Evan Dodds – Non-work-related blog

Last weekend was just a crazy weekend in terms of hobby spending. We went down to the Labor Day “SkiBonkers” sale at SouthCenter and bought our ski passes for Summit (to get early-season rates, since we were planning to buy them anyways). But then we also bought skis and poles. So now we have all of the stuff we need for our season of skiing.

Except, wait… no we didn’t! We had no way to get our skis from point A to point B at Summit, or Crystal, or Whistler or wherever. Getting them home from the SkiBonkers sale was no problem since we could just throw them in the back of Jodi’s car and put the rear seat down. That won’t work with MIL and Tim in town for our BC trip in January, or with Scott and Arika going to Summit.

So, it was off to REI to (finally) buy a ski rack for the Mazda. No problems, they were having a Labor Day sale on Thule rack equipment. 20% off. Yay! So we got the factory rack adapter and a 6x ski rack package. At which point we realized that we should probably get the Thule bike carrier stuff while it was also on sale. No sense paying 20% more, right?

In a flash, our trip to REI had become pretty darned expensive. So why not push it over the top? I also bought a new bike.

This part demands a little bit more explanation. I already had my old Mongoose mountain bike (from 1996 timeframe), so why buy a new bike? Well, I wanted a lighter “road-style” bike and I’d been looking and test riding various ones for a few months. I hadn’t been able to come to a decision on what to buy. Problem was that although I hated the heavy weight on my mountain bike and I wanted something with drop-bars, I was not all that thrilled with the jarring/bumpy experience of riding a carbon bike with 110psi tires on a standard, cracked road.

I’d been struggling with that for a few months and was about to give up when I noticed a bike at REI that looked like a road bike, but had slightly higher clearances and slightly larger (and lower pressure) tires. A Cyclocross bike! Sweet! I remembered someone mentioning to me a while back that Cyclocross bikes make great commuter bikes since they handle well in sloppy weather and can take fenders easily, but they’re still rather like road bikes in terms of basic layout. I was sold. This bike had it all!

In the end, the process took hours and hours to complete. Partially because REI was so busy for their labor day sale, and partially because they were INTOLERABLY SLOW. I won’t recommend the bike buying experience at REI to anyone, but bear in mind I’m drawing this conclusion from a limited sample set (me).

But, at the end of it, I had a shiny new Cannondale Cyclocross bike (roughly the same as this 2007 model, although mine was an end-of-season 2006). And now I have no excuses not to ride regularly, Jodi tells me.

Just call me “King Evan”, cause I got a crown. Yup, the tooth that had been cracked for the last year or so finally succumbed to the pressure and sheared off like a glacier affected by global warming…

This was actually put in a few weeks ago, but I wanted to get a shot of the temporary crown they dropped in while the permanent (thankfully, white porcelain colored instead of metal) one was being molded. It’s a bit blurry, but you can get the idea:

Finally I get to post one of the cool maps! Jodi and I took a bike ride this past weekend, up to the Arboretum. We did this after moving our bikes from the bike storage room in our building up to a bike tree in our condo unit. We’d been planning this for quite a while, to make our bikes more accessible, so it was pretty cool to finally get it done!

Our new Bike Tree:

Here was our path:

Today – December 8th, 2005 – the I-901 “smoking ban” passed overwhelmingly back on November 8th goes into effect. Smoke Free Seattle, indeed.

Jodi and I plan to celebrate tonight by going out for dinner and to a smoke-free bar.

Forgot to mention this yesterday in my pumpkin push write up: Just before the race, Jodi and I were wandering around and stretching to get ready for the run. We end up right next to a group of runners who were there representing the Seattle Animal Shelter. They were running wtih the very cutest dogs, all wearing little doggy uniforms advertising the shelter. We spent a few moments with a husky dog, and Jodi and I chatted about how we’ll probably have a dog some day…

Plus, watching the news last night the day’s high was 67 degrees. So it was probably low-to-mid 60s during the 10am-start race, since it was sunny and gorgeous.

Seattle is so awesome!

Jodi and I ran the 10th annual “Pumpkin Push” this morning at Seward Park. This was part of my “I’ll run up to one 5k per month” committment to Jodi the other week, and it worked out pretty well. It was a very pretty course, lots of fall leaves, view of Lake Washington, etc. I hadn’t been to Seward Park before, even though it’s only about 10–15 minutes from our house. It’s a great park, and I’m sure we’ll be back!

The race was a great time; lots of folks in costumes, etc. Since this was my “easing into organized exercise” 5k, Jodi let me decide the pace and the method of the run. We started out running a couple of minutes, followed by 1–minute walk. This is how we had done the July 4th run in Charlotte and it had worked pretty well for us. It’d been a while for me though, so after a few rounds we morphed it into “run a couple of minutes, walk a couple of minutes”, especially through the quite-steep hill in the middle of the course! We finished strong though, running the last half-mile or so to cross the finish line.

After the race, there was a fun yoyo show that we hung around for. Plus we got a pumpkin!

Previously posted on August 5 at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/evandodds/Blog/cns!1phaOgcvNsBxzvBN9Zpx1vbQ!143.entry