Has it really been a week and a half since I posted? Holy cow.

My how the time has flown.

So what the heck have I been doing for the last week and a half?

If there’s two things that consume my time right now, it’s being an engineer and being a cyclist. The big thing that’s been taking up my time kinda combines both of them I guess you could say that I’ve been ‘engineering’ a little bike ride coming up in about a week and a half. The official ‘full’ course is up, so check out the fun and excitement and come have a beverage and a bike ride.

The other thing that I’ve been engineering is a new fence and gate to keep the little dingo who’s been terrorizing our house from running out of the backyard.

They said ‘Shepard mix’ when we got her. I’m convinced it was a Shepard-Dingo mix. Really, do a google image search for dingo, the resemblance is uncanny……

I wanted a nice big double swing gate so I could still get the truck into the side yard, so I ordered a 4 foot gate and a 6 foot gate from the guys down at buffalo fence. They called me back and said ‘a 6 ft gate is pretty long, that’s gonna sag, are you sure you don’t want two 5-footers?’

As you can imagine, I took that as a challenge. I promptly went to home depot and started piecing together a nice little cable tensioning system for the gate posts.

You can stand on the end of the 6 footer and it doesn’t move. I don’t think it’s gonna sag anytime soon.

Boo-yah.

Lets see, what else…..

I did get some new toys, although they’ve been out of necessity more than desire. My helmet finally has a couple visible cracks in it, so I pulled the trigger on the new Bell Volt. I’m probably a bit overdue for it, since I can’t count the number of times I’ve come down square on my head in my current helmet. It’s had a good run of it, and I definitely don’t ever complain about spending the money on head protection.

I also had a bit of an ‘incident’ last week involving my car and the front wheel to my road bike…. The car won, and thus necessitated me ordering a new set of wheels for the road bike. The old front wheel has a distinct potato chip shape to it……

I got a set of the Easton EA90sl wheels. Not super-light, but a good training wheel, and a few grams lighter than the Ksyrium Equipes I was running (but no bladed spokes, so is it a wash on speed? whatever).

As a side note, since I only borked the front wheel, if anyone is in need of a used rear ksyrium equipe, drop me a line, I’ll sell it cheap. It’s in decent condition, and it looks all blingy with them fancy bladed spokes on it.

The only other thing to report is that I’ve got another 10 gallons of beer in the fermenters, but that should be pretty standard now. Rob (Radford), the guy responsible for getting me into brewing 4+ years ago is in town, and so we brewed up an irish red. I split the batch and we’re trying 2 different yeasts to compare and contrast. Should be tasty.

Beer, bikes, and blockades…… that about sums it up.