a winning combo.
Peter hated the picture of him that I had here, so no sidebar picture for you anymore.

• Everyone and their idiot brother falling off of their bikes or going off of the tracks. We watched three races total (both AMA Superbikes, and I believe the AMA Supersport 600) and must have seen 10 crashes. Tony and I were saying we're somewhat frightened to watch the races again, sober, for fear that they will be totally uneventful and boring, and that the red flags were all brought on by Stephanie's rum punch.

• The riderless gixxer. Every drunken race viewing should have a ghost bike dancing off into the woods at 60mph.

  

• Eric Bostrom's muttonchops are, quite possibly, the scariest thing in the world to see on a large screen TV when you're drunk. Hasn't anyone who loves him taken him quietly aside and given him heartfelt advice about ditching that haircut?

• Nicky Hayden extinguishing his own bike's fire. Why can't I find a picture of this online?

• Aaron Yates laying down on the damn track to red flag the race after Robert's bike burst into flames. That shit never happens when I watch races sober.

At any rate, it was an amazing end to the season. I still haven't seen the end of race 2, since we'd only recorded an hour and a half, and the race went to nearly two hours. Oops. There aren't many pictures from yesterday's race out on the web yet; I'll have to look tomorrow and see if the racing sites have updated by then.

Man, I really feel like my cats are licking the insides of my eyelids. When did I get old and unable to function the day after drinking a half-skull of rum punch? Yikes.

we survived the marin ride!
Saturday was Diana and my first attempt at leading a Women on Wheels ride. We did the Marin/Sonoma ride (the one we'd been doing pre-rides for since June), and I think everyone had a lot of fun. We ended up with 12 bikes total (12 riders and one passenger), which was far more than I was expecting. There was a nice mix of frequent WOW meeting attendees, women I hadn't seen in months or longer, and new faces. A couple of Short Bikers List gals, Tai and Jody, showed up -- we realized we hadn't seen each other since our Calistoga ride in May 2001, so it was really awesome to see them again.

My fears about going too slowly or too quickly for the rest of the riders were totally unfounded -- Diana kept a kickass pace throughout the ride, and I don't think anyone felt we were going obnoxiously quickly or slowly. I had to ride quickly to keep up a few times, but that's not surprising considering that I was riding sweep. I tried to stay a little ways back from the last rider, so that I could stop quickly in case of incident, but everything went really smoothly all day.

It was really hot, in the mid to upper 90s, through most of the ride. I ended up buying a Camelbak for the ride, and it worked pretty well. I inhaled some water and had to cough for a little while a couple of times -- it's harder than it sounds to work that bite valve from behind a helmet at 60mph -- but other than that, I was really pleased. The water reservoir was nearly empty when I got home, which means that I'd drank nearly a liter and a half more water than I would have without the Camelbak (I drank from a normal water bottle at stops). So that's definitely good.

The only downside to our ride was that my arms are decidedly angry with me. I had just seen a physical rehabilitation doctor on Thursday, and he said that I was on the right track, so he hadn't "refilled" my "prescription" to the physical therapy office (it actually is a prescription, for a set number of sessions). Oh well. He did give me even more stretches though -- I'm going to be Gumby by the time my arms are straightened out -- and they seem to be helping my arms since the weekend. I guess it's a good sign that even though my arms were killing me on Saturday night, I'm back at work today, typing this in addition to writing code. I drove my car for the rest of the weekend, and into work today, in an attempt to rest my wrists a little. Hopefully I'll be riding again within the next couple of days.

notes from my 11k service.
My chain needs replacing already, dammit. Poo! It's just a mean little ploy to get me all tempted to buy a larger rear sprocket. Hrmph.

When I went to replace the air filter, I realized that my airbox had popped off of my carbs -- it was just sort of sitting there on top of them. Ha ha, oops! Wonder how long I'd been running unfiltered air through my engine....

I am incapable of changing my oil without making a huge disgusting mess. I single-handedly keep the shop rag/paper towel people in business.

Nothing else interesting about the service. I was thrilled to notice that the next one, at 15k, requires a new set of sparkplugs already. This must be because my knuckles had finally finished growing new skin from the last time I had to replace them. Sigh. Do sparkplugs really need replacing every 7500 miles? At least they're cheap.