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I planned to get back to our hotel around 6PM – leaving plenty of time to take Kelly to see Red Rocks Park and stand on-stage at the ampitheater made legendary (at least to us) by Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, among others. Instead, in a dirt-filled rental car, toting a half-functioning rented Ellsworth mountain bike covered with red-clay mud and snow, I pulled into our hotel parking garage a little after 11PM. I still couldn’t feel my fingertips, and the mixture of mud and blood that washed off me in a hot post-ride shower would have been well-suited to an action-movie recovery scene.

The warm cafe where I’m sitting and typing this entry – with jazz, the smell of espresso and the sound of lighthearted conversation floating through the air – feels almost as otherworldly as the landscapes I just endured with two other riders…

More…

I’ve made a somewhat startling realization this week: Beginning July 15th, I’ll be participating in some sort of organized cycling event every weekend for a solid month.

On the 15th, I’ll be kicking off the craziness with a ride in the 6th Annual Fat Tire Festival at our area’s definitive singletrack destination, Dryer Road Park. But that’s just a warm up – the following weekend, I’ll be burning about 6x the energy of the Fat Tire when I ride in a twenty-four hour mountain bike race – thankfully, as part of a team of 4 riders.

From there, the fun moves onto the road, with the Ride MS century (that’s 100 miles, kids) the next weekend, and a 55-mile tour one week later.

I suppose the training rides have already started – but I sure don’t feel as ready for this epic month of cycling as I did for last year’s race!

It’s New Year’s Eve 2009 – just – and as of a few minutes ago, those of us in the Eastern U.S. began the final day of the final year of the first decade of the 21st century. Not that there’s any significance to any of that – but it makes for a nice lead-in…

After I punch the “Publish” button on this one, DaveRea.com will enter 2010 with 497 posts. Despite the frivolousness of our collective tendency to assign significance to arbitrary milestones (you know – odometer readings, anniversary multiples, centennials and the like) I’ll do my best to make my 500th post a special one.

In the mean time, I’ve got some New Year’s enjoying to do – Kelly and I plan to ring in the new year with friends this time around, a departure from our boring-by-comparison celebrations of the past few years, which usually consisted of one or both of us falling asleep long before midnight, then groggily stumbling to bed while mumbling our happy-new-years to each other while sleepily brushing our teeth. Actually, to be honest, I can’t even remember how we welcomed 2009, and my new year’s eve post from last December isn’t much help.

Nobody from DaveRea.com’s vast* commentariat bothered to answer my questions last New Year’s Eve, so (apart from this post’s title), I won’t bother asking any here. I will, however, mention a few blog-oriented resolutions… First among them being my participation in Project52, wherein I hope to post at least one entry per week here throughout 2010. We’ll see how that goes. I’d also like to give DaveRea.com’s underpinnings a bit of an overhaul – the theme is tired, the database has been neglected at the back of the fridge for a few too many months, and a most of the stuff I currently accomplish with plug-ins has been merged into the WordPress core code. So migrating to a fresh install with a new theme will probably happen sometime soon too…

At any rate, if perchance you’ve stumbled upon this site and are (inexplicably) still reading this far down the post, I wish you and yours a very happy New Year. May your celebrations be safe, your memories of 2009 be warm, and your expectations for 2010 be high.

* In this context, the word “vast” really refers to about 6 or 8 people… Maybe…

There was a time when you could query nearly any Linux user and learn about all sorts of things that couldn’t be done under Linux. Whether it was the latest digital camera, a quirky scanner driver, a proprietary video card or a problematic printer, it seemed using Linux-based operating systems was an uphill battle and nothing “just worked”.

These days – at least if my experience this past week is any indication – the times seem to be a-changin’. My family and I had the good fortune and blessing to spend the recent Thanksgiving holiday with my Aunt and Cousin in Southern California, and a patently wonderful time was had by all. We Northerners all got to have some grand new experiences – sailing a 35-foot Hunter Legend around San Diego Bay, enjoying wine and appetizers on an 80° Thanksgiving afternoon, and seeing a Tesla Roadster up-close-and-personal were just a few. But as a Linux user, I got to have an unusual new experience that my Windows- and Mac-OS-piloting kin couldn’t share: I finally got to enjoy being the only one who could enjoy a completely-obvious and should-just-work feature of my computer that everyone else couldn’t.

Between my family and myself, we have all the major OSs covered. Present at the Thanksgiving feast this year were two Windows XP laptops, three Mac OS-X notebooks, and my trusty HP 6710b running Ubuntu Linux 9.04. In the next room, there was an HP DeskJet LaserJet 1020, which – it turns out – became an unwitting participant in our Thanksgiving week adventures. The 1020, you see, isn’t supported by HP under Mac OS X. No drivers, no instructions, no work-arounds … nada. But under Linux? Three clicks – two of them on “Next” buttons – and my Ubuntu test page was sliding out of the heretofore-recalcitrant printer. Not even the Windows users present could claim that sort of ease – they still had to download and install drivers from HP’s website.

Maybe it’s just me – and I’m admittedly biased – but I thought Macs were supposed to be easy to use, and just work! And I thought Linux was “supposed” to be for power-users only, difficult and cryptic, and fraught with ventures into the scary world of the command-line! I didn’t win any Linux converts during our week on the West coast, but I did get to enjoy a new and unusual experience, one that I’m sure will be replicated many times over as Linux shines as a truly ready-for-mainstream operating system.

…to these two dear friends…

…who, as I learned last night, got engaged on Christmas morning!

Congratulations Brie and Jason!

Considering that I’m not up for shelling out 80 bones per wheel for studded mountain bike tires, last night’s ride might be my last for a few weeks. It’s been a while since I’ve done a “by the numbers” post, so this seemed as worthy a subject as any!

• Starting Temperature: 25°
• Riders: Lucky 13!
• Snow at Ride Start: None
• Snow at Ride End: Enough
• Trails Run: 9
• Headlamp battery failures: 2 (luckily not mine!)
• Cursing at my frozen feet: Um… a lot.
• Cursing as I fell over backwards: Um… a lot.
• Cursing as I fell over sideways:: Um… a lot
• Cursing as I fell over my handebars: Um… a lot.

Interestingly (or amusingly?) enough, with the ground frozen solid and thinly coated by dusty snow, I actually felt more secure on the bike than on my feet!

I think I’ve told Kelly the stories at just about every winter holiday, but – to me at least – they never get old. For some reason, whenever I find my hands coated in cinnamon, sugar and bits of apple, or whenever I feel the texture of floured dough and a rolling pin beneath my hands, it’s just like I’m there. There are certainly stories I tell when – this time around – she rolls her eyes and sighs as if to say “here we go again”, but never my stories about Mom.

As we stood at the counter together last night, peeling and slicing our way through a bag of McIntosh apples for Thanksgiving pies, I recounted the story once again of how my Mom and Aunt used to compete to see who could peel the longest thread of apple skin. They’d pick out the biggest apple they could find, and deftly slide their paring knives around in a meticulous spiral. There were no potato peelers here! Slowly, a pile of ribbonlike apple peel would appear on the countertop, until someone finally exclaimed… “eergh!” as the cut end of the ribbon fell to the counter. We’d all laugh and one sister would congratulate the other – and the piemaking would continue.

Sadly, I never learned the art of marathon apple peeling, though I doubt I’d have the patience for it anyway. But there is another favorite childhood tradition I can share with Kelly in the present-tense. One of the reasons I loved watching (and, in my own small-fry way, helping) my Mom bake her pies was, oddly enough, leftover crust. What didn’t go into transforming her pies into utter works-of-art went back into the bowl … and that’s where I came in. We’d toss some fresh flour on the counter, and hit that tablespoon-or-three of crust dough with the rolling pin. It usually ended up about the size of a saucer, with the thickness of a Christmas cut-out cookie. But what came next was the real magic.

Mom always kept a shaker of cinnamon-sugar in the spice rack, and after brushing a little butter or egg white over my newly-flattened masterpiece, we’d apply a liberal dousing of crunchy-sweet flavor over the top. Along with the pie, my doughy little confection would go into the oven, to emerge (a looonnng ten minutes later) as an inimitable sweet treat.

Well, almost inimitable – because last night, after we assembled our crumb-top apple pie, we managed to have just enough crust left over for a little trip down memory lane.

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for memories like these, and for a loving family to share them with. I’m sure there are thousands more, shrink-wrapped just beneath the surface, waiting for the right touch, the right smell, the right place to bring them out. I’m thankful for those, too.

You might be fine with paying $9 for two hours of mediocre entertainment at the movie theater this holiday season (important note: any movie involving “James” or “Bond” is categorically excepted), but some of us are pinching pennies…

It seems fitting that I follow-up a post riddled with third-hand information and a multiplicity of latent corrections with something a little more “primary source”ish. Tonight, I had the unique – but far from singular – pleasure of taking in a Public Comment Meeting of the Monroe County Parks Department, where the county’s retained engineering firm reviewed the proposed parks master plan for several East-side parks. To say the results were “colorful” would certainly be an understatement!

I knew going into the meeting that at least two groups with opposing viewpoints would be in abundant attendance: the ADK / Sierra Club / Audubon Society set (read: staunchly opposed to multi-use trails) and those of us representing the Genesee Regional Offroad Cyclists. What I didn’t anticipate, but should have expected, was plenty of others: the dog-walkers, the dog no-leashers, the aimless ranters, the hunting-is-evil’ers, and of course, the we-must-preserve-the-fragile-ecosystem-of-biodiversity-at-all-cost’ers.

A lot of folks made a lot of valid points, and a few people actually offered some interesting perspective. More than one completely disregarded the discussion topic and pounded their agendas zombie- or schizo-style, but by and large most folks were respectful.

Obviously, unlike those covering the meeting for legitimate news outlets (and yes, they were certainly there), I’m about as biased in this fight as I was when we talked about car companies the other day. I mountain bike. A lot. While I love the places I’m allowed to ride in our area – all of which are beacons of how well multi-use can work when it’s done right – I do wish that me and my fellow knobby-tire-riding friends could be something other than second-class citizens when we enter a Monroe County Park.

When all was said and done, one bottom line emerged: mountain biking is coming to Monroe County, and the growing crowd of 50 million off-road cyclists in this country is assurance of that. The question is “where?”, and there are plenty of folks who are perfectly content to say, “over there, in that little park the rest of us don’t want to use any more.” Unfortunately for their delicate sensibilities, that’s not gonna work for the rest of us. As has been demonstrated time and time again in this great experiment called America, segregation and discrimination don’t work.

The area’s off-road cyclists’ tax dollars are just as good as those that fund the parks department from the pockets of hikers, bird watchers, horseback riders, cross-country skiers, snowshoers, fishermen and dog-walkers. All of these users enjoy their activity of choice in our county parks, with mutual respect and without fear of harassment. I refuse to believe that our area’s trail cyclists shouldn’t be afforded the same opportunity.

For the record: The photo above only shows about 1-in-10 of the people present at the meeting. Guess I need to go get one of those snazzy wide-angle cell phone cameras!!