Not the Forecast I was Looking For

Intermittent snow showers and windy early. Remaining windy with peeks of sunshine later. Temps nearly steady in the low to mid 30s. Winds NNW at 25 to 35 mph. Chance of snow 30%. Winds could occasionally gust over 50 mph. (not good for dirt jumping!!)

We all had so much fun riding today, it's sad that is the forecast for the day of the week that is the best for riding! :( Dumb weather.

THANK YOU Lisa!!!!

So, today I finally got to ride with my good friend Lisa Myklak again. It has been WAY too long. I got to the Fix and she had already been riding for a bit. I started attempting to hit the small dirt jump line, Kneecap. Yesterday was my first day back to dirt jumping since sometime mid October. It was a rough reintroduction, for sure. I felt like I was working so hard to get any amount of pop off the lip and I wasn't going anywhere. Today started off about the same. Lisa gave me one suggestion to work on: relax my upper body a ton more and get low to be able to use my arms for the pump on the lip, too. Hmmm, well, she's pretty much a genius! I think I hit Kneecap better today than I ever have! Thank you, thank you, thank you Lisa!

She's lucky, she gets to head to So Cal to ride with Steve and TJ and then to AZ to ride with Buhly! I'll miss her, but she won't miss our next expected snow storm!

Whirlwind of a trip!

Total trip time: 78 hours
Total miles: 1808
Total driving time: ~27 hours
Practice hours: 11
Race runs: 2
Hours sleeping in 60 mph wind: 4
Awesome traveling partners: 2
Major crashes ending better than they could have: 2
Extra nice bruises from crashing: 2
Rocks not moved out of the way causing my good friend to crash: 1 :(
Windows that wouldn't roll up causing us all to go deaf on the way home: 1

Last weekend Phil, Caroline and I went insane. No, not really, but we did drive ~27 in a weekend just to go ride and race in Bootleg Canyon, and it was well worth it! It is a really cool place to ride, racing is another story. :) It's super rocky and technical, but tons of fun! I crashed in my race run, so I had a super crappy time, but I rode the technical section better than I had all weekend, so I was psyched about that! Caroline KILLED it! She was only 15 seconds off of Melissa Buhl's time on a 5 minute course! She is going to take some people by surprise this year! My camera decided to break again, so I don't have any pics. There are a few on TJ's site if you want to check out the terrain.

P.S. We had to go south to get there because I-70 was closed ALL DAY last Friday! LAME!!! Stupid, stupid snow!!

Fun Times with the Girls

We had a girl's night out last night in celebration of Anti V-Day. It was a lot of fun. Emily, Caroline, and Katie and I met up at this new bar in Boulder called the Purple Martini. It is a bit shi shi for Boulder, but it was fun anyway. After a bit Bama showed up, so we moved the party to the downer, Bama's local hangout! Being the self appointed DD is super, not only is it seemingly not quite a fun, but you get to be the taxi for everyone at the end of the night when you're super tired, too! :) haha No, I guess it's nice to have someone be the safe driver, and I'll put my turn in now and then.

I have so much crap to get done today so we can take off for sunny, dirt filled, anti-snow Bootleg Canyon tomorrow. I can't wait!! Although it's at least an 11 hour drive, I'm not even really dreading it for thoughts of riding and racing erase all thoughts of hating being in the car for that long! Nevada, here we come!!!

Oh So Nice x 4

Went down to pay my boys at Yeti a visit yesterday and came home with all 4 Team Totally Wired DJ frames. They are really beautiful! You'll have to take my word for it for now. If I still can't find my purse with my camera in it, I'll have to borrow a camera to take some pics!

I'm pretty psyched about the new geometry. They are considerably different! I can't wait to ride it!!! :)

Cobwebs

Last Saturday night my friend Phil talks me into going to do some DH shuttles with them on Sunday. There is a spot that Steve Wentz and Matt Fisher spent a lot of time shoveling off the trail so there would be somewhere to ride in our snow covered state. I had never been there before, but I really wanted to get back on my DH bike. Well, we'll just say, there were a lot of cobwebs that have crept into my riding skills since collegiate nationals (the last time I got to ride my bike). It is one of the steepest places I have ever ridden as well. It was a lot of fun, but I beat myself up pretty good, including landing right on a nice cactus with my left ass check. Mmmm, that was nice, and still is since I can't get at least 15 of the thistles out. I even tried soaking in a bath last night. No luck! Oh well, it was worth it. It was great to be out riding even if I did have to stay at school until midnight as a result!

Oh ya, and my camera started working, but someone how I managed to lose my purse and it had my camera in it... :(

Saturday Night

I'm sure most of you are out having some sort of fun adventures on this fine Saturday evening! :) I am in the lab "passaging" my stem cells. :(

Here's a picture of the little buggers, cuz I know that you're all dying to know that they look like. :)

Since I have 2.5 times the cells I had planned on, it makes everything take so long! I have been here since 5 and have been working on this straight for 6 hours! Ughhh. Remind me why I thought it would be fun to come back to grad school? Well, I'm leaving after this round in about 45 minutes, and I guess I'll have about 4 more hours of this tomorrow. :) I guess it will be worth it when I'm in sunny NV racing and riding my bike next weekend, though!! Yea, gettin' outa the snow!!!

New Favorite Drink

So, I have given up beer for the month (gasp, I know!!). I'm working on cleansing my liver and some other hippy bullshit feel better remedies, so I'm giving the liver a little break. It's very sad, since it's stout month at the Mountain Sun, but hey, maybe I'll loose a few pounds instead of gaining a bunch of weight in February!! Anyway, as a result, I have a new favorite drink, Boba Milk Tea (or Bubble Tea)! My friend TJ introduced me to this wonderful little drink a little while back, and it's pretty awesome! If you get the chance to try it, I highly recommend it!!

Pretty Darn Busy

Between being sick, trying to get stuff done at school, and working hard to get over a dumb boy, I feel like I haven't had time to do anything else! Well, that's a lie, but that's what it feels like. I did race BMX last Saturday and go snowboarding with my friend Kristin on Sunday. It was fun to board with her again. I hadn't been with her since I taught her how 4 years ago! She's having knee surgery today, so we had a last day on the slopes hoorah! It was a lot of fun and since it was Super Bowl Sunday, there were no lines and no I-70 traffic!

My research is super stressful and busy right now which is good and bad. Bad because I'm exhausted every day, good because it keeps my mind off of everything else! Hopefully it will continue going well! My stem cells are ALIVE! Yea!!

I talked to the USA Cycling people (they are the "governing body" for MTBing here) to find out what their plans are for making World's selections this year. Apparently they will be publishing a "very clear" (their quote, not mine) selection criteria for both automatic and petitioned selections in the next couple of weeks. It seems like it is going to be a bit ambiguous to me, as there are a couple of weekends on their new National Calendar that have 2 races in 2 different places. I guess we'll just have to see what it looks like when they publish their very clear criteria. I'm sure it will be clear as mud. :)

Enough Already!

So, I can handle 1 or 2 depressing things at a time, but this weather is enough to send anyone to the shrink to get Prozac!! Today's Current Weather: 6º, Feels like -12º with 17 mpw winds from the WNW!! Ahhh, balmy. Did I move to Alaska sometime when I wasn't paying attention? No, I still live in the wonderful "bubble" of Boulder, only the weather has turned to crap and is seriously affecting my ability to deal with normal depressing things!

On a better note, besides being sick this week, I have been working like crazy to get two different research grant proposals to NASA done and turned in yesterday. It was a ton of work, but my advisor said that they were really well written, and she didn't make too many changes (that's a first for me!) I won't hear back from them until about June, so keep your fingers crossed for me. They would be for about $90,000 over the three years that I have left in grad school.

Well, I am headed down to the BMX track tomorrow for some more ride on the dirt
(not the crappy snow) action! It should be a lot of fun.