One More Come and Gone

...Christmas' that is. Most of my friends know that I am not the biggest fan of Christmas, but this one was a pretty darn good one, if I do say so. It's not too often that I say that about a Christmas that I'm not able to be at home with my family, but for the second year running now, TJ has so kindly adopted me into his wonderful family and shared their love and kindness with me on this special day. To be fair, this one was a bit of an "ambush". haha I planned to join him, his little bro Ty, and his mom for fondue dinner at their grandparents house last night. I didn't, however, plan for a Christmas slumber party full of Who's in Whoville, the preparation of the Sharp family Christmas breakfast, a symphany of snoring from the brothers, and Mountain Elves doing Santa's busywork for him! On the way back from their grandparents last night, TJ and his mom convinced me to stay at their house and join them for their Christmas morning breakfast and festivities. I'm sure glad that I did!! They have a very special family that I am very lucky to get to be a part of every now and then! A BIG thank you to them for making this a very memorable Christmas! I hope that everyone had as wonderful of a time as I did! Merry Christmas everyone!!

(yes, I do have a camera now, but as I mentioned above, it was a bit of an "ambush", so I wasn't prepared and thus, have no photos! soon, though, I promise, as I know white and black writing gets real old, real quick!) :)

Opportunities for Mountain Biking in National Parks

There is a proposed rule change in Congress that would allow decisions about MTB trail building and access to be made at the local level for National Parks. Please take a few minutes to utilize the link that IMBA has set up to let your pro MTB voice be heard.
http://www.imba.com/news/action_alerts/12_08/12_18_nps.html

Thanks!!

X-mas Parties and Disdain :)

Bryant Research Group Holiday Party (funny, we don't look
like disgruntled grad students, well, except maybe Garret...)

So, you may or may not know that I am not a big fan of Christmas, for many reasons. It's too close to Thanksgiving to stuff ourselves like pigs, AGAIN. :) I would rather get people gifts when I see something that I think they might like (anytime during the year), rather than trying to think of something they might like at a certain time of the year and ending up getting them something trivial, useless, that they don't like (or god forbid, all of the aforementioned!) and vice versa. It's really stressful for so many reasons, people want everything to be just perfect (fat chance!), the gift bit, and crappy winter icy traveling (I'm not a big fan of driving on icy snowy roads after being in two roll over car accidents!), just to name a few.

K, I'm done with my anti-Christmas Grinch rant. :) I hope everyone has a really lovely Christmas full of good food and great time with your family and friends. I'll be in the lab working on my research. :)

I Love Full Moons!

Apparently, the full moon tonight is going to be the biggest (by 14%) and the brightest (by 30%) full moon of the year! Unfortunately, it is pissing rain here in Oregon, and I'm prolly not going to be able to enjoy it. :( So, for all of you where the weather is more desirable...go out and do something fun to enjoy it tonight! :)

Tissue Engineering in the News

I read this on the BBC website and think it's great that so many researchers are working in a similar area to my PhD research! It's cool to see something that is very close to coming to market in the Tissue Engineering field.

Bird Brain

My friend Erin is an amazing artist (she painted the large amazing piece on the wall of my room if you've ever been to my house!) and is also a scientist. She does some pretty sweet stuff, and she has a design up for voting on Threadless.com right now. She's very clever! The design is called Bird Brain.

If you aren't familiar with the sight, they have lots of T-shirts with unique designs. One of hers is up for voting right now, so if you've got a couple of minutes, go check it out. If you like it, vote 5 and $ (I'd buy it. You don't have to buy it to vote that you would.) :)

Thanks!

The Boulder Breakfast Challenge

So, today Chris and I drove past one of the many breakfast establishments in Boulder and devised the plan of the Boulder Breakfast Challenge. We aim to eat at each of the many, many Boulder Breakfast restaurants in town. He proposed 1 a week until we've hit them all. I think that I'd end up weighing 500 pounds by the start of the 2009 race season if we undertook that lofty of a goal, but perhaps we can manage 1 every other week or so. So, anyway, I've thought of quite a few of these lovely places to dine...if I've forgotten any (legit breakfast, not coffee shops that just serve baked goods, etc...), please let me know, so we can truly sample them all.
(in no particular order of greatness, haha) :)

Lucile's
Walnut Cafe
Southside Walnut
North Boulder Cafe
Dot's (x2)
Foolish Craig's
The Buff
Village Coffee Shop
Burnt Toast
Original Pancake House
The Teahouse
Chautauqua
Turley's
International House of Pancakes (not sure that this one counts)
Le Peep
The Egg and I

17!! That's a lot of breakfast restaurants in one town. It's amazing that they have such long waits all of the time on the weekends!

I don't know if Chris will be here long enough to do one every other week! We'll see. We may have to skip some of the ones that I'm not too particularly fond of! So anyway, if I'm missing any of the good ones, please let me know!

6+2

Today was my 6 week (+two days) follow up appointment with the Doc. I was very pleased that the x-rays definitely showed that the bone has started healing, but it's definitely still broken. :( She said that I could begin gingerly putting some weight on it...uhhhhhh, I guess that starting walking on it last Monday falls into that category???? I just really got tired of the crutches, and it doesn't really hurt that bad to walk on it. At first I used the walking boot, but that actually makes my ankle hurt when walking, so I figured, go for gold, haha. It actually doesn't feel too bad to walk on it. I did leave on the crutches, just for her peace of mind. :) It's snowing like effing crazy here right now, so this is as good a time as any to not be trying to drag myself around with those silly metal sticks!

I got the go ahead to start riding the bike outside...great, thanks Mother Nature!!! Skate skiing is def out of the picture until a bit after the new year and so is snow boarding, so I'd really rather the stupid snow stop falling all together! Oh well. I'm sure some people are happy.

In other news, I'm heading to Oregon (Albany and Portland) to visit my Dad and one of my best friends, Molly, this weekend! Hopefully it will continue to be unseasonably dry there for my visit! I don't know how those crazy Oregonians put up with all of that rain anyway! I'd go crazy. :)

That's all. Oh ya, except I won the investigation/dispute/whatever you want to call it with Paypal to get a refund for the cost of buying a battery to go in the camera that I bought on Ebay that never came with one, so...I'll get on ordering a battery so I can actually put some pictures up here, since I know my ramblings are a bit on the boring side! :)

I have been tagged

List 6 random things about yourself that most people do not know, then tag 6 more people and post their links. Sonya Looney tagged me so here I go:

1.) I once lived in a small town in WY called Emblem, population 10 (well technically 14 once we moved there).

2.) 6 years ago I was hit by an idiot old lady in a car while out training on my road bike. I had hip surgery and got a brain injury.

3.) I used to play the trumpet in the band AND the jazz band. I haven't played since high school. I'm determined to learn to play the violin, though...one of these days, in my spare time.

4.) I would like to move abroad sometime...sooner rather than later, not sure exactly where, though.

5.) I didn't get on an airplane until I was 15, and this year alone, I've been to Denver International Airport 28 times (14 round trips, gotta make up for lost time!!). :)

6.) My name is a palindrome, when people spell it properly. NeveN :)

I now tag:
Eszter
Melissa
Jaymie Mart
Redcoat
Kevin (i'm sure he'll LOVE this game the most!)
Brandon Turman

A Lil Busy!

I was in Colorado Springs for the past four days at the USA Cycling MTB Board of Trustees meeting and then 2 more days of a MTB Summit meeting. Hopefully some good things will start happening for Gravity racing here in the States. I'm sure it will be slow, but there are 3 of 9 of us on the board who are solely pulling for Gravity, so...keep your fingers crossed!!

Normally I'd love a weather forecast that looks like this in the middle of November, but these damn crutches make me want the weather to be sucky so everyone has to sit inside and keep me company! haha j/k I hope everyone is out making the most of these beautiful days!!

Back to the Doc on Thursday, hopefully for some good news and only 2.5 more weeks of the crutches!

Freeride Foundation Article

My friend Jackie runs FreerideFoundation.com. It's a great source for all things women's gravity! She wrote up a lil entry on my ridiculous riding antics of the past weekend! Check it out. They're also having a Fall Sale on some sweet women's items, ladies, you should check that out, too! :)

No Surgery!! Crutches for 6 Weeks... :(

The broken piece moves about 3-4 mm to the left when I stand on it!!

Well, after seeing the orthopedic surgeon yesterday, I am feeling a bit better about the the ankle getting all healed up. The Sports Med Doc on Tuesday thought I might have torn ligaments in my ankle (would have needed surgery), but the ortho thought it looked okay, and the bone only really displaces when I weight it...sorry, don't have pics of that X-ray. It almost made me throw up, though, so...might be better to not see them! :)

I guess I'll get all caught up on stuff that I should do when I ride my bike instead. :)

Collegiate Nats Come and Gone

Riding a lil gingerly with the bum left wheel!

Well, the weekend didn't pan out quite as well as I had hoped on the way out here! I was feeling really great on the DH track and especially good on the DS course in practice...then in yesterday's practice run, things went terrible wrong! :( I had a lil get off and landed on the back side of a berm in some gnarly junk and ended up breaking my fibula. I thought it might be just sprained (even though I heard it crack) and tried to give riding out the course a go. Needless to say it didn't go well and I ended up at the ER instead of racing DH.

I decided last night that I wanted to try and race DS today. I didn't think I'd be able to defend my National Champs title, but I wanted to give it a go anyway. I was definitley hop along cassidy for most of the day. I qualified 8th and gave it my all! In the end, I forgot to eat anything except breakfast, and I completely ran out of gas! I got 4th, which, I guess isn't too bad with a broken fibula!

New DS at Collegiate Nationals

The folks at Lees McCrae rounded up Chris Herdon to build a new dual slalom track for them for collegiate nats next weekend. As much as I generally dislike dual slalom, this course looks like it's going to be a lot of fun!! Scan ahead on the video to just before 2:00, and Chris shows you how it's supposed to be ridden...prolly not gonna look like that for more than a handful of folks next week! :)

Back in the Game

Got a new camera on the way!! Wahoooo!! I can't believe I've missed snapping pics of the beautiful colors of my favorite season b.c I left my camera in a castle in Austria!! Duhhhhhh! Not for much longer! :)

Mud Butz

I'm pretty sure Jordan never even crashed to get that muddy!!!

Two of the most quality boys out there!!!

Last weekend we took an army of CU Cycling racers (~40) down to Durango for the FLC race. It was the gravity conference finals, and we showed up with a whole crew of folks to race DH and DS. DH got off to a good start with the course finishing on a super steep techy section of trail that they've never actually raced down before. It was good fun (minus the 1.5 minute flat pedally section in the middle...that was painful, haha!).

Yea for riding in the mud...Boo for having to clean everything when we were done!

Immediately after DH, we all grabbed some food and ran down to DS practice...where it had started pissing rain! :( The DS turned into a ridiculous mud fest!! The mud at Chapman Hill is super clay mud that sticks to everything...including full on wet scream mud spikes!! We ended up having so much fun riding and racing in the mud with Cody ending up winning the semi-finals AND the finals on a rear flat. I think he was riding faster on the flat than he was when it had air in it! Crazy (check the FLC video, it's towards the end)!!!

Jordan and Cody in the semis...notice the rear flat in the gate!!

Jordan showing off his pearly whites! :)

Saturday evening found a typical super house party of cool bike riding people and a bit of a tour of the bars in D-town! Good fun for sure. FLC boys sure do have a lot more fun than the boys at CU! I guess they haven't introduced hater-ade into the water in Durango yet... haha :)

Fundraiser for T

Hey All-Check out the fundraiser that JDD is coordinating for Tara Llanes. She has ongoing medical bills that are well into the 6 figure range. This could happen to any of us, so if you've got a lil spare cash sitting around, send it over to Jeremiah for the raffle!!

Also, check out Tara's Road To Recovery Foundation website for other ways to help out!

Yea for Mud...?!?!

The forecast is off and on, but it's definitely NOT going to be dry in Banner Elk, NC for collegiate Nats at the end of the month. Now we can only hope that we get a new coach before then, as the current one is a headache that combined with the mud, I'm not prepared to deal with! If you look up dumb ass in the dictionary, his picture is sure to be there with the definition!

Still Camera-less

I'm working on getting a new camera...until then, I'll try and keep this as entertaining as possible! :)

Check out the legislation that this Oregon congressman in trying to get through the halls of D.C. There's a survey at the top. If you've got 30 seconds...fill it out!! :)

Happy Tuesday!

Grad School

Unfortunately, this is how I feel about my PhD. :(

Secrets of a World Champ

So, Sabrina is in town for a couple of days before Interbike this week, and she convinced me to do hot yoga (Bikram Yoga) with her (40.5ºC is a LONG way from my favorite temp of 21º!!). Yesterday it was just "heated" power yoga, which kicked my butt, big time! This morning we went to the actual hot yoga class, and it was great (minus, the disgusting guy in class who was only wearing a banana hammock swim suit and nothing else! p.s. he was old, gross, and had a lot of hair in places nobody wanted to see!!!). I'm definitely out of yoga shape, but it's been really good to get back into it.

It's been nice having Sabrina in town to go to yoga, eat great Indian food, and ride with. Sometimes having a cool girl to hang out with is a very nice break from all of my guy friends (no offense boys, you guys are great, but shopping and painting your toenails probably isn't on the top of any of your lists!) :)

P.S. If you live in Boulder and want a free week of yoga classes, Core Power Yoga is free for 1 week with a local address.

School Retreat

Just got back from a school retreat up in the mountains at a dude ranch. While I wasn't psyched to have to leave for 3 days right after I had just gotten back, the place we were at was so peaceful and reminded me a bit of where I grew up. We got to do some hiking and general relaxing intermixed with all of the school activities that we had to do. Today we got to choose going on a horse back ride or learning to fly fish...that was an easy one for me! I've been wanting to learn to fly fish for a long time now, so I was psyched to have the opportunity and for free! The instructor kept telling me how good my technique was which made me really pleased! I didn't catch any fish, just one almost, but really I just wanted to learn how! Hopefully I can get my fly rod all set up and actually go on my own now!

Sorry, no pictures...my dumb ass left my camera in the castle that we visited in Austria on Monday. :(

World Cup Finals

Schladming, Austria

Good Beer, Good Times, and AMAZING Friends

Jaymie Mart: One of the best friends anyone could ever ask for!!

Well, I'm back getting school stuff going again, but wow, what a trip! I think I can easily say that of all the amazingly beautiful places I have been lucky enough to race at this year, Schladming, Austria takes the cake for the best!! It is strikingly beautiful, the food is great, and the people are awesome! I sure didn't want to get on a plane and come home yesterday. Ah well, the fun has to end sometime, I guess. You can't be on holiday forever!

Here are some picture highlights from the trip. Enjoy, and book your flight to visit! :)

We ate at this restaurant about 5 times. The Schnitzel was awesome, and the pizza was pretty good, too! :)

The "pre-pre-party" Van: Norco World Cup Racing

Fee got the local brewery (Schladminger) to donate a keg for our party...awesome!

Aaron Gwin and I (he's the next American hopefull, fast kid!!!)

Anita and me, the girls of Yeti

We decided that this poor puppy needed a glow stick collar

Sniper and Mio were well in by the time we got to the Intense party! :)

The boys from down under were also in fine form on Saturday night! Aaron Bashford and Mitch Delfs

Me and Fee on the top of the Mountain Karting mountain

Mountain Karting x3!! This was so much fun, even if the Karts were about to fall apart! 7 km drifting downhill!!

Schladming, Well Worth the Trip!!

About a 5 minute walk from our apartment :)

Our neighbor Donkey, Fredoline, i.e. Eore...the early riser!

This place is amazing! You'll have to take my word for it until I'm able to have internet long enough to upload some pics, but a quick summary:

Beautiful expansive mountains here
Lush green grass!!
Kitties running round all over the place
Blue Skys (mostly, pissed rain all last night, though, boo!!)
Our neighbor is a donkey, named Fredoline, that I've renamed Eore...he/she get's up at 6:00
The 4x track is short!! and super smooth...BMX!
The DH track is LONG and ROOTY! Glad I'm not racing it, I'd be stressed!
Mountain Karting is one of the most fun things I've done in a long time, and we've been 2x, going again on Sunday!
Fee rocks, she got the local brewery to donate a keg for us to have a party on Saturday!
I want to move to Europe! :)
Ummm, internet is hard to find, so I don't have too long.

More, with pics later! :)

Off to a Good Start!! :)

Got to the airport today after bfast with Jess and a couple of hours of work. One of the TSA guys carried my bike up to the ticket counter for me...you don't see that everyday! I'm sure he was on break, too! Got all checked in and didn't have to pay for my bike at all, a nice perk of flying around so much this summer, I guess! Nonstop flights are the way to go for sure. Denver to Munich was right around 10 hours. Took an Ambien 30 minutes after getting on the plane and only woke up to eat dinner and breakfast! Also, they managed to get all of my stuff here no problem since it was direct! I'm just waiting for Fee and her parents to come get me, and then we'll be heading out to Schladming later today! I can't wait. I've looking forward to this trip for awhile! I'll post pics once I'm on my own computer.

Sol Vista G3: MSC Gravity Finals

Cody got 3rd and I got 2nd in the Pro Gravity Overall for the Mountain States Cup!! Wahoo!

This past weekend was the final race in the MSC gravity series for the summer. We raced a G3 series race up in Sol Vista. The Sol Vista boys have built some really sweet tracks up there over the past 2 years! Their recent addition, Buc Nasty, is a legitimately challenging DH track. Unfortunately, it's not very long (winning pro men's time: ~2:15), but it has a lot of track packed into that short amount of time! One of the days we all raced chainless, and it was one of the most fun races I think I've ever done! Not being able to pedal sure teaches you a lot about how to pump corners and everything in between to get as much speed as you possibly can!

Cody and Jordan working on Wade's bikes

My goal for the weekend was to get a lot of DH riding in besides the race runs and to have a lot of fun! I wasn't in pin it to win it mode for sure, as I'm trying to get ready for going to Austria next weekend for the World Cup 4x finals in Schladming, Austria! I completely accomplished my goal, got 5th place in the GC for the weekend (by only 0.52 seconds!!) and moved up to 2nd in the Pro women's gravity overall for the MSC series (3 years in a row!!).

Me and Sage

I had a great weekend of riding and racing with all of my Team Toally Wired/Rocky Mountain Roastery teammates this weekend. This is the end of a good couple of seasons for our team. Next year we'll be doing our own things. I'll sure miss them as my teammates, but Cody and Jordan are probably two of my favorite guys in the world, so I'm sure we'll all be hanging out at the races next year regardless of teams/bike sponsors, etc...! :)

If only all boys were as stellar as these two...life would be good! :) xoxo

Back to the grind at school for 4 days, a collegiate DH race in Saturday, and then on the plane for 10.5 hours to Munich on Sunday! I can't wait!!! :)

Sunny at an EC race, WHAT??

Manhattan skyline from Long Island...Post Card Style!

The first Jeep race was lats weekend in northern New Jersey at Mountain Creek. Eric Carter put in massive amounts of work to build a pretty sweet slalom track. It was one of the coolest slalom tracks that I've ridden. It had tight bermed corners, flat corners, little doubles, a md sized step up, good sized berms, big doubles, and a huge ski run type huck at the end. I was pretty pleased with my jumping on the course. Unfortunately my cornering is still sucking, and I didn't qualify for the finals. That was a big bummer since by just making the finals you got paid!

2-1-3

Lisa, Kathy, and Melissa

CVD got knocked out early, so he decided to be the bar tender!

Cody Warren, JD, Rando, and Petr were all on fire all day for the men, and Kathy Pruitt and Melissa were riding through the field all by themselves for the women. The men ended up in that order, as well as the women after Melissa crashed in a turn that sent Lopes home in the first round earlier in the day!

Look closely, you'll see her, well you'll see her backside!

After a fantastic breakfast by Buhly on Sunday morning, we all headed into the city to do a little sight seeing which turned into a lota sitting in horrible, horrible traffic and ultimately not getting to go to either ground zero or the Statue of Liberty! :( We did a Statue of Liberty drive by, well a drive by of her back side, so at least I got to see her, sort of. haha After we split with Buhly and Dave, we returned our rental car, checked all of our luggage in and then took a cab down to Long Island. It ended up being super cool with a really nice view of the Manhattan skyline, good food, and then almost missing our flight back home. Dohhh! Almost being the most important word in the last sentence! :)

Cool Graffiti artwork heading down to the water in Long Island

I don't think I'll be heading to the east coast anytime soon. It was nice (sometimes), very green, and had big buildings, but there were just too damn many people for my liking!

G3 in Sol Vista this weekend!! 3 DH races in 3 days, wahooo!! :)

Off to the Jeep KOM Race in the Morning

Well, I've been working hard at school trying to get caught up and ready to go to Schladming. This weekend, though, Petr and I are leaving tomorrow to head out to New Jersey to the Jeep King of the Mountain DS race. It's the first race in the series, so it'll be fun to see what they've got to offer this year.

Should be fun!!

Bike House Party Semester Kick Off

Most of these shady characters were in attendance...including John, The Scorpion King!

There is a famous, well maybe infamous, house here in Boulder that has been home to countless (well over 25, I'm sure) different names in the Boulder cycling scene. I think there has been as many as 8, maybe just 7, different people living there at any given time over the past couple of years. The house has a bomb shelter that has even been home to a couple of really poor bastards needing a halfway house for a month or two.

Anyway, they usually have a few parties throughout the course of a semester, and they got things off on the right foot last night! A keg of Dales Pale Ale, two grills with brats, burgers, Phil's fantastic King Salmon that he caught with his own teeth (well that's the story that Kiel is telling anyway), and a great group of people who LOVE to laugh and have a good time! I'm glad I decided to stop by on my way home from school. As usual, they did not disappoint! The night was finished off with me and James "racing" home. As it turns out, it is a little far to sprint the whole way, and the race wasn't so fair as James was rolling on big knobby tires!!

It's gonna be a good semester! :)

Gravity Girls and Their Pearly Whites :)

Me, T, Jill, and Jaym

I just found this picture from Sea Otter, and I decided that it should be the new ad for Colgate!

Surreal

We have some really nice sunsets (and sunrises, I'm just not usually up early enough to see them!) here in Colorado, but last night the colors of the clouds juxtaposed with the moon were really surreal. It was pretty cool, except that I was just leaving school when I happened to see it. :( The picture doesn't do it justice!

Also surreal was my good friend Jon's description of his adventures on a nuclear submarine this summer. He is in Navy ROTC, so he did his summer cruise this summer. He spent 39 days on a nuclear sub, and his description of what it was like was crazy. He said the air on a sub generally smells like amines mixed with ozone. Amines are similar to ammonia for those of you who hated chemistry, and ozone has a strange smell as well. He said that after awhile you don't notice the smell...ummm, probably not very good for the health of the sailors!!! There were many other stories that make me question his sanity for signing up for that, but I'm sure many of them are classified, so I shouldn't share them...haha, j/k!

Jon Topside in the Panama Canal

Bromont World Cup

A bit overdue...

Women's Final at Bromont

The track in Bromont was huge! It had the biggest berms I've ever seen on a 4x track! The course Builder, Phil, had ~700 truck loads of dirt to work with, and he and his crew did an amazing job. The first straight was super long and had great flow. A couple of pedals out of the gate and then the pumping began...step down, step down, step onto a table, try and sneak in a crank or two, step off of the table, and then a quick jump into the first berm! Awesome!! It rained like crazy so parts of the track were super muddy with some crazy ruts that formed, but all in all, the track was amazing, and SOOO long! Mio had the fastest qualifying time with a 1:10!

I crashed really hard in my last practice run right before the racing started and sort of felt like my head was underwater most of the time after, but I still had a lot of fun racing! I was in 7th in the small final and made a similar mistake to the weekend before and swung too far wide letting Eva pass me on the inside right before the rock garden! Ughhhh!!! I will learn to protect the inside, I swear! I ended up in 8th, but I still had an awesome time riding the track and keep learning more and more each time I race!

Break From Racing

This weekend was the G3 at Snowmass, and I definitely should have gone to the race, as I am sure that the promoters put together 2 great DH courses and an awesome Super D, but the bottom line is...I'm tired! It's already the middle of August, and I'm wondering where the summer went!

Instead, I decided to put in some time at school this weekend and try and get my life organized again. It seems every time I leave for a long trip, I come home and things are in disarray (I think that's the definition of Entropy)! :)

PLUS, the Olympics started today, and I'm a huge junkie for that every four years! Good luck to Jill and Jared, two kick ass 4x racers who are racing BMX in the sports Olympic debut this year!!

What Day Is It?

Well, when I look at my watch it says Monday, but somehow it's gotten screwed up. I wish it was Monday, that's when I was supposed to get home from Canada. Unfortunately Chicago SUCKS! Yesterday I had a pretty epic day of being at the Chicago airport with thousands of other people not being able to get flights to where we wanted to go because they just kept having lightening storms after lightening storms! Long story short (or shorter) I finally got on a plane that began our attempt to take off around 11:30 last night. We were next up on the runway for takeoff when the pilot told us we would be delayed because there was another lightening storm at the end of the runway we were trying to take off on. About 20 minutes later the pilot comes back on and tells us that our plane has just taken a direct hit of lightening to our tail!! I was too busy trying to thoroughly enjoy the only time I've ever been in Business Class, so I didn't even notice until the fire trucks made their way to our plane!

Spent the night in the airport and got a flight this morning which I got upgraded to First Class on at the last minute! Wahoooo!! Asking for an upgrade with a smile seems to go a long way these days. :)

Prior to my Chicago adventures yesterday, I met up with Katie and her bf in Burlington on Sunday. We had as nice of a day as you can have enjoying the town when it's raining the whole time. They had some crazy Dragon Boat Competition going on when we walked down to Lake Champlain. It was quite comical as many people were taking it quite seriously. It was good for a laugh and an inquiry from us. We decided to dodge the rain and see The Dark Knight. It wasn't what I expected, but it was good.

I'll have to do a race update after I get caught up on some school work...

Canada WC Update #1

Jess, Me, Lorena, Melissa, Jill, and Fee...Quebec City

On Monday, we had a bit of a duvet day (as my English friends call it) and took our time getting ready to move camp from Mont St. Anne to Bromont. We spent the afternoon in Quebec City. It was fun to see the Old Town and get to partake in their 400-year celebration. We had a lovely lunch with our own personal serenader. We walked around the city a bit before we got back in the car and made the rest of the journey down to Bromont.

A Cool Statue in Quebec City

Ha ha, the Lesbians Are So Funny!

We arrived in Bromont to the gracious hospitality of Phil and Marie, Melissa’s Canadian mechanic and his wonderful girlfriend. On Tuesday morning, our first stop was the Chocolate Museum that made Jess very happy! Melissa and I went on a road ride to get her prescribed training in for the day, and then we went to visit some friends of Jess’ who cooked us a magnificent steak dinner.

Jess and the Chocolate Museum Wonderfulness

On Wednesday Melissa and I headed down to Burlington for her to catch a flight home for some important family stuff. When I got back to town, I decided to call it an early night since I had to get up early to register. Thursday morning found us being awoken by crazy thunder and lightening storms and a torrential downpour. DH practice was delayed by about 2.5 hours. Once 4x practice finally started an hour late, it started pissing rain again, so we each got about 1 run in before practice got canceled again! The weather has made things a bit disappointing, that’s for sure!

Today, however, we were treated to sunny skies and drying courses. The 4x track still had spots that were a complete mess, but at least we got to ride and qualify today. I didn’t have a very good qualifying run, but it was good enough to make it to the “big show” tomorrow night. I’ve got a lot of work to do on this VERY long track before racing time comes tomorrow. It’s such a fun track; I’m just excited to get to ride it again tomorrow.

Pimp Daddy Shane and the 9 Lovely Ladies

Otherwise, I’ve just been doing loads of schoolwork when I’m not doing anything else during the day before practice and racing. I’ve got tons to do, so the rain has at least been nice as a motivator for me to get some work done!!