Crazy to think that in just 60 days I will be setting out on my bike across the country…

I feel confident in my cycling strength, although my knee has been giving me lots of trouble since going down in the race at William and Mary. My left one in particular, is very painful still, and it will be two weeks since the crash, so hopefully it starts feeling better soon. My shoulder has healed over completely, and my right leg looks and feels good, it’s been downgraded to bandaid status, I’m still trying to keep hydrocolloid on the left one. I just want to be healed already…it’s a pain to deal with, but hopefully by next weekend!

Our deadline to have $2000 raised is Monday, and right now I have $1925 raised! So I’m pretty much on track, and hopefully will be sending letters out to family soon, to raise the remaining $2075.

As part of the “Sweat Equity” requirement, which involves spending a minimum of 10 hours helping out local affordable housing organizations before the summer, I spent the day today in Roanoke with the Habitat for Humanity there.  It was another good experience with Habitat, and counting the fall work, I have the 10 hours but plan to continue with more!

Hayden (lower) and Alex assembling scaffolding, I was taking the pictures!

Lauren and Jenny’s Bday Dinner

Last night (Friday night), we went out to celebrate Lauren and Jenny’s birthday, at Bud Foster’s.  It was a good time, and we got a great picture together haha, Lauren said it was frame-worthy!

We look pretty fly haha

Community Bike Ride update

And in other happening this week, my ES group, our advisor Cortney Martin, and Beth Lohman and Ed Hokanson from the NRVBA met to finalize the ride plans. We decided to lead smaller groups, since the cops are allowing “no bike events in the downtown” and the NRVBA is going to sponsor the event, meaning there will be helmets required and hopefully the ride will leave from the GLC Lawn or the Drillfield, Click on Community Bike Ride flyer for a very tentative flyer.

We ran into many obstacles planning the ride with town, and it really pretty disappointing it is to plan an event, and how unsupportive the Town and Police towards a community bike ride… but after some gloomy moments, I do think it’s going to happen.  It is disappointing for us that it isn’t going to be one big group, and the whole difficulty of the process for something so simple, and how insurance and liability becomes such a big issue, and so it is also hard for us as students, who are usually only in Blacksburg for four-five years.  The “long-term” seems pretty lame, but I do think that getting this off this year will be a start to bigger and better rides.  The next step may be to have the co-op lead monthly community rides, although they definitely would be more of the unorgized “critical mass” rides.  There is tension between achieving visibility for cycling and pissing off drivers, and in no way does blocking the streets and making people mad do anything for cycling or to lessen the tensions between cyclist and motorist, which are unnervingly tense (think Lance Armstrong and Tony Kornheiser going at it on TV this week).

Other news

I did get a chance to go out to Roanoke on Monday as well, and picked up some new handlebar tape and hoods.  All white! It looks sweet in person, but has ALREADY not as white as new haha.

Looking fast!! And yes, my room is almost always this messy haha, no matter how hard i try to clean

The math HW that was due Wednesday consumed a significant amount of my time this week, it was a bitch, but I’m pretty sure I figured it out.  I also spent some time, a few hours, fixing up Lauren’s bike and with a new tube, it should be good to go!!  Also, in the coming weeks I’ll be working to help redesign Newman’s website, and maybe it will give me some inspiration to write my own Wordpress theme! (we will be writing the theme for that site from scratch)

I’m also up for election Monday to be an officer on the cycling team, which I already am but I’m switching haha, to either Webmaster, Sponsorship or President.  Both Ben Warren and David Henry are running for President, and both will be excellent presidents, right now they are VP’s of the mountain and road team right now.  So I will probably withdraw from that race, and am unnopposed currently for the other two haha.  I think that I would enjoy being webmaster, and I think sponsorship wouldn’t be so bad either! In fact, I think that those two need to work together well to integrate sponsors to the webpage, and create system to keep track of donors and sponsors for the team.

I shall end with a song that has been stuck in my head all week, see if you can guess who it is! \

“The star maker says, ‘It ain’t so bad’
The dream maker’s gonna make you mad
The spaceman says, ‘Everybody look down!
Its all in your mind!’ “