I’ve been a little light on the inspiration for posting lately, and I’ll be honest, it’s a direct result of the high stress level at work. It’s crunch time, and I’m on the line in a big way. Mostly cleaning up other people’s messes while trying to keep my own shit in line. I would say it’s a full-time job, but this week, it’s gonna be a lot more than full-time. Oh well.

I guess the bright side is that, for me, it translates to a lot of hard miles on the bike. Everyone has their own stress relief valve, mine has one gear and knobby tires.

I put in around 30 miles on the bike after work today, and every pedal stroke was just a little bit of that work stress melting away. By the time I was done with the 2.5 hours of sweating, grunting, sliding, rolling, and generally shredding, I had all but forgot why I was pushing so hard.

And that’s kinda the point, isn’t it?

It all came rushing back as I set the alarm for 5:15 tomorrow morning. Another long day ahead.

I’ll leave you all with a couple links to entertain yourselves and we’ll leave it at that for the evening.

• Chainlove.com – I posted a while back that backcountry.com and their evil mind-reading site steepandcheap.com were starting to sell bike gear. Looks like they realized that bikers are bigger gear whores than skiers, and it’s time to cash in.
• The Gnome speaks on the Horrible News – I’m sure everyone has seen the gruesome picture by now, Dave lays it down, as always.
• Bikehugger on his new Big Dummy – He named his “Betty 2.0”, and has taken my love of the internal hub one step further with the CVT hub.
• Bike Shopping in Alaska – Tim chimes in on the state of bike shop customer service.
• On the bright side . . . – Some good words for some good companies.
• Decipher if you can – Type in 2008036156 in the box that says “publication number” and then get a glimpse of what spend most of my time on during my days at work. You can read the full deal if you need to get to sleep.

Enjoy.