minutes or so that it seemed to take the bike to fully kick over all I could think over and over again was “boy, am I a dumbass”. Then I picked my bleeding ass up off the hard, cold, unyielding pavement and rode back home .

Recent issues aside, the bike has been a great release over the last year. For Christopher Cross it was sailing that took him away, but for me it’s cycling. When I get on a bike, it greatly simplifies my world - you spin the pedals around and keep a good line going down the road. It really helps put things into perspective, and - at least for the duration of the ride - really minimizes the impact of whatever problems that I’m having that particular day (hell, that particular hour). I used to stay in at lunch and work, but now I make it a point to get out at least 3-4 times per week and ride, and I’m much happier for it.

Sure, it’s not all roses - living in the Portage Lakes makes riding rough at times, since every direction you ride from my house seems to be downhill. Which is great - until you have to ride back. On the plus side, when I go riding in more flat locales - such as on the MS 150 - I blast by people on the flats and on most of the hills.

Another issue is that Beth worries about me riding on the roads in traffic. To be honest, that was a concern to me when I first started riding, but now I’m fairly far beyond that. I follow the laws of the road (nice summary here, courtesy of the Ohio Bicycle Federation), and I ride in a manner that is safe for me and for other vehicles. Oh, of course you get the occasional asshole who doesn’t seem to understand the rules of the road - I’ve had people cut me off on turns before, and once I had a pickup truck swerve at me as they passed (Side note - in most cases, if you swerve at or hit a cyclist that falls under the category of assault. Something to think about.) - but for the most part, people are courteous and give me room when passing. Note to drivers - if you’re interested, I do ride as far to the right as is safe (maybe take a look at the side of a road sometime), and I promise not to dart back into traffic. If I turn, I signal as soon as possible. I don’t ride on sidewalks (which is dangerous in illegal in most places), I don’t ride facing into traffic (also dangerous and of dubious legality), and I don’t flaunt traffic lights and blast past people on the red. Now, if you would be so kind as to make sure you give me about 3-4 feet on my left side when you pass me, and not cut me off at turns to get that extra minute ahead of me on the next road we’ll get along fine.

As an interesting side note, I’ve been pimping bike riding to my friends for the last 4 or 5 years now. Which I’m sure has prompted most of them to setup very elaborate rules in their email clients to filter anything coming from me that contains the words “bike” and “ride” and filter them directly to the trash. However, I just received a message the other day from an old friend who wanted my advice on buying a bike….so maybe all that prompting is paying off. He’s a bit insane and likes to do extreme things - so there is a good chance maybe we can get a ride setup for next year and do something crazy like the Ride Across Inidiana (RAIN) that Durfee was trying to talk Dugan and myself into this year.

Well, I’m off to wash the pus out of my wounds (yeah, it’s as gross as it sounds). Then I’m back on the bike to ride the same route as yesterday, hopefully without the whole skidding along the pavement part.

It’s football time again! Alex is playing on B-Team this year with games on Wednesday evenings. Alex has been working very hard this season, and has been playing on both sides of the ball - he’s spent time at Tight End and Guard on offense, and as a Nose Guard, Defensive Tackle, and Linebacker on defense. The team played very well against Stow in their first scrimmage, and we’re anticipating another exciting season.

If you’re able to, Alex would love to have you come down to see him play - all games start at 17:45. Home games are at Lockhart Field (down the road from us off Nimisila), with directions to the away games available at www.manchesteryouthfootball.com.

Our schedule this year has two scrimmages and eight games:

• 08/16 at Stow (Scrimmage)
• 08/23 Springfield (Scrimmage)
• 08/30 at Cuyahoga Falls
• 09/06 Ellet
• 09/13 at Field
• 09/20 at Stow
• 09/27 at Cuyahoga Falls
• 10/04 Tallmadge
• 10/11 at Kent
• 10/18 Springfield

This schedule - along with game results - can be viewed online from this link. The website is not the best in the world, but it works. Any questions please call.

Jason and Alex

I had this guilty little thought while I was out riding my bike at lunch today that I had failed to update this blog as planned following my return from England, so I decided to take a few minutes here before taking Alex up to football practice to write a little update.

So, as you can guess, I’ve been back for a bit, around 9 days. I’m just now starting to get out of this incredible bout with jetlag that hit me like a ton of bricks. For about the first 4-5 days back I felt like hell pretty much all day - tired, irritable (more so than usual), and just generally lethargic. Now I’ve managed to get back to some semblance of normalcy - the only remaining problem is that I’ve been incredibly hungry for the last 4 days. Beth claims that it’s probably stress related, and as usual she’s probably right. There are a number of little subplots going on in my life right now, some of which will be fairly stressful until they are played out.

The question I seem to be asked the most since my return - by family, friends, and other folks in the community invariable seems to be some variant of “were you scared/worried/nervous/crapping your pants.

Actually, no. Just irritated. Let me explain.

Now, it’s not a very deep secret that I don’t really like flying - in fact, in terms of expectation management I normally walk on an airplane fully expecting it to fall out of the sky. When this doesn’t happen I’m thrilled. Now, I’ve been told that this isn’t really the best way to deal with this and that it may mask some deeper emotional issues (no shit) - but hey, it works for me.

Even with that fear, I flew three times at the tail end of 2001. I walked the ghost town that was Pittsburgh at the end of that September. I flew to the UK in October for a conference while ground zero was still a mass of wreckage. I was worried then - let’s face it, watching a few jets plow through a pair of skyscrapers tends to make you a bit nervous when you’re hopping on a Boeing 767 - but I still got on the planes.

The media hype did get to me a bit - at various times I worried a bit about the anthrax scare, I worried about going to the mall. I started to work my way into a state of paranoia on most of this - as Jerry (Drummer, Geologist, and at times my personal Therapist) would say, I worked my way into a mind-f**k (sorry for the use of technical medical terms - but this one seemed appropriate). I asked Jerry about this paranoia, and he sent me back and email that pulled things into perspective for me.

People suck. Mean people suck even worse. A good friend once told me that you can’t live life waiting for the other shoe to fall. The more attached you are to this life the less of it you’ll actually lead. Kind of like wasting all of your time telling someone how much you’ll miss them instead of just enjoying the time you have.

Simple…but oh so true.

So when I was in Manchester and found out about the plot and the arrests - my first thought wasn’t that I was going to be blown out of the sky, it was more along the lines of “crap, I’m going to get stuck here”. Followed immediately by “nothing being allowed on? I can’t take a f**king book onboard! It’s an 8 hour flight!”

Yes, you heard that right. I was more worried about dying of boredom than anything else. That and a slight bit concerned that my laptop, iPod, camera, and a bunch of other somewhat sensitive equipment and toys would be subject to the tender ministries of the crack Delta luggage crew.

I was good - but It was apparent from talking to Beth that she was worried, and it seemed like some of my other friends and family were as well. So I fired off a few emails to let people know what I was up to - basically “I’m fine, things are screwed up, but I’m not worried and you shouldn’t be either”. Or at least that’s what I was trying to convey.

The flight home - hell, the entire airport experience sucked. To put it in a nutshell, I woke up at 6:00 AM BST (1:00 AM EDT) and got off the plane at Akron/Canton at 9:30 PM EDT (2:30 AM BST the next day). Included in that time was around 10 hours of flying, coupled with a good 5 hours of waiting in lines (queues, for those of a UK-ish persuasion).

I was going to write something about the fact that it seems like everyone got all worked up into a frenzy about this in way too short of a time and on way too little information. Oddly enough, someone out there has already written a bit on it that is so good I’m just going to give you a snippet and a link.

So the answer to how did I feel about this whole mess? Well, as John Rogers writes:

I am just not going to wet my pants every time some guys get arrested in a terror plot. I will do my best to stay informed. I will support the necessary law enforcement agencies. I will take whatever reasonable precautions seem, um, reasonable. But I will not be terrorized. I assume that the terror-ists would like me to be terror-ized, as that is what is says on their nametag, rather than, say, wanting me to surrender to ennui or negative body image, and they’re just coming the long way around.

Check out the complete post at http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2006/08/wait-arent-you-scared.html. Me - I’m going to get back to this enjoying life bit.

Ahhh, Sid Vicious was a poet, wasn’t he?

Nothing quite so fun as waking up on day 12 of a two week trip to the UK to the news that the UK has gone to a “critical” alert, and that air travel is going to be….oh, what’s the quaint English phrase…..”extremely disrupted” over the next few days. This is all because some jackasses were planning on blowing up US-bound planes over the Atlantic. Which, since my plane is scheduled to fly over the Atlantic in 2 days time to the US, is of a fairly high concern to me.

I’ll be heading out this afternoon from the client site that I’m on in order to purchase another piece of luggage or a duffel bag to pack some of my clothes in, since I’m going to have to check my laptop on Saturday. Shit, I’m going to have to check everything down to my glasses case.

My biggest concern? They’re not allowing books, newspapers, or any reading material on the flight - now, I can live without my iPod, my laptop, or my Zodiac. But books? That begs the question as to what I’m supposed to do for the 10 hours in the air. Let’s face it, watching the inflight movies on those 1970’s era CRT’s that droop from the ceiling of the 20 year old boeing product I’ll be flying on is beyond painful in the extreme and probably violates some component of the Geneva Convention (and don’t even get me started on the selection of movies - if I have to watch Richard Gere or Antonio Banderas dance on one more inflight movie I’m going to puke).

It’s going to be interesting - I’m sure they’ll be a few stories to pull out of this. Oh, and the picture up top vaguely reminiscent of a scene from Dante’s Inferno? It’s the current queues at Heathrow.