Friday Stuff

work has been bonkers this week… I mean more bonkers than usual so when Friday afternoon arrived the ’slump’ was deeper than normal, amplified probably by it being a long weekend over here in the UK. I generally avoid the usual Friday afternoon activity of pizza and cake (my body is a temple ruin tourist attraction) in favour of other pursuits during the inevitable mental downtime but I’m still not sure how we came to this- for one brief idle moment between flurries of activity we found ourselves plugging certain phrases (mostly rude) into eBay to see what popped up in the search results. Usually nothing but the software always offers alternative content based on knocking one or two words out of the search term to find related items. Well today we came across this gem of a listing (screenshot here). The listing title is truly special “New 1 Zebra Mohawk Hoof Donkey Rubber Ducky Bath Time“… I mean… {speechless for a moment}.. no, speechless for good – I’m lost for words (politically and anatomically correct ones anyway) right now. I never expected plastic ducks to go off down this branch of the evolutionary tree. Not sure what happened but it clearly involves some flavour of cross-species interaction that doesn’t even bear thinking about. I wonder though if you can guess the search phrase that brought this one up. You’ll have to figure out a word that is missing in this the title but I’ll give you a clue that the phrase does include donkey. Snickers bar for the winner….. I await results (or likely total lack of) with interest…

On an unrelated topic… TT’s are normally painful enough but last night I rode the Penzance Wheelers ’sporting’ (just a posh way of saying hilly) open promotion. Two of my ribs are broken at the moment which severely limits my ability to do any hard riding out of the saddle so it was with some trepidation that I rolled up to the start line…. and yes, that first climb out of Leedstown hurt like hell, my legs didn’t really want to know either (I’m never good in an evening event… ) so I made the mental switch from racing to thinking of it as hard training which somehow made it much easier to deal with. I’m not sure if I was actually any kinder to myself in terms of effort though (despite still being able to stand up after) being rather surprised at my result. i.e much better than I expected. So I think from now until the end of the season I’ll just stop racing and “go training” instead with a number on my back and simply wait for the PBs to roll in :o) Non-cycling friends said I was stupid racing anyway with broken ribs, my excuse being single I don’t have a ‘moderating factor’ at home to act as my common sense, so my boundaries of what is and is not sensible I guess are just in a different place to most folks… or blurred, whatever. Results from last night are here, Cyclelogic as a team aren’t doing too bad this year… hehe.

One final thought, I saw an ad in Singletrack today for a trio of Trek mountainbikes all sharing the characteristic of having a front wheel bigger than the back (no, I’m not going to get into that debate). What caught my eye was the single-speed version with it’s absence of gears and shifters and stuff was £300 more expensive than it’s geared brethren… i.e pay more, get less…. I saw a definite parallel there with workplaces in general… or I suppose in my case the usual dichotomy between engineers and management… and then of course there are my friends who work in the financial sector (polite term)… :o)

Talking of friends in the financial sector, I decided I’ll not mention the chap who paid good ££ for a cycling fitness test to be given advice that IMO pretty much came to “lose weight, ride more”. Admittedly with some frilly training bits around the edges but I could have told him that :o) I’ll stop now while I still have said friends….